We look forward to collaborating with Professor H. Kenny Nienhusser, this year’s faculty director for La comunidad intelectual (LCI). LCI is excited to welcome approximately 22 first year and 15 continuing students to its vibrant learning community. The learning community has a leadership team composed of faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students. This year, the leadership team is adding a Campus Partner Engagement Mentor who will be working more closely with ELIN to build our engagement across those units. For more information on LCI check out their website. You can read more about their vision of expansion and growth for La Comunidad Intelecutal.

Contributed by Charles R. Venator-Santiago.

Congratulations to Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann on her 2023-24 academic year Humanities Institute fellowship!

Katerina, an Associate Professor of Spanish Studies and past director of El Instituto (2022-2023), will bring a project entitled “Aimé Césaire and His Cuban Comrades in Art.” Katerina writes that the project “examines the relationships of solidarity and translation between Martinican poet, dramatist, essayist, and politician Aimé Césaire and a set of Black and white translators and artists in Cuba who shaped Césaire’s Spanish-language legacy. Césaire’s collaborative legacy notably includes the contemporary Spanish-language adoption of his 1935 neologism, “negritude,” so that this radical intervention in French to name blackness in defiance of anti-Black racism has become part of Spanish-language Black consciousness discourse. This book examines the practices of solidarity and translation that gave rise to Césaire’s impact on the circulation of the Spanish-language race-proud discourse of “negritud” and contributes to understanding how practices of solidarity and translation create social and aesthetic meaning and impact beyond the framework of fidelity.”

In general, Katerina works with Caribbean literature and intellectual history more broadly, with a special focus on the routes of circulation and translation of anticolonial, Black consciousness, and anti-racist poetics and discourse in addition to the dynamics of gender and sexuality in these routes of circulation and translation. She initiated the project she’ll bring to UCHI with her 2012 Comparative Literature MA thesis, “Cabrera’s Césaire: Notes on an Afro-Caribbean Crossing,” which went on to become her 2019 article for MLN, “Cabrera’s Césaire: The Making of a Trans-Caribbean Zone.” As she studied archives for her first book, Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time (Rutgers UP, 2021), she found most of the primary source materials that worked with for this project. Katerina has also recently published another essay from this project, available open access at Continents Manuscripts, “Colombes et Menfenil in Text and Image: Taking Flight from Conquest in Aimé Césaire and Wifredo Lam’s Collaborative Aesthetics.”

Contributed by Rodolfo Fernandez.

In my five years teaching at UConn, I have had the opportunity to teach well over a thousand students.  I have no doubt that it would not be possible to teach so many people without the help of graduate research and teaching assistants.  I know how invaluable the labor and intellectual contributions of graduate students are, which is why I am excited to start a new position this year supervising El Instituto’s Graduate Assistants. 

The Instituto created this new position to enhance the support we give to graduate students and the faculty with whom they work. In coordination with the Director and Associate Director of El Instituto, the Supervisor of Graduate Assistants will be the dedicated liaison for our graduate workers 

At the top of the list of the supervisor’s duties will be to foster and maintain open lines of communication with graduate students. I want to know if students are experiencing any problems that affect their responsibilities in the classroom; this includes any conflicts that may arise between graduate assistants and faculty. In case of conflict between the supervisor and a graduate assistant, students can rely on the Director or Associate Director to mediate.  

We want to see all graduate students succeed, and we understand that multiple organizational issues must be addressed to create the conditions for success. With each new semester comes the challenge of TA (teaching assistant) or RA (research assistant) assignments. One of the supervisor’s duties will be to match the graduate students’ strengths and abilities with the faculty’s needs while prioritizing the students’ class schedules. Nothing should come between the student and their ability to complete their degree in a timely fashion.  

Graduate assistantships at the master’s level are not common, so we value the training our students receive through these assignments. To ensure that every student makes the most of these opportunities, the Supervisor of Graduate Studies will assist with orientation and training and will perform assessments of each assistant at the end of the academic year.  

Finally, the Supervisor will be a fixture on the graduate admissions committee. The cultural and intellectual vibrancy of El Instituto hinges on the process of selecting and recruiting prospective students. Each incoming cohort of graduate students brings unique skill sets and research interests; the Supervisor’s active involvement in the shaping of these cohorts will result in smoother transitions for our new students.  

