Category: News: Hispanic Studies

Every year, the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports of Spain offers the opportunity to teach English in different educational scenarios throughout Spain.  College graduates, seniors and juniors can apply for the very competitive Cultural Ambassadors Program for North American Language and Culture Assistants in Spain in November /December (dates vary) for the following academic year.

During late spring of 2011, Anne Foster (Hispanic Studies & History ’11) was delighted to find out she had been selected by the Program to teach English in a High School in Madrid during year 2011-12.  She describes her experience as follows:

“In four years in the Hispanic Studies program I focused heavily on issues and research in the Americas.  My freshman seminar was Mapping Cuba with Professor Stock followed by Mexican Cinema with Professor Buck.  The closest I came to taking a class on Spain was my senior seminar with Professor Terukina in which we discussed Spain as a colonial power, but even so it was more of a class on philosophy and colonialism than Spanish culture.

“So when I heard about the Spain Cultural Ambassadors Program through Professor Buck I was unsure if it was quite what I was looking for.  On one hand I thought it would be a great opportunity to travel to a new country and a new continent.  At the same time I thought—I know so little about Spain!  My hopes of travel and employment trumped my doubts and I added the Cultural Ambassadors application to the whirlwind of applications I was working on in the spring of 2011.

“The application process was a little daunting.  To apply I had to submit documents such as a notarized copy of an FBI background check.  Obtaining some of the documents meant navigating a maze of bureaucracy but it was for my own good.  The Spanish Embassy required me to submit these documents so that when I went through the process of obtaining my visa, I would be ready to go.  A few months later, the program offered me a placement at a school in Madrid, and I had to proceed to the visa application.  But I was pleasantly surprised to find that I already had all the necessary documents for the application.

“But navigating the application and visa process were small feats compared to actually teaching.  The Cultural Ambassadors Program explained the guidelines and roles of the foreign teaching assistants in Spanish schools.  However, the specific duties of the assistant depend on the needs of his or her school.  Some assistants work one on one with students or small groups, some work alongside Spanish teachers.  I, however, found myself instructing classes of ten to twenty high school students on my own.  The first month made me rethink my ideas about teaching and social responsibility.  And gave me a new appreciation of every teacher I ever had growing up.

“A recurring theme of my job and travels in Spain was that of defining the Spanish nation as well as trying to define America.  My students were often eager to hear about the United States and they asked me open-ended questions such as, Does everyone get a car when they turn 16?  Is everyone fat?  What’s prom like?  They were just as eager to share with me their concepts of Spain: Spain is party.  Spain is lazy.  Some of them said.  Every time the class discussion turned to the country comparison game I couldn’t help but remember my Introduction to Hispanic Studies class in which we studied the concepts of imagined communities and nations.  The very concepts were playing out right in front of me as Spanish high schoolers and me, a young American, tried to describe entire countries with a mere few adjectives…lazy, rich, independent, extroverted.  But as we discussed in Intro to Hispanic Studies, these imagined national personas are nothing more than that: imagined.  Instead of encouraging these national stereotypes in the classroom, I looked instead for the things that my students and I had in common.  Music was a common class discussion.  I discovered that my students and I shared a fondness of Queen and ABBA, which are ironically neither American nor Spanish bands.  Another popular class activity was the “phrase of the day”; I would share an English phrase and the students would try to find a similar phrase in Spanish.  For example, one day I chose the phrase, I’m fed up.  And my students shared with me a Spanish phrase that expresses the same idea—hasta las narices (literally, up to the nose).

“I realized after a few months of teaching that, even though I didn’t have much hard knowledge on Spain before I arrived, I had been well educated in the ways of critical thinking.  My studies focused on Latin America, but Hispanic Studies as a concentration taught me how to question and critique my own country and to look beyond the façade of the nation-state.  In the end these qualities prepared me for work abroad not only in Spanish speaking countries, but anywhere in the world.

While at W&M, Anne received the Howard M. Fraser Award in Hispanic Studies.  This award recognizes the graduating Hispanic Studies major who has made significant achievements in the area of research and service related to the field of Hispanic Studies.

After interning at the Library of Congress during last summer, this fall Eleonora Figliuoli (History & Hispanic Studies, ’12) started her graduate studies in Hispanic Studies at the University of Virginia.  In the following lines, Eleonora reflects upon her experience at W&M, and the critical thinking skills she acquired through the Hispanic Studies program; skills she considers crucial for success in graduate school.

“My experience at William & Mary helped greatly in preparing me for the work I am currently engaged in at The University of Virginia, both as a graduate student and as a graduate teaching assistant. More broadly, my studies at William & Mary helped hone the critical thinking skills necessary for life in graduate school. I graduated from college as an independent thinker. Throughout my time as a student at William & Mary, I perfected listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills, and I am now able to call upon those skills and strategies when necessary in the graduate classroom. Similarly, I come out of my undergraduate institution feeling prepared with knowledge of foundational concepts in my field of specialization, and the ability to form a concise and well-developed argument.

