Conflict begets growth. Self-reflection can function as one of the most intense internal conflicts. The struggle of facing a mirror forces us to grow into who we will become since we face where we are now and have been. My lived experience allows me to understand how structures of privilege and marginalization have intersected on my body and affected my personal and professional journey. Through my diversity and inclusion statement, I hope to discuss how different facets of my identity have informed my experiences and affect my understanding of diversity, equity, and inclusion in libraries.
An integral aspect of my identity comes from my ethnicity. I identify as a Hispanic individual of mixed race. But more specifically, my ambiguous complexion (the product of my Colombian mother and Scotch-Irish father) continually affects my identity and how I position myself within my environment and culture. Especially in regards to language. Spanish was never spoken in my house and therefore my verbal ability is lacking. Moreover, when surrounded by my Colombian family I feel my outsiderness is even more. Framing myself as being of two parts, but never perceiving myself as fully whole.
My identity has impacted my academic/library/career journey in profound, fundamental, and transformative ways. The first time I felt the weight of my mixed ethnicity in higher education came as an undergrad. My ambiguous complexion enabled me to witness how easily erasure happens when no one thinks a person of color is present. My history cohort was 85% White, 6% Hispanic, and 4% African American. I experienced classmates, unaware of my identity, question the importance of engaging with history outside of a “great white men” narrative. Even a faculty member told me I should not trust oral histories of people of color because, as he stated, “they are not real sources of material culture.” This event deeply affected the rest of my academic career and highlighted the critical work that needs to be done to dismantle barriers in all levels of education. As a graduate student in the Folklore Program at UNC-Chapel Hill, I recorded oral histories with African American Blues musicians that now reside in the Southern Oral History Project archive. My work focused on the intersection of the lived experience of black musicians, Southern landscapes, and memory. My research culminated in my thesis entitled, “Birthplace of the Blues?: Dockery Farms, The Mythic South, and the Erasure of the African American Lived Experience in Mississippi Blues Tourism.” (1)
These experiences led me to realize that engagement with diverse individuals and communities is the future of libraries. As a historian, I have witnessed how implicit and sometimes explicit biases affect what society valued as historical. Past generations of historians and archivists muted the voices of disenfranchised groups, removing key narratives from historical texts. As a folklorist, I have explored the essential relationship between cultural lived experiences and historical narratives. Learning from the past, I believe that libraries can be at the forefront of fortifying the preservation of cultural lived experiences within our historical legacies. To amend the past, librarians must work collaboratively with a myriad of disciplines to create effective means of accessibility. Given the tools that have grown out of new strides in social and cultural history and cultural criticism, future librarians will better appraise, describe, preserve, interpret, and provide significant access to the massive amount of information and material generated by diverse communities today.
Intersecting cultural lived experience and expressive culture have been the thematic focus of my academic career. Libraries and archives were invaluable resources for my work. Now, I want to take part in the preservation and uplifting of cultural legacies. Using diversity, equity, and inclusion as a constant lens I hope to help dismantle structures of inequality wherever I end up working.
Endnotes:
(1) As talked about in class, I continue to deal with issues of identity inadequacies within higher education. Specifically, to paraphrase a classmate, I didn't look brown enough to change the white complexion of a class and the overall information science field.