September: Celebrating Latine Heritage Month

latine heritage month

From September 15 – October 15, Yale celebrates Latine Heritage Month, in honor of community members with ancestry from Latin America, inclusive of all races and genders. Explore the many groups, events, media, and other opportunities that celebrate our colleagues and classmates. 

Community members may celebrate other cultural and religious observances in September-October. Have we missed something?  Please let us know.

Engagement Opportunities:

Books and Library Resources 

Yale University Library 
Yale University Library has an extensive collection of Latinx resources, including: 

  • Books – Access books on a range of Latinx subjects, such as Performing Queer Latinidad, highlighting the critical role that performance played in the development of Latina/o queer public culture in the United States during the 1990s and early 2000s, a period when the size and influence of the Latina/o population was increasing alongside growing scrutiny of the public spaces where latinidad could circulate. 
  • Digital Collections – A digital collection of photographs by Jon Lewis, including images such as 1960s II, features scenes from the farm worker movement, the work and activities of César Chávez and Dolores Huerta, and the United Farm Workers of America’s California Grape Strike in the 1960s. In addition, the collection has begun to experiment with archiving the websites of several Latinx social justice organizations, to preserve evidence not only of the organizations but of their use of new technology to foster community development. 

Yale Library’s Spanish Civil War Collection includes magazines and comic books, handbills, broadsides, manuscripts, and toys (view examples of these objects on the Library’s website) documenting society and events during the Spanish Civil War. 

Yale Library’s Latin American collections are particularly notable for historical, political and economic materials   relating to México and Perú. One notable example in the Beinecke Library is the Codex Reese, a 16th-century map that records agricultural holdings within a colonial jurisdiction of Mexico City. The map contains a wealth of information about the region’s indigenous people and charts political authority, time, and the condition of sixteenth century New Spain. 

The Yale Collection of Western Americana is acclaimed for its coverage of early Hispanic exploration and settlement in the West. The collection includes copies of nearly all the works described in Henry Wagner’s monumental bibliography, The Spanish Southwest: 1542–1795; many of the titles are represented by multiple editions that permit scholars to trace their social and cultural impact over time. The collection also contains hundreds of Mexican imprints that document the end of the colonial era and the efforts of the Mexican republic to develop its northern provinces, including Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. 

Included among a vast collection of paintings, prints, and slides in the Beinecke’s collection are Richard Erdoes’ (1912-2008) depictions of 17th- century Hispanic southwest. Search the Library’s digital collections for additional objects created by, or depicting, the Latinx community. 

Courses and Resources 

Undergraduate Students

Review Latin American Studies (LAST) offerings within the 2023-2024 Yale College Program of Study. 

Graduate Students

  • Council on Latin American and Iberian Studies (CLAIS), Graduate Program 
    Although there is no advanced degree in Latin American Studies at Yale, graduate and professional students may draw upon the resources of many departments to make Latin America their field of concentration while working toward their respective degrees in conventional disciplines. 
  • Hispanic Summer Program (HSP) 
    Yale Divinity School is proud to support the cultivation of Latinx theological leaders as a sponsor of the Hispanic Summer Program (HSP). Since 1989, the HSP has offered accredited, graduate-level courses to master’s level students on topics ranging from theology, history, liturgy, and pastoral care, all from a Latinx perspective. 
  • Latinx and Latin American Christianity 
    The Latinx and Latin American Christianity concentration is an interdisciplinary program for students who wish to study Latinx and Latin American religious culture, theology, and history. 

The Program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration 
The Program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration (ER&M) enables students to engage in interdisciplinary and comparative study of forces that have created a multicultural, multiethnic, and multiracial world. 

Yale and the World - Latin America 
Review data and information on the Yale and the World (YATW) website representing the myriad of internationally oriented programs at Yale, including those related to Latin America. These programs are housed in virtually every school, department, and center across Yale.  

Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity and Transnational Migration (RITM) 
The Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM) is a university-wide, interdisciplinary academic research center with the mission of advancing rigorous, innovative research and teaching on key topics of historical and contemporary importance. Building upon Yale’s longstanding strengths, RITM fosters intellectual exchanges that cross-institutional, disciplinary, and geographic borders; enrich and challenge academic fields; and foreground perspectives often underrepresented in university and policy circles. Through research, teaching, and programming, the Center deepens and transforms scholarship, supports undergraduate and graduate education, and engages local and global audiences. 

LinkedIn Learning 
Explore free courses on LinkedIn Learning, including courses on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.

Events 

Latine Heritage Month, La Casa Cultural de Julia de Burgos: Latino Cultural Center 
September 15 – October 15, 2023 
In the United States, National Hispanic Heritage Month is from September 15 to October 15. During those weeks, La Casa hosts a series of collaborative efforts, such as retreats and keynote speakers, in honor of Latine Heritage Month (LHM) to celebrate our diverse cultural heritage. A list of upcoming events is forthcoming—follow La Casa on social media (Facebook | Instagram | Twitter) for updates. 

Sesión 1 del Seminario Abierto de Género & Derechos Humanos de LAIGN, Virtual

Monday, September 4, 2023 - 4:00pm to 5:00pm

“Mujeres en Espiral: Sistema de justicia, perspectiva de género y pedagogías en resistencia” 

Exponen: Patricia Piñones y Julia Álvarez-Icaza Ramírez (UNAM, México). Lunes 4 de septiembre de 2023, 4 pm ET, 2 pm MX, 5 pm ARG via Zoom

Esta sesión del seminario presentará al Proyecto Mujeres en Espiral: Sistema de justicia, perspectiva de género y pedagogías en resistencia que desde 2008 trenza prácticas, disciplinas y saberes para intervenir un escenario frecuentemente olvidado, silenciado, invisibilizado, espacio precarizado y de urgencia social: la cárcel de mujeres. Mujeres en Espiral articula pedagogía, arte, justicia y género, desde las perspectivas de género, derechos humanos, intercultural, de la diversidad y decolonial. Esta propuesta ha sido construida al articular la defensa de los derechos de cuerpos cercados y no normativos de mujeres en reclusión, en resistencia y lucha contra la discriminación por razones de clase, raza, edad, y lugar de enunciación geopolítica.
Mujeres en Espiral en el 2019 produjo el “Recetario canero. Lo crudo, lo cocido y lo finamente picado: Sabores y Sinsabores de las mujeres en prisión”, un recetario de cocina canero (de la cárcel), que hace visible la capacidad de las mujeres de combinar ingredientes culinarios, emotivos, culturales y críticos el espacio complejo y reductor de la prisión. La sesión de nuestro seminario del Grupo Género y Derechos Humanos del 4 de septiembre, nos preguntaremos ¿a qué sabe el encierro? ¿a qué sabe la justicia retributiva? ¿cómo se cocina y cómo se debería cocinar desde el enfoque restaurativo la justicia con perspectiva de género? además nos proponemos problematizar el derecho a la alimentación en el encierro y visibilizar las grandes fallas del sistema de justicia penal en este sentido.

Los Seminarios Abiertos del Grupo de Género & Derechos Humanos de la Red Latinoamericana de Estudios Interdisciplinarios de Género (LAIGN) tienen como objetivo propiciar un espacio de intercambio interdisciplinario sobre experiencias concretas que vinculan trabajos en diversos territorios con una reflexión desde los estudios de género y la perspectiva de los derechos humanos.

The seminars will be entirely conducted in Spanish.

Meghan Morris: Soil Forensics: Property and the Buried Truth in Medellín

230 Prospect Street PROS230, 101 | Friday, September 15, 2023 - 11:00am to 1:00pm

Meghan Morris a cultural anthropologist and legal scholar. Her research examines the role of law in conflict and peacemaking, with a particular focus on property over land. Her book manuscript, Making Peace with Property: Specters of Post-Conflict Colombia, examines how property can become understood as both the root of violent conflict and the key to peace. It explores this question through an ethnographic account of how the reordering of property is central to efforts to achieve a post-conflict era in Colombia. Her current book project, This Land is My Land: Property, Paramilitarism, and the American Dream, examines the contemporary and historical relationship between property and paramilitarism in the United States. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Alabama Law Review, Tulane Law Review, and the Revista Colombiana de Antropología (Colombian Journal of Anthropology). She hold a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, an M.A. in Law and Diplomacy from The Fletcher School at Tufts University, and a B.S. in Policy Analysis and Management from Cornell University. She is an Assistant Professor in the College of Law and Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Cincinnati. I was previously the ABF/NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in Law and Inequality at the American Bar Foundation and a senior researcher at the Bogotá-based Center for Law, Justice and Society (Dejusticia).

