Category Archives: Latina and Latino Studies

Hablando de ellas: Experiences of Latina K-12 Public School Administrators with Race and Gender

sign says "Our country's future economy depends on our children's education now"

Our Future. Photo by Flickr User Andy Blackledge. Feb 15, 2015. CC BY-NC 2.0

By Dr. Lisandra Tayloe 

Latinas are relatively scarce in leadership positions in K-12 public schools.  Nonetheless, as my recently concluded dissertation study (2016) indicated, fractional representation does not equal nonexistence but, rather, exclusion and neglect. In my study, I examined barriers to career advancement, the effects of barriers, successful strategies to overcome challenges, and the roles of race and gender on leadership ascension and practice from the perspective of K-12 Latina public school administrators.

Utilizing a mixed methods approach that included 30 survey responses and 4 interviews with two public school principals and two assistant principals in the state of Florida, I gathered information from Latina administrators of varied ethnicities, including Puerto Rican, Guatemalan, and Venezuelan. Their ages and leadership experiences varied too, ranging from 29-62 years of age and 1-26 years of educational leadership experience. Continue reading

The Latina/o/x Role in the 2016 Political Race

This week we feature Latina/o Studies scholars and writers Lisa Magaña, Christina Bejarano, and Daisy Hernández on the role of Latinas/os/x in today’s political climate and how the 2016 election will affect Latina/o/x lives.

Christina Bejarano, University of Kansas

Latinos play an increasingly important role in today’s political climate, both in terms of their increasing presence in the political environment and their growing voting power in the elections.  Latinos are a key voting bloc of swing voters that are courted by both political parties and they are forecasted to play a pivotal role in upcoming elections.  This particular election has brought a heightened sense of importance to the Latino vote.  However, this increased political attention comes with both negative and positive ramifications for Latinos. 

Word "vote" painted on fence

Photo by Flickr user H2Woah! Taken August 5, 2008. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The current political climate provides several clear issues of importance for Latino communities, which can be an additional motivator for Latinos to participate this election.  Latinos are concerned about multiple issues including their top concerns on immigration reform, improving the economy, and creating more jobs, as well as providing quality education and health care.  This election has also emphasized the need to address mounting anti-Latino and anti-immigrant discrimination in the country, as well as police violence and inner city tensions.  Many Latinos acknowledge the negative repercussions of the Trump campaign, which has created a more Continue reading

Reports from July 2016 Latina/o Studies Association Conference

panelists pictured

Panelists Beatriz Tapia, Alexandro Gradilla, Anita Tijerina Revilla, and Magdalena L. Barrera. Photo by M. Barrera. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Latina/o Studies Association 2016: Nourishing the Mind and the Spirit

By Magdalena L. Barrera

The 2016 LSA conference was a wonderful experience, for many reasons. To situate myself: I am a faculty member of the Mexican American Studies department at San José State University. My primary area of research is analysis of textual representations of Mexican Americans in early twentieth century American cultural production; however, in recent years I have developed a secondary research area that explores the retention and mentoring of first-generation and underrepresented students in higher education. This second area was inspired in part by the learning curve I underwent as my environment changed from the R1 settings of my undergraduate through postdoctoral training to working in the California State University system. Although I have maintained my primary research area, it requires some effort to stay in touch with emerging trends in the field, as I am the only person at SJSU who does Humanities-based work in Chicanx Studies. Moreover, I had not attended a conference in a couple of years, and so I welcomed this year’s LSA as an opportunity to fully engage as both a presenter and participant, and to expand my professional network. Continue reading

Stigmatized Markets: Los Angeles Street Vending Kids Working and Restoring a Dignified Self

By Emir Estrada

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgbGSYmLgmQ

The video in the link above depicts the public humiliation of a child street vendor in Tabasco, Mexico. Three officials stand tall next to him as he inconsolably and powerlessly follows through on their command to dump on the street the merchandise he carried on a small straw basket. Once he empties the basket, the officials turn away and leave him on the floor to collect his merchandize. This incident took place in Mexico, but this also happens in our own backyard, here in the U.S.

When I watched this video, I was working on an academic article based on original research I conducted in 2009 to 2012 with street vending children and their families in Los Angeles, CA.  Street vending is a popular economic strategy for poor, undocumented and Spanish monolingual Latinos in Los Angeles. During my study, I spent two and a half years with various street vending families and conducted 66 interviews with children between the ages of 10-18 and their parents. I also accompanied several families while they sold goods on the streets. Continue reading

The Marlin Mine and Women’s Resistance

by Nancy Sabas

With the permission of the author, we are republishing a blog essay by Nancy Sabas on Indigenous Mam Mayan women resisting mining operations in their community of San Miguel Ixtahuacán in the highlands of Guatemala. The essay originally appeared on the Latin American Advocacy Blog in June 2015 and is republished here with additional reference notes for readers.

Was it you who sent the miners?
They violate the womb of Mother Earth
They take the gold, destroying the hills.
One gram of blood is worth more than a thousand kilos of gold.
What about my people?
And you, my God, where are you hiding?
Fear paralyzes us
My people are sold and they do not realize it.

-Portion of a song written by the Parish of San Miguel Ixtahuacán.

A few weeks ago, I organized a learning tour for North American participants to discuss the mining industry in Guatemala, On the tour, we visited the department of San Marcos and surrounding communities that deal with this problem.

Mining operations in Guatemala are not a recent issue. In 1998, two years after the signing of the peace agreement following a harsh civil war, the Foreign Investment Law removed the restrictions on trade with Guatemala, which attracted transnational companies to enter the country. Among the various companies, Goldcorp, a Canadian extractive company with high interest in exploiting gold, stands out.

After a license granted by the Guatemalan government, the Marlin mine, operated by Montana Exploradora, a subsidiary of Goldcorp, began its operations in the community of San Miguel in western Guatemala. This was done without prior community consultation, even though it is an obligatory requirement of various international and national laws.¹  In 2009, Goldcorp stopped appearing in the Canadian Jantzi Social Index for ethical investment due to the controversial use of cyanide in their operations.²  Currently the Marlin mine is considered the most lucrative mine that Goldcorp owns worldwide.

During our trip, we visited the community and interviewed community members to hear their side of the story. I met Crisanta Pérez, a Mayan Mam woman with 6 children who lives with determination, loyal to her philosophy of caring for Mother Earth and defending her territory. Crisanta resists and denounces Goldcorp’s environmental and community violations.  Despite facing intimidation, 14 arrest warrants and criminalization for her work in defense of her territory and human rights, Crisanta stands firm. When we asked her how the resistance movement in San Miguel was born, she explained, ”There are many men who work as miners in the company. Our community is divided in opinions, and although some of the men disagree with the mining operations in the community, they do not take a position because they are working there. It is for this reason that the resistance movement in San Miguel against mining started from the women.¨

As an indigenous woman, Crisanta faces various levels of oppression. However, she resists the roles imposed by a patriarchal hegemonic system, and has become a public figure, with a voice, empowered with knowledge about her rights and equipped to assertively demand the vindication of environmentally sustainable traditional practices, in line with the Mayan worldview. In addition, Crisanta tirelessly denounces the massive exploitation of resources.
¨Transnational companies are destroying the most valuable thing we have, Mother Earth,¨ Crisanta explained during our visit.

