Language is the heart that pumps blood through our communicative bodies. Some of us have multiple languages that help form us, like squids and octopuses that have multiple hearts. While there’s always the primary heart that seemingly does the majority of the work, the other hearts are just as essential to live. Like our hearts and everything else that goes on in our bodies, we take language for granted.
In these past months of working with The Humanities Collaborative at EPCC-UTEP I have been able to experience different forms of literature along with being able to share literature with others. In working with Collaborative Faculty Fellow Professor Jorge Gomez, I have met people and, more specifically, faculty at EPCC that share the same passions I have in discussing literature, literacy, and showing people the power of their voice in a border city.
Two researchers at The University of Texas at El Paso are searching for glimpses of movements that can be difficult to discern and in doing so, they are reconstructing the ways that the humanities and the sciences once worked together to reveal new truths. As part of their search for paratextual verse in early modern printed books, J. J. Martinez and Andrew Fleck are focusing on the rare astronomical event known as a transit of Mercury.
In what ways can the 200-year-old poetry of William Wordsworth speak to school children in El Paso, Texas, today—and how can the children of our El Paso community help enrich the understanding of Wordsworth’s humanistic legacy for scholars, artists, educators, and community groups in both the West Texas borderlands and Wordsworth’s native England?
Just ask Jeff Cowton, Curator and Head of Learning at the Wordsworth Trust library in Grasmere, Cumbria.
Media denouncing Mexicans as criminals and permanently un-American. White vigilantes, stirred by such rhetoric, using violence to “take matters into their own hands” and punish the Mexican community for perceived transgressions.
Sadly, this narrative is true both of today and in the past.