Gaining trust in a changing world

February 19, 2021

I'm a Latina woman, I am also multiracial. My mother is White, and her family is of French heritage, and then also of English and German heritage. But I do consider myself a very multicultural, multiracial person having been brought up in a home where many different languages were spoken in many different customs and ways of being were accepted.

I know, my time has been shaped by the 2016 election. And all the politics that have gone on, I know that doing multicultural work felt different before then. And so again, I'm not trying to be partisan or political in any way. It's just that the world changed, I think, and the world has been moving and changing in ways that maybe we took for granted, or maybe we weren't really paying attention to. So, I do think that my time here has definitely been shaped by the political climate.

I remember, I don't know which year it was, but there was something that had happened on campus. And that's another thing to like, I think things happen. And then we react. I think we're in a reactive space right now, which isn't uncommon. To be honest, a lot of universities are in reactive spaces, especially given COVID. And given the world that we're in right now that there's so many things coming at us that we're having to just react as things happen, versus being proactive. So, something had happened on campus and I remember there were students gathering to sort of organize this they wanted to organize, they wanted to do something about it, they wanted to, you know, have some activisty type responses. And I remember that I was in this meeting, I had found out about it. And I went with my supervisor at the time, and it was hosted in Africana Studies. And there were some professors there as well. And students said, which kind of hurt and they said, we don't want administrators here, we just want faculty. And I think that's really tough, because as someone who is trying to do the work and trying to support students and trying to advocate and help students also feel empowered to advocate for themselves, it's really hard that they perceive sometimes faculty, as more of allies or resources when faculty are actually kind of in a separate arena, they answer to the provost, and they are on the academic side, whereas Student Affairs is Student Affairs, we are here for students and for student life. And all of these outside of the classroom experiences and the outside of the classroom learn learning and growth that happens is our responsibility. And it's what we are here doing. But like I said, the trust for us isn't always there.