With her focus from the periphery, Crisanta defies the ruling capitalist logic that sacrifices the sacred elements (Mother Earth) and whose goal is the strict accumulation of wealth. The position of inequality that Crisanta has, along with other Mam women, enables her to integrate a more holistic perspective in line with her worldview and allows her to critique the mining operations from a Maya Mam light. These women, based on their condition of oppression, have the ability to see with clarity from the base. This viewpoint enables them to understand the world from their ancestral worldview, as well as the reality of the mestizo (the Guatemalan State), and the dominant white (Goldcorp). This understanding contrasts the power groups’ viewpoint who understand and legitimize their knowledge as the only valid form of knowing. The women have become privileged epistemic subjects, for not being ¨contaminated¨ with only one way of knowledge that comes from an advantageous social position.

A member of the catholic parish, an indigenous Mam woman facing towards the marlin mine. Photo credit: Matthew Kok.

A member of the Catholic parish, an indigenous Mam woman facing towards the Marlin mine. Photo credit: Matthew Kok. Used with permission of author.

The case of mining in San Miguel Ixtahuacán, its environmental impact and the criminalization of women activists, can be understood from an ecofeminist perspective. As Vandana Shiva, in her book Stolen Harvest states: ¨For more than two centuries, patriarchal, eurocentric, and anthropocentric scientific discourse has treated women, other cultures, and other species as objects. Experts have been treated as the only legitimate knowers. For more than two decades, feminist movements, Third World and indigenous people’s movements, and ecological and animal-rights movements have questioned this objectification and denial of subjecthood.¨ The Guatemalan state and the mining company, driven by their focus on production, consumption and accumulation of wealth fail to respect the sovereignty and spirituality of indigenous peoples. The Mayan worldview is trampled by a mercantilist system that does not recognize the land as sacred, positioning man/production over woman /nature.

Crisanta and the anti-mining resistance group of San Miguel are reluctant to embrace the imposition of a clearly western and patriarchal “development” that despises life in the periphery and legitimizes abuse from its position of power. On the contrary, the women demand ¨the good life which according to their worldview and ancestral knowledge, consists in the search for harmony and balance with Mother Earth and all forms of existence. This philosophy of living naturally disapproves all forms of accumulation and exploitation that would alter the harmonious coexistence and quality of life of other beings.

In 2008, the Pastoral Commission of Peace and Ecology (COPAE) of San Marcos along with other organizations doing independent studies presented their detections of arsenic, aluminum, copper, manganese, and other metals in some water sources near the Marlin mine. The poor management of the mine waste and their presence in natural sources of water is a good explanation for the increase in gastrointestinal and skin diseases among the neighbors of the nearby communities.

During my visit, as we were interviewing members of the Parish of the San Miguel community, we talked about how racism was politically used to justify these atrocities. A parishioner tearfully explained, abuse is legitimized under the premise that ¨the Indians are dirty and unhygienic.¨ The hierarchy of race or gender is illogical and cannot be interpreted if it does not fall within a base structure with political interest. This is a clear example, where the discrediting and discrimination of a population is aligned with neoliberalist interest.

¨On the threshold of the third millennium, liberation strategies must ensure that human freedom is not achieved at the expense of other species, that freedom of one race or gender is not based on the increasing subjugation of other races and genders. In each of these struggles for freedom, the challenge is to include the other.¨ –Vandana Shiva

For me, Crisanta´s resistance is a miracle born from an oppressed community. The same system that abused and excluded Mam women, now is the same that caused the conditions for them to become creators of new knowledge outside of a dominant perspective. The heart and unbreakable spirit of these women defending their territory and returning to their ancestral knowledge, translates their struggles against the violation of the land to their female bodies and vice versa. They are women who cling to their indigenous philosophy of the ¨Good Life,¨ seeking harmony and sustainable living between people and nature peacefully. Under that view, Crisanta and the women of San Miguel Ixtahuacán rethink, deconstruct and reconstruct themselves.

Take action:
Send a letter to your congressmen to ensure that ensure that Canadian oil, mining and gas companies live up to international human rights, labour and environmental standards:
http://www.kairoscanada.org/take-action/open-for-justice/

References:

1.  S. James Anaya, “Preliminary Note on the Application of the Principle of Consultation with Indigenous Peoples in Guatemala and the Case of the Marlin Mine, ” UN Human Rights Council Report A/HRC/15/37/App. 8 (July 8, 2010), http://unsr.jamesanaya.org/special-reports/preliminary-note-on-the-application-of-the-principle-of-consultation-with-indigenous-peoples-in-guatemala-and-the-case-of-the-marlin-mine-2010

2. Jantzi Research Client Alert (2008), https://goldcorpoutofguatemala.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/jantziresearch-alert-080430-goldcorp-final.pdf

3. Vandana Shiva, Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply, (Boston: South End Press, 2000).

Nancy Sabas, originally from Honduras, currently lives in Guatemala as a exchange coordinator for the Mennonite Central Committee. She has a degree in Business Management and is a current student in a feminist studies certification course provided by Ixchel women´s collective in Guatemala City.

Writing about Julia

author photo

Vanessa Pérez. Photo courtesy of author. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

by Vanessa Pérez

In the early morning hours of July 5, 1953, two New York City police officers spotted a figure on the ground near the corner of Fifth Avenue and 106th Street in East Harlem. As they approached, they saw the body of a woman with bronze-colored skin. Once a towering woman at five feet, ten inches, she now lay in the street, unconscious. They rushed her to Harlem Hospital, where she died shortly thereafter. The woman carried no handbag and had no identification on her. No one came to the morgue to claim her body. No missing person’s case fit her description. She was buried in the city’s Potter’s Field. One month later, the woman was identified as award-winning Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos. Her family and friends exhumed and repatriated her body.

When I began writing about Julia de Burgos, I hesitated to mention her notorious death, seeking to move away from the narratives of victimhood that have shrouded her life for more than half a century. I wanted to focus on her poetry, her activism for women’s rights, social justice and the independence of Puerto Rico, and her legacy. Most Puerto Ricans already know her story, and many both on the island and in New York have been captivated by her life. However, I soon realized the importance of recounting even the most difficult details as I introduced her to new audiences. Her migration experience and her death on the streets of New York capture the imaginations of readers everywhere. Becoming Julia de Burgos builds on recent approaches to her work that focus on movement, flow, and migration. This book proposes a new way of reading Burgos’s work, life, and legacy, focusing on the escape routes she created in her poetry to write herself out of the rigid confines of gender and cultural nationalism.

For those of you who are not familiar with Burgos, let me offer a brief biographical sketch. Julia Constanza Burgos García was born on 17 February 1914 in the town of Carolina, Puerto Rico, the eldest of Paula García de Burgos and Francisco Burgos Hans’s thirteen children. Julia was intimately familiar with struggle, hardship, and death. She watched six of her younger siblings die of malnutrition and other illnesses associated with poverty. She obtained a teaching certification, a two-year degree, from the University of Puerto Rico, but would only work as a teacher for a year. In 1934, she married Rubén Rodríguez Beauchamp who she divorced only three years later. As a divorced woman in a conservative Catholic society, Burgos found that gossip, speculation, and vicious rumors undermined her respectabil­ity. During this time, she wrote her first collection of poetry, Poemas exactos a mí misma (Poems to Myself), which she later considered juvenilia and never published. In those early years, she also wrote “Río Grande de Loíza,” which became one of her most well-known works and was later included in her first published collection, Poema en veinte surcos (Poem in Twenty Furrows, 1938). This early work explored social justice and feminist themes, which she would continue to write about throughout her life. In poems such as “Pentacromia” and “A Julia de Burgos” she would write about her frustration with the institution of marriage and the limited roles available to women. In “Pentacromia” she repeats in each of the six stanzas the line “Hoy, quiero ser hombre (Today, I want to be a man),” expressing her desire for greater freedom to travel, and be an active participant in the world. In the poem, “A Julia de Burgos” she voices her frustration with social expectations of femininity through a split or double consciousness, suggesting postmodernist ideas of identity as performance. The speaker dramatizes the conflict between her socially acceptable constructed identity and her inner voices as a woman artist, as can be noted in the lines below.

