By Jay’Mi Vazquez
Managing Editor
photo | Jay’Mi Vazquez
Interim President Dwayne Smith and guest speaker Roberto Che Espinoza.
The university continued to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month with its annual Division of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Social Justice lecture series.
On Wednesday, Oct. 2, guest speaker Roberto Che Espinoza gave students and faculty a unique insight on how to overcome various forms of adversity through his personal life experiences.
The event kicked off with attendees able to enjoy traditional Hispanic dishes. Attendees also gained a warm welcome from Interim Vice President for DEI Kevin Rutledge.
“We take time to stop and pause and come together as a collective community to invite us to different concepts, different ideas and different insights as we join in today’s space,” Rutledge said.
Interim President, Dwayne Smith also greeted attendees and welcomed fellow speakers, Associate Director of Multicultural Affairs, James Henderson and Gian Melendez, graduate intern for the Multicultural Center.
Espinoza’s main discussion points were about intersectionality, liberation and critical imagination.
He conveyed these ideas through his personal stories of growing up a poor Latino, his experiences being transgender and his struggle with being neurodivergent.
“My story is one of great challenge and great adversity,” Espinoza said. “Today is more than a survival story; it’s a call to action, a call to reimagine what our intersections can teach us about changing the world,”
Pictures of Espinoza during different times in his life and artificial intelligence-generated images were shown on the screen to explain his talking points further.
He explained how his early experiences as a child and the police brutality during COVID inspired his first book, “Activist Theology.”
He discussed how during this tumultuous time he struggled, but how the simple act of a long walk helped him clear his head and come to terms with his identity.
He then dove into his experiences being transgender and neurodivergent. He spoke about his second book, “Body Becoming: A Path to Our Liberation.”
“This body tells a story, a map of both pain and liberation, of belonging and displacement.” Espinoza said.
The importance of talking about his experiences with his body was to explain how people should accept those for being different. But also, that those differences need to be celebrated and talked about more openly to bring together communities.
Espinoza listed Kimberlé Crenshaw’s definition of intersectionality, which is the study of intersecting social identities that are related to oppression, domination, or discrimination with the main point of being able to understand power relations and how they shape inequality, not identity.
He said that he believes everyone’s lives have been impacted by some form of intersectionality, and that we need to be liberated from those experiences.
Espinoza also explained the importance of creative imagination.
“We must celebrate what we’re creating and use it as a source of strength,” Espinoza said. “We need collective creative imagination to figure out how to address the complexities in everyone’s lives.”
Espinoza ended the event by going back into explaining how the university’s community can create a difference through its diversity.
“Let us embrace our intersections,” Espinoza said. “Let’s stand together in our differences. Let’s see adversity not as something we fear, but something we comprehend to transcend and transform.”
photo | Lily Rand
Faculty and students listening during the Social Justice lecture series.
VOL. 64- ISSUE 5
