Listening to more than salsa: A letter of appreciation to Dr. Frances R. Aparicio
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istening to more than salsa: A letter of appreciation to Dr. Frances R. Aparicio Wilson Valentín‑Escobar1 Published online: 23 April 2020 © Springer Nature Limited 2020
Dear Frances R. Aparicio, I’ve been invited—likely because of your recommendation—to offer some reflections on the importance of your scholarship to my work. As cultural studies scholars, you and I share numerous interests and perspectives on music, gender, and identity. My scholarly interest in Latinx music, specifically salsa, first developed in 1993, when I arrived in Ann Abor, Michigan, and enrolled in your Latino music class. Since that meeting, more than twenty-five years ago, you have been a steadfast ally, mentor, and supporter of my intellectual maturation. During this time, you have also been a prolific scholar, a remarkable role model, a consistently supportive friend, an excellent mentor to many others, an unwavering critic of social injustice, and a consistent voice for engaging with communities beyond the academy. I owe many of my professional accomplishments to your excellent guidance. Completing my dissertation would have been impossible without your commitment and your belief in my ability. For me, you challenged the deficit model so often imposed on working-class students and students of color. Others invited to this symposium will discuss your role as a scholar of Latinx studies. Of course, your prominence in the field is unchallenged. Symposium participants have also been invited to showcase our scholarship, to demonstrate your intellectual influence. Rather than focus on my work, however, I prefer to reflect on your invisible labor. I want to showcase your work as a mentor, an administrative visionary, and a scholar who understands community engagement not as “old school” social work but as a central component of ethnic studies. Mentoring requires a set of listening skills similar to the way we listen to salsa music. It requires capturing the nuances and silences between words and notes and understanding timing in an unexplored, often improvised, journey of discovery. I frame my comments here as a letter to you, but as I interweave narrative and analysis, I also argue that you are The following letter was presented at the Celebrating the Career of Frances Aparicio Symposium at Northwestern University on December 7, 2018. * Wilson Valentín‑Escobar [email protected] 1
University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, MA, USA Vol.:(0123456789)
270 W. Valentín‑Escobar
one badass boricua woman who works tirelessly to transform students, the academy, and the fields of Latinx and cultural studies. My letter is thus a testimonio to your impact on my teaching, scholarship, and academic orientation, which I share with so many of your graduate students.
Listening as learning For you, teaching, mentoring, scholarship, and community engagement are a seamless enterprise, and you do all this work while being a mother, grandmother, partner, and activist. Because these responsibilities appear seamless for you, I want to highlight t
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