Marisol Jimenez, the Latinx Heritage Month keynote speaker, smiles as she tells a story from her childhood Wednesday. She spoke about her life experiences and related them to what it means to be a Latinx." />
Hannah Shea
Marisol Jimenez, the Latinx Heritage Month keynote speaker, smiles as she tells a story from her childhood Wednesday. She spoke about her life experiences and related them to what it means to be a Latinx.
Multicultural Student Affairs, part of the Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity, hosted Marisol Jimenez, a UNC-Chapel Hill alumna, as keynote speaker for Latinx Heritage Month in the Coastal Ballroom of Talley Student Union Wednesday night for a presentation on the importance of Latinx identity, intersectionality and roots for students and faculty alike.
The presentation was entitled “Ni de Aqui/Ni de Alla: Finding Roots in Community, Ancestors, and Activism,” meaning “Neither from here, neither from there” in English to represent Jimenez’ multicultural upbringing as the child of Mexican and Irish immigrants in a Puerto Rican neighborhood of Chicago.
“I never quite got to be of any place, because I was of no place exactly,” Jimenez said, speaking about her childhood as a girl in between on the spectrums of race and culture. “I would go be with my mother’s family … and be treated very different from the other kids, be talked down to, have names thrown at me. Anybody who wasn’t south side Irish was not okay.”
Before starting the presentation, Jimenez brought to attention the recent natural disasters that have devastated Latin America with catastrophic results, speaking of Hurricanes Irma and Maria in Puerto Rico, and two earthquakes that struck Mexico this month alone.
“I can’t help but reflect on what’s happening in a lot of our home communities and in a lot of our families,” Jimenez said. “I want to take a moment to acknowledge that, to honor it. Tonight is supposed to be talking about how roots, ancestry, activism and spirituality all come together, and I can’t start without doing that first.”
Jimenez then asked for a moment of silence, and invited the audience to call out the names of family members that may have been affected by these disasters to set the mood and tone for the presentation, which concerned the spiritual aspect of ancestry and identity.
“I would get instructions from the other kids about how I could get accepted so they would play with me, and they were things like ‘get a tan,’ ‘gain some weight,’ ‘get a perm,’ all of those things were ways for me to be more Latina,” Jimenez said. “What I learned was that I had to fight for my identity, and so I did. I learned to fight to be the Latina that I identify as, but it was never something that came easy, it was always something I had to struggle for.”
Jimenez described attending Loyola University Chicago for her undergraduate years and forgetting the identity she held for some time while studying there.
“It wasn’t until my last year that I went to Mexico, and I went to the border, and then I remembered who I was,” Jimenez said. “Going to the border in the ‘90s in the middle of NAFTA with the construction of the border wall and the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, it fundamentally changed me. I came back to the United States from that trip and I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs that we needed to pay attention to what was going on.”
Jimenez described moving to North Carolina and having to make the decision to study the law, civics, global economic policy and immigration policy to prepare herself to work with lobbying efforts to enact change.
“I had to study how a bill becomes a law, buying suits that were awkwardly fitting but looked like armor that I could wear to talk to elected officials, and maybe I would blend in if I was wearing the suit,” Jimenez said. “I never did, I’m going to tell you that. Being a Latina yankee walking into the North Carolina General Assembly is never an easy thing, and those, mostly older white men, made sure that I knew who had power and who didn’t.”
The experiences that Jimenez had in the General Assembly made her aware of the dynamics and structures of race and power in the government and it was not easy for her to learn that.
“What was next for me was bringing a complicated conversation about power, privilege and oppression back to our organizations, our nonprofits and our movements and saying to each other, ‘how we are replicating the structure of power, privilege and oppression in our movement?’ and now, this is work that I get to do,” Jimenez said.
Through her own consulting firm, Tepeyac Consulting, Jimenez has worked to invigorate and mobilize the efforts of the Latinx immigrant justice movement in North Carolina, by offering racial equity trainings and coaching with community leaders and organizations across the country.
“I believe that what we are facing now, many of us have felt it coming,” Jimenez said. “I believe that we are facing as a movement, as a people is ancestral.”
Jimenez explained how the struggle faced by human and civil rights movements is something also faced deep in the past, which she copes with through being spiritually and rhetorically connected to her ancestors and indigenous deities of Latin America.
“As we go into these battles where we’re going after things like DACA and immigration reform, how do we not lose sight of the fact that these are small, critical, important things, but that they can quickly derail us from the larger picture of what is happening to humanity,” Jimenez said. “What is to be human is to be beyond that.”
Iliana Claudio, a first-year studying biochemistry, shared her views on the presentation as a Latinx student.
“I think it was especially important to talk about the idea of intersectionality, not just in the Hispanic community,” Claudio said. “This is especially important for me because I identify as both Puerto Rican and Mexican, and the idea that not being able to fit in one or either space is telling to my personal experience, and I thought this was a beautiful conversation about that.”
Jimenez encouraged student organizations to be wary of their own actions in order to not reflect the characteristics of injustice in the world.
“One of the things that is really critical for our Latinx community is to start unpacking our dynamics how we’ve internalized power, privilege and oppression,” Jimenez said. “For example, around race. In our communities, there are racial lines, lines around legal status and citizenship, and I think that to survive these battles we need to do real intersectional work.”