Elon University’s Latinx/Hispanic student center, El Centro, celebrated their value of “mi comunidad” with the release of its zine, “Perspectivas.”
“Perspectivas,” is a zine published on a semesterly basis that gives a space for Latinx/Hispanic-identifying students the opportunity to publish their art. The first edition of the magazine was released last fall and was created and supervised by junior Leslie Aviles. This edition is centered around the value of “mi comunidad,” one of El Centro’s core values that can be found on their website
El Centro student coordinators, freshman Camila Montoya Posada and sophomore Nicole Castillo, took on the role of editing and putting together the magazine for this semester’s edition.
Montoya Posada said that the idea of the zine came from El Centro student coordinator, Leslie Aviles, who is currently studying abroad.
“She had this idea that there are other organizations on campus that have magazines and have all these projects,” Montoya Posada said. “El Centro never really had something like that tailored toward Hispanic voices and artists and designers and writers.”
While Montoya Posada and Castillo supervised the creation of ‘Perspectivas’ they, along with other El Centro student coordinators, had the opportunity to add in their own art.
“We designed things, we wrote our articles, and for the most part it’s all of the SCs from El Centro working on it together,” Castillo said
Both coordinators said readers will be able to find a wide variety of art in ‘Perspectivas.’
“It's a place for artists, writers, poets, photographers and designers to put their art somewhere,” Castillo said. “You'll be able to find articles about personal stories, articles about something that's going on around Latin America, poetry, different recipes and jokes.”
This edition of ‘Perspectivas’ is also centered around the theme of community.
“The writers have that free range of writing or expressing however they feel their community is,” said Montoya Posada.
Montoya Posada and Castillo also talked about how there is such a wide diversity of stories from the writers of ‘Perspectivas’ ranging from love to immigration stories. There are also stories that touch on themes of having multiple identities and being multicultural.
‘Perspectivas’ was released during El Centro’s Cafe Con Leche with Friends, an event where all students can grab coffee, latin pastries, and sing karaoke. The event was overseen by MJ Larrazabal, assistant director of the Center for Race, Ethnicity and Diversity Education.
“We decided to release the zine because we want to showcase it to not just our community, but to everybody else,” Larrazabal said. “We want to do that in the community, we want to do that with food, that's very important to us in our culture, with coffee, with singing.”
Larrazabal and the rest of El Centro also hopes to grow ‘Perspectivas’ in the future.
“I'm happy that it's out and I'm already planning for the next semester,” Larrazabal said. “I want to make it bigger and better, last semester it was about 20 pages, now it's 48 and I can’t imagine what's gonna be next semester, but clearly there's a need for this space.”