Celebrated novelist Junot Díaz, M.F.A. '95, and four Cornell faculty members discussed the readiness of the arts to address immigration issues at a panel discussion Feb. 19 at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art.

"Anything that's going to create a sort of super-Latino or create a new possibility of larger, more productive, more humane collectives is going to require a narrative that currently doesn't exist," Díaz said. "Right now the forces that are fragmenting people have at their disposal narratives of astonishing power and reach."

Most people subject to that fragmentation "are not the ones who are being asked to take part in a narrative that can help bring us back together," Díaz said. "The people who meet the hammer are never the ones who are asked to help engineer the solutions."

Moderator Ernesto Quiñonez, assistant professor of English, had posed the question of the growth of a "super Latino" community attaining political, economic and social power in America.

The panel also included Amy Villarejo, chair of the Department of Theatre, Film and Dance; Roberto Sierra, the Old Dominion Professor of Composition; and Sofia Villenas, associate professor of education and Latino/a studies. Villarejo, although not a Latina, said she identifies as one politically.

"I believe there are possibilities for affiliation that are not based on origin or identity, but on political affiliation or solidarity," she said.

Sierra addressed the concern that Latino cultures seemingly "are homogenizing into a singular culture -- but we are not; we all come from different regions. Mexican music is different from Caribbean music," he said.

"Will we lose the aspects of the different cultures that we come from?" he asked. "And the children -- what will they be like?"

Villenas, an education ethnographer, said much of the energy in her studies of Latino immigrant education has been expended on "challenging the deficit perspective that blames the families" and pitting the question of "real" Latino identity against stereotypes.

"That's what's really promising about the work of the artists Junot Díaz and [Cornell professor and novelist] Helena Viramontes," Villenas said. "They're actually situating that question of the real within the histories of oppression. They all situate our lives within histories, and they show us the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, nations, citizenship and how these all work -- and then they play with the notion of, can we really know who Latinos are?"

The panel was co-sponsored by the Latino Studies Program and the Creative Writing Program. The latter also hosted a career panel and a reading by Díaz and alumni authors Melissa Bank '98 and Julie Schumacher '86.

Following the panel discussion, Díaz received the 2008-09 Eissner Artist of the Year Award, administered by the Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA).

"He worked as hard on his fiction as anyone who's ever passed through here -- not just on writing his fiction but reimagining his fiction. He is funny, and also ferocious," said Stephanie Vaughn, professor of English, who nominated Díaz for the award. "When he was here, he used to say he wanted to be the most famous man from the Dominican Republic who wasn't a baseball player."

Díaz was selected for the Eissner award a month before he won the Pulitzer Prize for "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," from which he gave a short reading.

The annual alumni artist award was established in 1997 by the University Council's Committee on the Arts and the CCA; the selection is made by a jury of arts department chairs. The award was renamed in 2007 to recognize Bruce and Judith Eissner's Endowment for the Arts at Cornell.

"Cornell is much stronger in the arts and better in the arts than many people know, and this is a vehicle for celebrating that as well as promoting it," Bruce Eissner said.