From its debut, the course has been a success. As one student told Harrington, “I found the liberal arts in one department.” Taught entirely in Spanish, “Hispanic Hartford” is intended as a mechanism for discovering and theorizing about contemporary urban life in the United States, while also serving as another medium to advance Trinity’s already productive connections with the city’s Hispanic communities. Students meet local leaders andstudy the community from a host of perspectives, investigating, as Harrington puts it, “questions of cultural integration that are discussed in the class.”

Video, podcasts, blogging

Each session of “Hispanic Hartford” involves both individual student projects and a single large project, within the community, that unites the course’s myriad threads. Since the course is taught by different professors, the large project varies from semester to semester.

This spring, Harrington challenged his students to tackle the course assignment with electronic technologies he’s been using increasingly since he produced a series of podcasts on Catalan culture and broadcast them via the Transatlantic Radio Network two years ago. While classwork focused on a wide range of social issues uniquely impacting the Hispanic community, teams of students took to the streets to conduct audio and video interviews with both local Hispanic leaders and people on the street. “This class really pushed me into the community,” says Cristina Wheeler Castillo ’10, a senior international health studies and neuroscience major from Oxnard, California. In partnership with another student, Denisa Jashari, Wheeler Castillo interviewed Frog Hollow and Parkville residents to explore the impact of controversial Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids that took place in 2007.

To read transcripts of student interviews with residents of Hartford’s Parkville and Frog Hollow neighborhoods, go to www.hispanichartford.org. Shown here is Luis Cotto, a member of the Hartford City Council

“The raids tore some families apart,” says Wheeler Castillo. “There was constant fear among many immigrant groups.”

Wheeler Castillo and Jashari interviewed both community activists and people who knew families affected by the raids. By interviewing residents with firsthand knowledge of what happened, they hoped to be able to juxtapose those reports against the rhetoric of politicians whose “spin” on the raids was more positive.

“Many people were reluctant to be interviewed,” she says. “Because many immigrants live in fear, it’s difficult to find them, let alone educate them about their legal rights and what to do in the event of a raid. People have rights, even if they don’t have documentation.”

Harrington’s students wrote a blog where transcripts of their interviews are posted. The exercise served multiple purposes, affording students opportunities to employ cutting-edge communications tools while simultaneously creating another mechanism to encourage residents of the neighborhood surrounding the College, fewer than 10 percent of whom have personal access to the Internet, to take advantage of Trinfo Café.

For a final project, the students synthesized audio and video images into a series of podcasts, using TrinfoCafé facilities and equipment. Wheeler Castillo, who produced DVDs of her podcast for distribution in the neighborhoods where she conducted interviews, says the class was an eyeopener. “It taught me a lot about the experience of new immigrants and the obstacles they often encounter,” she said, adding that it was also good training for her current job. With a coveted fellowship to the National Institute of Mental Health, in Bethesda, Maryland, she will spend the next year, before medical school, working with Hispanic populations in clinical trials related to depression and bipolar disorder.