HOME RUN! An inside look into Perla Herrera’s softball team

Most college students spend their time cramming for midterms and finals, with little time to keep their heads out of the textbooks. Many of us struggle to find time to enjoy the luxury of attending a yoga class or reading for pleasure. These hobbies that we enjoy on our downtime seem impossible to make time for. However, Parsons student Perla Herrera finds time for her own personal interest – sports, more specifically, softball. Other than her ability to exceed on the field and find humor in tough situations, her personal goal is to learn new ways to deal with individuals personalities that differ greatly from her own.

HEOP Lang Student Edward Lee- In His Own Words and Images

Hi, my name is Edward Lee, a psychology student at Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts. I am someone who is influenced by spirituality, tarot, philosophy, martial arts, and poetry. I take these interests with me anywhere and everywhere. For me, these interests are the basis of getting deeply in touch with my personal emotions and expressing them through words and motion.

When I draw or create artwork, I am inspired by the knowledge I have acquired from The New School. I am inspired by Sigmund Freud’s and Carl Jung’s psycho-analysis of the sub-conscious through dream interpretation. I am also inspired by theology and teleology, specifically on the question of human morals and ethics and how they relate to our influences by God and religious beliefs. Religious symbolism and the intrinsic nature of human existence are subjects I like to question myself and my peers. Other things that inspires me are my own experiences as a human being and my interaction with others. I am inspired by my own emotions and how they affect me.

Some artists that inspire me are Salvador Dali, Francis Bacon, Max Ernst, Rene Magritte, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Claude Monet, Emile Bernard, and Vincent Van Gogh.

Waiting on a trip to the promised land by Edward Lee

Emotional Hand by Edward Lee

HEOP Parsons Photo Student Nicole Vega Featured On Intern-Mag.com!

Nicole’s work often touches on themes of identity, primarily sexuality, gender and race. As a native New Yorker and a first generation American Dominican, her conceptual work often speaks about the issues she has been confronted with her entire life. “There’s been this new focus on young, ‘feminist’ female artists in the art and fashion worlds, but just like in the second-wave movement, the voices of women of color or lower classes are excluded and not paid attention to” she tells us. “I want to make work for our generation of ‘interns’ and the ones to come that transcends this institutional practice and expands the discourse on issues that affect me and my peers”.

http://intern-mag.com/nicole-vega/

Examining Haitian-Dominican Relations by Danilsa Alvarez

This summer I was offered the opportunity to work with an organization called Hope for Haiti, an NGO whose aim is to empower and educate Haitian people to make positive changes in the political and economic realities affecting their nation. Through the organization, I spent 2 weeks in Haiti, during which time I became even more assured of the career path I want to take and the reasons behind it.

Throughout my time in Haiti, I worked as an English tutor for underprivileged Haitian children in the city of Port Au Prince, one of the areas most deeply devastated by the 2010 earthquake. Although I do not speak the Haitian Creole language, a fact that I believed would place a barrier to effective communication between my students and I,, to my surprise, a considerable number of them understood and spoke Spanish (my first language). When I inquired into this, unsurprisingly, the stories I was told overlapped and took on very similar tones. These children were the sons and daughters of Haitian migrant workers in the Dominican Republic. They were born on the other side of the border, where they lived and attended school until they and their parents were forcefully deported.

In 2013, the Dominican Supreme court ruled that Haitians living in the Dominican Republic would be deprived of Dominican citizenship unless they could prove that they posses Dominican ancestry. This ruling led to the biggest case of stateless people in modern history, with over half a million people affected and force deportations occurring on a daily basis. Although currently, due to international pressures, the Dominican government as it claims, is aiming to solve the legal status of these people, my experience in Haiti made me question this initiative. When I questioned my student’s parents on whether or not any progress had been made to legalize the status of their children as Dominican citizens the answers were always no. They had talked to lawyers and representatives appointed by the Dominican state to handle this issue several months back, and had not received any information regarding the status of their case since. This situation reflects in great lengths the history of violence and struggle between the two nations, as well as the island’s colonial past and its consequences on what today makes up the Dominican and Haitian national identities. Racism plays a key role in this struggle, and is a problem that has been naturalized in Dominican society to the point where racism against Haitians in the country hardly receives the attention it deserves.

There are currently over a million Haitians living in the Dominican Republic, an outstanding number considering the nation’s population consists of a total of 10 million. Our proximity and our shared history make good communication and diplomacy between our people and our governments’ imperative. My experience in Haiti made me realize that there is a desperate need for a platform in which Dominican and Haitians can discuss these issues openly, and where Haitian workers and their descendants living in the Dominican Republic can receive the assistance that they need. My interest in human rights and activist work has influenced my decision to one day create my own NGO and in this way establish such a platform. I want to provide some of the tools by which Dominican-Haitian relations can one day hopefully change for the better and leave behind the history that has tainted it.