2025 True Heroes: Caroline Pecos-Duarte

CAROLINE PECOS-DUARTE found her way to medical school, but the road was not an easy one. There’s the expense, the intense coursework, and then there’s the fact that there are incredibly few doctors in America with backgrounds like hers. 

A member of Jemez Pueblo, she grew up understanding the importance of care and medicine to her community but wasn’t sure if medicine was a realistic career. That is, until she attended a conference hosted by the Association of American Indian Physicians during her junior year at Stanford University. 

“When I walked in the room,” Pecos-Duarte recalls, “I actually started crying, because I’d never met so many Indigenous physicians. I never really knew that it was possible.” Pecos-Duarte is not alone in these feelings. Today, fewer than 1 percent of practicing physicians in the U.S. are Indigenous, and given the importance of mentorship in medicine, this lack of representation can be a huge barrier. So when Pecos-Duarte saw all of those people that looked like her, she says, it made her realize she was in the right place—and that she wanted to help to get more young Indigenous people into rooms like this one. 

After returning to New Mexico for medical school at the University of New Mexico, Pecos-Duarte used her leadership position in the Association of Native American Medical Students to help organize and host a Native American Healthcare Career Expo for high school students in 2025. More than 100 high schoolers from across the state made their way to the UNM Health Sciences Center to learn about careers in medicine, pharmacy, nursing, and midwifery. 

“We got to hear what the students are interested in and show them that we’re here,” Pecos-Duarte recalls. “If they really want this, it’s possible.” She knows it’ll likely be years before these prospective students have the chance to apply for medical school or become physicians, but she’s still enthusiastic about helping them take the first step on the path she’s traveled.

“Caroline wants to bring others alongside her,” says Charity Bishop, a UNM physician and advisor on the Healthcare Expo. “She wants young students to know that there are health professionals who look like them and that they can do it too.”

For Pecos-Duarte, the desire to connect Native students to medicine is deeply rooted. She took care of her grandma, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, before she went to college and saw then how important it was to have Native health-care professionals available to care for Native people. The experience made her want to practice family medicine in her community, and as part of her medical schoolwork, she’s gotten the chance to return to Jemez and other Native spaces and to reconnect with those memories. 

“When I see people at the clinic who remind me of my grandma, it brings me so much joy,” she says, with the hope that in the future, there’ll be more Native doctors like her going back to their communities to provide care.