Contributed by Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann

On Friday, April 22nd, El Instituto had the pleasure of hosting award-winning fiction writer and author of the short story collection Love War Stories, Ivelisse Rodriguez. Rodriguez is from Puerto Rico and grew up in nearby Holyoke, MA. She visited my LLAS/SPAN 1009 “Introduction to Latino Literature, Culture, and Society” class to answer our questions about her short stories that we read for class. Rodriguez also met with my students from the fall 2021 LLAS 3230 /WGSS 3258 “Latina Narrative” course where we also read the Love War Stories collection for coffee at the Benton Museum café, and she discussed her research for her historical novel in progress with Prof. Guillermo Irizarry and me over lunch. The visit culminated with a reading co-sponsored with the UConn Humanities Institute, the Literatures, Cultures, and Languages Department, the Africana Studies Institute, and the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program.

The reading was attended by undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, and staff. She read from one of the highlight stories of the collection, “Holyoke, MA: An Ethnography,” a story that responds critically to an ethnographic photography project of the Puerto Rican community of Holyoke by taking a close look at the life of a popular high schooler named Veronica alongside a history of the city in which she resides. After the reading, we were all so eager to talk to Ivelisse Rodriguez about her work that we kept talking with her for informally for over an hour. Many members of our community were inspired by the opportunity to hear from her, to connect with her, and to hear her read her work. It was a very special day for El Instituto and for UConn.

Contributed by Anne Gebelein 

On Monday April 11th, Dodd Impact, El Instituto, and the Human Rights Institute, in collaboration with Skidmore College, celebrated the opening of an exhibit on children’s art created in the MPP camp of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. The exhibit “Painting the Border” will be in the Dodd Center until the end of June.

To mark the opening of the exhibit, a panel of faculty and activists discussed the current situation of children in refugee camps created by the United States’ “Remain in Mexico” policy, as well as pressing concerns of youth who have arrived in CT. The panel “Youth Seeking Refuge: U.S. Immigration Policy, Mobility Justice and Human Rights” included speakers Dr Diana Barnes of Skidmore College, who created the exhibit; Dr Anne Gebelein of El Instituto; Katia Daley, Healthcare Campaign Organizer for CT Students for a Dream; and Lucero Claudia De Alva Fernandez, industrial engineer, business owner, and the lead creator and organizer of a 9-shelter school system for 484 migrant youth in Ciudad Juarez.

Panelists discussed the many consequences of the closing of the border under Title 42, from foreign nationals not being allowed to exercise their right to request asylum; to a buildup of people seeking entry since 2019; to gangs making fortunes from charging tolls to cross their territory, from kidnapping and extortion, and from human trafficking and slavery. Citizens in Ciudad Juarez worked hard to convert 24 unoccupied buildings into shelters to bring families off the streets in one of the most dangerous cities in the hemisphere, and to create a school system in which to give primarily Central American children some sense of normalcy. Even so, the pictures these children painted in an art workshop reveal anxiety about leaving their homes and traumas in confronting additional violence in their journeys to our border.

Contributed by Anne Gebelein 

On April 28^th,  Anne Gebelein was awarded the Thomas E. Recchio Faculty Coordinator Award for Academic Leadership for her work as the Latin American Studies Faculty Coordinator for the Early College Experience. Anne has been working with high school teachers across the state since 2010 to develop and integrate Latin American Studies content into existing courses, and to teach LLAS 1190: Introduction to Latin America and the Caribbean. As LLAS 1190 is an interdisciplinary course, Anne works with both Spanish and History teachers to design a version of the course that works best for their department’s learning goals. She designs and leads yearly ECE workshops in topics of interest to teachers, including Central American migration, mass deportation, Puerto Rican and Latino activism, and changing immigration policy and human rights at the border. In addition, Anne regularly gives lectures in high schools to model college teaching of Latin American topics; has led workshops for students on college writing; and has recently led workshops for teachers in the teaching of border studies.

Contributed by Samuel Martinez 

With sadness but all best wishes for their next life chapters, El Instituto bids farewell to two outstanding UCONN Latinx faculty:

Linda Halgunseth (Associate Professor HDFS/El Instituto) leaves UCONN for Michigan State University in the fall 2022, after two years on our core faculty. In her short time with El Instituto, Halgunseth not only developed a new advanced undergraduate course on The Latinx Family, but took on important upper-level administrative responsibilities as Director of Academic Affairs at UConn Hartford, while also maintaining an active program of research, publication, and conference presentations.

Jesús Ramos-Kittrell (Assistant Professor in Residence, Music) will begin a tenure-eligible assistant professorship at the University of Oregon in fall 2022, after five years at UCONN.An affiliate faculty member, frequently involved with El Instituto as an event organizer and attendee, Ramos published the contributory volume, Decentering the Nation: Music, Mexicanidad, and Globalization, during his time on the UCONN faculty, as well as winning the 2021 AAUP Teaching Innovation Award.

Linda and Jesús, we will miss you!