{"id":991,"date":"2013-03-31T09:18:24","date_gmt":"2013-03-31T13:18:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/?p=991"},"modified":"2013-03-31T09:18:24","modified_gmt":"2013-03-31T13:18:24","slug":"reflections-how-urban-latino-life-abroad-and-in-hartford-shaped-my-thesis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/2013\/03\/31\/reflections-how-urban-latino-life-abroad-and-in-hartford-shaped-my-thesis\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflections: How urban Latino life abroad and in Hartford shaped my thesis"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my first blog post, I wrote about how attending mass at Our Lady of Sorrows parish brought back nostalgia for my study abroad semester in Buenos Aires. When I really stop to think about it, that emotion is an interesting way in which to begin a reflection on the route that brought me to my senior thesis topic and its methodology. A few weeks ago, Office of International Programs Director Lisa Sapolis, who I work for as a student Global Ambassador to the Trinity-in-Buenos Aires study away program<\/a>, asked to talk with me about my experiences connecting community learning in Hartford with my engagement abroad. (I work as a Global Ambassador to promote the Buenos Aires study away site.) This is a conversation that I also have at times with Carlos Espinosa, my director at Trinfo Caf\u00e9.<\/a> These talks got me thinking about the sometimes winding, but ultimately purposeful, journey that brought about the intellectual curiosity driving my thesis research.<\/p>\n

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Myself and students in Lena Stein's art class at the Montessori Magnet School, where I assist through the Art and Community Program. Photo credit: Lena Stein.<\/p><\/div>\n

Before going abroad, I had several meaningful engagements with community learning in Hartford. I did a bit of teaching-oriented service at Jubilee House<\/a>, the Montessori Magnet School<\/a>, and the Hartford Magnet Middle School<\/a>.\u00a0 In my first-ever CLI course, Cultural Rights, with Prof. Anne Gebelein, our class helped re-settle a Burmese refugee family by working with Catholic Charities to furnish their new apartment with basic furniture and material goods. (Take a look at the project’s pages<\/a> on the Hispanic Hartford site.)<\/p>\n

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My "Cultural Rights" class, led by Prof. Anne Gebelein, meets the Burmese refugee family whose apartment we furnished as our CLI project, in coordination with Catholic Charities, who resettled the family in Spring 2010. Photo credit: Hispanic Hartford website.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Finally, during my sophomore year, I completed in independent study with Professor Sonia Cardenas where I conducted interviews and observations (much like my thesis research, but less extensive) at Hartford Public Library<\/a>, Trinfo Caf\u00e9, and Mi Casa<\/a>. I learned a great deal from each interaction with Hartford, especially with immigrant and refugee groups. But these interactions felt a bit dis-jointed, and lacked an over-arching vision or guiding interest. Transportation was a challenge, and I was still uncomfortable navigating my way in a city, as I grew up in a semi-rural Massachusetts town of 9,000 people.<\/p>\n

Much of that changed in the Fall 2012 semester, when I studied abroad in Buenos Aires, Argentina. A few months ago, I found an old journal entry from before I started college. I had written something along the lines of “I don’t want to study abroad somewhere predictable like Europe. I want to go somewhere UNIQUE! Like South America or Africa!” Between that sentiment, my desire to perfect my Spanish language skills, and the Buenos Aires program’s focus on human rights, I guess I had my heart set on Argentina. The significance of experiences in Buenos Aires to me are too many to count.<\/p>\n

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Marching with the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, who demand rememberance of their disappeared children and grandchildren by publically marching every Thursday. Photo Credit: Sarah Kacevich.<\/p><\/div>\n

For example, this weekend I recounted to a new friend how mind-blowing it was to be in the basement of ESMA<\/a>, a former clandestine detention center from the years of the Videla dictatorship, standing in the very spot where military men had tortured “subversive” desaparecidos<\/em> (see the photo at left, and more info on the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo<\/a>). I had read about these practices quite a bit in Prof. Cardenas’ course “The Politics of Human Rights in Latin America.” Needless to say, I remember that day at ESMA very clearly. Besides clear connections to my academic courses, Buenos Aires also pushed me into an environment that demanded a high degree of independence and time spent alone navigating the city. I learned to depend on my intuition, my people skills, and my Spanish. Eventually I found the confidence and ability to balance the daily ups and downs of city life. A die-hard country girl became comfortable in the big city of 13 million people, and my 300,000-person university, Universidad de Buenos Aires (la UBA)<\/a>. I also gained incredible growth from my relationship with my host mother, a very special woman who taught me a lot about how to interact with people.<\/p>\n

