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2020

Juan A. Lainez Iscoa

Although being on campus really sucked a lot of the time, going to Dartmouth allowed me to explore my interests, further define my identity, and form several long-lasting friendships. All in all, I'm very grateful for the outstanding education I've received, for all of the magnificent professors who've helped me achieve what I have, and for all of the peer support I've received as a campus DJ. However, I wish I had known that Dartmouth is a playground for rich kids before I enrolled.

Faculty Support

Juan's prose  positively sizzles. It was always an absolute pleasure to read his papers. His thoughtful comments always moved the discussion in productive and unexpected ways. He is an iconoclastic thinker, and deeply committed to building vibrant intellectual communities. His fellow students appreciated and respected him, and sought him out for help on papers and projects.

  • Pamela Voekel (LACS 50.13)

Like many of the students who took Migrant Lives and Labor in the Upper Valley with me, Juan was apprehensive about "playing into white saviorism" to the members of the dairy farmworker community whom our course serves. By the end of the course, however, Juan articulated in his critical reflection essay that by collaborating with these farmworkers and their families, he came to understand the complexities of community engagement. He learned much about his community partners' past and present, as well as their individual characteristics and hopes for the future. Juan gained much insight into the hard realities that migrants face just beyond the privileged confines of the Dartmouth campus. Thanks to Juan's participation in this course, he helped to mitigate the social isolation that many dairy farmworkers experience in New Hampshire and Vermont.

  • Israel Reyes (LATS 037)

Madelyne J. Mayer

My professors have by far been the most meaningful part of my Dartmouth experience. Because of them, I've been able to expand my worldview and gain the skills I need to partake in social activism in and out of academia. Because LALACS is a relatively small department, I feel that each and every one of my professors genuinely cares about their students and the material they teach us. My professors have guided me to understand and reclaim my own social identities. And, in many different ways, they have taught me that everything is connected.
 
Thanks to my LALACS professors Mary Coffey, Matt Garcia, Richard Wright, Sebastián Díaz-Duhalde, Jorge Cuéllar, Sina Rauschenbach, Peter DeShazo, Douglas Moody, Desirée Garcia, and Marcela Di Blasi. Shout out to Leah Torrey and Professors Jennifer Sargent, Kianny Antigua, Trica Keaton, and Bill Hudenko for your profound impact on my college experience. And finally, all my love to Nick and Gustavo for supporting me through it all. Thank you for everything.

Faculty Support

Maddie is a joy to work with. We have been meeting remotely this term to cover our Crossing Over: Latino Roots and Traditions course. All of our course meetings have been in small groups. In response to our readings as well as her course-mates, Maddie has been kind, generous, and emotive. She is sharp, organized, and focused. Most impressive to me, though, has been her ability to credit her course-mates' ideas even in course discussion. She never misses an opportunity to give credit and praise to the thoughtful ideas of others.

  • Marcela Di Blasi (LATS 44)

Maddie was a standout even as a second year student when she took my course on Twentieth Century Art from Latin America. As an enthusiastic voice all term, Maddie helped to elevate class discussion about even the most esoteric propositions. Her incisive questions and sharp eye kept me alert to how gender/sexuality, and non-binary expressions in particular, could be better centered in our discussions.  Her passion for the world-making potential of art really came through when she led her exhibition group in an outstanding presentation of the exhibition Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas for their final project.

  • Mary K. Coffey (LACS 78.1)