Interview With Dr. Ginetta Candelario

Abstract

Journal of Critical Thought and Praxis has traditionally published interviews with individuals who have strong connections to our special issue topics. We believe that interviews are important ways to contribute to the conversation surrounding critical issues in social justice. This interview features Dr. Ginetta Candelario, whose recent visit to Iowa State University offered the opportunity for the editorial team to discuss her research and interests in Latinx Studies. Q. What drives you to do work surrounding Dominican history, activism, identity, and society? Where did it start for you and why is this work so important to you? Then, last part of that question, what's the most rewarding part of your work about Latinx populations? These answers could become a book. Like all academics, we end up studying ourselves; that's really what we all do. I think that's the case even for natural scientists, that if you explore fully enough their biography you come to find that there's usually some kind of biographical relationship between their intellectual pursuits and their professional pursuits and their life story. It's usually more obvious for humanists and social scientists, but nonetheless I think it's true fairly universally. In my case, it's not so much as what as who, which was my mother. My mother began her experience in the US not as an immigrant but as an exile. She was a political exile of the Trujillo regime and at some point, returned to the DR after I was born, with me as a baby, and then immigrated and became an immigrant into US society in the early '70s and remained in the United States, as I said in my talk last night, altogether for 53 years. She came as a 22-yearold, so really the bulk of her life was lived primarily in the US. But part of the experience of entering the United states in 1960, in fact the anniversary of her entry, October 10th, is coming up next week, was that she left a society that not only was a dictatorship, but it was a particularly closed society. Again, one of the things I mentioned in my talk last night was that in 1960 when she came there were fewer than 10,000 Dominicans outside of the Dominican Republic, period, anywhere in the world outside the DR, which is astounding when you consider that there were 4 million Dominicans at the time. That containment was part of the process of the dictatorship. That meant that it was a total institution. Orlando Patterson saw that the media, the school system, public