 Janette Candelario is a professor of sociology at Smith College. She's also the director of the program in Latin American and Latino Studies. Actually, I'm not. I was. Not anymore. OK. Cross that out. And faculty affiliate of the study of women's and gender program. Her research interests include Dominican history and society with a focus on national identity, formation, and women's history. Blackness in the Americas, Latin American Caribbean and Latina feminisms, Latino communities, particularly Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican, US beauty culture, and museum studies. She has been teaching community-based learning and research courses on the sociology of Hispanic Caribbean communities in the US in collaboration with a dozen Holyoke community-based organizations and nonprofits for more than a decade, for which she has received various awards. She is also, and I know this is not part of her bio, but she's also a contributor to our book, Civic Engagement in Diverse Latinx Communities, Learning from Social Justice Partnerships in Action. And she wrote a fabulous chapter. Highly recommended. Highly recommend the book. And there's information in the back. But she was a really important contributor to the volume and a wonderful friend and collaborator from over the year. She's one of the reasons why I ended up staying here as long as I have. Coming from Southern California, because she's not only a great friend but a comadre and a conspirator and just overall amazing person. So I'm going to hand it over to Janetta. Let's give her a round of applause. So thank you, Maddie and Joseph, for organizing today, which was really amazing. They asked that I come and be here the whole day, because I'm giving sort of closing remarks. And I'm really glad that they did, because people have come and gone, as you see. And only a few of us have actually stuck through the whole day, but it was totally worth it, as you know, right, if you've seen the whole day. So congratulations, you guys. You really put together an amazing program, as well as an amazing volume. So Maddie and Joseph asked me to offer a glass of my own and some thoughts. And I'm not going to take too much time, even though I love to talk, as some of you already know. But four things stood out to me that I wanted to touch on and offer by way of a kind of wrap up or food for thought as you go on from here. And the four things are the importance of history, of principles, of process, and of outcomes, right? That's kind of unifying themes. And I'll start with, obviously, history. As I was listening to the first presenter talk about how ethnic studies came to be in holocaust public schools and how that particular partnership developed, it occurred to me that while Dana did a great job, this is not slamming Dana, right? She did a great job historicizing her own entry into this work, that there were 15 years before that and probably another 15 years before that that needed to be shared with this group. So I arrived on the scene in Holyoke and at Smith and in the five colleges. Actually the first time in 1984 as a student from Hudson County, New Jersey. But in this capacity in 1998 as a faculty member in sociology and Latin American Latino studies. And when I came here, one of the first things I wanted to do was to do it better than it was done for me as a Latina student from Hudson County, New Jersey. A Dominican girl from a Cuban community, okay? Who felt that nothing I was learning in my classrooms at Smith made any sense or any difference for my home community, right? And that guilt that I already felt about having left my mother, having left my neighborhood to come to this far away, cold and unwelcoming place wasn't being ameliorated because of what I was getting in my classroom. So when I came to Smith as a professor, I wanted to do it different than my professors did. And I wanted to help my students, especially my Latina, my African American, low income, first generation, urban students understand that they weren't being selfish in coming to get a higher education and in doing things like maybe reading Plato too or learning about art, but that what they were doing was bringing something home from the party, right? Que se puede llevar un plato a su casa, right? For the people who couldn't make it to the fiesta, right? That's a very Dominican thing. Ah, no, toma tu plato para la, right? So how did I enable or help my students preparar un plato, prepare a plate to take home and to understand that that could be part of the project, right, that it wasn't just about filling their own bellies, which is very often what higher education feels like that's what it was structured to be actually to just fill the bellies of a few elites, right? Okay, so the very first thing I did then in that job was to seek out who were the people in Holyoke, who were the leaders who could teach me about what was happening in the community and how I could serve that project, right? And of course, the person who has to be named, may he rest in peace, is Carlos Vega, right? He was the one in Padrino de la Comunidad. So I went and I met Carlos Vega and he did for me what he did all his life. He taught me, he taught me about Holyoke, he taught me about its history, its politics, he taught me about respectful and reciprocal community engagement and he taught me about generosity, right? That there was a role for the five colleges to play, faculty and staff and students in supporting the work that was being done in Holyoke, but that very often it was done shabbily or hastily or poorly and in the end, often in damaging ways and that there could be a better model. He also taught me about his collaborators, his co-conspirators, people like Berimadina Liechtenstein, Miguel Alcel, Orlando Isasa, Gladys Martinez-Lebron, Diodado Lopez, Maria Cartagena's mom and dozens of others, right? Folks who were of the community and working for the community and the fact that they were more than happy to collaborate with us so long as it was done on a basis of mutual respect, right? And that's the part that was sometimes hard for people coming from the five colleges and beyond to understand. So I wanted to name their names because before this, there were these folks who were organic intellectuals, who were thinkers and who were leaders and who were collaborating from Holyoke and from Springfield outward, okay? And happy to open the door and share a plable with