Letter From the Editor: Latino Heritage Month

Nick Cimillo ’26

Managing Editor

The Tripod team is excited to once again begin publishing special editions highlighting marginalized communities on campus after a year-long hiatus. This week, we have for you our first ever edition Latino Heritage Month edition, complete with an insert of articles about events put on by Trinity’s Hispanic/Latino identity organization, La Voz Latina (LVL), as well as a feature on the coordinator for their cultural house, La Eracra. 

Providing a platform for these identities is especially important in a place like Hartford, a city whose population has the largest percentage of Hispanic/Latino people in all of Connecticut. Not that this statistic is needed to understand how deeply Hispanic/Latino identity runs in our capital city; whether you were out celebrating at the National Puerto Rican Day Parade in Bushnell Park last month (frequently touted as the largest of its kind in the New England region) or frequent Hartford’s numerous Hispanic/Latino restaurants (American Mexican Diner, my love), that much should be abundantly clear. And if we want the articles in today’s insert to demonstrate anything, it’s that these cultures are as present and relevant on our campus as they are in the city beyond it.

On a more personal note, I was interested to find myself in such a place when I was a first-year. I’m of Puerto Rican descent, but was raised in a largely white New Jersey suburb nestled between two massive Puerto Rican communities—those in Newark and New York City. Beyond my maternal family, I never really had much interaction with other Puerto Rican folks, but coming to Trinity and Hartford has afforded me so many opportunities to learn about my culture, whether it was getting to take a class on the island’s history of colonization, trying out mofongo from restaurants across Hartford or just bonding with other students over our shared heritage. 

While I was happy to engage with Puerto Rican culture more in this way, a more general insight I’ve gained is that of the vast plurality that Hispanic/Latino identity encompasses. This starts with the two central terms used to define the demographic: despite being used interchangeably, “Hispanic” and “Latino,” of course, mean two slightly different things, each term encompassing different linguistic backgrounds and areas of the world. As easy as it feels to lump such diverse identities into a single broad category, it’s important to understand that there are many different ways to belong to this demographic, not only in the sense that it’s possible to be both Hispanic and Latino, but also how those ethnicities intersect with race, gender identity and sexual orientation. With this Latino Heritage Month edition, and all our subsequent special editions to follow (continuing with a Pride edition next week!), the Tripod’s mission of delivering quality reporting to the people of Trinity emphasizes coverage of everyone in our diverse community, no matter their demographics or how they identify. But more importantly, this objective hasn’t started with our special editions, and it won’t end with them either.

– NDC