“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.

The injustices of offshore tax evasion. The relationship between Sigmund Freud and his mentor Jean-Martin Charcot. The connection between stress responses and glucose-sensing neurons in the brain. The power of dance to promote social-emotional learning.

These topics sparked the interest of three recent Fordham College at Lincoln Center graduates whose research papers were honored by the Global Undergraduate Awards, a Dublin-based program that recognizes top undergraduate work and seeks to connect students across cultures and disciplines.

Examining the Injustice of Tax Crimes

Public awareness of offshore financial crimes has risen since the publication of the Panama and Paradise Papers in 2015 and 2017, respectively, but Briana Boland, FCLC ’19 was left wondering whether the attention has resulted in increased regulation.

For her foreign service seminar, the international studies major looked at the tax governance policies of the United Nations, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the Group of 20, the international body composed of leaders from nearly two dozen of the world’s largest economies.

What she found is that while public scrutiny of offshore finance has increased, there has been little progress toward better international tax governance.

“Global governance mechanisms have failed to effectively regulate tax avoidance,” Boland writes in “Tax Injustice: The Failure of Public Scrutiny to Translate into Global Tax Governance.”

She does express optimism about the potential for increased public attention to lead to better regulation, stating in the paper’s conclusion that “[p]ublic engagement and activism to hold states and intergovernmental organizations accountable … is critically important to ensuring any future justice and equality in the international economy.”

Boland’s paper was recognized by the Global Undergraduate Awards as a Highly Commended entry in the political science and international relations category—a designation given to the top 10% of papers submitted in each subject area. It later was named a Regional Winner, meaning it was deemed the best paper in that category in the United States and Canada.

Boland described the recognition as “a tangible result of hard work and scholarship,” and expressed gratitude to her faculty mentor, adjunct instructor Anna Levy, “for encouraging me to pursue my research interest in the topic and for continuing to work with me even after our class had ended.”

Since graduating from Fordham last May, Boland spent the summer in Dalian, China, studying Chinese as a recipient of the Critical Language Scholarship from the U.S. State Department. Now she’s back in New York City interning for U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand on immigration and foreign affairs issues.

Freud as a Mentee—and the Amygdala’s Role in Eating Behavior

Kaetlyn Conner, FCLC ’19, who majored in integrative neuroscience, produced two award-winning papers.

In “Charcot: The Catalyst of Freudian Psychoanalysis,”—which received the Global Undergraduate Awards’ Highly Commended designation in history—she focused on the relationship between Sigmund Freud and one of his mentors, Jean-Martin Charcot. Conner decided to write about Freud and Charcot as a final assignment for her interdisciplinary capstone course, Hysteria/Sexuality/Unconscious, taught by professors Doron Ben-Atar and Anne Hoffman, because they were both prominent figures in the study of hysteria and sexuality.

Freud worked under Charcot, a prominent neurologist, at Paris’s La Salpêtrière hospital in 1885 and 1886, an experience that gave Freud the tools to invent the practice of psychoanalysis, Conner wrote.

“Freud’s ideas about trauma, sexuality, and hypnosis, that were formed and shaped by his early exposure to male hysteric patients and Charcot’s therapeutic methodologies, went on to have significant impacts on Freud’s way of thinking,” she wrote.

“By studying the works of both men, I was able to draw parallels between the two and infer some of the effects that Charcot’s work may have had on Freud’s career.”

Conner’s second paper earned the Highly Commended honor in psychology.

In “Glucose-Sensing Neurons in the Medial Amygdala and their Role in Glucose Homeostasis,” she investigated the way the medial amygdala portion of the brain responds to glucose levels, and how that affects subjects’ eating behaviors.

While most studies on glucose-sensing in the brain have focused on similar neurons in the hypothalamus and brain stem, Conner finds that the medial amygdala, which is central to reproductive, sexual, emotional, and defensive responses, may also have a role in feeding behaviors or glucose regulation.

“As obesity rates in America continue to rise at alarming rates,” Conner writes, “research investigating the neuronal processes and mechanisms behind feeding behavior will continue to be of the utmost importance.”

The paper came out of an independent research project Conner conducted under the supervision of Sarah Stanley, Ph.D., at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital. Conner continued to working in the Stanley Laboratory after graduating from Fordham, thanks to a grant from the American Heart Association that allowed her to extend her work there through the summer. More recently, she moved back to her hometown of Pittsburgh for a job as a research specialist in the CARE Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, which studies how parental care is related to how children learn to express and regulate their emotions using brain and behavioral methods.