Tú en ti misma no mandas; a ti todos te mandan;

en ti mandan tu esposo, tus padres, tus parientes,

el cura, la modista, el teatro, el casino,

el auto, las alhajas, el banquete, el champán,

el cielo y el infierno, y el qué dirán social.

 

En mí no, que en mí manda mí solo corazón,

mi solo pensamiento; quien manda en mí soy yo.

Tú, flor de aristocracia; y yo flor del pueblo.

Tú en ti lo tienes todo y a todos se lo debes,

mientras que yo, mi nada a nadie se la debo.

 

(You in yourself rule not; you’re ruled by everyone;

in you your husband rules, your parents, relatives,

the priest, the dressmaker, the theater, the casino

the car, the jewels, the banquet, the champagne,

the heaven and the hell, and the what-will-they-say.

 

Not so in me, who am ruled only by my heart,

only by what I think; who me commands is me.

You, aristocratic blossom; and I plebian floret.

You have it all with you and you owe it all to all,

While I, my nothing to no one do I owe.)

These lines offer an example of her commitment to freedom from prescribed roles for women. Burgos wrote and published her second collection of poetry, Canción de la verdad sencilla (Song of the Simple Truth), in 1939. Her third and final collection of poetry, El mar y tú (The Sea and You), was published posthumously in 1954. In January 1940, Burgos left Puerto Rico for New York where she stayed for six month. She then moved to Havana where she lived for two years before returning to New York in 1942. Several factors influenced her decision to leave Puerto Rico in 1940. The turn in Puerto Rican politics away from the nationalist and independence movement was one of the reasons. Also, many Puerto Rican writers, artists and musicians left for New York in those years in search of a wider audience, publishing houses, recording studios and greater opportunities to continue to develop their craft. Julia de Burgos wanted to be a part of this.

From late 1942 until her death, Burgos lived in New York where she struggled to make a living as a writer. She wrote for the Spanish-language weekly Pueblos Hispanos from 1943 to 1944, further developing her political voice. However, her journalism shows her political commitment to radical democracy and the struggle for immigrant and Puerto Rican rights and her advocacy of solidarity with Harlem’s African American community. In addition, these writings as well as her poetry reveal her understanding of cultural identity as fluid and unbound by national territory. While in the hospital months before her death, she wrote her two final poems in English, “Farewell in Welfare Island,” and “The Sun in Welfare Island,” describing the condition of exile and her sense of seclusion and desolation. These poems can be read as precursors to the literature of Nuyorican and U.S. Latina/o writers of the 1970s in both theme and emotional intonation.

Becoming Julia de Burgos recuperates a savvy, ambitious and influential intellectual who was a creative force both on the island and in New York. She is claimed by later generations as a beloved and inspiring icon and a fierce ancestor. There are at least two historical moments where we see a renewed interest in Julia de Burgos’s life and work. The civil rights movement of the 1960s is one of those moments. The women’s movement of that era led to a renewed interest in the poet on the island by feminist writers, artists and literary critics. The Nuyorican Movement of the 1970s led to ethnic revitalization and search for a deeper understanding of Puerto Rican history and culture that so many New York Puerto Ricans were distanced from. This coincided with first translations of some of her poems into English. As Latina feminists sought for intellectual genealogies during the women of color movement, they reclaimed Julia de Burgos as an ancestor. Julia de Burgos is remembered, reinvented and invoked in the poetry, prose, and artwork of various New York Latino writers and visual artist such as Sandra María Esteves, Mariposa and Andrea Arroyo, just to name a few. She is inscribed in the neighborhood of El Barrio in the form of murals, a cultural center named in her honor, and a street named after her. Sixty years after Julia de Burgos was found unconscious on an El Barrio street corner, she now forms part of the neighborhood’s urban landscape and cultural mythology.

Vanessa Pérez is an Associate Professor of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at City University of New York, Brooklyn College, and the editor of Hispanic Caribbean Literature of Migration: Narratives of Displacement. She serves as an associate investigator on the City University of New York-New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals (CUNY-NYSIEB), a collaborative project of the Research Institute for the Study of Language in Urban Society (RISLUS) and the Ph.D. Program in Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Mujerista in Spirit: On Being a Latina Lapsed Catholic Researching Faith during Lent

author celebrating first communion

Sujey Vega’s First Communion Celebration. Personal files of author. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

by Sujey Vega

It is Lent and so it is that time of year when my mother pleads, “Hija, go to church this Sunday.”  For years I have tried to make my mother understand that I no longer “go to church” by choice. My repeated efforts to attend Catholic mass as an adult have yielded only unease, a sense of acting out of unfathomable obligation. What I dare not tell her, however, is how much I actually miss it. How much I wish I could believe and truly engage the Holy Spirit that she, following in the steps of my querida abuelita, so wholeheartedly embraced. Like many families from Latin America, it was the women who carried on the lived religion in my family. I remember my abuelita’s wrinkled hands moving her rose petal rosary, her thumbnail rhythmically gliding the beads that after years of use still emitted the smell of roses. Indeed, the aroma of fresh flowers continues to remind me of my own days of “ofreciendo flores” or offering flowers to the Virgin. Growing up, we attended mass every Sunday. My amá had me in catechism, I was an altar girl and took confirmation classes, even though I was confirmed in Mexico at the tender age of two (because as a Mexican Catholic I had no choice).

As a young adult, I could not personally reconcile the directives of a parish priest who barred teen girls from wearing make-up to mass or the passive reception expected of religious women toward their ministerial leader, a male priest. My mother, my abuelita, the women of the faith were the ones solely responsible for maintaining the faith at home, and yet they were hardly ever recognized by the institutional church for their commitment. Moreover, the presence of the Holy Spirit was never felt in the pews listening to yet another lecture from the pulpit. I felt spiritual presence in warm embraces, Sunday carne asadas, and the sounds of familiar alabanzas (hymns) and none of these things were ever talked about during mass. I realized now that what I was feeling was what Mujerista Theology noted as lo cotidiano, or the every day lived religion. Even though I left the organized Church, I still find light and warmth in the way people gain spiritual comfort, healing, and belonging from their faith.

Much to my mother’s surprise, I study religion and its social impact on Latino immigrant communities. Much to my own surprise, I voluntarily chose this path. I can recall the first time I felt called to voluntarily step into a church for research purposes. In 2003, Chicago was the site of national tour of the Tilma de Tepeyac religious relic, a 17th century statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe carrying a glass-encased piece of the tilma. At Our Lady of Tepeyac Parish in the Little Village neighborhood Mexican Catholics knelt down at the pews to pray for hours. As I observed their prayer I could not help but feel moved. Moved not by the presence of the relic, but the power of faith. Watching old and young, male and female pray brought me to tears. I sat there wishing I could be the Catholic my own mother wished I was.

