“That would be the greatest transfer of human capital that we’ve seen in recent times,” he said of the move that would send 800,000 law-abiding, economically productive U.S. residents to Mexico. “It would transform Mexico in a very positive way, but of course this isn’t what the DACA recipients want. They’ve spent most of their lives in the United States, and even though they were born in Mexico or other countries, they believe this is the country they call home.”

In a wide-ranging Q&A at the Rose Hill campus on Oct. 3, Gomez-Pickering lamented the fact that in the United States, the word “immigrant” has become synonymous with “criminal.” He detailed his government’s efforts to aid DACA recipients and its response to last month’s earthquake in Mexico City. He also remarked on the ties that bind Mexico to the United States, New York City, and Fordham.

An Unbreakable Connection

The United States was the first country to recognize Mexico as an independent state in 1821, he said. In 1848, when the Mexican-American war ended, he noted that 110,000 families in Texas woke to find themselves living in another country. Even today, the economic and cultural bonds between San Diego and Tijuana are strong.

“It might seem that the U.S. and Mexico are going through a rough time, but that’s not necessarily the case. On an everyday basis, the relationship is still there. We’re much more than neighbors, because if you don’t like your neighbor, you can just move to another building.”

“We’ve got to stick together as we have been, in a positive manner.”

Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, said that the University’s connection with Mexico is “longstanding, deep, and enriching.”  He noted that one of the University’s most valuable artworks, the eight-foot-high painting Adoration of the Magi, which is on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until the end of the month, was created by the Mexican painter Cristóbal de Villalpando.

“In the 19th century, shortly after our founding, we had a very substantial number of students from the Caribbean, including the coast of Mexico, as part of our community. So our connection with Mexico is rich,” he said.

Welcoming Refugees

Monica Olveira, a Fordham College at Rose Hill senior majoring in International Political and Economic Development (IPED) who works with UNICEF, used the opportunity to ask Gomez-Pickering what the country is doing to help children who are migrating there from countries like Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.

“Mexico has always been a very welcoming country to refugees. If you look back at the later part of the 20th century when all the military coups happened in South America, Mexico was the number one destination for many political refugees,” Gomez-Pickering said.

He said that the Mexican government holds meetings at least once a with representatives of countries in the “Northern Triangle.” The goal is to aid migrants, particularly those who travel by themselves.

“That’s something that continues, especially for our brothers and sisters from Latin America.”

Gomez-Pickering’s visit was sponsored by Fordham’s Latin American and Latino Studies Institute (LALSI).

Castillo-Garsow said she wrote the poem while living in the area as a student at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Latin American and Latino Studies Institute.

Shortly after earning his doctorate in European medieval studies from Johns Hopkins University, Father Picó came back to a tumultuous campus at Fordham, where students had successfully agitated for changes in the curriculum to reflect the growing diversity of the student body. The Department of African and African American Studies had been established in 1969 and, through the efforts of the student group, El Grito de Lares, a Puerto Rican Studies program followed in the fall of 1970.

Two days before the first course was set to begin, however, the professor hired to teach the class bailed out. Joseph P. Fitzpatrick, S.J., GSAS ’41, a Fordham sociology professor who had researched the Puerto Rican migration to New York City, invited Father Picó to teach the class. At the time Father Pico had, in his words, only a “sketchy” knowledge of Puerto Rican history, but he accepted the position and began cramming.

“I was coming to Puerto Rican history with many questions; those of my prospective students were my own,” he wrote in the preface to his book Historia General de Puerto Rico (Marcus Weiner Publishers, 2005). The book is considered by many to be the definitive history of the island, said Cruz-Malavé.

The course became the cornerstone of what would eventually become the Latin American and Latino Studies Institute (LALSI). It was one of the first such programs in the country, Cruz-Malavé said.

El Grito de Lares, the student group that started it all, is still active on campus.

In his book, Father Picó acknowledged his experience at Fordham as the moment he pivoted from medieval history to the social history of Puerto Rico. He specifically credited Fordham Puerto Rican and Latino undergraduates for showing him the importance of viewing history from the “bottom up.”