Conner says that her research and professional success reaffirm that she chose the right school.

“Fordham’s unique mixture of supportive peers and engaging professors really challenged me and gave me the space to explore new areas of research that I had not previously considered,” she said.

Dance Education as an Agent for Change

Caroline Shriver, FCLC ’19, double majored in dance and Latin American and Latino studies, and she brought both of those subjects to bear in her award-winning research, which was recognized in the anthropology and cultural studies category.

In “Becoming an Agent for Positive Change: Youth Development of Self Efficacy and Agency through Social and Emotional Dance Education in Aguas Frías, Colombia,” Shriver sought to demonstrate how Colombia’s tumultuous history and identity of conflict pervade the country to this day, and how students would benefit from an emphasis on social-emotional learning.

After teaching dance-based social-emotional learning classes in the rural community of Aguas Frías and conducting interviews with a number of her students, she found that “a physicalized form of social-emotional learning gave students the opportunity to develop a degree of self-efficacy.”

In these classes, she had students take part in physical trust-building exercises, and she asked them to teach a dance move to their peers to build a collaborative choreography.

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Employing her research and that of others, she concluded that physicalized social-emotional education “offers an effective strategy to combat Colombia’s social order of conflict and provides a vehicle for young people to develop personal and cultural agency.”

Since graduating from Fordham, Shriver traveled to Spain, Berlin, and Panama, where she participated in dance workshops and taught dance. She also led a group of 13 undergraduate dancers from the U.S. on a dance outreach trip to Colombia. After returning from these travels, she has been freelancing as both a dancer and dance teacher. She said she plans on continuing to pursue a career as an artist and social activist.

“This award reminds me that arts education can have a positive impact on young people around the world, and it inspires me to further develop and share my passion for dance education,” Shriver said.

Boland, Conner, and Shriver are not the first Fordham students to be recognized by the Global Undergraduate Awards. In 2018, Joshua Anthony, FCLC ’19, was named a Global Winner for his paper on the morphing historical perceptions of La Malinche, the indigenous woman who was the chief translator to Hernán Cortés.

“The range of the majors and minors of these winners captures just some of the breadth of the many academic and research opportunities offered at Fordham University,” said Josie Grégoire, J.D., assistant dean for seniors at Fordham College at Lincoln Center. “We are delighted with their success.”

Nausheen Eusuf is a celebrated Bangladeshi poet.  She’s currently a Ph.D. candidate in English at Boston University, and holds degrees from Wellesley, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Georgia. Her academic credentials are relevant because her poetry is, well, academic—but it’s also relatable, conversational, playful, and heartfelt. Among her many other accomplishments, she was included in Best American Poetry 2018, which she jokingly acknowledged at Monday night’s reading: “I’m a citizen of Bangladesh,” she quipped, “I don’t know how I got into Best American, because I’m not American.” Eusuf then dove into “Allegiance,” a love poem that, as she described it, “takes the immigrant experience as a metaphor for the foreign territory you enter in a relationship”:

I said I have nothing to declare, no valuables,
no currency, contraband, nothing. An alien,
I feared deportation. What if I can’t assimilate?

Later, in one of the more emotionally charged selections of the evening, Eusuf presented “Not Elegy, But Eros,” a poem dedicated to Xulhaz Mannan, an LGBTQ activist who was murdered in 2016 in Bangladesh. The last stanza of the poem reads:

I have faced the flash of steel, the howl
of unholy voices. But it was their eyes,
their hard unloving eyes, that undid me

Renato Rosaldo took the podium next.  It’s difficult to recount his background concisely: his work is widely influential in the field of anthropology, he’s a professor emeritus of anthropology at NYU, and he’s a founding figure in the Latino studies world. In 1996 he began writing poetry, and what followed was a blend of multilingual phrases, distant voices, and remembered scenes, a style he dubbed antropoesía, or “ethnographic poetry.”  Rosaldo read first from his 2014 book The Day of Shelly’s Death, which focuses, as he told the audience, “on the accidental death in the Philippines, on October 11, 1981, of Michelle Rosaldo, my then wife.” The poems are tragic and deeply personal, as they take the point of view of various persons and objects he was surrounded by on the day his wife died.  Take, for example, the second stanza of, “The Tricycle Taxi Driver”:

After noon the soldiers arrive breathless,
say an American woman fell
from the precipice near Mungayang.

