Event Recordings

Fall 2020

Oral History Series ft. alumna Mariel Novas YC ‘10  (9/11/2020)

Join La Casa as our Oral History Series continues. This time around we are excited to welcome back Mariel Novas, YC ‘10! Mariel Novas was in Davenport College and graduated in 2010 with a degree in History & Ethnicity, Race, and Migration. La Casa Cultural Julia de Burgos was her second home - she worked at La Casa all four years of undergrad, was President of the Dominican Students Association, and co-founded Sabrosura: Latin Dance Team at Yale as a sophomore. As a Mellon Mays Fellow, she studied Dominican diasporic identity and cultural production in the 19th and 20th centuries, the topic of her award-winning senior thesis. She discovered her love for education as a family liaison and tutor for New Haven youth with Squash Haven, which helps students strive for and maintain school success and physical wellness. Above all, Mariel remembers Yale for the lifelong friends she made while there as a first-generation college student. Mariel completed her doctorate in Education Leadership at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in May 2020 and currently serves as Assistant Director of Partnerships & Engagement for Massachusetts at The Education Trust. In her role, Mariel convenes the Massachusetts Education Equity Partnership, a statewide collective of civil rights, social justice, and education advocates focused on eliminating disparities and advancing opportunities for historically underserved students. 

Latinx Heritage Month 2020

Spring 2021
Presented by Dr. Lorgia García-Peña and moderated by Dr. Pedro Regalado. Sponsored by La Casa Cultural de Julia de Burgos: Latinx Cultural Center, the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, Belonging at Yale, and the Harvard Endowed Lectureship Fund.
In this talk, Dr. Lorgia García-Peña, proposes Black Latinidad as an epistemology, as a way of understanding and producing knowledge from the site of unbelonging, from what Christina Sharpe calls “the unfinished project of emancipation.” That is, she proposes Black Latinidad not as an embodied identity nor a social construct, but as point of entry and set of methods that allows us to go beyond concepts of homogenous racial and citizenship exclusion; it denaturalizes the nation as a site of belonging, and invites us instead to learn and know from a productive detour, both away from and in contradiction to the colonial order that sustains national notions of citizenship and belonging.