“I have learned from all my students, but I learned more from these than from any others,” he wrote. “For them, the course was not a three-credit class to fill an academic record; it represented the fundamental university experience […] in Puerto Rican history. They came in order to find out who they were.”

“He remembered his students’ examples of seeing themselves as part of history, as protagonists in it rather than as its victims,” said Cruz-Malavé. “He saw their actions as an encouragement to research Puerto Rican history and to write a new kind of historiography, one based on the perspectives of those on the ‘bottom’ of historical processes.”

Cruz-Malavé said that Father Picó’s and Father Fitzpatrick’s pedagogy aimed to link critical thinking to engagement with social issues and service to communities they were studying. For Father Picó, that meant returning to Puerto Rico, where he eventually rose to become a distinguished professor at the University of Puerto Rico. Cruz-Malavé said he was admired for his many community-based projects, including his research and education of convicts, many of whom went on to receive a university degree.

“He was a scholar who was interested in working with ordinary people, and in the way they were not only acted upon by social phenomena, such as migration, but the way they could also be agents of change,” said Cruz-Malavé.

Cubans, though, were for the most part impervious. Their own baseball season was experiencing the nation’s greatest pennant race between league rivals Almendares and Habanas, in which Almendares won a historic 13 of 14 games.

The arrival of the Dodgers’ in Cuba and the Cuban League’s extraordinary baseball season that winter were distinct events, but both foreshadowed the modernization of Major League Baseball by challenging white ballplayers’ monopoly of the U.S. professional game.

“A large and significant part of what we know as American baseball history actually took place outside of the geographical boundaries of the United States, in places like Havana,” said Arnaldo Cruz-Malave, PhD, director of Fordham’s Latin American and Latino Studies Institute (LALSI).

On Nov. 6 at Fordham, Cruz-Malave and author and baseball journalist César Brioso, a longtime sports journalist whose book, Havana Hardball: Spring Training, Jackie Robinson, and The Cuban League (University Press of Florida, 2015), has just been published, held a discussion on the Cuban leagues and breaking the color barrier in the sport.

Brioso, a digital producer and former baseball editor at USA TODAY Sports who immigrated from Cuba with his family when he was five months old, became enthralled with his native country’s baseball history—and how it became intertwined with that of the United States—while listening to his father’s recounting of Cuban baseball of the epoch.

“Once I learned that Jackie Robinson’s historic major league season began in Cuba in spring training, Robinson and the Cuban league became obsessions for me,” Brioso said.

Ascending to the Major Leagues

Brioso, who has also written for the Miami Herald and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, subsequently spoke with dozens of players, managers who either participated or witnessed the Cuban League’s 1947 denouement, and Robinson’s eventual ascension to the major leagues that year.

He told of how the Mexican League for a time lured American and other professionals to that country with promises of generous contracts. Faced with the possibility of defections, Major League Baseball’s commissioner, Happy Chandler, effectively ostracized those who absconded south of the border and also those who played with or against them. An ensuing agreement between the Cuban League and Major League Baseball would for a time strengthen baseball in the island nation and nearly land a AAA affiliate in Cuba.

But perhaps the most significant outcome on the grass of that island country would be the adaptation of black, white, and Latino players to play together, on Cuban League teams, barnstorming squads, or in spring training sessions for their Major League clubs.

“That certainly helped change the way a lot of white players probably thought about African-American players,” Brioso said.

That experience eased the way for Robinson’s scaling of the color barrier and the eventual integration of the game in the United States.

“Cuban and, by extension, Latin-American cultures are an important, even a crucially important, component of U.S. American culture,” Cruz-Malave said, “especially as represented most evidently by baseball.”

The event was co-sponsored by LALSI and the Cuban Cultural Center of New York.

–Rich Khavkine

On Oct. 5, in collaboration with the United Nations Remember Slavery Programme, Fordham hosted a moderated discussion of scholars, writers, and historians to honor and commemorate the lives of these enslaved black women.

The event, titled “Truth: Women, Creativity, and Memory of Slavery,” also examined the ways in which contemporary women artists address historical absences and give a voice to the unheard.

Opening the discussion before a capacity audience at the Fordham School of Law, Kimberly Mann, Chief of Education Outreach at the UN Department of Public Information, noted that women throughout the African diaspora used art “to express, endure, survive and liberate both themselves and their people.”