The night ended on a more jubilant note, however, as Rosaldo shared poems from his forthcoming book The Chasers. They recalled his time at Tucson High School with a group of his Mexican-American friends, “more club than gang,” whose “jackets made them visible at Tuscon High.”

The next Poets Out Loud event is on Thursday, October 18.

–Dane Gebauer, FCLC ’13

For decades, Cristóbal de Villalpando’s Adoration of the Magi had been hiding in plain sight at Fordham. This year, it was part of a major show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

When visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art took in the exhibition Cristóbal de Villalpando: Mexican Painter of the Baroque from late July to mid-October this year, one of the paintings they likely saw for the first time was The Adoration of the Magi. For more than a century, it had been seen only by visitors to the Fordham president’s office in Cunniffe House.

The 1683 painting depicts the famous scene from the Gospel of Matthew when kings, or magi, visited the infant Jesus. It was given to Fordham during the mid-19th century, shortly after the University’s founding, and likely first put on display at Fordham sometime around 1900.

Villalpando, who lived from 1649 to 1714, emerged in the 1680s as a leading painter in viceregal Mexico and one of the most innovative and accomplished artists in the Spanish art world. During his lifetime, he exported paintings widely throughout Latin America. The Adoration of the Magi, which was based on an early 17th-century engraving of the same title by Peter Paul Rubens, was touted as one of the highlights of the Met show, along with Moses and the Brazen Serpent and the Transfiguration of Jesus, a 28-foot-tall masterpiece Villalpando also painted in 1683.

Ronda Kasl, curator of Latin American art in the American Wing at the Met, said The Adoration of the Magi is significant because it reveals Villalpando’s capacity to envision the divine. “The subject itself is fundamentally concerned with the revelation of divinity. The holy child’s humanity is manifest in his nakedness, while his divinity and his mother’s is revealed in the illumination of their idealized features,” she said.

A Chance Rediscovery

The painting had hung at the Rose Hill campus long before Barbara Mundy, Ph.D., professor of art history and Latin American and Latino studies at Fordham, stumbled upon a mention of it in the University archives while researching several other paintings in the Fordham collection.

“It must have been in 1999 or so,” she said, “when the president’s office asked me to look at four paintings in the council room that somebody thought might be from Latin America. It turns out they were not particularly good or notable paintings, but in doing a little research on them I found mention of a painting by Cristóbal de Villalpando. That intrigued me because he’s an immensely important Mexican painter. He’s like a Michelangelo of Mexico in the 17th century,” she said.

The document she found, an inventory of art at Fordham that was taken during the 1940s, described the Fordham Villalpando as being more than eight feet tall. But when she tried to determine its whereabouts, nobody seemed to have any information—until she mentioned the subject matter.

“That’s when someone said, ‘You know, there’s a big painting of the Epiphany in the president’s office.’ So people understood its imagery and the subject matter, although they had no recognition of the painter himself,” Mundy said. “Of course, Villalpando’s not exactly a household name, so it wasn’t until the Met show that people realized, ‘Oh my gosh, this is really important.’ I almost hit the floor when I first I saw the painting.”

The show, Mundy said, was years in the making. After seeing the Fordham Villalpando, she contacted Clara Bargellini, Ph.D., an academic in Mexico who would go on to serve as a co-curator of the Met exhibit. “We had the painting photographed, and I would bring people in to see it, so word got out about this painting among specialists.”

An Extensive Restoration

Getting The Adoration of the Magi from Rose Hill to the Met was no simple task, however. “The painting was literally nailed into the wall, at least since the 1940s,” Mundy said. So in September 2016, the Met sent a team of specialists to Fordham, and they worked closely with Fordham’s carpenters to make sure the painting could be removed safely, without damaging either the 334-year-old artwork or the wall itself.

Because of its size—78 inches wide and 99 inches high—the painting was Met conservator Dorothy Mahon’s primary focus for nearly 10 months, during which time she traveled to Mexico to see other examples of Villalpando’s work during the same period in his life.

Before she could begin, however, she had to determine how best to proceed. “What’s varnish? And what’s an old paint? It’s a technical examination to be sure that we can separate the original from the later restoration, and that process takes some time,” she said. “Then we began the restoration work: cleaning the picture and cleaning off the old repairs, most of which were terribly discolored.”