Playing With Fire: Incandescent Pedagogies and Critical Politics (Mexico City, 2016-22), Virtual

Wednesday, September 27, 2023 - 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

Speaker/Performer: Marisa Belausteguigoitia

Description: This conference focuses on the ways in which the protest- in particular young feminist and student protest in México City- can be visualized, translated, most of all read and theorized as crucially pedagogical and critically political. Much of what is expressed, drawn, painted during the protest (graffiti, murals, pintas) fades or vanishes below the surface. My aim is to stay with what vanishes and fades, with what is incommensurable or difficult to be narrated or placed together, and may be constitutive of a political discourse or a pedagogical intervention. I analyze the narrative mechanisms and conceptual trajectories -the verbal and performative explosions, the Molotov and the fire, graffiti and murals- these glancing, incandescent points of light, transformed into constellations of meaning, delivered by women and sexual dissidence in the public space in México City (2016-2022)

Dramaturgy of the Marginalized Citizen: Aesthetic & Ideological Innovations in the Peruvian Drama 1960s and its Present Repercussions, La Casa Cultural Center

Wednesday, September 27, 2023 - 6:00pm to 7:00pm

Speaker/Performer: Dr. Ernesto Barraza

Talk by Dr. Ernesto Barraza Elezpuru, Director of Performing Arts, Scientific University of the South (UCSUR), Lima-Peru

Sesión 2 del Seminario Abierto de Género & Derechos Humanos de LAIGN, Virtual

Monday, October 2, 2023 - 4:00pm to 5:00pm

“El rol del empoderamiento jurídico en la lucha contra la violencia de género”. Expone: Suyai Lutz.

Esta charla abordará cómo el empoderamiento jurídico de las comunidades actúa como un elemento central en la prevención y accionar ante situaciones de violencia de género, a partir de diversas experiencias territoriales de los sectores sociales más vulnerables, y qué agentes de cambio han operado para impulsar dicho empoderamiento.

Los Seminarios Abiertos del Grupo de Género & Derechos Humanos de la Red Latinoamericana de Estudios Interdisciplinarios de Género (LAIGN) tienen como objetivo propiciar un espacio de intercambio interdisciplinario sobre experiencias concretas que vinculan trabajos en diversos territorios con una reflexión desde los estudios de género y la perspectiva de los derechos humanos.

The seminars will be entirely conducted in Spanish.

Yale Choral Artists with The Percussion Collective, Sprague Memorial Hall SMH, Morse Recital Hall 

470 College Street, New Haven, CT 06511 | Friday, October 13, 2023 - 7:30pm to 9:30pm

Poems and Prayers - Alejandro Viñao (world premiere)
Memory of Water - Garth Neustadter
Seaborne - Garth Neustadter

Yale Choral Artists, Jeffrey Douma, conductor
The Percussion Collective, Robert Van Sice, Director

There will be a preconcert panel discussion at 6:00 PM
The historical and culture contexts of Poems and Prayers
Sudler Hall, entrance on cross campus

Panelists:
Américo Mendoza-Mora, Faculty Director, Latinx Studies Working Group, Harvard University
Irma Álvarez Ccoscco, Quechua-language poet, educator, and activist
Alejandro Viñao, Composer
Jeffrey Douma, Conductor

The Road Ahead: Iberian Soundscapes, Henry R. Luce Hall LUCE, Common Room

34 Hillhouse Avenue, New Haven, CT 06511

Friday, October 6, 2023 - 1:00pm to Saturday, October 7, 2023 - 8:00pm

This 2-day convening aims to explore the ongoing impact of Iberian histories in South Asia in shaping identities, social distinction, histories of merchant and commercial capitalism. We bring to the longue duree inquiry of Luso-Hispanic globality (15th century and beyond), a unique focus on histories of music and performance in South Asia and the Americas, particularly Brazil. This conference is co-sponsored with Columbia University and will bring together scholars, musicians, journalists, and other cultural producers to participate in a series of panel discussions and concerts at Yale during two days: October 6 and 7 in Fall 2023.