Not long after this moment in Chicago I realized that my being agnostic does not deter from my interests in faith and Latin@ communities. I may not necessarily agree with the tenets of most organized religion, but I can appreciate the value that lived religion has on strengthening people’s lives. For the populations I study, faith provides material and emotional stability in an otherwise unstable world. This might seem crass or reductionists, but for me (a non believer) it helps to situate how religious faith serves a purpose in people’s lives. In this way, I could study faith and its role in religious communities without necessarily getting into the politics of accuracy or ranking religious beliefs.

This finessing of skepticism with appreciation has been more than valuable in my current research project on Latino Mormons. This research began in 2006 when I met Veronica, the wife of a Mormon President in a store-front rama, or Mormon branch. Here close to a dozen families gathered every Sunday to testify to their faith as Latter Day Saints. I had never met a Latino LDS member, and to be frank, did not even know such a community existed. Latino Protestants of all sorts (Baptists, Jehovah’s, and Seventh-day Adventists) were in my periphery, but Latino Mormons were completely out of my realm of possibility. Veronica invited me to her home where we bonded over her delicious pozole.  Veronica recalled the story of her crossing into the United States with her children, “fue una aventura terrible pero para ellos yo se les hice ver divertido – como que todo estaba bien… Gracias a Dios estamos aqui, que si pasamos por todo fue porque El lo quiso asi que valoremos mas las cosas, lo que tenemos, nuestro hogar, la familia” [It was a terrible adventure, but for them [her children] I made it seem entertaining, like everything would be ok. Thank God we are here, what we went through was all because He wanted us to value things, value what we have, our home, and our family].  It was women like Veronica who solidified my own interests in faith and religion as a coping mechanism for Latino immigrants. Veronica courageously faced the crossing with her children. Terrified herself, she referenced the crossing as “una aventura” an adventure to compartmentalize the fear and transform it into excitement for her children. Since then, I have continued to address the role of faith and family in Latino Mormons. Currently I am sifting through archives, conducting oral histories, and attending church events/services to understand more fully how specifically the Church of Latter Day Saints is inclusive of its Latino converts, and how Latinos have, for almost a century now, found their own spiritual belonging as Mormons.

The researcher in me wants to probe the Mormon Church’s problematic vision of a “light-skinned” God speaking to and saving indigenous communities in the Americas. I want to remain aware that the Church can be welcoming to some while extremely inhospitable to queer and gender non-conforming members. I want to point to the juxtaposition of families encouraged to grow and produce the next generation of Mormons while Latina females continuously get labeled as over-reproductive burdens on society.  I want to, and I will, but I also have to be true to the members who do feel satisfaction, who are tremendously strengthened by their faith, who remake an otherwise predominately Anglo Church in their own image. Members like Josefina who noted, “In December I turn 89 years old…and the Relief Society still fortifies me, it gives me strength so that if I have live more months, well it helps me. The Relief Society is always helping you and renews you.” These women are claiming their own way to belong, and draw strength from their Church and the Relief Society. They are moved by el espiritu, and I cannot deny them that. I cannot forget how much I was moved during the a holiday performance when I did feel something, when I almost heard my own abuelita sing “os pido posada…”. I can’t help remember the other women of the Spanish Tabernacle choir whose arms wrapped me in an embrace when they found out I wanted to do a book about their lives. The women who all surrounded me trying to take pictures and encourage my work. The 92 year old elderly woman whose wrinkled hands held onto my own and asked me “estas en el facebook” so she could keep up with my work. Every woman wanted to take a picture, tell me their conversion story, and encourage their daughters to talk to me. I can’t but account for their narratives as well. As a feminist, non-Mormon, Women and Gender Studies professor, I’ve faced questions and skepticism about my research from the Mormon women I am researching. I want to remain open to their voices rather than rush to condemnation. Perhaps what I am actually doing, what drives this work, is the search to connect to my amá and abuelita, to their faith and their willingness to assert their own roles as Mujeristas, or women who lived their faith fully in their every day. So this Easter Lenten season I will go to church, but much to my mother’s chagrin it will be for research and not spiritual reasons.

References

Isasi-Díaz, Ada María. Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996.

Sujey Vega is on the faculty at Arizona State University and a member of the Mujeres Talk Editorial Group.

Latinas/os and Corporate Mestizaje

 

by Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo and José Alamillo

En lo puro no hay futuro
la pureza está en la mezcla
en la mezcla de lo puro
que antes que puro fue mezcla.

“En lo puro no hay futuro,” Jarabe de Palo

[There is no future in that which is pure. / Purity comes from the mixing. / The mixing of that which is pure, / Because before it was pure, it was a mixture. “There is no Future in that which is Pure” Jarabe de Palo]

During the last two decades, Latinos and Latinas have achieved a modicum of recognition in U.S. mainstream culture, in part because of the marketing machine of corporate America. However, as Arlene Dávila (2001) proposed, the recognition that Latinos/as have achieved has been simultaneously and paradoxically accompanied by “a continued invisibility in US society” (3). Corporate spending and advertising directed at Latinos/as have grown at an annual average rate of more than 10 percent since 1998 and will continue to grow as census numbers reveal that Latinos now constitute the largest minority ethnic group (US Census, 2012). Given this new demographic reality suspiciously dubbed the “browning of America,” marketing officials are developing more sophisticated approaches to reach the Latino/a consumer replacing the crude and offensive images of the past that outraged Latino civil rights groups. The new images have been refined and repackaged to present Latinos/as less as a caricature and more as a seamless harmonious unified group. This contemporary construction of Latinidad by corporate America needs more critical interrogation amidst neoliberal policies and global economic forces that insist on merging the Latin American South with the Latino North to create the new (future) hybrid marketing, especially one geared toward mainstream non-Latino communities.

The process of intercultural borrowing/appropriation and racial mixture has a long, tormented history in the Americas, dating back to the European colonizations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This process has been known as syncretism, miscegenation, creolization, metis, transculturation, hybridity, and mestizaje. Because of their own colonial histories, many Latin American countries have adopted the ideology of cultural and racial mixing as a central tenet for their nation-building projects. Although some of those projects have transcended their countries of origin through the movement of immigrants, in the end, the US has never adopted or even seriously contemplated hybridity as part of its nation-formation processes.

At the same time, Chicano/a Studies scholars have critically interrogated the concept of “mestizaje” making a crucial distinction between its Mexican and Chicano nationalist configuration. In Mestizaje, Rafael Pérez-Torres argues that because of Chicana/os racialized experiences in the US context, “mestizaje” rises to the level of a counter discourse and practice that challenges dominant Chicano and American conceptions of white masculinity and heteronormative sexuality. While Pérez-Torres’ re-configures the term “mestizaje” with a critical edge, it does not prevent US advertisers and marketers from appropriating hybrid culture for economic gain.

Thus, the American marketplace has recently developed its own ideas about mestizaje and hybridity with the purpose of selling products, images, and ideologies to mainstream American audiences. These ideas are usually used in tandem with mainstream commodified constructions of Latinas/os, which are often presented as “mestiza/o” or “hybrid” constructions. This is happening at the same time that we are witnessing a major backlash against Latinos in virtue of a government-created hysteria about (Mexican/Latino) immigrants and immigration. We call this particular selling of ideas corporate mestizaje, not because we think this is a bonafide case of social or cultural syncretism, but because we want to call attention to a specific pattern where those doing advertising for US companies combine seemingly benign aspects of American and Latin American cultures in their selling of specific products (cars, food items, etc.). As an illustration, we offer the advertisement for a beer introduced by Miller Company in 2007, which used a particular kind of English-Spanish hybridity to market its new product. Though we only discuss this one example, we would like to call attention to the fact that this has been done pretty consistently during the last decade or so, as we have repeatedly witnessed the peddling of consumable “hybrid” images for the mainstream audiences.