folks who came to the fiesta there. I wanna also name the work that was done by people in the planners network. Folks that were Preston Smith, Diodado Lopez, also Alan Blumgarden, Irma Medina, Agustín Laomontes, Manuel Fragramos, Imre Queves, and many, many others, okay? 2002, Planners Network met in Holyoke to advance this work. Out of that, the Puerto Rican Studies Seminar that Irma and Preston were key developers of and that trained many of us who were doing this work on Puerto Rico specifically, but again, how do we engage with community-based organizations and with folks who may or may not be affiliated with those organizations? To Maria's point this morning when she was like, okay, there's the CBOs, but what about all the people who don't come to the CBO, right? I wanna also name people like Maddie and Bob Marquez, Roberto Marquez, who were among the first Latino Studies scholars and faculty in the five colleges at Mon Holyoke and who were among the first Latino folks who were doing college community connection work in the 70s and in the 80s, establishing schools in Holyoke that would serve Latino students in projects like the art school, which many of us didn't even know about, that happened, Silvia Galban, Mexicana, who was an, yes, right, bilingual educator who continued to work today, by the way, and the Carlos Vega Fund for Social Justice and the Latino Scholarship Fund, right, who have found ways to not only collaborate with organizations, but to produce projects that are mindful and thoughtful and empowering for Latinos across these different spaces. We talked about student bridges and I noted that even though it was mentioned that student bridges was founded in 2005, it wasn't mentioned that it was founded at the behest of two Puerto Rican girls from Holyoke, who were at UMass Amherst and were feeling disconnected, right, just 10 miles up the road and it's another world, right? And these two girls, one of whom was Josebuz's daughter, from San Sarengue, okay, motivated UMass to produce a project that would help to connect, provide a real pathway between UMass and the communities around UMass and then beyond UMass, the five colleges, okay? And it was out of that structure that Holyoke bound, which is now in its 10th year was born. Student bridges led that project of creating, and again, this is all in response to Carlos Vega's work, creating a one stop shopping kind of place of orientation for all the five colleges and now, thankfully, we're finally expanding beyond that to Holyoke Community College and the Springfield Colleges to introduce people, orient them to how to work respectfully in Holyoke. And all of that then goes to the kinds of work that we're doing with the public school, with the Ethnic Studies program. So there was a long history before that, working with Caraballo, working with Pais, working with DuPont, and I'm looking at Winmai because one of the things that she and I noted is that before the Ethnic Studies project between that and this was Lea. Sergio Pais pulled together a group of, what he called Latino Intellectuals, who were Wilma Flores, Sonia Niento, Jason Irizari, who's now left and gone back to Yukon, Jonathan Rosa, Vanessa Rosa's brother who was here and is now at Stanford, and myself. And we met with Sergio for three years and began the work of professional development classes with his faculty that liked the groundwork for someone like Dana, who took several of our PDs and then went on to coordinate this project. Can I correct something? He called us the scholars, remember? The scholars. We don't like that, and we change it. The Latino Educator Council. Yeah, Lea, Latino Educator's Advocating, Aguacin. So all of that is just a lot of history, but I wanted to name the names and note, and I'm sure there's stuff that I missed, that came before 1998. So I think a project for us is to begin to narrate that history and really try to flesh it out and to document it, so that people know what has come before and what's coming next, right? Principles, it's pretty straightforward, repable, right? That's the core principle that has been articulated in every one of these panels. Respect, mutual respect. Respect for ourselves, respect for others, respect for where we're coming from and where we're going. Knowledge as power and knowledge for empowerment and the basis in which knowledge is produced is being as significant as the results of the knowledge itself, right? Outcomes, and this is where I'm going to, I think, close. Well, process, pedagogy, right? Pedagogy of the oppressed, that's it, right? Consciousness raising, right? You work with people where they are and you valorize what they know, right? And in turn, they teach you something, right? Okay, so closing, I want to quote the Dalai Lama. And it's in response to the class that I just ran this week where I was walking my students who are working with the group from the high school that Dana's a part of and with five or six organizations again in Holyoke. And they came to me and they said, you know, we're really nervous here because we just had this great conversation about on the one hand how it's important that we do these internships with the organizations, that we do these field exercises that you're asking us to do and that we really put ourselves to work in response to the needs of community that we are learning from and about. And on the other hand, you're telling us that all of these structures produce the problems that the organizations are trying to respond to. So are we not contributing to the status quo by showing up to feed someone or house someone or clothe someone? That's the perennial problem, right? What is the relationship between service provision and revolution or transformation? And what I said to them is what I'm gonna leave us with a closing thought is that you have to feed and shelter and clothe people. That is just a basic fundamental human need. But what you are doing that for is what matters the most. Are you doing that in order to drug them to their oppression and make them complacent and dependent upon you? Or are you doing that so that you can empower them to stand up and fight their own battles? And if you think that your little grain of sand, as we say in the Dominican Republic, granito de arena is not gonna make a difference, remember what the Dalai Lama said. If you think you're too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito, be a mosquito.