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My host mother and I in her apartment in Buenos Aires. Photo Credit: Bill Parzych.<\/p><\/div>\n

I thought about staying another semester abroad, but in a way, I am grateful that I did not, as in the semester that I returned, I took two courses that significantly shaped the direction of my future thesis research. “Hispanic Hartford” had me going with a small team of classmates every other week to the Parkville neighborhood, interviewing residents and business employees about topics related to the Latino experience in Hartford. In one of these excursions, I interviewed Deacon Valentin, which would eventually lead me to approach Our Lady of Sorrows <\/a>as a case study site for my thesis. In “Women’s Rights as Human Rights,” with Professor Janet Bauer, she introduced me to a way of looking at human rights that instantly clicked with me. Through her background in anthropology, Professor Bauer is able to describe the connections between a human rights norm, mediating factors like culture and family, and how access to human rights plays out in real life. My final paper for her course looked at economic security for Latina women in Hartford. By the time the Grossman Grant for Global Studies from the Center for Urban and Global Studies<\/a> was announced last Spring, I had a rough sense of what I wanted to write my thesis on, and decided to apply for the grant. In August 2012, I was lucky enough to return to Argentina to study primary source texts in Spanish from major writers of the liberation theology movement. (See this link to ISEDET<\/a>, the research site pictured in the photo below.)<\/p>\n

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ISEDET, a Catholic seminary school in Buenos Aires, which hosts one of Latin America's best collections of liberation theology texts. I studied frequently at ISEDET as part of my Grossman Grant research. Photo Credit: ISEDET.<\/p><\/div>\n

Among many inspirations, one of the clearest for me was a text I read in “Hispanic Hartford<\/a>,” which asserted that due to the influence of social movements like liberation theology, the Hispanic Church in the U.S. gained a new, unique, assertive identity. Because I had become fluent in Spanish by studying abroad, I was able to begin working at Trinfo Caf\u00e9 as a bilingual adult computer literacy instructor. My conversations with my Latino students at Trinfo were indispensable for my initial thoughts on a thesis. Finally, during Summer 2012, I interned with the Partnership for Strong Communities, a non-profit in the Frog Hollow neighborhood focused on housing and homelessness policy. Living on campus over the summer opened my eyes to a new side of Hartford, since I had the chance to explore the city more, get to know professionals working on issues that interest me, and visit other social service agencies in the area.<\/p>\n

So, come this past Fall, I zeroed in on a thesis that would allow me to study the challenges that face low-income Latino immigrants in Hartford by looking at the gaps between human rights ideals and “what really happens” in a resource-scare city. Ethnographic research allows me to observe individuals involved with Jubilee House and Our Lady of Sorrows in their “lived context.” I have said many times that with a project like my own, it is essential to immerse oneself in the research context through ethnography before entirely knowing what it is that one wishes to research. I could not pretend that I knew all of the questions, nor their answers, right away. As the semester went on, I was happy to find that many of my early hypotheses were spot-on. I owe those intuitions to my earlier community learning experiences, and to the advice of Professor Bauer. But I also found myself creating new hypotheses and research sub-directions as the semester went on.<\/p>\n

As a final observation or two, I would like to note the extent to which my community learning and ethnographic research has motivated my desire to become a social worker. While I did not apply to MSW programs for next year, my heart is really set on beginning this profession a few years down the road. My experiences with individuals affected by incarceration, through Professor Judy Dworin, intersects in this area. By taking part in Judy’s work<\/a>, I gained the ability during community work to be assertive and confident, yet also sensitive and observant. These skills are essential to meaningful ethnography, and they are also what I hope to bring to my future as a social worker.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In my first blog post, I wrote about how attending mass at Our Lady of Sorrows parish brought back nostalgia for my study abroad semester in Buenos Aires. When I really stop to think about it, that emotion is an interesting way in which to begin a reflection on the route that brought me to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":466,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/991"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/466"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=991"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/991\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1021,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/991\/revisions\/1021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}