Claudio Alberto Rivera, M.D. | English Literature and Molecular & Cell Biology Major Class of 2002
Gastroenterologist & Author, Los Angeles, California
Claudio Alberto Rivera is a Mexican Puerto Rican American physician-writer born and raised in Los Angeles. Drugs, violence, and police brutality plagued his upbringing in a single-parent family in Section 8 housing on L.A.’s ferocious inner-city streets. He rose out of this darkness to obtain an A.A. in Liberal Arts & Sciences and Biology from Los Angeles Valley College, a B.A. in English Literature and Molecular and Cell Biology from UC Berkeley, an M.P.H. in History of American Public Health and Medicine, Ethics, & Policy from Columbia University, and an M.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He completed clinical training in Internal Medicine at the LA County Hospital at the University of Southern California and Gastroenterology at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Ars Medica, Garfield Lake Review, Pulse, Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly, and in the Signs of life, a literary anthology themed around first-and second-hand experiences of illness and caregiving. He was a participant at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference under the renowned writer Sigrid Nunez. He lives in Los Angeles with his family, where he is a practicing gastroenterologist and working on multiple projects, including a novella and a collection of short stories.
Dr. Rivera recently published his story about medicine and culture written while he was a medical student in the magazine Pulse: Voices from the Heart of Medicine. Read it here now: El Jugo Me Hizo Daño
My personal life experiences as a Mexican Puerto Rican American growing up in a single-parent family in Section 8 inner-city housing along with my work as a physician working in underserved communities has inspired an enduring pursuit of social justice through writing and the practice of medicine. Although I survived social-economic devastation, I suffered through poverty, police brutality, and multiple encounters with death. I questioned the arbitrariness by which some of us live and die, realizing as a young man that the war on drugs in the 1980s and 1990s was a war against the souls of inner-city children. This experience fueled my imagination to search for an escape. Like the author, Annie Proulx once said, “The imagination ameliorates hunger, bodily harm, bad luck, loneliness, insult, grief, restlessness, desperation, imprisonment, approaching death. From it spring ideas, images, actions, absurdities, beliefs, as blades of grass from underground rhizomes…the life of the mind, the realm of the imagination is a more brilliant and compelling world than the one we inhabit.” As an adolescent, I used my creative imagination to maneuver through the ferocious city streets, enabling me to overcome harrowing encounters with violence. Such experiences also produced in me a deep curiosity to understand the violence that children of color continue to face and inspired my commitment to social change to provide the same mentoring that proved so critical to my own trajectory.
As a writer and now as a clinician, I work to better understand the suffering of the disenfranchised and tell their life stories. As a clinician for the underserved, I teach patients about how the constructed social environment shapes, defines, and determines their disease process and its progress. As a creative writer, I demonstrate how the fate of people in the margins of LA is shaped and defined by the architectural, social, political, and cultural economic forces by which they live and die. Too often the focus is on the argument that individual behavior creates disastrous social conditions in communities of color. However, rarely do we stop to think that some of these communities inherited a social environment designed by biased and flawed urban planning and policies that ultimately determine the fate of the individuals. My goal as a creative writer is to expose such architectural, social, political, cultural, and economic biases in all their forms while putting forth a multicultural vision of America in American literature.