The celebrations took place from May 2–6 at the Rose Hill and Lincoln Center campuses, honoring students from the Black, Latinx, LGBTQ, and Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities. Seniors received colored stoles, certificates, and other items that symbolized their identity.

Juan Carlos Matos, assistant vice president for student affairs for diversity and inclusion, said the events drew a lot of excitement this year, with students buzzing about the celebrations beforehand and younger classmates leading the planning process.

“I think being able to create a tradition that folks look forward to and a culminating experience that connects back to people’s identity and culture is an important thing for the Fordham community,” he said.

Dorothy Bogen is a Fordham College of Rose Hill sophomore who served as a programming coordinator for the LGBTQ History Month committee of the Office of Multicultural Affairs, which ran the Diversity Graduations.

In her role she also led the planning for other events, including the Lavender graduation ceremony for LGBTQ seniors, which featured an appearance from theology Professor Patrick Hornbeck, Ph.D.

“Professor Hornbeck gave an inspiring speech (even with a fire drill interruption!) and it was awesome to feel the joy and the energy in the room as students were called up to receive their stoles,” said Bogen, an American Studies and Film and Television major from Cleveland. “We also got to connect with the Rainbow Rams (the alumni group for Fordham LGBTQ graduates), and their representatives also gave great speeches on both campuses.”

Arianna Chen, a Fordham College at Rose Hill senior from Wayne, New Jersey, attended the AAPI ceremony. She said she was grateful that the Office of Multicultural Affairs hosted these events and took the time to “acknowledge and celebrate the unique experiences held by students of varying identities.”

“It was important for me to participate in the Diversity Graduation ceremony because my identity has been a key part of my Fordham experience, not only as a DEI student activist, but also just a student of color navigating a predominantly white institution,” she said.

Chen received an AAPI stole and ACE (Asian Cultural Exchange) pin that she said she is “so looking forward to proudly donning at [her]Commencement ceremony.”

Matos said there was a “mix of support, love, and joy” at the events, each of which featured a recorded greeting from Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham.

“Students being able to celebrate with their peers and be celebrated was a huge deal,” he said.

In an Oct. 6 panel discussion, four members of the Fordham community explored this answer and the evolution of their own ethnic identities. 

“We’re trying to fit a square into a round hole peg. We’re trying to find a word to name X amount of countries that have different cultures in a United States context,” said Juan Carlos Matos, assistant vice president for student affairs for diversity and inclusion, addressing an in-person audience and guests on Zoom at the Lincoln Center campus. “Folks sometimes get caught up in, well, what’s the right way? In many ways, we haven’t figured out the right way.”

Matos was joined by Tanya K. Hernández, Archibald R. Murray Professor of Law at the School of Law; Miguel García, Ph.D., assistant professor of Spanish at Fordham College at Rose Hill; and Bethany Fernández, a senior at Fordham College at Rose Hill and member of the Bronx COVID-19 Oral History Project.  

The panel began with an overview of today’s Latinx population in the U.S. According to a recent study from the Pew Research Center, Hispanics now make up more than 60 million people in the U.S.—roughly 20% of the population, said the panel moderator and Fordham’s chief diversity officer, Rafael Zapata. But it’s still difficult to pinpoint a name that describes their collective identity. 

“This has continued to evolve as American society figures out how to look at us and as we see ourselves and are changed by our migration, assimilation, integration, exclusion, and marginalization from the broader United States society and culture,” said Zapata, whose office co-hosted the panel with the Office of Multicultural Affairs. 

No ‘Win-Win’ Situation

There are many different names to describe themselves, said the panelists. In 1980, the census started using the term “Hispanic”; a decade later, the term “Latino” began to become popular, said Zapata. The two terms, which refer to descendants of Spain and its former colonies in Central and South America and the Caribbean, continue to be used interchangeably. Other terms have sprung up since then, including “Latinx,” which was designed to be a gender nonconforming word. 

But the term has received backlash because it is difficult to pronounce in Spanish and indigenous languages, said the panelists. 

