In her novel, Garcia tells the intertwined, intergenerational stories of a group of women, starting in 1866 with María Isabel, a cigar factory worker affected by the bloody stirrings of Cuban nationalists’ fight for independence from Spain, and ending with two of María Isabel’s descendants whose fates converge with those of a Salvadoran mother and daughter in present-day Miami.

As the women’s stories progress, Garcia, who studied sociology and communications at Fordham College at Rose Hill, tackles opioid addiction, migrant women in detention, and the stories told and untold that shape their lives and legacies.

Hispanic Women uses both social science and literature to examine the changing roles of Latina women in society with regard to Latino men, motherhood, the labor force, sexual awareness, media, political and economic power, and women’s liberation. Using literature as a lens, students in Rodríguez’s course examine the structural position and changing concepts of Hispanic women in the Americas.

And visiting authors like Garcia help with this exploration. A few weeks before her visit, students also heard from Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, the author of Daughters of the Stone and Woman of Endurance.

During November’s hourlong Zoom session, Garcia, who has her own fond memories of taking a class with Rodríguez before graduating in 2007, shared how Fordham helped shape who she is today, her favorite part of the writing process, and why women figure so prominently in her work.

She also delved into the meaning of “salt” in the novel’s title. Though she was drawn to the word’s versatility and varied connotations, Garcia said she “looked at elements that kept coming up multiple times [as she was writing the novel], and salt was one of those. And it can mean so many things,” from the salt of the ocean and sweat and tears to biblical references.

Liliana Gutierrez, a senior in the Fordham Theatre program, asked Garcia about the nature of history and why she adopted a nonlinear, vignette style for the novel.

Garcia explained that such a structure ensures that the book has “that feeling of stories.”

“When I think about history, I think it’s important to always realize that we’re talking about a story. It’s in the word,” she said. “I knew that I didn’t want to write a sweeping saga that went into all the details of these past characters fully: I wanted glimpses,” like those you have of your own history.

Hannah Berggren, a sophomore majoring in urban studies and sociology, wondered how extensive the research process was for the novel, particularly regarding the intimate details that emerge regarding migrant detention centers and the experiences of the women held there. Garcia drew from her own experiences to fuel those passages, she said: Prior to enrolling in an MFA program in creative writing at Purdue University, she did some organizing work with women in deportation and detention centers.

Rodríguez said she felt that the “section on detention was one of the best” in the book “because you see this coverage in the media where people, or politicians essentially” drop in with platitudes, “but it’s only when you read your descriptions from the women’s perspective that you really get the full picture,” she told Garcia and the class.

Garcia, who also writes poetry and short stories, is at work on her next novel. Though it’s early stages yet, and she’s “still figuring out the meat of it,” she knows one thing for sure: It will center on women characters.

“It was America’s dead babies. I was trying to get my head around why so many babies, about seven out of 1,000 born, die before they turn 1,” said the New York Times columnist in an online conversation on Oct. 29.

Even though scientific achievements made over the last 50 years have dramatically increased the mortality of children born after 32 weeks, the mortality rate in the United States is almost double the rate in Korea, three times the rate in Japan, and six times the rate in Iceland, he said. Most of the U.S. babies who die young are also born to mothers who are poor and Black.

“The U.S. may be the richest country in the world, so the question is, why don’t we behave like one? It’s racial conflict,” he said.

In an online conversation hosted by Fordham’s departments of American Studies, Latin American and Latino Studies, and Sociology and Anthropology, Porter laid out the premise of American Poison: How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise (Penguin Random House, 2020), which is that racism weakens American’s belief in one of the most critical components of a modern, functioning society: public goods.

“One of my core arguments is that Americans decided that if public goods must be shared across lines of race and ethnicity, they would rather do without them,” he said.

In his talk, which was followed by a response from Janice Berry, Ph.D., associate professor of economics, and a lengthy question and answer period, Porter said that although President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is lionized by liberals, his New Deal was colored by the stain of racial hostility. To win the support of white southern Democrats in the Senate, Roosevelt made sure that major parts of the legislation excluded anyone who was not white.

