For the past four weeks the Tufts Civic Semester cohort has been taking Mexican baile folklórico (folkloric dance) every Monday at Moving Arts in the city of Española. Moving Arts is an organization dedicated to building community and cultivating leaders through art and the preservation of culture. Our dance classes were instructed by Salvador Ruiz-Esquivel, who is the executive/school director and co-founder of the organization. Every class we switch from our trainers and crocs into our dance shoes with metal soles, which has been very exciting as they only elevate the performance with their sound. Traditionally, men do the dance with machetes while women wear long, brightly colored skirts. Fortunately, we have been able to play with the role of gender by not separating our group into two and all dancing together with machetes or in skirts.
As Moving Arts deals with much more than dance, we were also able to take a cooking class there with Laura where we made vegetarian Mexican pozole, blue cornmeal muffins, and vegan buckeyes. The meal was absolutely delicious! Dancing with Salvador has been such a wonderful experience as he has been able to share a part of his culture with us. Our last class was truly emotional for all of us, as we are grateful for the organization Moving Arts, and inspired by all the community work that they are able to achieve through the visual, graphic, and culinary arts. We are also super grateful to have worked with Salvador and truly appreciate his patience and kind words throughout our lessons. We are sad to be leaving Truchas and the surrounding communities, and hope to learn from organizations just as amazing and community-oriented as Moving Arts.
On Friday the 24th of September, the Tufts Civic Semester cohort visited the Tesuque Pueblo Farm on our quest to learn more about seed sovereignty and agriculture. Tesuque (also known as Taytsúgeh Oweengeh in Tewa) is the southernmost Tewa Pueblo. We spent a lot of our time learning from Emigdio Ballón, one of the leaders at the farm. Emigdio is originally from Cochabamba, Bolivia and has been running the farm in New Mexico for about 15 years. While talking with Emigdio we got to learn a lot about Seed Banks as well as look through the Seed Bank that the farm had. It was fascinating to see the variety of melon, quinoa, cucumber, and corn seeds that were being held at the farm. It was also nice to know that anyone in the Pueblo was allowed to use the seeds for their own personal benefit.
While discussing the importance of conserving seed, as “Seeds are the Future,” Emigdio also talked a lot about health in general and the importance of eating well because “Your Food is Your Medicine.” Sometimes we forget how sacred our bodies are and the importance of treating and feeding ourselves well in order to successfully turn outwards and engage with our community. After all, how you take care of yourself is how you take care of the environment.
After doing a lot of reflection and discussing with Emigdio, we were able to get our hands dirty and help out with the farming. We used hoes to dig holes around fruit trees in the orchards so that the holes could be filled with compost and manure to help the trees grow.
The visit to the Tesuque Farms was like that of no other. It caused us to think more critically about the way in which we take care of our bodies, as they are precious and deserve to be treated as such. Moreover, the physical labor that we did allowed us to have a greater sense of appreciation and gratitude for all the difficult work that farmers do in order to grow crops. We are definitely looking forward to returning to the farm and doing some more work to support the Tesuque farmers in any way we can.
1. What was your Civic Semester experience? As a rising junior, how if at all has Civic Semester impacted your Tufts experience beyond your time in the program?
Absolutely positive! Just the idea that I’m writing about how awesome this program was already excites me. I’m not saying this in an exaggerated way: Tufts Civic Semester was a life-changing experience. I had very little idea about what civic action really entails until I gained hands-on experience in Peru where I had the amazing opportunity to work at a non-profit organization that provides physical therapy services and mental health counseling to disabled patients – an underrepresented and often disregarded group of individuals in the country. Beyond my time in the program, I always find myself engaging in rigorous self-reflection processes about civic action that have become an integral part of my life. As for my future career path, I am looking for opportunities that will allow me to engage in some level of civic work and social activism, likely international non-profit organizations.
2. How did the Civic Semester impact your Tufts education
so far? Do you see any impact on your academic path, extracurricular
involvements, peer group, or other areas of your life?
