CLACS Blog

Don Orlando Tobón at his travel agency in Jackson Heights, Queens. Photo by Jordan Cooper

He slips a stack of papers between the metal jaws of a stapler and swiftly strokes the device with the heel of his clenched fist.

“This is what you put in the mail.” He shakes a manila envelope in his left hand, glaring out over a pair of spectacles resting decidedly lopsided at the end of his nose.

His lower lip juts out and he licks his thumb. His tongue flicks the side of his mouth.

Again he strikes the stapler like a judge who bangs his gavel at the end of a hearing.

His fingers are stubby and wide but they work with the kind of certainty and conviction inherited only through thousands of repetitions. “And this…”—he adroitly stuffs a second package—“…is what you bring with you to the office.”

He passes the materials across the desk to a Colombian couple grinning with satisfaction.

They have just done their taxes.

But to meet the sixty-year-old Tobón under such ordinary circumstances reveals very little of his remarkable life outside of work.

NYU CLACS co-sponsored an event at Hunter College to celebrate the Spanish translation of a new biography of Bolivian President Evo Morales.

Bolivian President Evo Morales at Hunter College
Juan Victor Fajardo

New York--Instead of going to class on Monday, September 21, Hunter student Alex Hamblet stood in line outside the College's Kaye Playhouse. He was there to "get an unbiased look" at a president who he says "tends to get a little misrepresented" by the US media. In Latin America "we've had indigenous presidents in the past," said Mariano Muñoz a few feet down the line, "but none with the same impact as Evo."

Bolivian President Evo Morales's story has inspired millions of people around the world. He is a man who grew up herding llamas in the Bolivian mountains, who became the national leader of the Coca Farmers Union, who successfully led a peasant struggle against the privatization of water, and who became the first indigenous president of a country with an indigenous majority.

“El Barrio,” the predominantly Latino neighborhood in East Harlem, has long been a cultural center for the New York Latino community. Latinos began emigrating to El Barrio in the 1920s, with a large wave of Puerto Ricans immigrants arriving after World War II. In addition to its cultural heritage, El Barrio has also overcome significant struggles with poverty, and drug and gang activity. Recently, many Barrio residents complain that real estate development in the neighborhood is leading to gentrification, and a loss of Latino cultural heritage in this historic neighborhood.

On October 5th, 2010 the Museum of the City of New York presented a film series titled, “In Danger of Extinction,” which showcased two films dealing with gentrification in New York City. “The Lower East Side: An Endangered Place” by Robert Weber, focuses on the gentrification of the Lower East Side, one of the oldest neighborhoods in New York City that has long been home to a diverse community of working-class immigrants. “Whose Barrio?” investigates gentrification in El Barrio, and was produced by Newsday journalists Ed Morales and Laura Rivera. Laura Rivera is also a graduate of NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. In the film, two Barrio residents—Jose Rivera and James Garcia—reveal starkly opposing views on gentrification.

Queloides is an art exhibition that investigates race and racism in contemporary Cuba. Cuban artists, including musicians, writers, painters, performers, and academics, have been denouncing the persistence of racial discrimination in Cuban socialist society since the early 1990s. Queloides, curated by Alejandro de la Fuente and Elio Rodriguez, brings together artists whose work actively confronts racism in contemporary Cuba.

Queloides is currently on exhibition at the Mattress Factory Museum in Pittsburgh, PA. On October 22nd, Queloides artists Marta María Pérez Bravo, Elio Rodríguez, Armando Mariño, and René Peña participated in a CLACS sponsored artist roundtable at NYU. Ana María Dopico, CLACS affiliated faculty and Associate Professor in NYU’s Spanish and Portuguese department, moderated the event.