Porter cited several examples:, a major component of the New Deal that is credited with increasing homeownership, was a big contributor to redlining, a process by which predominantly black neighborhoods were declared blighted. The Civilian Conservation Corps, a work relief program created in 1933 that employed hundreds of thousands of young men, housed them in camps that were segregated by race. And when it was first created, Social Security excluded domestic and farm workers, the majority of whom were black

“This may offend those believers in the grand alliance of working men and women, immigrants, and racial minorities coming together to confront corporate leviathans, but that is what happened. Racism stymied the great liberal leap in American policymaking,” Porter said.

The civil rights movement provoked a backlash of the white majority against the idea of a society wrapped together by a common safety net, he said, adding that it was not a coincidence that Medicare and Medicaid, the last programs inspired by that ethos, were signed into law in 1965, one year after the Civil Rights Act. After that, he said, white Americans resisted the creation of additional social welfare programs.

“That same year, President Lyndon Johnson presented Americans with a ‘War on Crime,’ and a few years later, Richard Nixon offered this war as the new lodestar for American social policy,” he said, noting that for the next five decades, prison became the country’s preferred tool of social management.

Today, the country is considerably less healthy than its peers as a result, as measured by metrics such as the number of Americans living below the poverty line. And although technology advances and globalization are often blamed for the decline, Porter noted that countries such as France, Germany, and Canada have faced the same challenges.

“So when the good jobs went away, and wages stagnated, the bedraggled American safety net just could not hold the line. America’s dead babies, its bloated prisons, its idle men, its single mothers can all be traced to this exceptional fact: Americans chose to let those sinking sink,” he said.

“Why? Because a lot of those people sinking were people of color.”

Ironically, he said, these attitudes have betrayed white Americans as well.

“That part of white America that’s addled by opioids, ravaged by suicide, and despairing of a future is also a victim of a nation that refuses to care,” he said.

There is some hope that change is coming, he said, as the American population is growing more diverse. While three out of four Baby Boomers are white and non-Hispanic, only 55 percent of Americans born between 1981 and 1996 fall into that group. Eventually, Porter said, color lines are going to blur, and that the Black-white divide that has defined racial relationships for hundreds of years will soften.

Porter confessed that he is not very optimistic though.

“Minorities might eventually reshape American attitudes, but I would not discount the political clout of white voters trying to delay their decline from power,” he said.

The problem, he said, is that white voters in rural areas don’t interact with minorities, but they understand that minorities will eventually be moving into their towns, and it scares them.

“Conquering this fear, to my mind, is America’s most immediate challenge. The task of progressive politicians is to construct a public discourse that embraces America’s multiplicity of people,” he said.

“They must convince Americans to invite solidarity across lines of identity.”

To watch Porter’s lecture and Q&A, click here.

“Who are we not to take this on?” Lenhardt would ask rhetorically in response, pointing to the University’s commitment to social justice and the Law School’s deep and diverse constellation of race scholars.

On February 29, Lenhardt and Fordham Law School formally launched the Center on Race, Law and Justice, publicly announcing its presence as a leader on issues of race and the law in New York City, the United States, and abroad. The event featured presentations from five Fordham University professors involved in the center, including associate directors Tanya Hernandez and Kimani Paul-Emile, and a keynote address from preeminent civil rights lawyer Debo Adegbile, now a partner at WilmerHale in New York and the former acting president and director counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

Law School Dean Matthew Diller called the center’s launch “a huge red-letter day for Fordham Law School and Fordham University.” He lauded the collaboration, mutual support, and excitement present in the 26 faculty members associated with the center’s focus.

Joseph M. McShane, SJ, president of Fordham University, placed the center’s launch in historic context, noting it came more than 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, the death of Abraham Lincoln, and the end of the Civil War, and around 50 years after the Civil Rights Movement and the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Further change, he said, would come from conversion of hearts and a movement in which “Fordham is engaged.”