“When we’re dealing with what to call ourselves, we are navigating a very complicated question,” said Fernández. “If we try to define it in terms of English or Spanish, we are dealing with languages that have been involved in the colonization of our people. In that sense, there’s not really a win-win [situation]… If that’s how someone identifies and it makes sense and it’s not harmful to anyone else who is within our realm of Latinidad, that’s fine. Because ultimately, we want people to embrace who they are.”

Fernández, who identifies as Afro Latiné, said she was more familiar with her Black roots because of her mother, who introduced her to documentaries and museums focused on their culture. But she was able to bond with her Puerto Rican heritage on car drives with her father, where they often jammed out to their favorite salsa songs. 

“He would enjoy the music and tap [the steering wheel]a little bit while we’re at the stoplight. But in those moments, while he was vibing, I was sitting down and listening to the songs and trying to figure out what they were saying, what songs I liked, and their message,” Fernández said. 

Matos, who was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in Brooklyn, said he struggled to fully embrace his Afro-Latinidad heritage when he was younger. In elementary school, he said he felt ashamed of speaking Spanish after a classmate told him, “This is America—speak American.” His parents, a Black Dominican father and a fair-skinned, biracial mother, also disapproved of his afro. 

“I definitely don’t think there was much acceptance of Blackness in my family, to this day,” Matos said. 

Authenticity & ‘Complicating the Narrative’

What’s especially problematic is when people proclaim that they are Latinx, but are clearly not, said the panelists, citing the case of Jessica Krug, a white historian who pretended to be Black and Latina for years. García said that in one of his classes, his students discussed whether or not they should police people’s identities. 

“They were very divided on the issue,” said García, who is Mexican American. “I am more interested in … What’s the political motivations that they are using to identify as Afro Latinx, Mexican American, Puerto Rican? Are they doing that to benefit themselves somehow?” 

This year, the Census Bureau showed that the number of non-Hispanic Americans who identify as multiracial jumped by 127% over the past decade. But these results don’t really show a growth in the multiracial population, said Hernández. This increase in numbers is largely facilitated by people who, in light of George Floyd’s death and the Black Lives Matter movement, don’t want to be implicated in white supremacy, she said. 

One stark example can be found in Puerto Rico, she said, where people’s selections for racial heritage drastically changed from 2010 to 2020. 

“White alone went from 75% to 17%. Demographers will let you know that is not physically possible unless you’re talking about a mass genocide. The overall number of Puerto Ricans on the island has not changed, so this shift is one of social identity construction,” said Hernández,. “The fluctuation is less about an embrace of multiraciality and much more about a mad escape from any sense of implication in whiteness as a privilege.” 

There is no checklist that defines someone as Latinx, said Matos. But if you start judging people by specific characteristics—like whether or not they speak Spanish or an indigenous language, said Matos—then you risk demoralizing people. 

“I think it’s more about being authentic, being able to complicate the narrative, and us being open to that while checking people [like Jessica Krugg],” Matos said.

In Of Women and Salt, breakout novelist Gabriela Garcia takes readers from 19th-century Cuba to modern-day Miami, Texas, and Mexico, illuminating migrant mothers’ choices and the fractured legacies they pass on to their daughters.

As much as Gabriela Garcia loved creating stories when she was growing up, she didn’t plan to pursue fiction writing as a career. A Miami native, she studied sociology and communications, graduating from Fordham College at Rose Hill in 2007. She worked in the music and magazine industries and as a migrant justice organizer until she realized that writing fiction was all she wanted to do, all the time. She dove in, earning an M.F.A. from Purdue University, as well as several fellowships and awards that helped her turn her thesis project into a highly acclaimed debut novel.

Published in April, Of Women and Salt (Flatiron, 2021) was immediately chosen as a Good Morning America Book Club pick and soon became a New York Times bestseller. In it, Garcia tells the intertwined, intergenerational stories of a group of women, starting in 1866 with María Isabel, a cigar factory worker amid 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. Jeanette, a first-generation Cuban American, is Carmen’s only daughter. She’s struggling to overcome an opioid addiction when she sees U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrest her neighbor Gloria. Despite a tenuous hold on her own life, Jeanette decides to take in Ana, Gloria’s young daughter. Of Women and Salt delves into the betrayals and the stories told and untold that shape these women’s lives and legacies.

