Dr. Jason G. Irizarry’s (Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Faculty Associate of El Instituto) undergraduate course, Education in the Latinx Diaspora (LLAS 3998), critically explores the educational experiences and outcomes of Latinos, the largest and fastest growing “minoritized” group in U.S. schools. The curriculum and course assignments range from readings on LatCrit Theory, Latinx epistemologies, and Latinx student identities, to projects in which students draft testimonios, conduct phenomenological interviews with one another, and complete an investigation of an issue related to Latinx students in U.S. schools using Photo Voice. The “latino-centric” approach interwoven through this course has been to use theories generated by Latinos to examine Latinx education, approach the coursework critically using Participatory Action Research, and allow for a space that both promotes self-reflection and stimulates a desire for action and advocacy.

Unexpectedly, even though Irizarry’s class is open to all UConn students and does not require pre-requisites, only five students signed up for the course, all of which happened to self-identify as Latinx. None of the five students are Education students; they are instead comprised of majors spanning from Sociology to Neurobiology. Both Irizarry and the students concur that having this specific set of students has added, in the words of Irizarry, a “wrinkle” to the course. Simultaneously learning about Latinx students and being a group of Latinx students in an otherwise predominantly non-Latino institution has allowed for a more profound connection to the coursework and has fostered a more intense motivation for the students to learn.

A handful of the students described their experience in the course as not only a period of introspection, but also an opportunity to flip the deficit narrative for the entire U.S. Latinx community. The students alluded to the class being a journey; collectively agreeing that upon walking into this class at the beginning of the semester, they believed their previous educational experiences were unique to themselves as individuals. However, throughout the course of the semester, the knowledge they’ve gained from the course materials and assignments has made them aware of the commonalities among their schooling experiences and, more broadly, the systemic marginalization that Latinx youth face in U.S. schools.

Perhaps the greatest takeaway from this class for this diverse group of students has been the opportunity to have an academic space in which they not only can reflect on the issues that they and the Latino community face in terms of schooling, but also have a space in which they don’t feel pressured to justify why they are there. Moving forward, Irizarry hopes to have more students sign up for the class and have the PRLACC METAS course be a pre-requisite.

Contributed by  Julia Marchese

 

 

 

Each year, the Latinos in Education Foco invites a speaker for a plática with students, faculty and staff at the university. El Foco is a research community within El Instituto that provides opportunities for mentorship, networking and professional development for junior tenure-track faculty.  This year’s guest of honor was Professor Gilda Ochoa.

Ochoa is a distinguished professor of  Chicana/o – Latina/o Studies at Pomona College in Claremont California. She has been teaching at the college since 1997, when she earned he Ph.D. in sociology from UCLA two decades ago. In the past two decades she has become a prominent figure in the study of Latinos in U.S. education. Her most recent book, Academic Profiling : Latinos, Asian Americans, and the Achievement Gap  was named one of the Huffington Post’s “35 books that all educators of African American and Latino students must read”.

On April 18th, Professor Ochoa sat with members of the UConn community to discuss the importance of establishing classroom environments that best foster student involvement and learning. Rather than lecture about her work on reclaiming the voices of students whose voices are often silenced in a classroom context, she turned the community space of The Puerto Rican Latin American Cultural Center into a classroom in which she aimed to both teach and learn from those in the room.

Professor Ochoa placed great emphasis on the importance of students and teachers truly getting to know each other in order to create a welcoming and supportive class environment. In order to show the strength of establishing relationships in classrooms, she had everyone in the room turn to neighbor and introduce themselves. She then urged everyone to talk about which of the terms: power, privilege or silence characterized their own educational experiences.

She believes that truly getting to  know each other involves facing issues of power, privilege, and silence head on. Though this may be challenging in some contexts, she recommends doing s

o in order to ensure that all members of the classroom community have equal opportunity to speak and create an environment in which no one is silenced.

In addition to encouraging everyone in the room to work toward making classroom environments safe supportive spaces for everyone, Ochoa urged teaching and other university staff in the room to not be silent about causes they believe in. All of her work, and this event are testaments to the need for people and universities to speak out against the many injustices minoritized populations face in this country and the world.

Contributed by Victoria Almodovar

 

 

When Amanda Guzmán was growing up in the Bronx in the 1990s, she rarely saw her family’s Puerto Rican heritage reflected in the great museums of New York City. There was one exception. Her parents took her to the Museo del Barrio to show her an exhibit on the archaeology of the ancient Taino civilization, which populated Puerto Rico before the Spanish conquest.

Amanda got her first opportunity to curate a museum exhibit when she was an undergraduate at Harvard.  In a course taught by a curator of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography, each student had to curate a small exhibit from the museum’s collection. Amanda asked the Harvard curator if the museum possessed any objects from Puerto Rico. The curator had no idea.

