Month: December 2009

Latin@ Affirmation Month 2009:  Looking Back, Moving Forward

 Convocation Speech–Dorisol Inoa ’13 and Gladys Sosa ’13

           Gladys:  Looking back, I realize that we all come from very different environments, and I do not mean simply different countries. I mean we all come from different neighborhoods, different religious backgrounds, and even different cultures. I am specifically looking back, though, on the social environments we spent our last four years in, well for some of us it has been longer than that.

Some of us come from high schools where Latinos were the majority of the school’s population, where Spanish dialects roamed the halls and where being Puerto Rican or Dominican or Mexican was the norm. Everyone had Latino pride or at least faked it to fit in. Therefore there was no need to define who the Latino community was or make a group to provide support, like Ajua Campos does.

          Dorisol:  Others come from private or boarding school where Latinos were the minority. In fact, you could count the number of Latinos in the school. There was no joking around in Spanish or sharing stories that everyone could relate to. Being Latino in school meant being different. Although you may have dreamed of having some sort of Representative Latino group in your school, you felt that there weren’t enough Latino students to successfully organize such a group, like Ajua Campos.

We won’t settle down for a silent group of Latinos. That is why we are here today, as new members of Ajua Campos because moving forward, we as Wesleyan freshman look forward to becoming a part of a group that specifically explores the roles of Latinos in our community and in the academic and professional world. We look forward to the resources that are available to us as WES students that enable us to reach out to our community. We look forward to representing our families and culture in academia.

          Gladys:  We want to be a part of a Latino community that strives to diminish the barrier between other communities and ours, created by the mindset that we are not like them. This way we may learn to freely and comfortably engage with anyone of any ethnic background. Most importantly, we look forward to learning of Ajua Campos’s past and making history in the next few years.

Finally, I am glad to say that since I have arrived on this campus, I have been welcomed by the Ajua Campos community, exposed to controversial issues surrounding our community, and inspired to make change for the better here at Wesleyan as well as in our world.

This was the third summer that my youth-led community organizing education organization, The New York 2 New Orleans Coalition (NY2NO.org), led trips to post-Katrina New Orleans. This time it was bigger than ever, with 8 groups of 25 young people over July and August.  We worked with Our School At Blair Grocery (www.schoolatclairgrocery.blogspot.com) — a recently started community high school that also functions as an urban farm. Among their curriculum is a food justice unit and a Build Our Village Program, which empowers students with the physical and critical thinking skills to design and build their community as they want it.

However, as important as the work we did for the school was, we wanted to do more than just be volunteers who came and worked, and then went back to our lives. The problems that poor communities in New Orleans face — such as lack of housing, unequal public education, bad health care, and few jobs — were all present before Katrina, and were only exacerbated by the storm. What’s more, these problems exist all over the country, especially in our home in NYC. Our organization therefore trains youth organizers who can return and work on issues in their own communities. So along with handling logistics, I also got to spend this summer writing lesson plans and running workshops on organizing and anti-oppression topics.

                It is unquestionably the most fulfilling work I’ve ever done. But after three years of packed summers and other trips throughout the year, I luckily now have new young people to run the organization, and I have moved on. However, I am excited to be able to expand this work, starting with 6 Wes students, who will join Pitzer and Brooklyn College students in New Olreans this January.