Yuko Miki, PhD, assistant professor of history at Fordham, explained that women’s resistance to slavery is often overlooked, however, as historical narratives focus on larger, more violent uprisings led by men.

“I would also like to recognize that women’s resistance often happens in much more subtle, everyday forms,” she said.

These forms were visible in a series of archival photographs presented by Deborah Willis, a photographer and the chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University.

Through images of enslaved women, runaway slaves, teachers, washerwomen and other workers, as well as famous figures such as Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, Willis showed that women were not merely the objects of photography, but played a role in constructing their own identities for the camera.

Nicole Fleetwood, associate professor of American studies at Rutgers University, explored a similar agency expressed in photographs of incarcerated black women today, who use the medium “as a mode of self-representation” and a way “to claim interior lives,” she said.

Puerto Rican writer Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro discussed the inspiration for her own book, Negras: Stories of Puerto Rican Slave Women” (2012).

“I decided that the visibility of slave women needs to be reclaimed by means of fiction. I took in hand the memory of all black women to make them visible and to bring out their contributions to humankind,” she said.

Other panelists included Gabriela Salgado, an African and Latin-American contemporary art curator based in London, who focused on the work of Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino, and Iyunolu Osagie, associate professor of English at Pennsylvania State University.

Osagie summed up the evening’s sentiments concisely when she claimed, “Women have always been there. If you look for them you will find them.”

“Truth: Women, Creativity, and Memory of Slavery” was sponsored by the Latin American and Latino Studies Institute, Department of African & African-American Studies, the School of Professional and Continuing Studies, the Department of History, and Fordham’s theatre program.

–Nina Heidig

After decades of stalemate between Cuba and the United States, Muñoz, FCRH ’15, figured she would probably never see the country of her family’s origin, from which her grandparents emigrated in the 1960s.

So, when she saw that Fordham’s Latin American and Latino Studies Institute was offering a course study tour to Havana, she jumped at the opportunity.

“My grandparents had told me so many stories about it—and suddenly I was there,” said Muñoz, who graduated on May 16. “Walking [along that boardwalk]was intense. There were so many emotions. I have chills just thinking about it.”

Muñoz was one of 19 undergraduate students who traveled to Havana last semester. It was the first group of Fordham students to do so since the United States and Cuba announced normalization in December 2014.

The course, Contemporary Cuban Culture, explored the renewed importance of Havana as a vibrant contemporary cultural scene and introduced students firsthand to the music, art, dance, literature, and film that have emerged amidst Cuba’s transition to a globalized world market. The students stayed at Cuba’s premier cultural institute, Casa de las Américas, and took classes with Casa faculty.

For some students, the trip offered a perspective of the island nation to which few American students have had access.

For others, like Muñoz, the trip connected them to a heritage known only through family lore.

In Havana, Muñoz met her grandfather’s cousins (her only relatives left in the city) for the first time. She had contacted them via email before she left and had made plans to have dinner with their family. The reunion was powerful, Muñoz said. At her great-cousins’ house, there were pictures on the walls of her grandparents and her father.

“I’ve gained a greater consciousness about my identity and my roots,” Muñoz said. “It also helped me not to see things in black and white. When my grandparents left … in the early 60s, they’d lost everything. So I had grown up with this dichotomous version of Cuban history. But then I met the family members who had decided to stay and heard [their stories about Cuba].

“The experience helped me to see that you can’t reduce a person to just one identity. It’s about seeing the whole person. That’s something that I’ve also learned by being at Fordham.”

The theme of seeing individuals and situations in all of their complexity surfaced often throughout the study tour, said course instructor Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, PhD, professor of Spanish and comparative literature. Not only did students gain a more nuanced understanding of U.S. and Cuban relations, but they also experienced the frictions within Cuban society itself.

“Havana is a city of great economic tensions,” Cruz-Malavé said. “The whole discourse of the Cuban revolution had been about equality—and in some spheres that was accomplished, most notably in education and health. But then came the collapse of the Soviet Union, which subsidized the Cuban economy, [followed by]the deterioration of the Cuban economy in the 90s.”

