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UTEP Students Stand Up for Gender Equality at Uruguay Conference

Last Updated on February 06, 2018 at 12:00 AM

Originally published February 06, 2018

By Laura L. Acosta

UTEP Communications

As a Panamanian woman educated in the United States, UTEP social work graduate student Julissa Corona has always felt a strong connection to the country where she was born, and the country where she has lived since she was 16 years old.

UTEP students and faculty, including Yvette Belinda Díaz and Associate Professor Eva Moya, Ph.D., (standing left, foreground), Julissa Corona and Patricia O. Carret (kneeling center) and Liliana Gomez (standing right, foreground) pose with other participants at the 14th Feminist Conference of Latin America and the Caribbean in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 2017. Photo courtesy of Eva Moya.
UTEP students and faculty, including Yvette Belinda Díaz and Associate Professor Eva Moya, Ph.D., (standing left, foreground), Julissa Corona and Patricia O. Carret (kneeling center) and Liliana Gomez (standing right, foreground) pose with other participants at the 14th Feminist Conference of Latin America and the Caribbean in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 2017. Photo courtesy of Eva Moya.

In 2003, Corona’s parents sent her from La Chorrera, Panama, to live with her aunt in San Antonio, Texas, where she dreamed of going to college. Corona learned English from watching television. After high school, she enrolled in cosmetology school while waiting to become a U.S. permanent resident. With support from scholarships and military spouse education benefits, Corona attended Methodist University in Fayetteville, North Carolina. She graduated in 2014 with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology.

“With the help of many others, I overcame poverty, injustice and the lack of opportunities,” said Corona, who expects to graduate in May 2018 from the UTEP Master of Social Work program. “I had tremendous opportunities that changed my life, and I hope to give back to others.”

Corona shared her story with other women who overcame similar challenges at the 14th Feminist Conference of Latin America and the Caribbean (EFLAC) in Montevideo, Uruguay, in late 2017.

Corona and three other students from The University of Texas at El Paso – Patricia O. Carret, Liliana Gomez and Yvette Belinda Díaz – met female scholars and activists from Argentina, Peru, Haiti, the U.S., Mexico and other Latin American and Caribbean countries who shared their views on gender, identity, migration and nationality.

“I went to Montevideo thinking, ‘I’m going to gather new skills and I’m going to learn as much as I can about feminism, defending women’s rights and fighting for social equality,’” Corona said. She plans to apply the knowledge from the conference when she travels to New York City in March 2018 to participate in the Practicum in Advocacy at the 62nd session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. “It was really neat to get together with individuals from all over and hear them talk about their perspectives.”

Empowered Voices

Held every three years, EFLAC is a venue where community, academic and policy leaders convene to strategize about how to advance the gender equality agenda in the region and globally.

The UTEP delegation, which included undergraduate and graduate students from social work, nursing, sociology and linguistics, led a two-hour Conversatoria, or structured dialogue, with 35 feminists from Panama, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Honduras, Nicaragua, Spain, the U.S. and Mexico on the complexities faced by U.S.-Mexico border residents regarding identity.

They discussed the realities of people who cross the U.S.-Mexico border from the perspective of intersectionality, gender, identity and migration under the theme of Diversity, Autonomy and Power.

“Each of these students talked about their life journeys and how they have either dealt or lived with migration or mobility and how it has impacted their respective lives,” said Eva Moya, Ph.D., associate professor and interim chair of social work at UTEP, who accompanied the students to the conference. “They also talked about their core values around feminism and the areas that they are most passionate about, which range from reproductive justice to abortion, to the rights of LGBTQI youth and adults.”

Nursing student Patricia O. Carret was born in El Paso but was raised in Veracruz, Mexico. Despite being born in the U.S., Carret talked about how she considered herself to be completely Mexican for most of her life. She didn’t begin to identify as Mexican-American, Latina or feminist until she moved to El Paso at 18 years old and took classes in sociology and women’s and gender studies at UTEP.

“You create your identity based on your gender, based on your values, based on where you come from, so we tried to present that to the people attending the Conversatoria, but we also wanted to hear where they were coming from, their path and their experience” said Carret, who also holds a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from UTEP.

Social Transformation 

The students were invited to present at the conference by Lopa Banerjee and Ines Esteban Gonzalez of the United Nations Women's Civil Society section.

Banerjee, the UN section’s chief, came to UTEP in April 2017 to talk about the need for young people's activism for gender equality. During her visit, she said that students at universities like UTEP, which are located along the U.S. border and deal with different issues, such as culture, justice, peace, race and gender, are key to bringing about social transformation.

“We see working with young people and educational systems as crucial to our work because our work is about transformation,” Banerjee said. “Gender equality is not only about the rights of women and girls, gender equality is about social transformation. It cuts across so many different issues.”

Attending EFLAC changed Liliana Gomez’ plans for her future. Gomez, who will earn a bachelor’s degree in linguistics in May 2018, planned to become a speech therapist. 

But while preparing for the conference, she realized that she would be better suited for a career that combined her passion for reproductive justice and women’s rights. Gomez plans to pursue a graduate degree in human rights advocacy or women’s and gender studies, rather than in speech language pathology.

“I learned that I need to get out of my bubble and look at feminist issues not just on a local or state or national level, but to look at it from a global level,” Gomez said.

At the conference, sociology graduate student Yvette Belinda Díaz realized that despite differences in culture or socioeconomic status, all women are united in the struggle to achieve equality and dignity.

She has been inspired to create a nonprofit organization that helps to advance the rights of women on both sides of the El Paso-Juárez border.

“What came out of this conference is you want to continue working on women’s issues,” said Díaz, who has a bachelor’s degree in interdisciplinary studies and a master’s in special education from UTEP. “You want to continue feeling connected to these women you met and you feel an obligation to do something.”

The students and Moya will talk about the conference during the College of Health Sciences’ Healthy Exchange Lecture Series at 12:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 21, in the Health Sciences and Nursing Building, room 211. The presentation is free and open to the public.