“Specifically, the topics presented in my Hispanic Studies coursework at William & Mary have proven of great relevance for my graduate studies at UVA. For instance, in my freshman seminar at William & Mary, and in an upper level seminar later on in my undergraduate career, I studied the literature of the Spanish Civil War, and particularly of Carmen Martín Gaite. This semester, I am reencountering these same works in a broader-themed course on contemporary Spanish literature. The sequence of courses I took at William & Mary also exposed me to an introduction to reading medieval Spanish, which few of my colleagues can boast, and which I am required to do on a regular basis in a course on the History of the Language.

“Moreover, though I was never formally trained to teach undergraduate students at William & Mary, there I discussed teaching Hispanic culture in a senior seminar on colonial Latin American literature. This knowledge gave me not only introductory knowledge of the canon of colonial Latin American literature, but also of a few important topics in foreign language pedagogy.

“Lastly, when the time will come to prepare for comprehensive exams, or write articles in my seminar courses, my confidence is boosted knowing that the research skills I gained at William & Mary allow me to reflect independently on the lectures or texts that I listen to or read, and on my own written and spoken work in order to constantly challenge my preexisting assumptions and form new paradigms. In my duties as a teaching assistant, I try to facilitate the development of the same learning skills and strategies in my students, so the knowledge I gained comes full circle.

At W&M, Eleonora received the R. Merritt Cox Fellowship in Hispanic Studies, awarded to the graduating student with an outstanding level of academic excellence in the field of Hispanic Studies, and who will pursue a graduate degree in the field in Hispanic Studies.  This award was established in memory of Professor R. Merritt Cox, a well-known 18th century scholar in Spanish Studies and a highly esteemed colleague in W&M’s Department of Modern Languages & Literatures for many years. With this award, the faculty recognize a graduating Hispanic Studies major who exhibits those qualities admired and embodied by Professor Cox: a deep appreciation and broad interest in Hispanic cultures, literatures, and the Spanish language.

[By Jim Ducibella. You can read the full article here]

Every author knows that there are book signings and then there are book signings. The first are pro forma, a mere exercise of putting pen to paper. The latter can be profound, soul-sharing experiences.

William & Mary Professor of Hispanic Studies Francie Cate-Arries recently returned from Spain and nearly two weeks of profound experiences presenting her book Spanish Culture Behind Barbed Wire: Memory and Representation of the French Concentration Camps, 1939-1945. (Culturas del exilio español entre las alambradas: Literatura y memoria en Francia, 1939-1945.)

The book originally appeared only in English when it was published in 2004. While there had been significant scholarship published on the Spanish Civil War and General Francisco Franco regime over decades, Cate-Arries’ book was the first monograph written about the literature and culture of the French internment camps for Spanish war refugees.

By the end of the Spanish Civil War in March 1939, nearly 500,000 Spaniards had fled the country to escape Franco’s military dictatorship. More than 275,000 of them found themselves interned in concentration camps in Southern France, exiles and outcasts in every sense of the word.

Although they were anti-fascists who expected a very different reception in democratic France, the French government was ill equipped to handle hundreds of thousands of war refugees. The French state also didn’t want to show friendship to the losers of a war whose adversaries had been very publicly supported by Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, to the point that France established diplomatic ties with Franco before the general even declared victory.

Book examines cultural, literary legacy of refugees

Cate-Arries’ book examines the cultural and literary legacy of the thousands of exiles who were interned in these concentration camps. She examined the literature and art that was produced, as well as refugees’ memories of the camps published during World War II, but never viewed or read within Spain during the Franco regime.

After the Franco dictatorship was dismantled in the late 1970s, there was a tacit understanding throughout the country that Spaniards were just going to move forward, not look back at this sad chapter of their history and wrestle with human rights violations and refugees.

Three years after Cate-Arries’ book was originally published, the Spanish Parliament modified this position in 2007 with its passage of complex — and controversial — legislation popularly known as the Law of Historical Memory, which opened the door for vigorous debate and coincided with new exhibits. In the case of Cataluña, museums were even opened, which focus on the history and cultural legacy of civil war exiles, including the inhabitants of those camps.

In March, an expanded version of Cate-Arries’ book was published in Spanish by Editorial Anthropos, a Barcelona publishing house, and in June she was invited to make presentations at four venues: the Museum of Catalonian History in Barcelona, the University of Barcelona, the Ateneo de Madrid in that city, and the Memorial Museum of Exile in La Junquera, right on the Spanish-French border, the 1939 gateway to exile for hundreds of thousands of war refugees.

There, her audience, whose questions to Cate-Arries were often in French, not Spanish, was almost entirely made up of the now-elderly children of exiles who crossed the border at that very spot, some of them babes in arms at the time. Most of them attended the lecture by way of Argelès in Southern France, once the site of the largest, most notorious internment camp, where their parents settled, often never to return to Spain.