This new position will evolve as El Instituto evolves, but its responsibilities to graduate students will remain constant. I welcome the challenges and opportunities coming my way and will always be open to feedback and suggestions from members of the Instituto’s community. Consider my door open as we all work together to support and empower our graduate workers. 

Contributed by Lorena Solis.

A Path to Social Justice

I am an assistant professor of industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology at the Department of Psychology and a core faculty member at El Instituto. My research focuses on understanding the manifestation of inequality in organizations and institutions. Specifically, I study inequality within the context of workforce diversity. I aim to produce research that brings awareness to the mechanisms that lead to the experience of marginalization for all women of color. I approach this work by incorporating three pillars: curiosity, inner work, and imagination.

Curiosity. My identities have been the most significant sources of knowledge in my personal and professional development. As a Mexican-American woman from a low-income household, I have been navigating systems of oppression that impact my reality in higher education. However, Black Feminist and Decolonial literature gave me the tools and resources to fight for my freedom from narratives of oppression. As I immersed myself in this literature, I began to experience curiosity about social justice. This curiosity allows me to critically evaluate the world and the conditions perpetuating oppression for people of color.

Inner Work. My introduction to Black feminist and Indigenous resistance also helped me view my experience with marginalization as a source of resistance. Take, for example, the beautiful words from Audre Lorde in her work, Black Feminist Thought in the Matrix of Domination,

“Offering subordinate groups new knowledge about their own experiences can be empowering. But revealing new ways of knowing that allow subordinate groups to define their own reality has far greater implications.”

For me, studying workforce diversity and incorporating Black Feminism and Indigenous resistance is an opportunity to 1) reconnect with my motherland, 2) understand the complexities of the Latino/a/x Identity, and 3) undue my internalized oppression that is very much rooted in colonization. Further, my self-awareness allows me to critically reflect on how I study and reproduce knowledge concerning groups that have been historically excluded from positions of leadership and power.

Imagination. I am excited to begin my career journey at the University of Connecticut. I will teach courses in psychology and Latinx studies. I plan to continue my research on workplace diversity. I have launched my research lab at UConn Hartford, The Resisting Inequality in Society (RIS) Lab. The work that my students and I will conduct is rooted in radical imagination. Imagination is vital in the abolition of systems of oppression. In my lab, we center the work of Black and Brown scholars who have provided us with theoretical and practical tools to challenge the status quo. We will use these tools to understand how women of color are navigating systems of oppression in organizations and institutions. In addition to examining the mechanisms that contribute to oppression, our lab will also investigate how women of color find ways to act (e.g., use voice behavior, advocacy, and expertise) against systems of injustice. Our mission is to center and amplify the stories of individuals experiencing marginalization due to their identities.

Contributed by Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann.

The Black Arrow, a book of poems reflecting on the U.S. naval based in Guantánamo by José Ramón Sánchez Leyva that I translated with Esther Whitfield was recently released by Linkgua Ediciones. José Ramón Sánchez ventures into territory that few Cuban writers have approached: the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, leased from Cuba by the United States since 1903, under the coercive terms of the Platt Amendment, and used since 2002 to hold detainees in the so-called “war on terror.” A long-time resident of the Cuban city of Guantánamo, less than twenty miles from the base, Sánchez reflects on the history and continued presence in his country of the U.S. military, the detention camps and the land-mined fence line that separates the base from Cuba.

To share the news with you about this book, I include here a selection from its translator’s note that Whitfield and I co-authored as we reflected on how we understand the book we collaborated to bring into being in English.

Isolated though it may be, the Guantánamo that the author inhabits in these poems is expansive in its history, geography, and imaginative connections. It is the Guantánamo of long-standing imperialist designs and resistance: of the Spanish-Cuban-American War that ended colonial rule in Cuba and established the continuing American presence at Guantánamo, through the lease in perpetuity that has been a vehement theme in the anti-imperialist rhetoric of the Cuban Revolution since Fidel Castro first seized power. It is the hostile space of the post-1959 years during which the base has been framed as a threat to Cuba, whose military forces surveil a borderland impassable to Cuban citizens other than the few elderly base workers permitted to continue crossing back and forth until the last of them retired in 2012— and the wild animals who, in several of the author’s poems, graze there freely. Also unhindered by the border, until systems were upgraded on the base, were radio and television channels that allowed residents of Cuban Guantánamo to listen into English-language broadcasts unavailable elsewhere in the country, allowing them what the author calls, in “The Channel from the Base,” “the exclusive luxury” of “an outside world/ beyond our socialist republic.” Post 9/ 11 Guantánamo, that has held over seven hundred detainees as “enemy combatants,” is well-known worldwide but has had a scant presence in the Cuban press. The experience of the detainees — as Muslims, as prisoners, and in many cases as poets—is, however, deeply compelling to the author. Sánchez Leyva pieces together what he can about this experience from a haphazard and multivocal archive: memories of a childhood in which light, sound, and broadcast signals from the base reached into the surrounding areas; printed histories and maps; official records pertaining to the base’s creation and development; oral reports from residents of Guantánamo province; leaked documents pertaining to detention operations; and detainees’ poetry.

