Cornell Visiting Professor Edna Acosta-Belén brings her multidisciplinary understanding of Latino and Caribbean cultures and women's issues to the Latino Studies Program's Sixth Annual Unity Dinner this month.
Acosta-Belén will be the guest speaker at the event honoring Hispanic Heritage Month, Friday, Oct. 30, at 5:30 p.m. on the third floor of Noyes Center.
Tickets are $5 and are available until the day of the event. They can be purchased at the Latino Studies Program, 434 Rockefeller Hall. For further information, contact the program at 255-3197.
Acosta-Belén, who is a visiting professor this fall in Latino studies in the Department of Romance Studies, is a distinguished service professor of Latin American and Caribbean studies at SUNY Albany, where she also is director of the Center for Latino, Latin American and Caribbean Studies.
The theme of Hispanic Heritage Month is "Women in Leadership," and the title of Acosta-Belén's address will be "The Challenges for Latinos in the New Millennium."
Her talk will focus on the need to "foster unity and to recognize the historical, cultural and socio-economic diversity represented by the many nationalities under the umbrella term 'Latino/Hispanic,'" she said.
Acosta-Belén said she also will discuss the importance of Latino studies programs in producing new scholarship and teaching that challenge the "culture of intolerance" that still permeates U.S. society; and in challenging the "distorted views and exclusions of ethno-racial minorities" that have characterized most of the traditional disciplines.
"Edna may be truly considered among the foremost precursors of Latino studies as a field of knowledge, yet her work reconstitutes it as a conceptual and practical field in which other kinds of knowledge converge," said Vilma Santiago-Irizarry, assistant professor of anthropology at Cornell.
Acosta-Belén's address will be prefaced by a short talk titled "Connection to Mama" by junior Alexa Bonilla.
Philip Lewis, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, will offer opening remarks, and Santiago-Irizarry will introduce the guest speaker.
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