Staff Spotlight: Jaime Cader Celebrates Hispanic Heritage Month

This week, Vallejo City Unified School District's Hispanic Heritage Month spotlight series features Jaime Cader, a bilingual tutor at Jesse Bethel High School. Cader said his favorite part of the job is helping students learn English and understand the language better.

Cader's family is from El Salvador, and what he loves most about his heritage is the variety found across the Spanish-speaking world, from food and music to traditional clothing and speaking accents. For Cader, the phrase "Unidos, somos más" is about the strength of numbers. When Hispanics from different countries unite, he said, they form a much larger group, and a larger group can accomplish a lot more in the community and in the nation.

Cader currently lives on his own, so his language use at home comes down to phone calls, where he speaks Spanish or English depending on who is on the other end. When asked what destination in El Salvador he wishes everyone could experience, he pointed to Suchitoto, where some of his ancestors are from. The town is known for its colonial-style buildings, with a view of a large lake and the mountains of the Chalatenango region in the background. Cader said there are still many places in El Salvador he has yet to visit, including the summit of a volcano.

Growing up, Cader looked up to a priest from Sicily who spent part of his life in Argentina. Cader described him as an intellectual, musician, and composer who cared deeply about others, and credits him with sparking his own interest in historical and cultural research.

That interest connects to a tradition Cader is proud to carry forward in one branch of his family: collecting historical documents so the information can be published later.

Cader's advice for VCUSD students this year is to attend all of their classes, do their best, and ask for help when an assignment is confusing. Plenty of tutoring services are available, he said.

Cader also said he wishes more people understood how important greetings are in Hispanic culture. A simple "good morning" or "good afternoon" matters, he said, yet in many places people are in a rush and skip straight to asking for what they need. He admitted that as he concentrates on his work, he has caught himself doing the same.