Definitely! Fun fact: I was seriously thinking of giving up learning Spanish after four years of studying this language in high school until I was selected as a participant of the Civic Semester program. I created so many meaningful moments in Peru and I would very much love to keep in touch with my friends there by perfecting my Spanish speaking skills. As a result, I have decided to pursue a minor in Spanish! Another fun fact: I think all my Spanish professors are quite familiar with my participation in the Tufts Civic Semester Peru program by now because of the frequency I write about this experience in analytical papers, short stories and poems. Although I plan to pursue a double major in International Relations and Sociology, I have seen myself adopting various aspects of Civic Studies in my interested research areas. Outside of classes, I have been involved with social impact groups in Beijing and New York, but I hope to return to the Tisch College and be more active there in the future!
3. What was it like coming back to campus for the spring
semester? What advice would you give to future Civic Semester students about
this adjustment?
I had a pretty smooth transition back to the campus. Along with the rest of the Peru cohort, we attended a lot of school activities and applied to a number of on-campus opportunities. It was not difficult making new friends in class because most of the time your fellow classmates didn’t really know each other either Clubs are also a great way to get to know new people. Based on my own experience, I would say that actively pursuing an abundance of opportunities (academic and extracurricular) on campus is a great way to reconnect with Tufts. However, it is also important to balance work time with rest time so you are not stressing yourself out during this first semester on campus.
4. Looking back, would you do it again? What overall
advice do you have for students considering the program?
Of course – 100%! My family and close friends all know that I can never stop talking about my experience in Peru. I would like to tell future students that it is totally normal to feel uncertain and scared about leaving home and traveling to a new place. I was too. I had so many concerns about going to Peru: Am I able to use Spanish to effectively communicate with the locals? Can I get along with my host family? Will I suffer from high altitude sickness all the time? But everything turned out to be an absolutely rewarding experience. I realized that language is never the only thing in the world that connects you with people who share your interests and passion (I didn’t really understand 1/3 of the things my mentor said to me but we managed to be great friends through our shared love for singing). I also realized that some physical and emotional discomfort from time to time has made me a much stronger and open-minded person than I ever was before. I left my home country to live and study in different countries since I was 14 years old, but none of my abroad experience is comparable to this Civic Semester experience that exposed me to another way of living my life that I had never imagined before.
Parque Rodó in Montevideo, one of my favorite spaces to relax and reflect. Photo taken by me. 12.02.2019
With the biting Vermont breeze a refreshing reminder of where I ended up after a week of mild chaos, I finally began to reflect on my time in Uruguay. As my dog ran ahead of me, I remembered some of the highlights of the year, laughing to myself, thinking of all the crazy things that had happened. I then found myself getting a little more philosophical, as I tend to do on my walks. I tried to piece together who Silas is after the experience and how he compares to Silas before the experience. Through lots of reflection, I realized how little self love I had prior to beginning my gap year. But that all changed in Uruguay. On my walk a few days upon arriving home, I tried to narrow down what catalyzed this change and I came up with three
1. Space for Reflection
When was the last time you tried to be completely alone with your thoughts?
I began to reflect at our orientation week at Tufts when Professor Talusan told us journaling would be an essential part of our class. Originally dismissing it as a useless formality, I grew to recognize the importance of devoting time to reflection as it was reiterated through activities and workshops. On our final night, our peer leaders, Daniela and Mateo, led us in a sharing circle, where for the first time, I worked to identify what drove me to take the gap year. This allowed me to know what I wanted to work on over the course of the year and gave me a way to gauge my progress. During the first few months of being in-country, I journaled nearly every day. Those daily 5-10 minutes helped me deconstruct what I felt that day, which especially helped through a period of intense homesickness. I obviously had felt sad, or angry, or scared, etc. before in my life, but I rarely gave myself the space to unpack it. In trying to keep up an always positive, happy facade I would not work on or even validate those feelings, instead convincing myself everything was fine, remaining ignorant of my own emotions. During the year, I devoted time to listen to myself instead, whether through journaling, meditation, or simply taking a walk. In the wake of being robbed, reflecting on those emotions helped me to not panic anytime a beggar asked me for change. During bouts of homesickness, reflecting helped me be more open and honest about how I felt, recognizing the sadness as a real and valid emotion. Giving myself the space to reflect has made me feel less like the product of other people’s expectations and opinions, as those are no longer the only feelings I listen to.
2. People
Who in your life do you feel you can be completely yourself around?