Miller’s New Hybrid Beer

Milwaukee-based Miller Brewing. Co. has long been associated with white blue-collar America and sales have been declining for the past few decades. To reverse sagging beer sales, Miller decided to go “south of the border” to find inspiration for their new light beer called “Miller Chill” (Kesmodel, 2007). This lime and salt flavored beer was introduced in a television advertisement campaign called “Se Habla Chill” (translated as “We Speak Chill”). The “Miller Chill” beer was advertised as “an American take on the Mexican ‘chelada’” (translated as the cold one). The “chelada” emerged as a popular drink in Mexican beach resorts in the 1960s and it consists of beer, lime, salt, and ice in a salt-rimmed glass. According to one Miller spokesperson, “We call it a modern American take on a Mexican classic” (Lentini, 2007). Miller Chill was packaged in a lime green bottle with words “Inspired by a Mexican recipe with lime & salt” on the top, followed by green and silver modular Aztec-like design in the middle” with word “Chill” in bold letters, and “Chelada style” words at the bottom. One television commercial featured a close-up of the green bottle with bright colors and Latin music in the background. The Spanglish narration included such mock Spanish phrases as “Beerveza,” “It’s Muy Refreshing,” or “Viva Refreshment.” The Miller web site (www.millerchill.com) described the “hybrid” dimension of this new beer: “Refreshment takes on a whole new meaning south-of-the-border where the sun burns HOTTER and LONGER; where heat creeps into EVERYTHING from food to music to nightlife….Inspired by a Mexican recipe. Miller Chill is a unique, refreshing fusion of two cultures per 12oz serving.”

The Miller Chill advertising campaign uses the trope of “tropicalization” that refers to stereotypical Latino images, music, and characteristics that are defined as “tropical” and associated with representations of hotness, exotic, wild, and passionate peoples/things (Aparicio and Chavez-Silverman, 1997). Building upon Edward Said’s concept of “Orientalism,” Frances Aparicio and Susan Chavez-Silverman (1997) argue that “tropicalization” is formulated from an Anglo dominant perspective, it homogenizes culture to construct a “mythic idea of Latinidad based on….projections of fear.” (8). The bright colors, salsa music, and tropical fruit are “tropicalizing” references associated with Miller Chill’s “Beerveza” made with an “unexpected twist” and “brewed for a new level of refreshment.” In addition, when the website pitches their new beer as “unique, refreshing fusion of two cultures” it is combining a “traditional Mexican style” recipe with low-calorie beer to construct a “happy hybridity” discourse that appeals to mainstream consumers.

The problem with this particular celebration of “hybridity” has to do with its disengagement from reality. For instance, although we could interpret the use of English and Spanish along with the specific allusions to Mexico as a step toward acknowledging the long (if torturous) relationship between that country and the US, or the crossing over boundaries of specific cultural artifacts, we must keep in mind that this type of hybridity is not meant to extend beyond the advertising campaign. That is, we could argue that immigrant behavior does the same thing creating a hybridity in defying two nation states by simply crossing the border between them. But, we would be ignoring how the nation state has continued to intervene in the lives of migrants through surveillance, legislation, militarization, arrests, detention, and deportation. Moreover, the “fusion” of American and Mexican cultures as reflected in the new Miller Chill beer campaign is less an example of hybridity (cultural, social, or political) and more an example of market forces dictating trends in beer consumption based on perceived notions about consumer preference via the appropriation of certain cultural elements. As Miller’s chief marketing officer observed, “There’s clearly a move toward Latinization if you’ve been watching the American consumer” (Kesmodel, 2007).

We must also point out, that although we see this type of marketing campaign as directed to mainstream audiences, Latinos also watch and witness how these advertisements are seeking to peddle certain cultural elements associated with them. In fact, Latinos and Latinas are not passive consumers of marketing campaigns, and have had a long tradition of organized boycotts against products and social actors that promote anti-Latino agendas. In 2006, when immigrant rights activists in Chicago discovered that Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner, author of the anti-immigrant bill, HR 4437 received political contributions from Miller Beer they threatened a national boycott of Miller beer products. Almost immediately, Miller conceded to organizers’ demands and put out a one page ad in a Spanish language newspaper proclaiming their opposition to HR 4437 and pledged their “support for the Hispanic community and the rights of immigrants” (Navarette, 2006). Although Miller was more concerned about declining profits than becoming a pro-immigrant company, organizers took advantage of this political moment to fight anti-immigration legislation but also proclaim that market inclusion should translate into political inclusion.

Conclusion: The Corporate Hybrid in Perspective

Corporate America has used a Latino hybrid trope to reach mainstream audiences and consumers, but this “cultural inclusion” has meant material exclusion for the large number of Latinos and Latinas. More to the point, mainstream America seems more at ease with “south of the border” things than people, as long as these things appear in and stay confined to their television, their films, and their advertisements. Corporate Mestizaje is an insidious practice that creates and deploys commercials like those of the Miller Chill, turning them into tools to ease the insecurities and fears of mainstream culture about an impending Latinization of the United States. However, the marketing of Latinidad has not effectively addressed the underprivileged circumstances of Latinos/as. In the end, these types of commercials say nothing about Latinos and everything about mainstream U.S. culture. After all, an accessible and re-imagined mestiza Latino/a “culture” (one without the reality of Latino/a people) is definitely more titillating and certainly less frightening. Jarabe de Palo’s lyrics in the opening epigraph become an ominous means of marketing, “there’s no future in purity,” and corporate America is cashing in on that.

Works Cited

Aparicio, Frances and Susana Chavez-Silverman. Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad. Hanover, CT: University Press of New England, 1997.

Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture.  New York: Routledge, 1994.

Colker, Ruth. Hybrid: Bisexuals, Multiracials, and other Misfits under American Law. New York: New York University Press, 1996.

Dávila, Arlene. 2001. Latinos Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People. Berkeley: University of California Press.

García Canclini, Nestor. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

Jarabe de Palo. 2001. “En lo puro no hay future.” De Vuelta y Vuelta. Emi Latin.

Kesmodel, David. “Miller asks, ‘Se Habla Chill?’ to keep U.S. Market Hopping; Brewer Hopes Lager With a Mexican Twist Can End Sales Slump.” Wall Street Journal. 12 Jan. 2007: B31.

Lentini, Nina. “Miller Draws Outside the Lines with New ‘Chill.” Media Post Publications. 9 Feb. 2007. 2 July, 2007. http://www.mediapost.com/publications/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=55265

McClain DaCosta, Kimberly.“Selling Mixedness: Marketing with Multiracial Identities.” Mixed Messages: Multiracial Identities in the Color Blind Era. Ed. David Brunsma. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006.

Navarette, Ruben. “Immigration Issue Brews Beer.” Hispanic Trends. June 2006: 35.

Pérez-Torres, Rafael. Mestizaje: Critical Uses of Race in Chicano Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006

US Census. 2012. “Hispanic Origin.” http://www.census.gov/population/hispanic/data/2012.html.

Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies at Washington State University. Her research focuses on Latinos in the US, “the War on Terror,” and the representation of Latinas/os and other minorities in popular culture.  José Alamillo is a Professor of Chicana/o Studies at California State University, Channel Islands. Dr. Alamillo’s research focuses on the ways Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans have used culture, leisure, and sports to build community and social networks to advance politically and economically in the United States. His current research project includes a transnational history of Mexican Americans in sports and the commercialization of Cinco de Mayo during the 20th century.

Immigration Policy in the US: It’s All About Race

by Tanya Golash-Boza

The current debate over immigration policy in the United States revolves around how many immigrants we should let in and what we should do about those immigrants that are here without authorization.

In the contemporary United States, it seems completely natural that we would enforce our borders and regulate the entry of people into this country. Many people believe that the failure to do this would result in complete chaos.

It is thus remarkable that, for the first one hundred years after the founding of the United States, there were no laws governing who could or could not enter into or remain in this country.  For the first one hundred and fifty years after the establishment of the United States in 1776, economic development in this country depended on immigration. The free movement of labor between Europe and the United States was essential to the economic growth and prosperity of the United States, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest.

Discussions over immigration restriction first became popular when large numbers of Chinese immigrants began to arrive in the United States during the 1848 Gold Rush.

The arrival of thousands of Chinese immigrants into California provoked nativist sentiments among whites and these sentiments eventually translated into public policy.

In 1875, the Page Act was passed, which prohibited the entry of “undesirable” immigrants. This law primarily was designed to prevent the entry of prostitutes and forced laborers from Asia, and effectively barred the entry of any Asian women into the United States for the next few decades.

Debates over immigration policy in the United States have always had racialized undertones – except perhaps when the laws were outright racist.  The first major piece of immigration legislation was the Chinese Exclusion Act, signed into law in 1882. In an essay titled “The Chinese Exclusion Example: Race, Immigration, and American Gatekeeping, 1882-1994,” Erika Lee argues that

“Chinese exclusion introduced a ‘gatekeeping’ ideology, politics, law, and culture that transformed the ways in which Americans viewed and thought about race, immigration, and the United States’ identity as a nation of immigration. It legalized and reinforced the need to restrict, exclude, and deport ‘undesirable’ and excludable immigrants.”

The Chinese Exclusion Act was overtly racist in that it targeted one specific group: Chinese laborers. In specifically excluding a group because of race and class, the Chinese Exclusion Act set the stage for U.S. immigration policy, which has both overt and covert racial and class biases.

The Chinese Exclusion Act initially only governed entry policies, but worries over fraud and illegal entry gave rise to the 1892 Geary Act and the 1893 McCreary Amendment, which required Chinese people who resided in the United States to possess proof of their lawful right to be in the United States. These “certificates of residence” were the first precursors to today’s legal permanent resident cards. Such documents were required only of the Chinese until 1928, when “immigrant identification cards” began to be issued to all arriving immigrants.

Nineteenth century immigration laws tended to focus on Asian immigrants. By the 1920s, however, the United States no longer depended on the large-scale influx of European labor. Technological advances, which reduced the need for labor, along with rising nativist sentiment in the context of wars with Europe led to increased support for immigration restrictions.

These sentiments translated into legislative action. The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act was the nation’s first comprehensive immigration law.  As Mae Ngai explains in Impossible Subjects, “It established for the first time numerical limits on immigration and a global racial and national hierarchy that favored some immigrants over others” (Ngai 2014: 3).

The quotas set forth in the 1924 Act were based on ideas of white superiority – particularly the superiority of Germans and people from the United Kingdom. Whereas 65,721 visas were allocated to people from Great Britain, Italians were only allocated 5,802 and the Turkish only 226. The quotas were ostensibly based on the national origins of US citizens in the 1890 Census, but they excluded people of African and Asian descent.

While Congress used quotas to exclude undesirable races from entering the country, the Courts ensured that those who were in the United States would not attain citizenship. In the early 1920s, the Supreme Court decided that Japanese and Indians in the United States were ineligible for citizenship

The restrictive quotas and laws prohibiting Asians from attaining citizenship were eventually lifted. Today, our immigration policies are ostensibly colorblind.

However, over 90 percent of immigrants in the United States today are non-white, meaning that laws that restrict or provide opportunities for immigrants will have racially disparate consequences.

A Congressional decision to provide avenues for legalization and citizenship for undocumented immigrants would go a long way towards reducing inequality between Latinos and whites insofar as about 75 percent of undocumented immigrants are from Latin America. In contrast, decisions to enhance immigration law enforcement would further restrict opportunities for Latinos insofar as 98 percent of people deported last year were from Latin America.

No matter what your opinion is on immigration law enforcement or immigrant legalization, there is no denying the fact that discussions about immigration in the United States are and have always been discussions about racial difference and racial equity.

Tanya Golash-Boza is a 2015 Contributing Blogger for Mujeres Talk. She is on the faculty of UC-Merced and has published books and articles on the topics of immigration, migration, race, racism, transnationalism, borders.

Focus on Dr. Daisy Cocco De Filippis

Dominican Blue Book

President Daisy Cocco De Filippis was born in Santo Domingo. Her parents moved to the United States when she was 13 years old. She served for many years as professor of Spanish and Latin-American Literature at The City University of New York (York College). De Filippis is currently president of Naugatuck Valley Community College—the first Dominican president of a community college in the United States.

President De Filippis holds a Ph.D. in Spanish Language and a M. Phil. in Spanish Literature from the Graduate School and University Center of CUNY, as well as an M.A. in Spanish Literature and a B.A. in Spanish and English Literatures summa cum laude from Queens College, CUNY. A published author and literary critic, her scholarly work is recognized internationally as pioneering the field of Dominican women studies and Dominican authors in the U.S.

Prior to coming to NVCC, Dr. De Filippis served as provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Eugenio Maria de Hostos Community College of the City University of New York (CUNY). Dr. De Filippis began her career at York College as an adjunct lecturer in 1978, advancing to become a professor of Spanish and ultimately being appointed associate dean for academic affairs.

As president of NVCC, Dr. De Filippis has been honored by the Latino and Puerto Rican Affairs Commission, Connecticut Women’s Education and Legal Fund, the Boys and Girls Club, Habitat for Humanity and the Martin Luther King Jr. Commission. She was also invited to speak at the Waterbury mayoral inauguration in 2012 and named Dominican Mayor of the Day in 2013. She has previously been the recipient of, among many other honors and awards, the Woman of the Year Award from the Association of Dominican-American Supervisors (2006), the Order of Merit, Duarte, Sanchez and Mella in the Rank of Commander, presented by Dr. Leonel Fernandez, President of the Dominican Republic (2005), the Hija Distinguida of Santo Domingo (Distinguished Daughter) Award, presented by the Mayor of Santo Domingo (2005), the Educator of the Year Award from Dominican Times Magazine (2004), the Order of Merit Cristóbal Colón, in the Rank of Commander, presented by Hipólito Mejía, President of the Dominican Republic (2003), the Myers Outstanding Book Award, presented by the Gustavus Meyer Center for the Study of Bigotry in North America, to authors of Telling To Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios (Duke University Press, 2001), Simmons College (2002), the Influential Latina Award, El Diario/La Prensa (1998), a Citation for Outstanding Contribution to the Community and Academe, Ruth Messinger, President, Borough of Manhattan, New York (1996), and a Citation for Outstanding Contribution to Academe, Claire Shulman, President, Borough of Queens, New York (1994).