“I see great hope here,” McShane told the audience.

Both Diller and McShane praised Lenhardt’s vision, for transforming a decade-long dream into a reality.

Diller celebrated Lenhardt as “a superb colleague, teacher, and friend who adds insight, value, poise, and grace to everything she touches.”

Father McShane, meanwhile, highlighted Lenhardt’s persistent and persuasive arguments in championing her visionary concept.

“In every way that counts, you are the person who brought this to fruition,” Father McShane said to Lenhardt, noting her meticulous nature and gift for hard work convinced him this would be not a center on paper but a center in action.

The center will function as an incubator and a platform for cutting-edge interdisciplinary scholarship on race, structural inequality, and racial justice tools grounded in critical analyses, comparative inquiry, and innovative methodologies, its leaders said.

The center will not only explore the deployment of the law as a solution for racial inequity but also seek to address through original research and analysis how it simultaneously functions as the architect of such inequality in ways that strip minorities of opportunity, dignity, and belonging, Lenhardt explained.

The center’s mission, she continued, is to explore issues of race and inequality in both the domestic and global contexts and to promote conversations about access, opportunity, and discrimination at Fordham University and in the legal profession more broadly.

Hernandez will lead the center’s global and comparative law programs and initiatives. Paul-Emile, meanwhile, will lead the center’s domestic programs and initiatives. Law Professor Olivier Sylvain, Political Science Professor Christina Greer, and Sociology Professor Clara Rodriguez also detailed their scholarship on race and racial justice during the 90-minute event.

Lenhardt also highlighted the presence of Gay McDougall, a MacArthur Foundation “Genius,” distinguished scholar-in-residence at the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice, and the wife of the late John Payton, former head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the architect of the legal strategy that led to the Michigan affirmative action cases decided by the Supreme Court, on which Lenhardt worked.

Payton’s LDF protégé, Adegbile, shared his mentor’s impact on his career in a speech that combined insight into how civil rights progress is not unilateral but ebbs and flows and that often the cases that matter most directly affect the lives of young people.

At present, Adegbile represents Harvard College in a lawsuit that challenges the constitutionality of its admissions program, one that raises the same kinds of issues presented by the Michigan cases and the Bakke case before them. Adegbile shared his view that such challenges present the questions “who are we and who do we want to be.”

Progress happens as a result not of one person’s efforts but of an intergenerational fight for change, Adegbile said, noting he viewed the center’s launch and future work as a continuation of this idea.

“Whether you’re Thurgood Marshall or Constance Baker Motley, it doesn’t matter,” Adegbile said, referring to the first African-American Supreme Court justice and first woman to serve as Manhattan borough president. “There will always be another fight. There will always be something for the next generation to do.”

—Ray Legendre

“I consider it a great honor to serve on the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee,” Rodriguez said. “The USPS has such a long and storied history and plays such an important role in the lives of all Americans. To be a part of that history, and to help select the images that reflect the vitality and diversity of this amazing and constantly changing nation, is a major responsibility, and one I embrace with great enthusiasm.”

The postal service receives about 50,000 letters regarding the stamp program each year, but only 20 to 25 subjects are commemorated on postage annually. The 15-member committee is responsible for choosing new subjects for stamps, reviewing their designs and approving final products on behalf of the postmaster general.

Committee members serve three-year terms and reflect a wide range of educational, artistic, historical and professional expertise. Current members include Michael Heyman, chancellor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley; Henry Louis Gates Jr., Ph.D., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University; and Joan Mondale, the former vice president’s wife.

Rodríguez, author of 10 books, most recently co-authored The Culture and Commerce of Publishing in the 21st Century (Stanford University Press, 2007), which won a National Jesuit Book Award last year. The October 2007 issue of Hispanic Business named Rodriguez one of the “100 Most Influential Hispanics.”