I’ve told friends I love them before and it has been true, but never has it held so much meaning as saying it to other gap participants on our last night. The end had come much sooner than we expected so these final moments made us reflect on our time spent together. Going through this experience with people was very powerful, as we were learning so much about ourselves, together. A friend once told me “It’s hard to change when the people around you are just gonna classify or treat you like the person they are comfortable knowing you as.” We, however, were all comfortable with each other while growing, so we were unafraid to show that development. What resulted was friendship based purely on love for who we were. Unlike some previous friendships in my life, there was little fear of judgment, meaning that as I learned so much about myself, I was able to show it wholeheartedly. Being vulnerable, and still valued by amazing people helped me value myself more.
3. Hell yeah, I just did that!
Do you know when you’re crushing it?
I’ve always had trouble recognizing and talking about my accomplishments because I don’t want to seem like an egotistical person. Not talking about them also meant I did not celebrate them myself. However, in Uruguay, I realized it was healthy to recognize accomplishments, no matter how small. Earlier in the year, I wrote about how I had discovered the most gratifying parts of life to be the small victories. Focusing on these little moments day to day helped me through some of the toughest times in Uruguay because even when all I wanted was to go home, I thought of the short conversations at work, the memorable nights with friends, the walks exploring the city, and I was reminded of the life I was building there. When we heard we would be leaving the program early, I was devastated, which surprised me, after spending so much of the year thinking about home. However, I had built a vibrant life on a different continent with all new people, in a language I couldn’t speak well before. That’s pretty amazing. I took initiative in getting to know the city, building a healthy routine, becoming an important member of my internship. Part of my journey to self-love was realizing that so much of the success of the year could be attributed to my own actions.
Perhaps the greatest lesson from the year is realizing the importance of growth. Through learning self-love, I grew into myself. On the first night of our Bridge Year orientation, another fellow asked me why I decided to do this. “I don’t know,” I said. “I just know something has to fundamentally change in my life.” I knew I was looking for something, but I didn’t know what. During the year, I found what I had lost: myself. Before the trip, I felt I had lost parts of what made me myself, or at least I failed to value them. The journey of self-love is certainly not over and neither is the journey of growth. All of life is an opportunity to grow and I hope to never stop.
A photo from our very special final night in Uruguay. Taken by Liani Astacio 03.14.2020
I
walked into my neighborhood’s TATA (a supermarket chain in Uruguay) on the
morning of my two-month early departure, due to the pandemic, to buy some
Uruguayan essentials: dulce de leche, yerba, y membrillo. As I entered the
store my attention was immediately drawn to the song playing on the overhead
speakers. I started singing along in my head, “Caballero… Recuerde que el amor es lo primero.” My mind drew the
connection instantaneously that the song playing was “Alegre Caballero” by
Rubén Rada.
Before
this year, I had only come to Uruguay once 5 years ago with my sister and dad,
and we had listened to that song on repeat because it was the only CD in my
Uncle’s car. I stopped in the middle of the aisle and allowed myself to embrace
all of the nostalgia in that moment. It felt as though it was this perfect
paradox: Where the in-country exploration of my Uruguayan culture/heritage had
begun and ended.
I
had always felt that I was lacking a personal connection to the country,
preventing me from claiming my “Uruguayanness.” It had always been a place of
relevance but one I couldn’t fully grasp. Both my parents would talk about how
our culture and their experiences living there influenced them deeply but
without further explanation. Beginning this bridge-year, I had this expectation
that I would leave fully feeling confident to claim my Uruguayan identity yet
it became so much more than that.
In
October I met two people who became my closest Uruguayan friends throughout my
bridge-year: Marcelo and Agustina. They both allowed me to connect intimately
to Uruguay as a country, by being a platform to meet more local youth and
subsequently deepening my connection to the language. The more time I spent
with each of them the more I learned. Sometimes Marcelo would say things like
“manzana” (apple) accompanied by a hand gesture, and claimed he was teaching a
very slang version of Uruguayan Spanish. He advised me to never use it in a
formal context, which eventually became an ongoing joke that I would later
tease him about in the months following. Agustina would always invite me to
cool “underground events” which allowed
me to uncover deeply the city of Montevideo and take advantage of
everything it had to offer. These friendships created a foundation and a
tangible connection to Uruguay. Such experiences allowed me to construct a
Uruguayan life of my own, independent from that of my family.
