An Introduction

I am a junior at a Pasadena independent school. In ninth grade, I travelled to Jinotega, Nicaragua with peers and faculty through Outreach360, which I wrote about here. Since then, I have become invested in community engagement here in Los Angeles and deliberately worked to improve my Spanish-speaking ability, achieving what I like to think of as a nearly conversational—though certainly not fluent—degree of understanding. Last year, I took a class offered by the Global Online Academy, with which my school has an established relationship, called Comparative Politics. This semester, I am enrolled in Globalization and Human Rights, an elective that delves into the effect of our increasingly interconnected world on the liberty of the global citizen as well as the moral and political responsibilities of sovereign nations in dealing with violations of human rights. I have worked with Reading Partners, a national literacy nonprofit, for the last three years. Though not directly linked to global communities, many of the schools in which Reading Partners operates have first-generation American students or students whose first languages are not English. Thus, this organization stands at the intersection of my commitment to community outreach and my love for the Spanish language. This past semester, I wrote a history paper on the practice of housing discrimination and land seizure in mid-twentieth century Los Angeles, a city that is a product of pre-Columbian, Spanish, and American history. The effects of redlining and eminent domain can still be seen today in the ethnic composition of various parts of Los Angeles and their respective economic fortunes—or plight. For my capstone project, it would be immensely gratifying to expand on the work and research I did earlier this year, through interviews, many of which might be conducted in Spanish, and community engagement, to link the explicit discrimination of our past to the manifestation of that oppression in Los Angeles’s modern global communities.