Latinx Heritage Month, an annual celebration hosted by the Organización Latina Estudiantil (OLÉ) at Hopkins to educate the school community about Latin American culture, came to a close after a month of activities that began on Sept. 30, with a celebration of Día de los Muertos last Friday at the Glass Pavilion.
Día de los Muertos, also known as Day of the Dead, celebrates the lives of deceased ancestors and loved ones. The celebration opened with a reflection on the significance and personal relevance of the holiday to those who attended the ceremony. The event also featured two dance performances, a dinner and an open dance floor.
Highlighting the intersection of different cultures and identities within the community has been a major focus of OLÉ this year. Formerly celebrated at Hopkins as Latino Heritage Month and celebrated nationally as National Hispanic Heritage Month, Latinx Heritage Month was named accordingly this year in order to make the event more inclusive. Unlike the masculine term ‘Latino,’ Latinx is gender neutral.
OLÉ collaborated with other organizations, including LGBTQ Life and Gender Equity, to organize the event this year. OLÉ Community Outreach Chair sophomore Osiris Mancera felt that this was a crucial development.
“Hopefully we’ll be able to do more events like this with more intersectional work and more community based work,” Mancera said. “It’s not just our group doing things, but it’s us connecting with different groups and making sure that everybody is being represented and different identities are being represented.”
According to junior Monica Herrera, president of OLÉ, the Latinx community within Baltimore is particularly diverse, consisting of people from many different parts of Latin America. She contrasted this diversity to that of her home state, Texas, where most Latinos are of Mexican origin or heritage.
“By expanding the variety of the cultures that we showcased throughout the month, we’re showing the differences between the different countries and the different origins and showing that there are a lot of different parts of Latin America,” Herrera said. “It’s not just one big thing meshed together.”
In addition to events such as the closing ceremony, Latinx Heritage Month also provided a space for in-depth discussion and exploration of issues relevant to the Latinx community. According to Herrera, OLÉ worked on emphasizing issues within the Latinx community of Baltimore.
“We’ve brought in a lot of Baltimore community representatives,” Herrera said. “It’s really about bringing up these issues that are happening in the community around us and making them known on Hopkins campus.”
Mancera also spoke on the importance of discussing such issues with the Hopkins community.
“We’ve been trying to talk more about issues that people have been sort of mentioning and we’ve been hearing things about but people aren’t really educated about,” Mancera said. “Things like immigration issues.”
The events this month were designed not only to give people of the Latinx community an opportunity to convene and learn about one another’s cultures and experiences, but also to include students who did not identify as members of the Latinx community. One such student was freshman Danielle Vaithilingam.
“I came [to the closing ceremony] to see one of my friends from back home,” Vaithilingam said. “I love the dancing. I love the culture. I like to experience different things. So I don’t really understand it, but I would like to.”
Due to a busy schedule, Vaithilingam did not get to participate in as many events as she wanted to, though she did have the opportunity to participate in the salsa workshop.
“It was so much fun,” she said. “We basically just went through the basics of salsa and we had maybe half an hour at the end to just practice dancing... I always want to meet more people to dance with.”
Sophomore Haris Malik, who is not of Latinx heritage but who describes Latin American culture as something that has always been in the background of his life, liked the interactive aspect of such activities.
“I feel that teaching individuals how to create [Latin American] style art or other interactive activities is always attractive and a good reason to escape from Brody for a few minutes,” he wrote in an e-mail to The News-Letter.
Despite the presence of students like Vaithilingam and Malik, Mancera felt that there could have been a more widespread attendance of students outside the Latinx community.
“Our population of Latin American people, Caribbean people and Latinx people at Hopkins has been growing,” Mancera said. “But we’re still not that huge. It’s not that big of a challenge to get those people to come to these events, but really reaching out to the rest of the community has been a bit of a challenge.”
Herrera agreed, and felt that some of the new developments OLÉ made this year may have made some students outside of the Latinx community more hesitant about participating.
“Something that I’d like to see improved in the future is the attendance of the events,” she said. “I’m hoping that throughout the year and the next few years that we’ll start seeing more people coming to our events, wanting to understand what is going on in the community around them.”
Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The News-Letter.