Today is the last day of National Hispanic Heritage Month 2020. Recently, I reached out to Zoe Cornwell, president of Latinos Unidos, to ask her why this month is important to her and other members of the student organization. She stated:
"Hispanic Heritage Month is very important to us because not a lot of people know about our culture and traditions. Because UW-Stout is a primarily white campus, our goal is to teach and expand people’s knowledge of the Latinx community. We also aim to raise awareness of what is happening with the Latinx community around the world by hosting speakers to talk about the deeper conversations. We are very proud to be an inclusive community and have a lot of people from many different backgrounds and cultures in our organization."
Despite COVID-related challenges, Latinos Unidos found ways to bring people together to celebrate UW-Stout’s Latinx community through activities that fostered camaraderie and knowledge-building, which will culminate in a Day of the Dead craft night on Tuesday, Nov. 3.
Last week, I also participated in one of the Honors College’s discussion groups focused on Jason De León’s book The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (the author also spoke with students virtually last Thursday). During the discussion session, students grappled with the challenging text and difficult subject matter and spoke about issues raised by the text, the positioning of the author, and the overall reading experience. I know that as a reader, I grappled with the beauty of the prose and complexity—often brutality—of the subject matter:
"These migrant narratives have no formal structure. They are Polaroids, stories with no resolution. After one or two conversations with someone I encountered in Nogales and later watched enter the desert, I usually never heard from them again. This border town, like all others is just one stop along the migration route. All I could often do was take notes as people passed through my line of vision before disappearing over the horizon. (128)"
Students are also taking part in a participatory art exhibit sponsored by the Undocumented Migration Project, for which they complete toe tags “representing migrants who have died trying to cross the [Sonoran Desert] from the mid-1990s to 2019.” During the Honors colloquium, I listened to students reflect on the impact that this participatory art experience had on them and how it made many of the issues discussed in De León’s text more immediate to their understanding.
As I wrote in my campus communication on Monday with respect to Indigenous Peoples’ Day, periods of recognition and remembrance like National Hispanic Heritage Month, and others in November like National Native American Heritage Month, Veterans Day, and the Transgender Day of Remembrance provide us with a reminder of the importance of being intentional in our reflection, planning, and programming, but also to expand our everyday commitment to creating a more equitable, diverse, and inclusive culture at UW-Stout.
Sincerely,
