Hopefully Hernandez

      I was about eight when my grandmother began having me study Russian after school. I vividly remember one lesson — a cloudy day during winter break, trying to make sense of a foreign alphabet in a little blue study book, and looking forward to not having school the next day. I can't remember what I was thinking that prompted me to ask, but on this day, I remember asking my grandmother a question I asked time and time again.     "Can you tell me about Baba?"     I knew the story — at least what I had thought to be the whole story, but it was so intriguing that I never grew tired of hearing my grandmother tell it again and again. Perhaps it was my way of trying to wrap my young mind around what I knew to be a difficult topic.     My grandmother would tell me every time I asked, and I could tell she loved talking about her mother. So, I sat on the floor beside her recliner and listened. She would begin by telling me about these horrible peo...

    I was brought up with a culturally colorful childhood. Russian Jews on my mother's side and Andean Colombians on my father's side. My father, being an immigrant, made Colombian culture a large part of my life, and my grandmother, being an immigrant, refused to have me be sheltered from the horrors the Holocaust cast on her family. I grew up as a small child spending an hour or two after school being taught Russian by my grandmother, and spent weekends mangling broken Spanish together with my Colombian family over Skype calls. I got to enjoy making arepas with my dad and eating tostones for lunch, and my mother's tangy borscht soup for dinner. Like I said, a very colorful childhood.     However, there's something other than joy and warmth that the multicultural individual often experiences. When I was young, I didn't exactly feel a cultural connection among my peers. Usually for show and tell or storytime, I would bring something my dad brought back from Colombia...

In March of 1776, Abigail Adams wrote her husband a letter urging him to “remember the ladies.” In drafting a new code of law for our emerging nation, John Adams had to consider the words of his wife, “...in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not push such unlimited power into the hands of husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by an y laws in which we have no voice, or representation,” (Adams, 1776). This famous piece shows that feminism has been a part of American culture since the dawn of our nation. In the centuries since Abigail Adams ’ moving words, many changes have come to pass in the benefit of women’s equality, safety, and treatment in American society. However, this and th...