Organización Latina Estudiantil (OLÉ) and the Office of Multicultural Affairs (OMA) held the LatinX Heritage Celebratory Keynote Address on Tuesday.
The event was the closing ceremony of the 2018 LatinX Heritage Celebration. The theme of the celebration was Raíces, the Spanish word for ‘roots.’ Unlike past years, OMA moved away from restricting celebrations to a single heritage month. Instead it started a new initiative called “Heritage 365.” Adwoa Tandoh, an intern at OMA, explained the change.
“We don’t want celebrations pertaining to Latin culture just to end,” Tandoh said.
Dania Matos, the deputy chief diversity officer at the College of William & Mary, was the keynote speaker at the event. She appreciated that Hopkins goes beyond the one-month model. In Matos’ experience, Hopkins is the first university to celebrate heritage year-round. She was attracted to the inventiveness of this idea.
“Hispanic Heritage Month officially ends on Oct. 15, so even holding this event on Oct. 16 was an act of resistance,“ she said. “I wake up and I am Latina. Every day is a celebration for me.”
Kimberly Gonzalez, the president of OLÉ, opened the event and reminded the attendees of the quote that accompanied the Raíces theme: “They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know that we were seeds.”
According to Gonzalez, the organizers wanted to choose a quote that adequately expresses the Latinx experience.
“We felt that it shows the resiliency of the people. This celebration is so important because it shows us where we’ve been, who we are, how we got there and everything that we have accomplished along the way,” Gonzalez said.
Matos elaborated on the significance of the theme. According to Matos, Raíces was inspired by the 1990s Zapatistas movement, a left-wing political and militant group which fought for indigenous rights in Mexico. The group borrowed the term from the Greek poet Dinos Christianopoulos. Matos believes that the term’s history highlights its intersectionality. She also touched on the metaphor of the seed.
“During difficult times, the metaphor of seeds holds particular emotional sway. It expresses the idea that those who have suffered immensely might help bear the fruits of justice later,” Matos said.
Matos extended the metaphor of seeds to the act of storytelling. She believes that telling stories is a way of correcting the characterization of the Latin American community as homogenous.
During the talk, Matos told the students attending that the University plays an integral role in shaping their worldview as Latinx people.
“Your Hopkins experience is truly going to inform a lot of your identity. You see it as a particular way of being, experiencing and interpreting your place in the world,” Matos said. “You have to remember these spaces weren’t built for us so your act of just being here is an act of resistance.”
Guillermo Ortiz, Matos’ brother and a 2014 Hopkins graduate, also spoke at the event. He said that his experience at Hopkins as a Latinx student was different than the experience of current students.
“The great part of coming back to the Homewood Campus as an alumnus is seeing all the growth and development that has been going on, specifically in diversity and inclusion work at the University,” he said.
Gonzalez agrees that the Hopkins Latinx community has evolved in her four years at the University. When she arrived, she joined many different Latin American cultural clubs, hoping to find a sense of Latinx kinship that she felt in her hometown. This year, a group chat was created to connect a group of more than 200 students of Latinx heritage.
Unlike Gonzalez, Ortiz said that he was not involved in the Latinx community at Hopkins. Instead, his engagement with the Latinx community at Hopkins began when he graduated. He is currently working on creating a network of Latinx alumni. He hopes that the alumni network will help to provide mentorship and leadership opportunities for current students.
While Ortiz acknowledges the progress that has been made, Sami Ayele, the president of the African Students Association, believes that events like the LatinX Heritage Celebration are not receiving enough support from University administrators outside of OMA.
“People from administration never make it to these events,” Ortiz said. “This event was led by student collaboration and innovation, and it is not the norm, it is very much the exception.”
Chisom Okereke, the president of the Black Student Union, acknowledges that the University has made an effort to include minority voices but needs to be more committed to taking action.
“I think that we are at the table, but are we talking or being heard? I don’t know,” Okereke said.
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