Like the best professors, De Filippis begins our interview by directing me to the definitive written resource on the subject at hand, in this case her remarkable essay “The House that Mamá Biela Built,” published in Telling to Live. She then proceeds to speak spontaneously, with flowing ease and often poignant honesty, about her early life and intellectual formation.

“My grandmother was a teacher. Born in 1898, she had very emancipated ideas for a woman of her time. She believed that girls could do anything boys could do, and she also believed in me with a passion that nobody else has yet believed in me. My parents were divorced when I was very young, and she taught me to love one of my fundamental loves, the place where I go to find a sense of order and beauty in the world and that is poetry. Poetry defines the manner in which I communicate. I’m not really a poet, although I do write poetry for my granddaughters, because I would like them to remember me in a similar fashion; but I have written many books promoting, translating, and analyzing the poetry of Dominican writers. I learned from her a sense of who I was and what it meant to be Dominican. We used to walk the street to visit women who had been friends of her mother. I was a little girl who actually liked to sit with old people and listen to them tell me stories about how the city was formed, who our family was and what they contributed to that. I would sit in the park and read and make sense of things, I was going through a difficult time since it’s not easy to have your mother remarry when you are four years old. She was my anchor, and through her, I learned to love my island and love my half-island; and through her I learned that there are many traits in my character, resilience and creativity and endurance, that come precisely from what it means to grow up with palm trees that never bend, though they certainly sway, and are not broken by the storm. All of that shaped my view of the world.”

At the Graduate School and University Center of CUNY, De Filippis wrote her doctoral thesis on Dominican poetry: the first dissertation to deal with Dominican literature, it thus became the first of numerous historic milestones she has chiselled out for the community in her career. Due to the boldness of her endeavour, she was advised to present the subject in a European theoretical framework. “I used the theories of Michel Riffaterre. The semiotic study of poetry really looks at the way words relate to one another so that they make meaning. The words need to have a reason to be there, to belong. Semiotics is about organizing. That was the framework, but I got into texts that dealt with a Dominican reality, that brought in the voices of the Dominican countryside. It created a controversy in the Dominican Republic.” De Filippis acquired the reputation of being “a Dominican critic who promotes Dominican works.” In fact, however, her guiding principle was much broader: “I just promised myself I wouldn’t write about anything I didn’t like. That I would just take the time to bring justice to good works.”

With President De Filippis, the conversation flows naturally and easily back and forth between life, literature and language. “My dreams and aspirations have always been very, very high,” she recalls, “because I grew up with a grandmother who introduced me to books as the best way to find meaning in life. In a difficult situation, the best getaway is to enter a book and find yourself in it and find comfort in it and through reading, you understand that there are multiple ways to make meaning in this world and there are different ways of organizing and creating stability, beauty, and knowledge that are not dictated by one culture or by one gender or one people. So I learned very early on, I was bilingual in the Dominican Republic, by the time I was eight or nine I was fluent in Italian, and I learned a lot. My stepfather’s mother came to live with us, and since I gravitated towards old people, I had two grandmothers, one Italian, one Dominican. It shaped my understanding that you could say things in different ways and it would still mean the same thing. You could look at the world, organize the world with different grammatical order, with different words, and the meaning at the heart would still be the same.”

Stories that tug the heartstrings featured prominently in the adolescent De Filippis’s development of her keen eye for patterns of meaning. She likes to say that Charles Dickens picked up where her grandmother left off: “in the sense that Great Expectations was the first complete novel that I read in English, in 9th grade. You know Dickens talks about children who are abandoned and disenfranchised but in the end, somehow justice prevails. There’s a sense of comfort that things are going to work out. And so I think that first year, being in this country and being away from my grandmother, and the way she taught me, reading took over that role.” Later in life, visiting the Dominican Republic for the summer with children of her own, De Filippis had the chance to watch her grandmother giving the same lessons to them. “She would draw a leaf, and she would begin to show me the different parts of the leaf in her drawing, and then we would go to the park– el Parque de Ramfis, now called el Parque de Hostos. What we try to teach our college students in General Studies, which is how connected things are—I learned that from her, as a kid: that a leaf can nurture a life, can feed it, but also can nurture the spirit if you paint it or if you write a poem about it, if you write a story about a tree. Those lessons I learned from her early on and I brought them here, and then Dickens gave me the sense that I could survive, because junior high school is a really tough environment.” De Filippis has since written articles on the subject of the trials and tribulations of junior high students. She notes that she still mourns her grandmother, who died at the age of 86.

Summarizing her revelatory essay, De Filippis tells me that “the conclusion of ‘The House that Mamá Biela Built’ is that I am that house. I am that house that she built, and my survival or my strength and the fact that I can go to New York and now be in Connecticut and have a way to make home and I use the tools to make this home: being who I am, a Dominican mother who is now a grandmother, who is also an administrator and educator but who has also written many books and reads poetry. This campus reads poetry all the time.” She mentions that acclaimed Dominican writers Chiqui Vicioso and Marianela Medrano (a close personal friend of long standing) will be visiting soon. Medrano hosts a poetry reading called Confluencia four times a year at Naugatuck Valley Community College, a tradition now in its sixth year. The fifth-anniversary milestone was marked by the publication of a book: Confluencia in the Valley: Five Years of Converging with Words, with a Foreword by President De Filippis herself.

De Filippis recently stepped down as president of the Dominican Studies Association, a position she had held since the 1990s. “We would get together every couple of years: it was about me disseminating Dominican Studies but also about having the young people that were coming up get to know one another and hear what they have to say and create our own sense of space and history.”

What challenges she has faced as the first Dominican community college president? “I think the challenges that I have are about the same as I would have, whether I were Dominican or not. You’re really trying to open the doors, to bring people in. This past May, our graduating class was aged 17-71. We have a group of students who are finishing high school and for two years they take some college-level courses and get a certificate in manufacturing, so I had a bunch of 17 year-olds who were graduating from high school who already had a certificate from a community college so that they could begin to look for work.” Though the school is predominantly white (60%), De Filippis is proud to say that the current freshman class is 25% Latino (the figure for the entire student body was 14% when she arrived), and that the school is applying Hispanic-Serving status.

As De Filippis tells it, the story of her becoming president of NVCC hinged on a basic, undeniable chemistry, a sense of mutual trust and serendipitous synergy that became apparent in her immediate encounter with the school, with the people who work and study there. “There was an incredible meeting of minds when I came here. I really wasn’t planning to come. Somebody nominated me. They wrote to me asking if I would like to be considered and my husband said, ‘You can’t say no to what hasn’t been offered, or to what you have not seen.’ He and I drove over here and I saw Waterbury, which has one of the highest poverty rates in Connecticut. And I saw a lot of young men, especially black and Latino men, on the corners. And I thought, ‘So, I have a reason for coming to this place.’ I came here and the search committee had set up interviews with all the different constituencies in the school from 9:00 in the morning until 5:00 PM, when I finally met the search committee. The students, faculty senate, student senate, different administrators, you name it. And the message I got at the end of the interviews was: We really want you to come. So by the time I talked to the search committee, I also wanted to come. The challenge I had was this: I came to an environment that was ready for change. I always say, I’m very grateful to those who came before me, because they did some work that I don’t have to do.”

