Latin America Comes Alive

Latin America is everywhere: children of Dominican heritage are learning to read English in Hamilton, Ohio while U.S. students live and study in Brazil during the summer to learn about the country’s economic challenges. The Latin American Studies (LAS) program, designed to inform students of Latin America’s presence in the world is, understandably, one of the more diverse programs in the College of Arts and Science. With professors in anthropology, geography, political science, English and Spanish involved in planning the curriculum, students receive a broad education about our southern neighbors.

Recently the LAS program has encouraged students to take a closer look at Latin America through non-class programming.

With an $80,000 per year Title VI Undergraduate International Studies and Foreign Language Programs grant from the U.S. Department of Education, matched monetarily by Miami, the LAS program is organizing speakers and creating classes so that students will better comprehend the impact our southern neighbors have on our culture and the world.

According to Charles Ganelin, the head of the department of Spanish and Portuguese and a member of the strategic team, the newly expanded LAS program will create a bridge to a wider community.

“We are helping to develop study abroad options in Latin America with the grant,” said Ganelin. “When you study abroad in Latin America, you bring back a broader cultural understanding.”

Spanish graduate student Martin Kane is one of a handful of Miami students to spend a year abroad in Latin America.

“People who didn’t know exactly where I went would ask me ‘How was Spain?’ when I got back,” said Kane. “For me it was an incredible journey [that is] far from over.”

Kane chose to study in Chile and Argentina because of stories he’d heard from other students and because he wanted a true immersion experience. He also began to understand the United States’ impact on Latin American countries, something the new LAS program addresses.

“It’s pretty crazy how much American companies are doing down there,” Kane said.

Not only will the grant help fund the development of programs abroad, but it’s helping to fund courses and events on Miami’s campus right now. One of the main changes taking place in the LAS program is an increase in the number of courses offered for the minor. While the program already includes many disciplines in the College of Arts and Science (political science, history and geography courses, among others, all count towards the completion of an LAS minor), it also offers three new interdisciplinary courses:

•LAS 106: Migration and Movement Across the Americas—this first year seminar is designed to offer freshmen a small, discussion oriented introduction to the LAS program. It also satisfies a Miami requirement.
•LAS 315: Latin American Diaspora: Communities, Conditions and Issues—this course, an interdisciplinary 300 level course, includes a service-learning component. Parallel with academic studies, students are expected to enter a Latin American community where they interact with the culture while performing service at the same time.
•LAS 410: Current Latin American Issues—this class is also an interdisciplinary offering. It is planned and implemented in connection with a broad array of cultural events, invited lectures and debates. Students are expected to take their classroom knowledge and apply it in practical ways, through attendance at speakers and programs such as UniDiversity.

Through these new course offerings, which will be combined with other courses that have previously been offered in the minor, students begin to interact with Latin American culture in a way that has not been widely done at Miami. All three new courses address issues that are important to a student’s understanding of Latin American culture.

Shelly Jarrett-Bromberg, a professor at Miami’s Hamilton branch campus, is heavily involved in the service learning aspect of the new LAS program. For students in one of her classes, service in Latin American communities is a requirement.

“It’s not volunteerism,” said Bromberg. “These students receive credit, and in response they’re required to read, write and reflect.”

According to Bromberg, integrating LAS and service learning on a global level was a goal the program set out to attain.

“Some of these people, if not physically at least economically, are living between new worlds and even traveling back and forth between the two,” said Bromberg.
For students, service at locations such as Su Casa, which provides translation services, tax preparation assistance and Spanish and English classes, helps them connect with the Latin American population in the U.S. and gives them an opportunity to talk about Latinos in the world.

These new classes were developed so students begin to connect Latin America and the U.S. Susan Paulson, director of the LAS program, said new initiatives (such as the service learning component) were created in anticipation of applying for the Title VI grant.

“First, five LAS members worked over a two year period to assess and redesign the curriculum,” said Paulson.

The team first held a strategy meeting when Paulson became director of the program, coming up with a plan and an outline for the grant application. Once they finished writing the grant, implementation of some aspects began immediately. This is the third time the LAS program has applied for the Title VI grant, and the first time they’ve been awarded the money.

“Just writing [the grant application] was 90 percent of the work,” Paulson said. With the new curriculum and the monetary award, the program has grown unbelievably in the past year.

“There’s a whole lot to discover between Canada and Chile,” said Kane, who noted that the new program would help to eliminate the mental division Americans make between the U.S. and South America.

Along with increasing class offerings, the funding increase will also improve the visibility of minority programming through LAS. One major step forward in programming was the creation of UniDiversity in 2003, a semester-long interdisciplinary program of performances, lectures and other events focused on Latin America. The program, which continued in its second year during fall semester of 2004, began the semester’s events in September with an opening outdoor festival in uptown Oxford, featuring ethnic food and musicians who performed for anyone who happened to walk by.

UniDiversity ended its programming in late November with a performance by the Nego Gato Music and Dance Ensemble, a group whose performances are designed to share the variety, power and beauty of Afro-Brazilian culture.
In between these two events, a series of over 20 lectures by various scholars and artists offered students and faculty at Miami a glimpse at various topics centered on Latin America. Topics ranged from “An Ancient History of the Caribbean: From the Ancestors to Columbus” to “Costa Rica: A Microcosm for Global Change,” and also included the popular Citizens of the World concert in October.

“The grant has enabled us to expand our offerings for UniDiversity,” said Ganelin. “We’ve learned to focus [this year].”

Not only has the program introduced more UniDiversity events; it has increased student participation and creation of certain programs as well. This fall, nine students from different campus organizations gave three minute presentations for the program “Latin American Immigration: Good or Bad for our Nation?”

Members of the Indian Student Association, the Black Student Action Association and the Association of Latin American Students, to name a few, were present, along with an invited scholar and a Latino labor leader who facilitated discussion.
Programs similar to these are planned for next year’s UniDiversity festival and will likely expand in the future to include more student initiatives as well.
For Paulson, the importance of Latin America cannot be emphasized enough.

“Our challenge is to work on increasing sophisticated diversity in the United States,” she said.

With the grant and a completely redesigned and integrated Latin American Studies program, Miami is on its way to increasing our understanding of where Latin America is right now and where it might end up in the future. New courses and the continuation of programs like UniDiversity and service learning are opening students to a world they generally don’t think of as having an impact on the United States.

Paulson hopes the grant will provide new opportunities for those students who don’t often get a chance to interact with Latin Americans. Whether studying abroad in South America or tutoring native Spanish speaking children in after school programs, students in the LAS program continue to learn new things about the culture every day.

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