SPAN 495
Course description: Through the completion of a community project, students will demonstrate that they have actively immersed themselves in authentic Hispanic cultural and linguistic environments and have internalized the language and cultural experience, from which they have developed personal understanding and new perspectives of Hispanic communities. This course is taught in Spanish.
Meets MLO 5
Meets MLO 5
Reflective Narrative
In SPAN 495, I had the opportunity to connect the topics that I have analyzed in my literature classes with the experiences and opinions of members of my Hispanic community. In this course, Dr. Christine Fernández prepared us to open a conversation about topics that we previously discussed in other courses with two members of our Hispanic community through interviews. To carry out this project, we had to take into account the culture, values and ideals of our community and ourselves. Therefore, during the first weeks, we reflected on what we personally consider to be the most important values to live in society. In my case, I decided that respect and empathy are needed to understand the perspectives and life experiences of others. Then, we had to choose a topic, based on past readings, that was not talked about much in our Hispanic/Latinx community, or that there were not many records of those conversations. So I decided to speak about prostitution and the perspective that my community has on women who engage in voluntarily prostitution. With my topic in mind, I structured the interview questions around the opinion of two women of Hispanic descent from different generations, asking about their culture and religion to see if that was part of their perspective on female prostitutes. I must say that the answers I received were partly what I expected, in relation to the freedom of a woman to decide what to do with her body. But I was also surprised that both interviewees recognized that it is difficult to be totally in favor of voluntary prostitution, since in any case it is a practice that objectifies women and puts them in a place of vulnerability and danger. In the end, with the information and the new perspectives that I was able to obtain, I wrote a reflection on this subject with which I hope I can return to read it in the future to see if things have changed or improved regarding the perception of prostitutes in the conservative society in which we live. With this experience, I am glad to have opened the conversation about prostitution, and I would like to continue talking about it in favor of women's freedom of choice.