Contributed by Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann and Anne Gebelein. 

Congratulations to Heidi Pineda, senior in Latino & Latin American Studies, who has won the Outstanding Senior Women Academic Achievement Award. The dean’s office let us know that competition for this honor was exceptionally high, as they received nominations from across all 38 units in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS).

Heidi is honored because she has demonstrated exceptionally high achievement in her coursework, research, and leadership in service to the University. Throughout her time at UConn, in addition to regularly excelling in her work in both LLAS and Political Science, Heidi has been a fierce advocate in research and service to increase Latinx student academic achievement and access to professional development. Heidi has been researching higher education practices to serve Latinx students and working with UConn’s Center for Career Development to develop the affinity community outreach program. She has piloted a new liaison position to facilitate career development between El Instituto, PRLACC, and La Comunidad Intelectual (LCI).

Heidi has presented her research on promoting cultural awareness for increasing the desire and motivation (“ganas” in Spanish) of academic achievement for students of Latin American descent in the U.S. academy at two conferences: Conference in Higher Education Pedagogy and NESPA. The eight different projects she has created through her work in academic affairs, combined with her leadership as president of Distinguished and Motivated Academic Scholars (DAMAS), are impressive. Here’s a highlight shortlist: Latinx Career Empowerment Collective, Careers for the Common Good: Giving Back to the Latinx Community, Latinx Networking Nights, Poderosas: Latina Empowerment Career Panel, and DE&I Career Ambassador Intern Orientation Training. She has also been dedicated to promoting the LLAS major, serving as a representative in The Major Experience, and volunteering to present, every semester, an undergrad’s perspective on the major to LLAS 1000-level classes.

Heidi’s senior thesis is a two-semester project examining HSIs who have been granted government funding regarding their interpretation of the funding’s mandate to serve Latino students in culturally appropriate ways. It is a fascinating project with value for UConn itself, as Stamford and Waterbury campuses begin to lean into their new HSI status. It is no surprise to us that she was chosen by all 5 top graduate programs in Higher Education research she applied to and will be attending Michigan State University in the fall to earn her master’s degree. We wish her the best of luck at her new university!

Contributed by Constance Holden

My dissertation examines gender, Blackness, and visual culture in modern Argentina. As my research links popular representations of Blackness to how African-descended women charted their own destinies, I became curious about the specific experiences of African-descended women scholars of Latin America. It was at this juncture that I learned about Black anthropologist Ellen Irene Diggs, who studied African-descended political and social lives in Latin America. In 1946, Dr. Diggs became the first Black scholar to receive a U.S. State Department Fellowship to study the African Diaspora in Latin America. Using the fellowship to research in Montevideo, Uruguay, Dr. Diggs’ work intervened in an ongoing community dialogue about the meanings of equality, inclusion, and freedom. Dr. Diggs, who offered alternative interpretations of Black belonging, disrupted monolithic representations of Black political cultures.