Mahon said that the varnish coating the painting had to be delicately removed and replaced, and although the structure of the painting was in good condition when she received it, the backing holding the canvas taut needed to be replaced. “It’s a big picture, so it had lots of varnish and lots of discoloration,” she said, noting that every step of the restoration was painstakingly done by hand with custom-made tools and adhesives.

A Broader Perspective

At a July 24 preview of the Met show for members of the media, Diego Gómez Pickering, consul general of Mexico in New York, said the exhibit could not come at a better time for the estimated 1 million Mexican Americans living in the New York metropolitan area, many of whom, like Villalpando, hail from the state of Puebla.

“The Hispanic community is a founding community of this country. We cannot understand the fabric of American society if we do not mention these important roots,” he said, calling the exhibition “a chance to build … bridges that connect peoples, cultures, societies, and nations.”

Mundy said she’s pleased that the exhibition has called greater public attention to the “extraordinary quality and beauty and richness of Mexican painting.” She said she sees the show as part of a trend in which big U.S. museums are looking beyond traditional subject matter.

“Before, maybe 20 years ago, people thought Europe had it all. But there’s been a growing sense that art history and art heritage doesn’t just come from Europe,” she said. “And this of course reflects the changing demographics in the United States, where more people, American citizens, are coming from Spanish-speaking countries.”

As an example, Mundy cited the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s 2016 show Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910 to 1950, which the museum described as the most comprehensive exhibition of modern Mexican art in the U.S. in 70 years. Mundy was teaching a course on modern Latin American art at Fordham at the time, and she decided to give her students the opportunity to see the show. “We hijacked a Ram Van and went down there on a Saturday,” she said. “This was a class that had a lot of art history majors in it, so they were really jazzed about being able to go.”

One of those students, Peter Vergara, called the exhibition a “cornerstone show for the Latin American art scene as a whole,” and he said seeing it and the Villalpando exhibit at the Met have been formative experiences for him.

“Seeing these enormous exhibits of Latin American and Mexican art in the U.S., and how they are promoting dialogue and cross-cultural interaction between American visitors and Mexican art, and also between Mexican tourists and American cultural centers, is exciting,” he said. “It makes the gaps feel a little smaller.”

Vergara, a Fordham senior who is writing his final seminar research paper on the Fordham Villalpando painting, knows firsthand the value of cross-cultural experiences. He was born in Washington, D.C., but moved with his family to Spain as a toddler when his father took a job in Madrid. He grew up speaking English and Spanish, and spent countless hours at the Prado Museum.

“As a child, I was there all the time. My parents and I would go together in the morning. We would stay for an hour or two, and then they would go to lunch or to see other things, and I would stay for hours,” he said. “My earliest memories are of just lying on the floor of the gallery.”

Vergara moved to the U.S. to attend Portsmouth Abbey School, a Catholic boarding school in Rhode Island, and enrolled at Fordham in 2014. As a first-year student, he developed a passion for art history through two courses in particular, including one on colonization in Latin America, and with support from Mundy and other Fordham professors, landed a string of internships—at the Hispanic Society, the Cloisters, and Sotheby’s.

“I was aware of this world of Latin American art from freshman year, and now it’s shaping where I want to go with my career,” said Vergara, who has applied for a Fulbright study grant to Mexico, where he has been accepted into a master’s degree program at Universidad Iberoamericana.

A Painter and an Inventor

Vergara said his research paper would focus in part on the complex exchange of influences in Villalpando’s art. “While Mexico is heavily tied to Spain through the viceroyalty in Villalpando’s time, how much is European and how much is newer? How much are these artists breaking away and how much are they staying with tradition?”

He’s also focusing on the iconography in the work. “Some of it is very clear,” he said, “like we have wheat on the floor next to Mary and Jesus, and that’s a clear reference to the Eucharist.” But the meaning of other elements in the painting is less clear. For example, he said, “We might have a self-portrait of Villalpando near the back, where he’s looking around the column,” near the figure of Joseph, who is depicted wearing a green robe. “That’s a classic pose for a self-portrait,” he said, and it was common at the time for artists to include themselves in paintings of the Epiphany, to show themselves as “witnesses to the incarnation, among the very first.”

