People

Black History Month Convocation Speech — January 31, 2010

I could stand here and philosophize about the implications of Black History Month, what we should do to promote solidarity, and pump my fist in the air. This would only be ironic, as I’d be acting out a personality that would be just that: pulled tight and full of hot air.  I’ve always tried to keep it real and not get caught up in ‘ABC movement’ or ‘XYZ movement’ because half of the people in them end up being full of hot air; a whole lot of gust with no direction.  In short, I’m simple, and I can only speak on the simple life I lead at Wesleyan.

One of the best times of my day is sweeping up hair from my large blue tarp. This is partly due to the fact that I can’t stand a dirty room and it bugs me when dust has the audacity to set up camp in my corner of the room. But nonetheless, I love sweeping up hair, because it means I just sent someone on their way with a new look, a new opportunity to present themselves.  As an apprentice barber I’ve seen a lot of heads. But somehow I’m still fascinated by the change I see in people from pre- to post-haircut. There is this aura that seems to spring up as they look into the mirror and see a new person.

Now, I know black folk love their hair. We love to cut it, shape it, curl it, straighten it, pick it out, comb it, brush it, wrap it, set it and wash it, and for those who can afford new clothes everyday, Jeri curl it. Our obsession with our follicles has spawned controversy and multi-billion dollar industries, and I admit I am apart of that love-hate divide. 

But I err on the side of love. I love black hair. I do cut every type of hair, but I get a special feeling from cutting black hair. As a smorgasbord of a people, each black person’s head out there is different. And like a scientist, I enjoy discovering new species. With a customer’s request and my battery of tools and gadgets, I work away in my lab; the barbershop.  I comb, brush, fade, line, clip, straighten, and tease the hair to bend to my will creating something new that conforms to my customer’s vision.

With my research work done and my payment received, I feel as though, in my small way, I am supporting ‘a movement.’ Black folk’s grooming has always been tied deep into our culture, especially in our recent history here as African-Americans. The barbershop or the salon is the place of grooming, the CNN of the neighborhood, the gates from childhood to adulthood, and ultimately a pillar in the community.  I’m not claiming my measly ad-hoc ‘shop is something so monumental. But I do think that by servicing our brothers and sisters on campus, I’m helping support the SOC community at Wesleyan. 

It’s funny what big thoughts come into your mind when you’re obsessively sweeping the floor…

Over the summer of 2008, I participated in a young filmmakers program at Maine Media Workshops, where I had the opportunity to learn about the craft of filmmaking with other students as well as professional filmmakers. I knew from the beginning of the workshop that I wanted my final project to be a documentary, and after investigating a variety of subjects around Rockport, ME, I learned about a local man named Andy Swift who made a living restoring antique fire engines. I was immediately interested, so I gave him a call. He turned out to be a far more interesting subject than I ever imagined. He was an extremely profane but good-natured guy with an incredible wealth of knowledge about fire engines. He seemed like he had been interviewed by local media maybe one time too many for his liking, but he was fun to work with and very accommodating. I spent several hours exploring and filming his enormous workshop, and then interviewed him about his trucks and his work. At the end of the day, he took me for a ride on his favorite fire truck, where I got some of the day’s best footage. My film, entitled Fire Engine Man, was a hit at the Workshops, and is now available for viewing online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RLs_HQSlIA

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.

The AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps is not what the website says it is. It’s not what alumni say it is. It’s not even what they tell you it is in member orientation. This government-run community service program is so widespread and so diverse that no two teams in the program will ever have the same experience. For ten months, I traveled from Sacramento to New Orleans, from the Grand Canyon to Lake Tahoe, from El Dorado National Forest to Reno. I drove cross-country twice. One AmeriCorps team went to Hawaii to work on an organic farm. Other teams worked at a children’s camp in Seattle, assisted at the Special Olympics, and were even on MTV’s Inaugural Ball. My team and I finished fixing up over twenty houses damaged by Hurricane Katrina in Port Sulphur and Lake Charles, Louisiana. We served over two thousand meals to volunteers in New Orleans. We cleared brush from five football fields of high fire-risk land, and fought a two-acre forest fire. I’m now certified by the Forest Service as a Type-B chainsaw faller and have my Red Card, a license to fight forest fires. I can use miter saws, pack pumps, and a deep-fat fryer. At the end of all this, I graduated with over 2,000 hours of community service and more life experiences than I thought possible. My time in AmeriCorps had high highs and low lows, and I’m still trying to make sense of it. So when I try to tell people what AmeriCorps NCCC will be like for them, I can’t, because I don’t know. It can literally be anything.

If you want to look into the program, a good place to start is http://www.americorps.gov/

Some people say that family does not always have to be blood-related. I found this out this summer when I visited my family in El Salvador. I hadn’t visited my family there for more than nine years, so it basically felt like I was meeting them for the first time. Everybody was really nice and I had a great time and didn’t expect anything out of the ordinary to happen. Yet a friend of my grandmother’s came to visit her family at the same time that we were there. I didn’t know much about her and didn’t even notice she was there until she decided to stop by and talk. It was then I found out that she believed I was her granddaughter. I didn’t know whether to believe her or not, since I didn’t know much about my biological father. She kept on insisting that I was her granddaughter and everyone kept on saying, “Yes, she looks like fulana de tal’s sister or cousin.”  I fell in love with the idea of knowing my father’s family, but in the end, we all accepted that I was not related to them by blood.  However, that did not stop me from seeing her as part of my family or from her seeing me as part of hers. My time in El Salvador was irreplaceable. It not only gave me the opportunity to spend some time with my family, but also allowed me to add another member to my family.

This summer I was able to work on the set of the new hit TV show on CBS, “NCIS: Los Angeles,” which is the spin-off to the original NCIS. This new show is starring Chris O’Donnell and LL Cool J. It was a great experience to hang out on the set and see all the behind-the-scenes work that goes into an action TV show. I’ve been on other entertainment productions, but never an action TV show, so it was an interesting change up. Also because my mom is a part of production, I was able to meet all the actors and actresses.  It happened that one of the actors went to Wesleyan, and it was really cool to chat with him about his experience before I took off to Wes myself.