The economic collapse forced Cuba to rely on the tourism industry, which did help to revive the economy. However, it also introduced foreign currency into the country, such as euros and Canadian and American dollars, which are significantly more valuable than the Cuban peso. The competing currencies have created a gap between those with access to foreign money and those without access—in essence, a gap between foreign tourists and Cubans.

“The students had read about this inequity, but there’s nothing like being there and realizing … that you, as a tourist, have access to things that Cubans do not,” Cruz-Malavé said.

Cruz-Malavé recounted an instance when a small group of students attempted to visit the Jose Martí Memorial Museum with a young Cuban they had met. The guards at the museum allowed the Fordham students to enter, but not the Cuban student—tourists only, they said.

“So we just left,” said Muñoz. “I was so mad. I asked [our friend], ‘Aren’t you upset?’ And he said, ‘I used to get upset by it, but it’s just part of life.’ That broke my heart. Because it’s not okay. It’s wrong on so many levels.”

In response to these inequities, the students opted for solidarity, Cruz-Malavé said—for instance, forgoing tourist restaurants and dining instead at paladares, family-run restaurants that often operate right within a family’s home.

Most importantly, he said, they went straight to the source to find out what life is really like in Havana.

Travis Hernandez, a rising senior, said that one day he joined a group of boys playing basketball. At the end of the game, one of the boys invited Hernandez to have dinner with his family.

“When we got to his home, the door was already open… which surprised me, because where I grew up in New York City, that’s not something you do,” Hernandez said.

“That little gesture—keeping the door open—meant something. It said a lot about the open community there.”

Photos by Travis Hernandez and Sebastian Reismann

[doptg id=”20″] ]]> 18258 https://now.fordham.edu/arts-and-culture/panel-explores-the-new-normal-for-u-s-cuba-relations/ Fri, 27 Feb 2015 12:30:00 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=7271 “They’re going to put a U.S. embassy in Havana! In Havana!”

Sujatha Fernandes was on the subway when the announcement came that the United States and Cuba would be restoring full diplomatic relations after nearly 54 years. A scholar on Cuba, Fernandes was nonetheless shocked when the man seated next to her on the train began shouting the news.

Margaret Crahan, another renowned Cuba scholar, was at an academic conference in Havana when the news broke on Dec. 17. Crahan—as well as the 400 international researchers at the conference with her—were also caught off guard.

“We were struck dumb,” Crahan told a Fordham audience. “And then the room erupted as people cheered, cried, and hugged. We started asking ourselves, ‘How did this happen?’ And eventually, ‘What impact will this have?’”

On Feb. 26 a panel of Cuba scholars gathered at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus to discuss the impact that the normalization of U.S.-Cuba relations will have on the empowerment of Cubans and on America’s relationship with the island.

Sponsored by Fordham’s Latin American and Latino Studies Institute, the panel featured:

• Margaret Crahan, PhD, director of the Cuba Program at the Institute for Latin American Studies at Columbia University
• Sujatha Fernandes, PhD, associate professor of sociology at Queens College, CUNY and author of Cuba Represent!: Cuban Arts, State Power, and the Making of New Revolutionary Cultures (Duke University Press Books, 2006)
• Achy Obejas, Cuban-American author of the novels Ruins and Days of Awe, and a translator, journalist, and blogger

The policy change is a paradigm shift, the panel said. Still, there are difficulties and copious details to iron out before the two countries reach a new “normal.”

For instance, Crahan said, Cuban President Raúl Castro has made several requests that will require significant negotiation between the two countries, including the return of the Guantánamo Bay naval base to Cuba, the end of Radio y Televisión Martí (a Miami-based broadcaster that transmits newscasts to Cuba), and compensation to the Cuban people for the “human and economic damages” caused by U.S. policies.

Nevertheless, slow progress has begun. Some restrictions have already been relaxed. For instance, all professionals and not just academics can now travel to Cuba for work or study purposes. Travel agencies and airlines no longer need to obtain special licenses, leading many to start looking into expanding flights to the island nation.

Ordinary tourism is still prohibited, however. “So don’t pack your bikinis just yet,” Crahan said.

