Campos, Easton’s city administrator and the vice chair of Governor Josh Shapiro’s Advisory Commission on Latino Affairs, utilizes skills he built at Muhlenberg in his work and his many volunteer leadership roles across the region and state.
As the city administrator for Easton, the easternmost city in the Lehigh Valley, Luis Campos ’99 has his hands in just about everything. He is the first person to draft a budget each year before it goes to the mayor and city council for deliberation and final approval. He is the city’s lead negotiator with labor, police, and fire unions. He meets weekly with the directors of each of the city’s eight departments and attends city council, authority, and community board meetings. Campos has been in this role since 2016, and it has yet to lose its luster.
“I love the fact that I’m part of the apparatus that manages city government and can affect the community in a positive way,” says Campos, who was an international studies major at Muhlenberg. “I get up in the morning motivated to come in because I enjoy my job so much.”
“I love the fact that I’m part of the apparatus that manages city government and can affect the community in a positive way. I get up in the morning motivated to come in because I enjoy my job so much.”
Campos and his family came to the United States from Nicaragua when he was 4 years old and moved to the Lehigh Valley shortly after. Easton Hospital had recruited his father, a surgeon, to serve the area’s growing Spanish-speaking population. Campos got to know Muhlenberg through his father’s connections with faculty working in the community, including Professor of Spanish Erika M. Sutherland and former Professor of History Anna Adams.
He chose his major hoping to learn more about the world, and he studied abroad three times as a Muhlenberg student. He spent a semester at the University of Chile, a month in Spain, and 10 days in Peru on a biology expedition. And from those experiences came papers: After Chile, he wrote about a transnational power company that was creating hydroelectric facilities there and the effects on the population and the environment. After Peru, where he was the only student not studying the sciences on the trip, he wrote about ecotourism. After some personal travels to Nicaragua, he wrote about the Nicaraguan economy. He later had the opportunity to present two of those papers at the Middle Atlantic Council of Latin American Studies annual conference.
Campos with Executive Secretary Destiny Smith
“My professors saw something in me, and they really encouraged me to participate in independent studies,” he says. “[The conference] was an unbelievable experience in itself, to be able not only to write about something you’re studying but to be able to present it and then get questioned on it in real time. It was a lot more vibrant than just writing a paper and getting graded on it. I remember all this stuff like it was just yesterday, and sometimes I can’t even remember what I did last week.”
The Bormann-Paris Professor in Political Philosophy, Giacomo Gambino, encouraged Campos to pursue a master’s degree in political science at Lehigh University, and that’s where his focus shifted toward domestic political issues. He wrote his thesis on emerging U.S. Latino politics, and he has seen a massive shift in the Lehigh Valley — where 53.8% of the population of Allentown, 29.4% of Bethlehem, and 24.5% of Easton now identifies as Hispanic or Latino — in the decades he’s lived here.
“My professors saw something in me, and they really encouraged me to participate in independent studies.”
“Things have changed night and day, from a small, fledgling type of community where, at one time, the city of Allentown was seemingly combative to new immigrants, to today, where many Latinos, including myself, serve in leadership positions in government and are running not only small but mid-sized companies, and in some cases, larger companies in the [Lehigh] Valley,” says Campos, who serves as vice chair of Governor Josh Shapiro’s Advisory Commission on Latino Affairs. “Things have changed significantly.”
Listen to a more extensive interview on the alumni podcast 2400 Chew.
In addition to his duties as city administrator, Campos furthers his community involvement by volunteering with a variety of organizations. He helped launch and now coaches for the city of Easton’s youth basketball program, which allows children who are Easton residents to play on a competitive travel team at a reduced rate based on need. He also serves on the boards of the Greater Lehigh Valley Chamber of Commerce, the Fé Foundation (which delivers the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of the Lehigh Valley’s educational and community development programs), Easton’s Third Street Alliance for Women & Children, the Lehigh Valley Community Foundation, and Lehigh Valley Public Media. He credits Muhlenberg — where his stepdaughter, Sofia Sotomayor ’27, is studying psychology — for setting him up for success in all the roles he fills.
“Everything I did as a student, I still use those skills today. It’s critical thinking skills, communication skills, presentation skills … all those things, I learned at Muhlenberg.”
“Everything I did as a student, I still use those skills today. I have to write a lot. I have to review a lot of documents. I have to communicate with [Easton’s] legal team, our directors, city council, the mayor, the public,” he says. “It’s critical thinking skills, communication skills, presentation skills … all those things, I learned at Muhlenberg.”
These student-athletes used their extra year of eligibility to compete for their teams while pursuing master’s degrees from the School of Graduate Studies.