¡Fiesta Latina!, Yale Peabody Museum 
Date/time forthcoming 

¡Fiesta Latina! is the Yale Peabody Museum’s long-standing community celebration of traditional and contemporary Latin American cultures. Co-founded and co-hosted with Junta for Progressive Action, this annual festival brings together artists, scholars, musicians, scientists, and community leaders from across Yale and New Haven. Visitors enjoy music and dance performances while learning from and honoring the perspectives and accomplishments of the Latin American diaspora. 

¡Fiesta Latina! centers on the work of the many local organizations in New Haven and across Connecticut addressing issues ranging from environmental justice to community economic development. 

Films 

Yale University Library 
Yale University Library offers a wealth of images, sounds, and films related to Latinx Studies. Included among them are two documentaries: 

My Story (Stories about Belonging) 

Belonging at Yale – My Story 
Each member of our community—Yale students, faculty, staff, and alumni—has a story to tell, one more fascinating than the next. All community members, including Latinx community members during this month-long celebration, are invited to tell their stories by reflecting on a time when they did or did not feel like they belonged, either at Yale or in the world. Submissions are in and our editorial team has selected the stories that are online and applied some light editing when needed. We have posted the stories in a “story map” as a way of promoting understanding and creating a community of belonging at Yale. Please explore the story map and add your narrative to this new digital library.

Organizations, Offices, and Centers of Engagement 

ARTE INC. 
ARTE is dedicated to promoting Latino, Art, Culture, & Education and has served thousands of urban youths since 2004 with programs that provide social-emotional development, team building, language, creative thinking, and healthy minds. ARTE’s activities deliver purposeful, supportive, and meaningful learning experiences. ARTE coordinates annual celebrations for Hispanic Heritage, including a variety of free events and exhibits. 

La Casa Cultural de Julia de Burgos: Latino Cultural Center

La Casa Cultural de Julia de Burgos, affectionately known as La Casa, is the Latino Cultural Center at Yale. Established at its current location in 1977, La Casa provides a home away from home for Latinx students at Yale. Within the three-story, 19th-century red brick house, students socialize, plan activities, cook together in a fully equipped kitchen, discuss Latinx and Latin American issues at events featuring visiting scholars and practitioners, and in general come together to create a warm and robust community. Students who visit the center a greeted by two building murals; enjoy an ever-expanding library of books and resource materials on Latinx and Latin American topics, including access to computers; access a kitchen to cook meals and enjoy snacks; use a large multipurpose room and study spaces; enjoy a variety of art displays and student exhibits. The center is also open to New Haven community members, like the Literacy Volunteers of Greater New Haven, and their community-based ESL programs for non-English speakers. 

La Casa Cultural also offers lists of affiliate Latinx groups including: 

Movimiento Cultural 
Join Movimiento Cultural for free Bomba community workshops, featuring drumming and dancing, on recurring Sundays.  

Yale Latino Networking Group 
The Yale Latino Networking Group (YLNG) seeks to promote a community of interest among Latino staff members and to promote an inclusive and empowering work environment for all Yale employees. 

Office of Diversity and Inclusion 
The Office of Diversity & Inclusion (ODI) collaborates with departments and individuals across the Yale campus to promote a respectful, accessible, and inclusive community for all Yale employees. 

Office of Institutional Equity and Accessibility 
The Office of Institutional Equity and Accessibility (OIEA) is responsible for ensuring Yale’s commitment to equitable and inclusive working and learning environments. This includes administering Yale’s Policy Against Discrimination and Harassment.

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