Category: Culture

Campus, Culture, Lifestyle & Culture

¿Cómo se Dice? How Do You Say it? – A space to express yourself through Spanish

By Cynthia Ntinunu

The flyer for ¿Cómo se Dice? How Do You Say it?, which is held biweekly. (CMASS website)

On Wednesday Feb. 20, five Latinx students sat at a table in the Latinx American Cultural Center admiring how fast El Alfa rapped in Spanish in his music video “Mi Mami” at the first ¿Cómo se Dice? How Do You Say it? event of the semester.

“I want to speak Spanish like him,” Yanni Cabrera, English major, said as she and the four other attendees watched the video.

Held every spring semester, ¿Cómo se Dice? How Do You Say it? is a biweekly event hosted by the LACC to give a space for Latinx students and all people to come speak in Spanish. No matter what skill level of Spanish you are at, the doors are open for you.

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Art, Campus, Culture, Lifestyle & Culture

UMass printmaking professor uses her art and teaching to showcase her journey as an Afro-Cuban migrant growing up in America

By Isha Mahajan

Juana Valdes, printmaking professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, acknowledges that students and faculty of color deserve a platform and a community that makes them comfortable and creates a space where students can get together to share ideas and beliefs.

“Often times, there is not enough importance put to these situations and these issues are not addressed as quickly as they need to be addressed,” Valdes said.

Valdes recalls gravitating towards making art as a junior in high school, when she was put in various creative classes. She now sees it as an opportunity to express her perception of the world.

“As a woman, as a woman of color and as an immigrant, I feel that I’m at an intersection of a lot of discriminations and push-backs of my ideas and beliefs, so I have decided to use my work as a vehicle to communicate what it’s likes to be in my position.”

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Culture, Lifestyle & Culture

“If Beale Street Could Talk” film review: A “radical project of black love”

By Ethan Bakuli

(Warning: Light spoilers ahead)

University of Massachusetts Amherst faculty, students and community members were in full attendance Sunday evening for a special film screening of If Beale Street Could Talk, hosted by the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies in partnership with local movie theater Amherst Cinema.

Afro-American Studies department chair Stephanie Shonekan introduced the evening’s screening, anticipating that Barry Jenkins’s (director of Moonlight and Medicine for Melancholy) film adaptation of the 1974 novel by James Baldwin would allow present-day audiences to “pause and think about what messages [Baldwin] is still sending us decades later.”

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Culture, Lifestyle & Culture, Multimedia, Photos

Natural Hair Care Fair (photo series)
By Cynthia Ntinunu

On Saturday Oct. 27th at 11am Smith College held a natural hair care fair. This event was dedicated to people with natural hair or those interested in it. There were various tables that featured products, arts and crafts, and tables teaching people how to do different hair styles. Attendees were able to see instructors teach how to do box braids, wigs, twists, and flexi rod sets. Alongside this there were people selling their products like shea butter and jewelry. Also, the company Curls sponsored the event by giving out “free products.

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Attendees gather around to see the various stations.
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