Hampshire to Host New England Latino Student Leadership Conference
Hampshire College has been selected to host the 13th Annual New England Latino Student Leadership Conference (NELSLC) on Friday and Saturday, April 1-2. This event is facilitated and supported by the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA), and organized by Raíces, Hampshire's pan-Latinx student group.
To date, the conference titled, “Solidarity Through the Decolonization of Ourselves,” has more than 200 participants registered from the New England region, to hear presenters and speakers from across the US.
Student organizer Xavier A. Torres de Janon says that Raíces intends to build strong leadership in Latinx communities by “taking a step back and looking at ourselves, our identities and our colonial histories. One of our main goals is to justify and compassionately highlight the more marginalized or hidden parts of the ‘Latino diaspora,’ to question the term itself, and discuss how we can engage it through a decolonial framework.”
Other members of the event planning committee from Hampshire are students Yesenia Pum and Alyssa Pimentel, and staff members Araina Muniz and OC Gorman.
The event seeks to take a holistic and inquisitive approach to “what leadership as Latinx in the US means, the context in which these battles are fought, the communities that support us, how we ended up becoming ‘Latinos’ in the first place, the infinite repercussions of colonization in our realities, and what being a 'Latinx student leader' implies,” according to the conference website.
For more information, see the Conference website http://nelslc.com/about/ and the Conference Facebook event https://www.facebook.com/events/1626456517616231/ or e-mail Torres de Janon at xat12@hampshire.edu.