After jumping through some hoops, Amanda finally discovered that Harvard possessed more than one thousand Puerto Rican objects.  Thus began a series of questions that she would continue to explore as a doctoral student in anthropology at UC Berkeley. How many U.S. museums possessed archaeological and ethnographic objects from Puerto Rico hidden in dusty storage rooms?  When, how, and why were these objects extracted from the island and stashed in U.S. museums? Were these museums — located in cities like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia with large Puerto Rican diasporas — doing anything to make these collections publicly available?

With some detective work, Amanda tracked down more than a dozen dusty museum collections and tried to reconstruct the history of the objects therein. She discovered that the largest group of collectors had been U.S. military officials and their wives who went to Puerto Rico in the 1898 Spanish American War to take the island as a U.S. possession. The most important archaeology collector was the son of the owner of a U.S. sugar company.  That status allowed him to strike deals with the businessmen who owned most of the land in Puerto Rico, to get their permission to excavate and extract the island’s archaeological treasures.

Museum visitors would never know this, however, because it is a hidden history.  Museums have typically portrayed these objects with little mention of Spanish colonialism, and no mention at all of U.S. colonialism.

When Amanda finishes her doctorate in May, she hopes to build a career as a curator, scholar, and critic of museums. Her big dream is to create a digital museum that one day will bring together all of the scattered, plundered Puerto Rican objects in one virtual space, where their history can be explored by people on the island, mainland, and throughout the world.

Contributed by Megan Fountain

 

 

In early March, Professor Lazaro Lima visited UConn to give the annual Luis B. Eyzaguirre Lecture. The lecture honors the memory of Professor Luis Eyzaguirre, who taught Latin American literature and Spanish at UConn for over 30 years. The purpose of the lecture series was to provide the UConn community with an opportunity to capture a glimpse of the humanism of Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

Professor Lima is the E. Claiborne Robins Distinguished Chair in Liberal Arts and professor of Latin American and Iberian Studies and American Studies at the University of Richmond. His work focuses on Latino political engagement and the factors that facilitate or hinder it. He has written several books, including his most recently published, Being Brown: Sonia Sotomayor and the Latino Question. Additionally, Lima has co-written and co-produced two documentary films: Las Mujeres: Latina Lives, American Dream and Rubi’s Story: A DACA Dreamer in Trump’s America.

The title of his lecture was “Being Brown: The Latino Question in the Democratic Commons.”

In addition to giving the lecture, Lima spent some time getting to know some UConn students, both at the graduate and undergraduate levels. Prior to the lecture, he attended a session of an undergraduate Latino and Latin American Studies course to talk to students about the integral part they play in the advancement of Latinos and other marginalized people in the United States. He urged students to be proud of all that they have accomplished and what they will accomplish as a result of taking courses that cover topics not covered in many major plans of study that encourage students to think critically about what is going on in the world.

Contributed by Victoria Almodovar

 

 

The end of this academic year brings many new beginnings.We celebrate the scholarly achievements of our graduating undergraduate minors and majors and cheer for the career milestones reached by our graduate students (see Graduate News). We give thanks for another year’s good work, with our partners, the Puerto Rican/Latin American Cultural Center, La Comunidad Intelectual living learning community and our sister social justice and intersectional studies institutes, helping to nurture and promote diverse voices. Without the inspired ideas and indefatigable energy of our faculty and staff, I could accomplish nothing as El Instituto’s lead coordinator. Thanks in particular this year go to our Associate Director, Anne Gebelein, who stepped in to serve as acting director of El Instituto during my spring semester sabbatical leave. At this time of the year, we look forward to new possibilities for El Instituto, too, through partnerships aiming to bring more talented and community engaged faculty and students to campus. The need seems greater than ever for the kinds of critical, fact-based, innovative, politically progressive and experience-near research, teaching and outreach that we support. I look forward to hearing your ideas about how we can work together better, next year and beyond.

 

-Samuel Martinez

Special Collections conservator at UConn, Natalie Granados, had her art featured at Homer Babbidge Library. Granados’ featured works are vivid depictions of places Granados has visited brought to life digitally through Adobe Draw. Places she has been such as the Dominican Republic where she was raised and New Orleans where she lived for a period of her life and views from the Detroit River.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Granados went to art school during her undergraduate career in the Dominican Republic, then finished her degree at Parsons School of Design for Illustration. Granados says she was inspired to make her own exhibit after she witnessed a faculty member’s artwork on display. “About a year ago I saw an exhibit from someone that was a part of the community, she had been a faculty member and a light bulb went off and I thought maybe I can do this,” Granados said. Granados says her artwork is a passion of hers that she has been working on her whole life. Besides the art exhibit, she dedicated much of her time to creating art through different mediums. Granados previously owned business where she sold artwork and made clothing. Granados says she recently started to portray her latinidad through art, something she had not done before. Granados’ inspiration came from her recent visit to the Dominican Republic, and now she is tying much of her artwork to things from her visit such as flowers and houses that drew her attention while she was there. One thing Granados hopes to highlight more within art is creating work that speaks of street harassment and violence against women. We applaud Natalie’s work and look forward to her future works.

-Contributed by Jareliz Diaz