Students celebrate culture through art
Celebrating healing through art in an art exhibit, students in Maria Cordero’s Spanish 3060 class displayed their response to Latin American problems, Cordero said.
Cordero said the objective of the course was to stir students to action while the rest of America largely sits by and watches the Latin American world struggle. She said she wanted to challenge her students to empathize with the Latin American plight, demand responsibility from those in a position to provide aid and to act on their feelings.
“I wanted the students to learn the importance of art as a means of healing,” Cordero said, “especially when the political system fails to provide justice.”
Cordero said the problems in Latin America have been caused by political unrest and the oppression of the Latin American people. The goal of the students in the class was to empathize with the Latin American people and then act by creating a final project that expressed how they felt about the problems in Latin America, Cordero said.
“It was not enough for the students to understand the problems in Latin America,” Cordero said. “They need to empathize. When they can feel it, it will be more long lasting and they will be able to affect the community.”
Cordero said one of the final projects was a tomb, which was supposed to be a resting place of a victim of political unrest who never found burial. Another student made a quilt, sewing together small fragmented pieces of fabric, Cordero said.
“The fragmented quilt was made to show how the different pieces of lives can be stitched back together, that even when trauma has happened, life can be pieced together into a congruent whole,” Cordero said.
Cordero said students in almost any major are also learning Spanish and are applying what they learn to their other career paths. Students from many majors are learning to empathize and understand, making the effects of the class more far-reaching, Cordero said.
“We are helping students understand immigrants better and we are teaching the students to be a support to the immigrants,” Cordero said.
Cordero said because she herself is an emigrant, exiled from Cuba, she thinks students need to be brought to understand and help those fleeing other countries.
“I have lived through these things,” Cordero said. “I have learned that when you approach the world with responsibility and you devote your life to service, you live better and with more joy.”
-debrajoy.H@aggiemail.usu.edu
This skeleton sits under a tombstone to represent a person who died under the oppresion of the leaders of Latin America. (Hawkins, Debra)
Maria Cordero stands in front of a few of the final projects created by her Spanish 3060 students to celebrate healing through art. (Hawkins, Debra)