Category: Student Views

Visits to two public universities in Peru over the last two summers helped deepen my understanding of the system and explore some ideas for my own research. The first summer, I began visiting the National University of San Marcos (UNMSM) to learn about historical admissions processes and search for lists of applicants and admitted students. I wanted to identify those students and follow their educational, professional and political trajectories at one of the country’s most important universities. In the summer of 2025, I once again visited UNMSM in Lima and traveled to Cusco to visit the National University of San Antonio Abad del Cusco (UNSAAC). This time, I conducted interviews with professors and student representatives to learn about their experiences and perspectives on higher-education policies such as faculty salary reforms and the processes for the hiring and promotion of professors.

Over the summer, I visited four public schools in Peru located in two regions, about 1,200 miles apart from each other. I interviewed teachers, principals and high school juniors and seniors. I wanted to discover their perspectives on perceived opportunities and barriers for students to plan for and fulfill their higher education goals. I also interviewed the superintendent at each school district to learn about local initiatives aimed at decreasing barriers to higher education transition.

On a recent trip to Havana, two fellow visitors reminded me what it feels like to encounter the Cuban city for the first time and to become enamored with its paradoxes. The first, a young Kansan woman in my Airbnb, learning that I study Cuban architecture and urbanism, expressed a familiar curiosity about the dramatic contrast between austere 19th century mansions, colonial palaces and the surrounding blocks of ruinous buildings. The second, a Berliner, shared ceviche with me on a restaurant balcony overlooking a street bustling with tourists and art vendors. He pointed out with a laugh that our utensils came from Air France first class.

“I believe we are in an exacerbated crisis of non-guarantee of women’s rights throughout the country, with the peculiar characteristic of finding ourselves in a moment of different rhetoric — of it being the time of women — because we now have the first woman president, seventy years after women gained the right to vote in this country,” said my interviewee, an organizer for a women’s rights organization in Oaxaca.

Around the halfway point of my doctoral studies, I spent a year living between Boston and Belém in the Amazon region of Brazil to experience firsthand what I had until then been researching from satellite images and other people’s accounts. Belém became my base, from which I made frequent short excursions to surrounding areas to get a feel for life in the region. After that initial experience, I planned deeper immersions that recently brought me back for two longer field trips. This is a brief narrative of one of them.

My first morning in Santiago, Chile, the city greeted me with a kaleidoscope of life. The Andes rose sharply in the distance, their peaks dusted with snow in the early Chilean winter. Street vendors sold fresh empanadas and pastel de choclo, their aromas blending with the crisp mountain air. That morning, I also met my host family, who would become my home away from home for the summer (Boston’s summer is Chile’s winter).

The young girls led me through tall wet grass along a muddy footpath to a clearing behind their house. I had recently asked to film them as part of a year-long Sensory Ethnography production course at Harvard, and I had not expected such swift acceptance into their group. The

“The past is in front of us and the future is behind us.”

This phrase, repeated by DRCLAS Mexico Student Coordinator Lorena Rodas many times across the two months I spent in Mexico, transcends time

In my grandmother’s foyer in Guatemala City sits a massive round table of solid mahogany, its lion-shaped feet gripping the rug like it’s been there forever. I grew up admiring it, running my hands along the carved details and pondering the skill required to make it.

What does it mean to be eena dem saal?
I asked my mother who referred me to my grandmother who referred me to my great grandmother.
“Eena dem saal?… Mi neva hear dat one before,” my great grandmother told me.

In rural communities in the United States, it takes an average of 34 minutes to reach the nearest hospital. In rural Haiti, the average is two hours. Infectious diseases including tuberculosis, cholera and HIV/AIDS go untreated due to the lack of basic healthcare infrastructure and the violence disrupting the provision of health services.

On February 28th, the Moses Mesoamerican Archive and Research Project held the inaugural Nahuatl Workshop “Yoltajtol, A Word from the Heart.” The workshop had the twofold goal of offering an introduction to the Nahuatl language and showing to the participants that Nahuatl is a constitutive part of present-day indigenous peoples’ worldview.

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One of the simplest yet most effective ways of saving a life in the case of sudden cardiac arrest is cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). It’s an accessible procedure to be trained on, as almost anyone of any age can learn it. Knowing this, and that performing CPR right after cardiac arrest increases survival chances two to three times, why hasn’t everyone been trained on CPR at some point in their lives? (American Heart Association).

The moment I stepped foot back on the island, I was no longer the 14-year-old boy who once proudly wore his school uniform to Wolmer’s Boys High School—the oldest school in the Caribbean—and to Maranatha Gospel Hall, my local church. I had become something else entirely in the eyes of the state: a criminal. An illegal presence.

I write these words not based on my experience from a distant field site in another country but from clinics and community spaces in our neighborhoods in Massachusetts and long video calls—spaces where I’ve had the privilege of listening.

Rabinal Achi’ and Las Guacamayas are among the oldest dances in Guatemala, whose origins date back to before the Spanish conquest.

In November 2021, Samantha Power, the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), presented the agency’s “New Vision for Global Development” to the audience at Georgetown University.

For undergraduate students at Harvard, the completion of a senior thesis represents the culmination of years of academic exploration and for me, this journey was particularly memorable as it helped me combine my passion for law and politics with my personal connection to Latin America.

As I walked into the sweeping courtyard of the Autonomous University of San Luis Potosí (UASLP) in Mexico, flanked by its grand stone pillars, I knew that EAAMO’24 was going to be unlike any other academic conference I had ever attended.