Of Women and Salt combines your interest in Cuban history, American identity, immigration detention and deportation, addiction, and social privilege. What fueled those interests?
I’d been doing work around detention and deportation for many years, and organizing with a lot of women in detention. I grew up traveling to Cuba most of my life, so that’s something that I’m always thinking about. I was also really interested in writing against the idea of a monolithic Latinx community because I grew up in Miami, the daughter of a Cuban immigrant and a Mexican immigrant. Miami is a city that’s Latinx majority—one of the few in the U.S.—but there are all of these divisions along racial lines, along socioeconomic lines. I was interested in portraying the complicated version of Miami that I know. All of those things were swirling in my mind, and I wanted to find a way to be able to write into all of those interests.

Which character came to you first? Did you feel that you needed to tell readers more of any one character’s story?
Yeah. It’s been interesting to hear from readers how everyone gravitates toward a different character. Some people really wanted more from the María Isabel story, or wanted to see more of Gloria, or really connected with Jeanette, you know? It’s just been fascinating how people are super invested in different characters. When I started, I wasn’t sure who the hinge was going to be. As I was writing, it sort of became Jeanette.

Why did you choose this multigenerational, vignette format for the novel?
When I sit down for conversations with my family, we’ll start on one thread, and then it’ll go into something else, and then it’ll go into a memory and connect to other things. I wanted the book to have that feeling of stories, of memory, of historical accounting—where there are these spaces of knowing where it shifts kaleidoscopically.

While men hover at the periphery of the novel, male violence and abuse is a central theme. Talk a bit about your decision to have that experience or fear figure prominently.
I was really interested in exploring women navigating these really patriarchal worlds, in the generational echoes, and also in how women navigate male violence. I wanted to center the women and I wanted to write against a lot of tropes that exist, like even the idea of strong women surviving. I wanted to show that, oftentimes, there’s a cost for that survival, and that these expectations of strength are imposed when what a lot of these women deserve is rest or care or healing.

I was also interested in the idea of immigrant mothers as perpetually suffering or sacrificing as the expectation. Not that the women in my novel don’t often sacrifice or suffer, but they’re also so much more than that. There are times when Gloria questions if she even wants to be a mother. I wanted to show the relationship between women as they navigate these worlds.

There’s the expectation that it’s really noble that women should sacrifice everything as a mother, rather than asking why it’s necessary to have to sacrifice so much of yourself. What is there structurally or societally that requires that sacrifice?

A couple of 19th-century literary works figure prominently in your novel. How did you choose which books to feature?
I looked into the actual books that were read to workers in Cuban cigar factories during that time. That’s where the choice of Les Misérables and Cecilia Valdés came in. I sort of imagined this character of María Isabel as finding her world cracking open through literature, through these books that are read to her.

At the same time, I was struck by how most of the books being read to workers were overwhelmingly written by white, European men or white, European-descendant men in Cuba. I was thinking about how everything that she is absorbing is coming through this particular lens. That made me think about stories in general and whether there’s the ability to reclaim some of that story for herself, whether that’s even possible, and how things are passed down and how we absorb things—from what perspective.

I wanted to point to the ways that things can be inherited, but they don’t have an essential meaning. The books come to mean different things to different people throughout generations. Preserving just one meaning through generations feels almost impossible. I wanted to point to some of that impossibility, too, in the way that we pass down stories and histories.

—Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Sierra McCleary-Harris.

When their names were called, graduates were honored with special stoles, pins, and other items celebrating their culture. Faculty and staff offered words of praise and encouragement, both virtually and in person. Speakers included Chief Diversity Officer Rafael Zapata, political science professor Christina Greer, and Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham.

Celebrations were held at both the Lincoln Center and Rose Hill campuses. They were sponsored by the Office of Multicultural Affairs and the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer in conjunction with the President’s Office and Senior Week.