Although the college sits in a landscape of sweeping storybook grandeur, there were some changes to the space and its use that immediately cried out to be made. De Filippis followed her intuition and common sense. “Having been at CUNY, where it was very difficult to see any green, and having come from an island, here, I’m surrounded by a glacial ridge of trees. What I didn’t see, however, what was lacking, was the pulse, the vibrancy, the life, that we had at Hostos Community College, where I had been the Provost for six and a half years and which I loved very much. Here, I had all this beautiful space, but there wasn’t a single garden. I walked through the fifth floor that connects all the buildings on campus, but with these beautiful corridors with glass so you see all this wonderful vegetation outside, there wasn’t a chair for the students to sit in. Everything was beige. There was a sense that, as Aida Cartagena Portalatin (about whom De Filippis has published a book) would say, a woman was needed here, and I am that woman.

“What it was lacking was a kind of nesting, creating a space and organizing the space. I looked around and I didn’t see too many services being offered. I also noticed that the graduation numbers were not high. There were many things like that. So I started by defining the space as a place where student success is our expectation.” De Filippis also notes with approval that how to make a good flan has become widespread knowledge at NVCC– thanks to the many flans that she herself has made for her constituents (it is, she says, part of the essence of governing as a Hispanic woman).

Far from imposing an autocratic vision, the dynamic transformation De Filippis has wrought consists in empowering her various constituencies in multiple ways. “I have taken the fifth floor and given people permission to paint the walls.” De Filippis found painters and encouraged them to get started changing the look of the place, adding more warmth and color. “We reconfigured one space on the fifth floor and created the Academic Center for Excellence. I envision it as a New York loft with movable pieces, so the students have free tutoring and mentoring that they can go to seven days a week, including at night.” The library was reorganized to make it more accessible, more integrated with the heart of the campus.

“We took all the furniture from the core of the building and sent it to the prisons to be reupholstered. We got the students in the arts program to take ownership of the walls and paint them, so we began to create this learning commons, with multiple seating areas for the students.” These initiatives inspired the workers in the Admissions, Registrar, and Cashier’s Office to come forward with ideas for reorganizing their working spaces “in an orderly way that would make sense for the students,” De Filippis tells me. Services were streamlined and consolidated. The staff of the Center for Academic Planning and Student Success also spoke up in turn with ideas for optimal use of their space.

President De Filippis has also worked with local and elected leadership to bring evening bus service to Waterbury, secure funding for an Advanced Manufacturing Technology Center, receive two Fulbright Scholar-In-Residence guests and bring the federal GEAR UP program to Waterbury. NVCC also established a Bridge to College office, which administers $12 million in grants aimed at preparing students to enter and succeed in college.

With striking clarity of vision, De Filippis repeatedly returns to the connection between these enormous practical and logistical advances made at NVCC under her administration and her lifelong passion for literature. “You see, my writing a doctoral dissertation on the semiotics of Dominican poetry was great because it brought me into the world of Dominican letters. I studied poetry as a tribute to my grandmother. But then I came here and I said, wait a second! Semiotics is also lean management. Everything is where it’s supposed to be, for the purpose that it’s supposed to have.

“I arrived here on Bastille Day, July 14, and I remind them of that. The number of graduating students this year was 1,353. So we’ve more than doubled the number of completions.” Under her guidance, student retention has steadily risen, enrollment has increased from 6,128 students (fall 2008) to 7,293 students (fall 2013), and graduation awards have grown from 521 (2007–08) to 1,353 (2013–14) total awards.

“We are the only community college in Connecticut that has had the honor of having more than 1,000 completions in a year. This is the third year in a row. The first year the number was 1,008, then it went up to 1,252, and now it’s 1,353. But for the black and Hispanic students, the numbers have more than doubled. It’s a 200% improvement in completion. So I’m here for everybody. But because I am here and because I’ve created an environment where the students all know me as ‘President Daisy,’ and I spend time and I listen to them, and they all feel that if this sixty-something woman, who’s a grandmother, who has an accent, who’s an immigrant, can be one of the most effective presidents for a community college—and I’m not bragging, it’s a fact, my supervisor tells me that—then they can do anything. So my being a woman, my being Dominican, my being Latina—and I embrace all of my students, I don’t care what color they are, because anybody who comes here is mine, I’m their mother, guide and mentor, I’m their defender, but to have the black and Latino kids rise the way they have risen gives me tremendous satisfaction. I am doing what I have done my entire life, which is: I am an educator for everybody; I try to help my people as much as I can.”

I ask what her proudest accomplishment as president so far is. “Having created an environment where students believe in themselves and having given the support for them to jump high, to aim high, and achieve, and I’m going by the number of completions, which is spectacular here.” In her scholarly work? “Giving voice to the Dominican literature written in the United States in Spanish.” Here, again, De Filippis’s sense of literature as a dynamic social force is crucial. “I have received as much recognition from the community as I have from the academy. Helping as much as I can to create space, not only at the institutions where I am but in the institutions where I have friends who are academics, for Dominican writers in particular, but not limited to those. You want to maintain the flow of the community. I think I contributed to that.” She is also a prolific translator, but mentions that only in passing, as she moves on toward more vital concerns. “As much as time would permit, I have done a lot of work to promote that. I (and many others) have become a vehicle for the country to open itself to its racial makeup, to the role of women, to the need to embrace the Haitian as your brother or sister, because after all, we are Haitians here. Who cares whether I was born on the west or east side of the island? I’m very proud that the women in particular have embraced a very open and inclusive approach. We, from here, have become examples; have become a constant mirror to some of the lesser angels of the island.”

The unity of art, scholarship, and life is a truth De Filippis affirms once more as I ask for her advice to young aspiring scholars or administrators. “I never took a course in administration, education, or accounting. I have managed more budgets than I could tell you. The humanities and the arts teach you to think on your feet, teach you to read, teach you to communicate, teach you to be serious, and give you the tools to do anything. The best administrators, in my experience, are those who begin as faculty, who learn what it’s like to get through one semester, which bring the experience and can then guide others and become the chair and ultimately, if they have the patience for many meetings, continue to advance. I always tell the women’s groups I get invited to speak to that I didn’t have a road map; what I kept on with was my spirit open to possibilities. And then, when you go there, whatever it is that you do, the important thing is to believe in it. If you love it, you will do your best. When I began teaching at York College, everybody thought that being an accountant was the way to go. But in the end, you’ve got to be able to get up in the morning. I love my job. I love what I do. It has meaning for me. I want to do more of it. And I could tell you honestly that since the day I began working in 1975 when I graduated from Queens College with a bachelor’s degree and they made me an adjunct—I taught two courses. And I went to pick up my first check. I laughed all the way home, because I would have paid to stand in front of a classroom and teach.”

As we conclude our conversation, President De Filippis stresses the continuity between her past, whether as a child in the Dominican Republic or as a young teacher at CUNY, her present at Naugatuck Valley, and her future legacy. “Wherever I came, I carry all those people with me. Wherever I am, I’m Dominican. Wherever I am, I will honor that. And wherever I am, I want people to understand that it is a good and beautiful and honorable thing to be Dominican. I have three sons and two beautiful granddaughters, one of whom is nine years old, and she writes poetry. She sent me a poem last week: ‘I am from / burnt caramel flan / and the soft fabric / of my abuela’s shawl.’ My work is done.”

This is one of several profiles featured in the newly launched Dominican Blue Book by the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, which this year is celebrating its 20th Anniversary with a grand event, The Dominican Intellectual Legacy Gala, on Saturday, December 6, 2014, at 6:30 p.m. Congratulations to the Dominican Studies Institute on this important anniversary!