Latino Cultural Center releases schedule of spring virtual events

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Purdue University’s Latino Cultural Center has released the upcoming schedule of virtual events.

All events are free. Registration is required for all events and can be done via the LCC’s website.

• Feb, 8 – “Illegal Intimacy: A Poetry Reading on the Surveillance of Queer Love, Undocumented Immigration, and Blackness,” with Alan Pelaez Lopez. Co-sponsored with the Purdue LGBTQ Center and Native American Education and Cultural Center, this event is livestreamed, and participants can register online. Lopez is an AfroIndigenous poet, installation and adornment artist from Oaxaca, Mexico. Titled after Lopez’s poem, “Illegal Intimacy,” the poetry reading offers a conversation of how queer love, migration and Blackness are surveilled by the nation-state. The poet will read work from the collections, “Intergalactic Travels:” poems from a fugitive alien, and to love and mourn in the age of displacement and talk about the ways in which intimacy is an underlooked embodied experience that can serve as protest, civil disobedience and a tool to think of words otherwise.
• Feb. 9 – DACA New Applicant Workshop, co-organized by Lafayette Urban Ministry, Greater Lafayette Immigrant Allies, Purdue Immigrant Allies, Latino Center for Wellness and Education and the Latino Cultural Center. This is an online workshop for community members who would like to apply for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) as new applicants. The workshop will be held on at 6:30 p.m. and will be in both English and Spanish on the Go2Meeting virtual platform. It is open to members of the Greater Lafayette community, and is free of charge. You can register online at Lafayette Urban Ministry’s website. For more information, emailimmigration@lafayetteurbanministry.org. 
• Feb. 10, 17 and 24 – Lit Club: “My (Underground) American Dream: My True Story as an Undocumented Immigrant Who Became a Wall Street Executive,” with Julissa Arce at 5:30 p.m. Arce, an undocumented immigrant who grew up on the outskirts of San Antonio, worked tirelessly to achieve academic excellence and landed a coveted six-figure-salary job on Wall Street. The level of professional and financial success that she achieved was the very definition of the American dream. But in this new memoir, Arce digs deep to reveal the physical, financial and emotional costs of the stunning secret that she, like many other high-achieving, successful individuals in the United States, had been forced to keep not only from her bosses but even from her closest friends. Register for Lit Club can be done online.
• Feb. 22 – “Embracing Your Intersectionality: Perspectives on Social Justice with Hugo Treviño,” with Hugo Treviño at 6 p.m. Co-sponsored with the Purdue LGBTQ Center and Disability Resource Center, this event is livestreamed and participants can register for the event online. Born with a genetic disability called Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA) type 3, Treviño was presented with unique challenges that made him constantly have to adapt. He is a proud first-generation Mexican American born to two immigrant parents, and a Chicago native. He loves his family that consists of one sibling also with SMA and two able-bodied siblings. While obtaining his undergraduate degree, Treviño learned to embrace his intersectionality and how embracing all identities would be a tool toward success. Helping students with disabilities became his first goal as students tend to struggle in silence because they do not know that they can receive assistance in college under the law of the American Disabilities Act and Section 504. This leads him to student activism, where he advocated for the rights of Latinx, LGBQTIA, students with disabilities, and other marginalized communities.
• March 3 – Brock-Wilson Center Intersectionality Speaker Series – A Conversation with Julissa Arce. Co-sponsored with the Brock-Wilson Center, this event is livestreamed at 7 p.m., and participants can register for it. Arce is a political commentator, speaker and best-selling author. She was named one of People en Español’s 25 Most Powerful Woman of 2017. She is a leading voice in the fight for social justice, immigration rights and education equality. Her second book, “Someone Like Me,” is her first young-adult book and was published in September 2018. The evening will be moderated by Carina Olaru, director of the Purdue Latino Cultural Center.
• April 8 – An Evening with Jose Antonio Vargas, co-sponsored with the Pursuing Racial Justice Together Series and the Asian American and Asian Resource Cultural Center, this event is livestreamed at 7 p.m., and participants can register online. Vargas is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Emmy-nominated filmmaker and Tony-nominated producer. Vargas rose to prominence in 2011 with his groundbreaking essay in the New York Times Magazine, which revealed and chronicled his life as an undocumented immigrant. In 2012, he penned a follow-up essay and appeared with other undocumented immigrants on the cover of Time Magazine.

Since then, Vargas has written several books, including his best-selling memoir, “Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen.” He also produced and directed “Documented”, an autobiographical documentary that received an NAACP Image Award nomination. He directed “White People”, an Emmy-nominated television special on what it means to be young and white in a demographically changing America, and co-produced the Tony-nominated play “What the Constitution Means to Me.”

Vargas is the founder of the nonprofit media and culture organization Define America, a culture-change organization that uses the power of narrative to humanize conversations abut immigrants and advocating within news, entertainment and digital media to create an America where everyone belongs.

• May 14 – Latinx Graduation Ceremony. Co-sponsored with the Purdue Latino Alumni Organization, this event is livestreamed at 6 p.m. ET. All Purdue students graduating in 2021 are invited to participate in the ceremony, which takes place on the Friday of graduation weekend, by submitting an online RSVP by April 2. Students and their families and friends are invited to this ceremony, held in Spanish, Portuguese and English. The LCC will celebrate the accomplishments of the graduating class and recognize the efforts of their families and friends in the process. Family members or friends of graduating students can send a congratulatory message through May 5. Faculty or staff can send a congratulatory message through March 5.

About Purdue University

Purdue University is a top public research institution developing practical solutions to today’s toughest challenges. Ranked the No. 5 Most Innovative University in the United States by U.S. News & World Report, Purdue delivers world-changing research and out-of-this-world discovery. Committed to hands-on and online, real-world learning, Purdue offers a transformative education to all. Committed to affordability and accessibility, Purdue has frozen tuition and most fees at 2012-13 levels, enabling more students than ever to graduate debt-free. See how Purdue never stops in the persistent pursuit of the next giant leap at https://purdue.edu/.

Writer: MaKenna Fitzgerald

Media contact: Matthew Oates, 765-586-7496 (cell), oatesw@purdue.edu, @mo_oates

Source: Carina Olaru, colaru@purdue.edu  

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