Vergara said that although the painting is “a big, big nod to Rubens,” an argument can be made that Villalpando is also staking a claim not simply as an imitator of the day’s European masters but as an artist in his own right. “He signs this one ‘Villalpando invento ipinto,’” Vergara said. “So he invented and he painted.”

Mundy called the inclusion of The Adoration of the Magi in the Met exhibit a long-overdue recognition for a masterpiece that for many years was hidden in plain sight. She’s especially taken by Villalpando’s ability to “paint the emotion in scenes,” she said. “You can see the response of all of the figures to the Christ child. You can see the awe and the adulation that the magi are feeling, and you can see the wonderful, calm serenity in Mary’s face.

“What’s also fabulous is the big crowd scene behind them,” she added. “Every member of the crowd who is peering in to see the Christ child has their own distinct personality and response to this event.”

—Ryan Stellabotte contributed to this story.

When visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art take in Cristóbal de Villalpando: Mexican Painter of the Baroque, a new exhibition opening on July 25, one of the pieces they’ll see for the first time is the Adoration of the Magi.

For a little over a century, the painting has only been seen by visitors to Fordham’s Office of the President in Cunniffe House. The 1683 painting depicts a scene from the Gospel of Matthew when kings, or magi, visited the infant Jesus. It was given to Fordham shortly after the University’s founding and first put on display in 1900.

Villalpando, who lived from 1649 to 1714, emerged in the 1680s as a leading painter in viceregal Mexico and one of the most innovative and accomplished artists in the Spanish art world. The Adoration of the Magi, which was based on an early-17th-century engraving of the same title by Peter Paul Rubens, is being touted as one of the highlights of the show along with Moses and the Brazen Serpent and the Transfiguration of Jesus, a 28-foot-tall canvas that he painted in 1683.

Ronda Kasl, curator of Latin American Art in the American Wing at The Met, said Adoration of the Magi is significant because it reveals Villalpando’s capacity to envision the divine.

“The subject itself is fundamentally concerned with the revelation of divinity. The holy child’s humanity is manifest in his nakedness, while his divinity (and his mother’s) is revealed in the illumination of their idealized features,” she said.

The painting had hung at the Rose Hill campus for nearly a century before Barbara Mundy, Ph.D., professor of art history and Latin American and Latino Studies, stumbled upon a mention of it in 2001 in the University’s archives while researching four other paintings.

“I couldn’t believe it, because Villalpando is an immensely important Mexican painter. He’s like the Michelangelo of Mexico in the 17th century,” she said.

“I almost hit the floor when I first I saw the painting.”

Because of its size, (78 inches wide and 99 inches high), it has been Met conservator Dorothy Mahon’s primary focus for the past 10 months. Mahon noted that over the years, the varnish coating the painting had become discolored and needed to be delicately removed and replaced. The backing holding the canvas taut needed to be replaced as well.

“It’s a big picture, so it had lots of varnish and lots of discoloration,” she said, noting that every step of the restoration is painstakingly done by hand with custom-made tools and adhesives. As part of the restoration process, Mahon traveled to Mexico to see in-person other examples of Villalpando’s works from that same period.

At a July 24 press preview at the Met, Diego Gómez Pickering, Consul General of Mexico in New York, said the timing of the exhibit could not come at a better time for the estimated one million Mexican Americans living in the New York Metropolitan area. who, like Villalpando, primarily hail from the state of Puebla.

“The Hispanic community is a founding community of this country, along with the African American, European and the Indian American community.  We cannot understand the fabric of the American society if we do not mention these important roots,” he said.

“I hope you will enjoy the exhibition and have a chance to build with us bridges that will cross boundaries, bridges that connect peoples, cultures, societies and nations, bridges that no wall will ever tear apart.”

Mundy called the inclusion of the painting in the exhibition, which runs through Oct. 15, a long overdue recognition for a masterpiece that was hidden in plain sight.

“Villalpando has a very special way of painting the emotion in scenes. In this one, you can see that response of all of the figures to the Christ Child, who is seated on Mary’s lap. You can see the awe and the adulation that the magi are feeling, and you can see the wonderful, calm serenity in Mary’s face, and the way she’s holding the baby,” she said.

“What’s also fabulous is, the big crowd scene behind them, and every member of the crowd whose peering in to see the Christ Child as he’s seated on his mothers’ lap has their own distinct personality and response to this event.”

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.