They have formed a citizen’s group – FFREEE Association — dedicated to keeping alive the legacy and memory of parents who fought and fled Franco in the name of democracy.

After the presentation, a man approached Cate-Arries and asked her to sign a book for his mother.

Emotional encounters with those who were there

“He said, ‘You know, my mother is 94 years old and she’s blind, and she’s not going to read this book,’” Cate-Arries recalled. “He said, ‘But I’m going to read it to her, and I’m going to read her the dedication that you write today. She was 21 years old when she went into that camp and that was a transformative moment in her life.’”

In the presentation at the Ateneo de Madrid, Cate-Arries shared the panel with Maria Luisa Libertad Fernández who was three weeks old when her parents carried her from Barcelona across the Spanish border, just before Franco’s troops captured the city at the war’s end. She spent the first four years of her life interned in a series of French camps.

“I told her, ‘I wrote this book for you before I ever even met you,’” said Cate-Arries.

One question Cate-Arries heard continually was why she undertook this project. Did she also have relatives affected?

Hispanic Studies majors Katherine (Katie) Brown and Jane Rabinovitz have been selected to receive the J. Worth Banner Award in Hispanic Studies.  This award is given to the rising senior Hispanic Studies concentrator with the highest overall grade point average.

Katie Brown, who over the last two summers has conducted research projects on the Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua in Cusco, Peru, and on the chronicles by Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and Chimalpahin, is currently working on her honors thesis, which analyzes the role of science in the debates that 16th- and 17th-century Spanish, Creole, and mestizo intellectuals held regarding the nature of the population in the Andes and their political right to self-government.

“I never would have imagined upon arriving at W&M that I would have the opportunity to study abroad in both Peru and Spain, be able to work closely with faculty on developing and carrying our research projects, write an honors thesis, and generally expand and transform my understanding of and approach to Hispanic literatures, language and cultures,” says Katie. “I’m mostly just grateful to have been able to immerse myself so deeply in the subject over the past few years and to be a student in a department as dynamic and inspiring as that of Hispanic Studies at W&M.”  Katie plans to attend graduate school after graduating from W&M.

Jane Rabinovitz, who is also minoring in Dance, is an accomplished performer who has participated in several productions with Orchesis, the modern dance company at W&M, with Sinfonicron, a student-run light opera company on campus.  During Spring of 2012, she participated in the W&M study abroad program in Seville, where she realized she could combine her two passions, Hispanic Studies and performance, through Spanish-English interpreting.  Now she plans to pursue a career in interpretation in a legal, medical, or governmental setting after graduation.

“I found in Sevilla that oral interpreting was a new and different aspect of my Spanish language study that I had never before tapped into.  I think I grew to love interpreting during my semester abroad because it helped bridge the gap between my two passions: Spanish and performing arts.  Interpreting is the performance of Spanish and I would love to pursue that aspect of my language study more in my final year of college and beyond into the work force,” explains Jane.

Congratulations, Katie & Jane!

The J. Worth Banner Award in Hispanic Studies honors Professor Banner, who was a well-liked Spanish professor at the College of William and Mary, and a respected Chair of the Department of Modern Languages & Literatures for many years. In the past, this generous award has helped support the recipient’s pre-honors research, international travel, or participation in study abroad programs.

Elizabeth (Libby) Hennemuth (Hispanic Studies & Government ’13) recently published an article, “1980 U.S. Partial Grain Embargo: Pragmatism’s Centrality to Argentine Refusal to Cooperate,” in the Summer 2012 issue (17.2) of W&M’s The Monitor. Journal of International Studies.

Congratulations, Libby!

With this article, Libby joins other Hispanic Studies majors who in the recent past have published the results of their research in The Monitor: Casey Lesser  (’11), who published “A Confluence of Cultures: The Child Virgin Spinning Paintings of Colonial Peru” in Summer 2011 (16.2), and Nathan Hoback (’10), whose article “A Hollywood Haunting in Spain: Raza (1942), Rebecca (1940), and Commemoration of the Spanish Civil War” appeared in Winter 2010 (16.1).

Lauren Ila Jones (BA, W&M Hispanic Studies & Sociology, 2004; PhD, UCLA Social Science and Comparative Education, 2009) was recently awarded a Fulbright Scholar Award for the United Kingdom during 2012-2013.  She will lecture and do research in the Education Department at Roehampton University in London.  At Roehampton, she will work in the London Paulo Freire Institute, based in the Center for Education Research in Equalities, Policy and Pedagogy (CEREPP).

While at William & Mary, Lauren worked under the advisement of Prof. Jonathan Arries (Hispanic Studies) and Prof. Jennifer Bickham Mendez (Sociology).  Since 2007, she has worked with Prof. Arries as co-instructor of the William & Mary Modern Languages and Literatures Summer Institute in Nicaragua.  They plan to take the next cohort to Nicaragua in August 2013.