Obejas said that one policy that has to be undone is the Cuban Adjustment Act—commonly known as “Wet Foot, Dry Foot” policy. Enacted in 1966, the law grants permanent residency to any Cuban immigrant who reaches American soil.

“It would be impossible to normalize relations if you’re giving those who are dissatisfied with their situation in their home country the opportunity to come here no questions asked, no asylum petition—nothing except their physical presence on U.S. soil.”

The panel is a precursor to a Fordham undergraduate study tour of Havana that will be led over the spring break by Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, PhD, professor of Spanish and comparative literature.

The course, Contemporary Cuban Culture, will explore the renewed importance of Havana as a vibrant contemporary cultural scene. Students will be exposed to the music, art, dance, literature, and film that have emerged amidst Cuba’s economic transition to a globalized world market.

The aim of this radical policy change, the president said, is to “cut loose the shackles of the past” and “unleash the potential of 11 million Cubans.”

Next week, Fordham University will host a panel discussion exploring the impact that the normalization of U.S.-Cuba relations will have on the empowerment of Cubans and on our humanitarian assistance to the island.

“Empowerment, Humanitarian Aid, and the Normalization of U.S.-Cuba Relations”
Thursday, Feb. 26
12:30 to 2:30 p.m.
Bateman Room | Fordham Law School | 2nd Floor
150 West 62nd Street, NYC

The panel will feature renowned Cuba scholars and humanitarian aid activists:

• Margaret Crahan, Ph.D., director of the Cuba Program at the Institute for Latin American Studies at Columbia University
• Sujatha Fernandes, Ph.D., associate professor of sociology at Queens College, CUNY and author of Cuba Represent!: Cuban Arts, State Power, and the Making of New Revolutionary Cultures (Duke University Press Books, 2006)
• Alberto R. Tornés, director of economic empowerment at Raíces de Esperanza

The panel, which is sponsored by Fordham’s Latin American and Latino Studies Institute, is a precursor to an undergraduate study tour of Havana that will be led over the spring break by Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, Ph.D., professor of Spanish and comparative literature.

The course, Contemporary Cuban Culture, will explore the renewed importance of Havana as a vibrant contemporary cultural scene. Students will be exposed to the music, art, dance, literature, and film that have emerged amidst Cuba’s economic transition to a globalized world market.

Carlos DeCena, Ph.D., will publish his findings in a forthcoming book, Tacit Subjects: Dominican Transnational Identities and Male Homosexuality in New York City.

DeCena is the Career Enhancement Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center and an assistant professor at Rutgers University. He visited Fordham’s Latin American and Latino Studies Institute to read from his book and solicit feedback.

DeCena began researching Dominican transnationals and male homosexuality in New York’s Washington Heights neighborhood for his dissertation at New York University, which he finished in 2004.

His ethnographic research suggests that a close analysis of how immigrant men juggle their erotic attachments, sense of ethnic belonging, and race and class positions in New York have much to teach about inequality and power in Dominican transnational communities.

“What I found was that these subjects were dealing with downward class mobility after migration,” DeCena said. “For these men to come to New York City and face racial subordination was a remarkable thing. It’s not something they experienced in the Dominican Republic.”

One man, DeCena said, expressed antagonism toward the Dominican males of Washington Heights, comparing them to the folks who live in shantytowns in the Dominican Republic.

“[He] described them as ‘filthy people who think themselves central to the world and are non-sociable,’” DeCena said. “It’s as if my informants had a need to distinguish themselves from ‘those’ Dominicans.”

Most of the subjects he interviewed had sexual relationships with men of color.

“They were either Hispanic or African American,” DeCena said. “So there’s this entanglement with this thing that you hate, but love at the same time.”

Norma Fuentes-Mayorga, Ph.D, assistant professor of sociology, said DeCena’s research clearly showed upwardly mobile working-class men struggling with the fact that they are living in this neighborhood of lower working-class men.

“According to the 2007 census updates, 35 percent of the Dominicans coming to the United States are middle to upper class,” Fuentes said.

Monica Rivera Mindt, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology, said she understood DeCena’s subjects because she is the daughter of a Dominican father and Colombian mother who grew up in an area of California that was largely Mexican.

“Identity was a struggle,” she said.