Once
I had that foundation and felt increasingly comfortable in the life I was
constructing for myself, I began to understand my own upbringing better and the
references my parents would make. I can picture my dad taking a bus from the
countryside into Montevideo to sell fresh fruits and vegetables in the local
ferias on the weekend. I can picture my mother at her boarding school, looking
out her window into her ocean view. It’s simply being in the country and
picking up the customs, and hearing the day-to-day noises in the environment
that brings more awareness and understanding of my roots.
After
spending 7 months in Uruguay, I realized I grew up more “Americanized” than I
thought and learned to embrace being a yankee
(gringa), or as some of my friends called me, “Uruguaya-yanki.” Before this
year, I would’ve gotten defensive about being called these names and would’ve
felt invalidated of my identity but instead, to my surprise, this year taught
me how to embrace it. While it still may take time to fully embrace myself as a
Uruguayan-American, I left making a home of my own, feeling more connected to
my roots, and confronting parts of my identity that used to make me insecure.
There is so much more reflection about my experience that I anticipate having
and unpacking throughout the next few months and beyond, but I feel more
confident than ever of who I am. The song Alegre Caballero” by Rubén Rada, will
forever be an ironic symbol making my own identity out of a collective one and
mark a place of my own in Uruguay.
3/15/20: With Agustina and Marcelo on my last night in Uruguay.
I laid on my bed in the humid hostel room as the dry bed sheets stuck onto my sweaty back. The whole room reeked of body odor from the day-old damp bathing suits hanging on the towel rack in the bathroom and some hidden in plastic bags. Two of my friends came back from their beach run with their sandy feat and were laughing in unison as the white floors became muddy. I was getting frustrated by these small annoyances, so I silently slipped out of the cramped hostel room while the four of my friends applied their sunscreen. I started walking on the Olón Beach to escape all the chaos and to let my mind breathe. Ten minutes into the walk, I closed my eyes and started walking, something that I do sometimes in my neighborhood in Tokyo out of boredom when I’m walking home from various places, but I often fail to walk even a block without opening my eyes out of a fear of hitting a pole or running into a bush. It’s a kind of test for me to see how straight and far I can walk before I become afraid of running into something. But on this beach, I was free. I checked the view before I closed my eyes again, and no one was present for a mile or two. However, the moment I closed my eyes, the liberating feeling that I enjoyed just moments ago was overtaken by fear. I felt blind, and I didn’t know where I was going.
Fear clouded my mind momentarily, but as I continued to walk,
it was replaced by a sense of thrill for this challenge. I began to think about
the physical senses that I could use to guide me toward the other side of the
beach. So after I took a few deep breaths, I tuned into the sensations of my
body. The warm and soft wave wrapped my ankle, and I felt the moisture in the
sand; I was somewhat close to the water, and I was going in the right direction.
A few minutes later, I realized that the waves weren’t hitting my ankles
anymore; however, my feet were still feeling the moist sand. So I took a few
diagonal steps to the left: one, two, three, four. My toes felt the lukewarm baby
waves wading back into the ocean.
I eventually had to reopen my eyes after what seemed like hours,
but realized that I probably only walked for half a mile. It was interesting
how different the experience was to complete one mile while closing my eyes
from a normal walk, because during my blind walk, every step mattered. The same
mile contained steps with a totally different purpose and beauty to it. As I
continued the walk towards the other side of the beach, I thought about this
metaphor. I didn’t know far the end of the beach was and I couldn’t see if
there were any obstacles in my path, but I learned to cherish the beautiful moment-by-moment
sensations of the baby waves brushing my ankles, the warm and moist sand, and
the rustling sound of the waves going back home. Just like on this blind walk
on the Olón beach, my future is full of unknowns and sometimes my mind gets clouded
by the sense of fear and the lack of direction. However, deriving anxiety from
the future–something that I cannot fully predict or control—and letting it
influence my present situation is pointless. Focusing on the one step ahead of
me—no matter how blurry life may seem—will give me the strength and the courage
to achieve it. So enjoy life, step by step. Disfrutar la vida, paso a paso.
Clubs are also a great way to get to know new people. Based on my own experience, I would say that actively pursuing an abundance of opportunities (academic and extracurricular) on campus is a great way to reconnect with Tufts. However, it is also important to balance work time with rest time so you are not stressing yourself out during this first semester on campus.