My research into Dr. Diggs resulted in an experimental biographical essay published in the first issue of the Journal of Black Educology. While most of the scholarship on Dr. Diggs focuses on her professional relationship with sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, who she met as a student at Atlanta University, my article recontextualized Dr. Diggs as a scholar within her own right and centers her experience in Uruguay as foundational to her academic career.  I used Morgan State University’s newly digitized collection of Ellen Irene Diggs personal papers and the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s online archive of the W.E.B. Du Bois Papers to reconstruct her history. I situated her time in Uruguay as one element of her lifelong intellectual formation, tracing her journey from her hometown of Monmouth, Illinois, to her studies at Georgia’s Atlanta University where she met Du Bois, and to her doctoral program at the University of Havana, where she worked with Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz. After securing the State Department Fellowship, Dr. Diggs arrived in Montevideo in September 1946. Although initially, they embraced the arrival of a Black scholar from the United States, African-descended journalists later criticized Dr. Diggs, who characterized their political activism as incoherent in an interview with an Argentine newspaper. In my essay, I argued that the debates that unfolded in the Black Uruguayan press in the aftermath of Dr. Diggs’ limiting analysis illustrated diasporic anxieties around racial progress, collective activism, and class mobility. In telling an intertwined story of the politics of Dr. Diggs and African-descended communities in Uruguay, my work examines the terms of communal and self-representation.

My essay understands Black women’s biography as a central methodology for exploring the processes of data collection about Latin America, how that information translates into knowledge production, and how representations of that knowledge shape divergent understandings of race, nation, and power. Ultimately, my research demonstrates that histories of representation and identity formation reveal the varied responses to liberal promises of racial inclusion across and within national contexts. Writing about Ellen Irene Diggs, and thanks to funding support from El Instituto, inspired me even more to write a dissertation about how African-descended women in Latin America represented their own lives and experiences.

Contributed by Sarah Willen & Heather Wurtz

Now is a crucial moment to reflect on our experiences of COVID-19 over the past three years and discuss lessons that we, as a global society, can learn as we strive for a better future. These are central objectives of the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP) — a combined research study and online journaling platform that was created to chronicle ordinary people’s everyday experiences at the height of the pandemic. Today, PJP focuses on elevating those voices and experiences to deepen our understanding of the pandemic’s lasting impact on the world and to generate dialogue and reflection about what we have both lost and learned during Covid-19 — and what we have yet to overcome.

PJP was created in the spring of 2020 by two medical anthropologists, Sarah S. Willen at UConn and Katherine A. Mason at Brown University, with support from an interdisciplinary team of students and faculty at both institutions. For two years (May 2020-May 2022), people around the world created weekly records of their pandemic experiences — in English or Spanish — in their choice of text, audio, and/or photographs, using only their smartphone or other device.

Since PJP launched, El Instituto (ELIN) support has been vital, and our team has continued to pursue new opportunities for engagement and exchange in Latin America as well as Latinx communities here in the U.S. For instance, we are disseminating our scholarly findings in Spanish and Portuguese. Our written interview with PJP creators (SSW & KAM) about PJP’s human rights implications appeared in the Journal of Human Rights (in English), then in the Portuguese journal Metaxy, and a Spanish version is forthcoming in Estudios Sociológicos. Two papers on an ELIN-supported spin-off study of COVID-19’s impact on Mexican college students are in process: a chapter for a Spanish volume about the “future after Covid-19,” spearheaded by an interdisciplinary group from El Colegio de México (COLMEX), and an article for a special issue about students’ experiences of COVID-19 across the globe.

PJP has also teamed up with community partners in Mexico on several projects engaging youth, students, and the broader community. This includes a five-chapter podcast spearheaded by a youth advocate in Mexico City featuring youth testimonies, photos, and music — the culmination of a four-week project of journaling and psychosocial support (i.e., active listening and guided conversation) with trained professionals. In addition, PJP has joined forces with the widely respected Center for Gender Studies at El Colegio de México, A.C. (CEG-COLMEX) to bring PJP’s multimedia traveling exhibition, Picturing the Pandemic: Images from the Pandemic Journaling Project, to Mexico City, in conversation with images from COLMEX students, faculty, and staff (May 9-June 6, 2023; Spanish site here). Picturing the Pandemic fosters equity and inclusion by displaying creative expressions from ordinary people from across the Americas, and around the world, through both narrative and art-making. It aims to redefine elite spaces to welcome underrepresented voices and aesthetics, and to elevate diverse Latinx perspectives while also creating opportunities for intercultural exchange.

On PJP’s website, we declare: “Usually, history is written only by the powerful. When the history of COVID-19 is written, let’s make sure that doesn’t happen.” As these activities — some sponsored directly by ELIN — make clear, elevating Spanish-speaking and Latin-American perspectives is crucial to this mission.

Sarah Willen is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at UConn and Co-Founder, together with Katherine A. Mason, of the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP). Heather Wurtz is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with PJP, with a joint appointment in Human Rights and Anthropology at UConn and the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University.