Socio Economic Outlook of Latin America and the Caribbean
Thursday, Sept. 26
5 p.m.
Tognino Hall, Duane Library, Rose Hill Campus

Before working at the ECLAC/CEPAL, Bárcena served as the as the Under-Secretary-General for Management at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. She also was Chef de Cabinet and Deputy Chef de Cabinet to the former Secretary-General, Kofi Annan.

“This is a fantastic opportunity for the Fordham community to hear and meet an influential member of the Latin American and international community, Alicia Bárcena,” said Dewis Shallcross, the representative for the Latin American and Latin Studies Institute (LALSI) Graduate Student Association.

The ECLAC/CEPAL, headquartered in Santiago, Chile, is one of the five regional commissions of the United Nations. It was founded in 1948 with the purpose of contributing to the economic development of Latin America and reinforcing its economic ties around the globe.

“This is the first time that Bárcena will be visiting our campus and we at LALSI would like to open this opportunity to those outside our own department,” Shallcross said.

The event is sponsored by LALSI. For more information and to RSVP, call LALSI’s office at (718) 817-4792 or email [email protected] with “Barcena” in the subject line.

José Miguel Insulza, secretary general of the Organization of American States (OAS), expressed his hope to more than 200 Fordham University faculty members and students that the next century will bring social, economic and political harmony to his home region. He spoke at the Rose Hill campus on “The Dangers for Democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean.”

Born and raised in Chile, Insulza played an active role in Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government until it was overthrown in a 1973 coup led by General Augusto Pinochet. Insulza spent 15 years in exile before returning to Chile in 1988 and rising to prominence as minister of the interior and vice president of the republic in a new democratically elected government.

“Today the primary reason to be optimistic in Latin America is economic,” said Insulza, who was in New York to speak at the United Nations General Assembly.

The region, he said, is showing vigorous growth that has moved tens of millions out of poverty and has led to the rise of a middle class. The recent global recession was felt less in Latin America than elsewhere because of sound macroeconomic policies and a responsible banking sector, he said.

However, although Latin America’s democratic governments have grown stronger with a strengthened economy, they still face myriad challenges—political and social—that have made Latin America “not a poor continent, but an unfair one”.

“There is clearly greater respect for human rights today than just 20 years ago, when people were just ‘disappearing,’” Insulza said. “Yet violations continue, including police abuse, subhuman conditions in prisons, persistent violence against women and discrimination against vulnerable groups.”

Insulza said that the OAS has helped promote democratic governance by acting as an observer in 50 recent elections, and by drafting an Inter-American Democratic Charter that emphasizes the critical role of citizenry in any democracy. Essential elements in a democracy include transparency, respect for social rights and freedom of the press.

“[A government] must not only be democratically elected. It must also govern democratically,” he said. Insulza noted that the historic development of democracy is “not linear, but sprinkled with advances and setbacks.”

“These ups and downs are normal symptoms of a complex process,” he continued. “But in others they constitute actual breaches of the foundations of democracy.”

He listed four areas that threaten to curtail or unravel democracy in Latin America.

—    Even with the rise of a middle class, one-third of Latin Americans still live in poverty and 1 percent of the population holds 50 percent of the national income;
—    Drug-trafficking and money-laundering “criminal corporations” control large areas and populations, working outside of governmental authority with their own private armies;
—    Many governments are poorly financed;
—    Often newly elected “democratic” governments believe that they can disregard the losing side and use their office to preserve their own power and thus never building a national “consensus.”

“In a democracy, all power must have limits,” Insulza said.

Time will tell whether “our region takes advantage of the major opportunities offered by the global economy or if it will remain, as it has so many times in the past, at the threshold [of democracy],” he said.

The Office of the President and the Latin American and Latino Studies Institute sponsored the event.

A Spanish-language book on theology by Claudio Burgaleta, S.J., assistant professor of theology and coordinator for Latino Studies in the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education, is one of the top five Spanish Language Catholic best sellers, according to the Catholic Book Publishers Association (CBPA). Manual de la Teologia para los Católicos de Hoy (Liguori Press, 2009) has climbed from 10th place in June to 5th place in July. Each month the CBPA ranks best selling Catholic books in four categories: hardcover, paperback, children’s and Spanish language. The Catholic News Service sends the list to newspapers and magazines; some 670 bookstores also receive the monthly listing.

Father Burgaleta, who is Cuban-born, has a special interest in developing Latino ministry and its history. In 2007 he founded Isidoro, an online resource for Latino/a Ministry.