Faculty Voices

With this new website section, the Center for Caribbean Studies (CCS) plans to begin to highlight members of our campus community who advance the study of the Caribbean in their research and teaching.

We start this series with Professor Aponte Avilés, Senior Lecturer and Language Coordinator in Language and Culture Studies, who has worked at Trinity College since 2014. This blog is a summary of an interview conducted with Professor Aponte Avilés in spring 2024 by CCS student research assistant, Jackeline García Alvarado (Class of 2027).

Photograph by Paola Evangelista (Class of 2026)

Professor Aponte Avilés’s academic journey began in Puerto Rico, where she earned her undergraduate degree in Biology and pursued graduate studies in Microbiology. However, her passion for literature and comics significantly shifted her academic focus. She transitioned to Hispanic Studies at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez Campus, and later completed her PhD at the University of Connecticut in 2018.

 At Trinity, Professor Aponte Avilés has sought to enhance language learning by incorporating cultural connections, games, and community awareness into her teaching methods. Her role has expanded beyond classroom teaching to serving as the co-director of the Blume Language and Culture Learning Center.
Aponte Avilés’s personal connections to the Caribbean significantly influence her academic and professional trajectory. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, she brings a rich, firsthand perspective to her work. She had the opportunity to teach a course on Latinos in the US at the University of Connecticut which allowed her to build her understanding of the broader cultural and historical contexts of Caribbean culture within diaspora contexts.

Professor Aponte Avilés currenly teaches “Hispanic Hartford”, a course that delves into the understanding of Hartford’s large and diverse set of Spanish-speaking communities. As she explained in our interview, “When you think of Hispanic Hartford, you have to think of the Caribbean community and the Latin American community in general”.
One of her notable campus projects is “Voces de la Migración” (Voices of Migration), an oral history initiative documenting the experiences of the Latin American community in Hartford. The archival project represents a collaboration with Christina Bleyer from the Watkinson Library, Erica M. Crowley from the Center for Hartford Engagement and Research, and the staff at the Hartford Public Library.

Professor Aponte-Avilés asserted that, “We created it in such a way that anybody from the community or anybody around the world can just go in, check it out, listen to their conversations…it could be a way for people to understand how Hartford has evolved, how Hartford has changed, how the Latin-American community has reshaped the city”. When asked about her advice to students interested in Caribbean and Latin American studies, Professor Aponte Avilés encourages students to move beyond textbooks and classroom lessons with travel. She emphasized that “You cannot learn about Latin America without having the experience of being in Latin America. So, dare to, if you have the chance, and there’s a possibility, go to Cuba, go to Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Chile, Ecuador…Go beyond what you learn in class. What you learn in class is just the beginning. The rest is out there.”

Looking forward, Professor Aponte Avilés is excited about her ongoing and upcoming projects, including further expansion of the “Voces de la Migración” project to additional languages and in partnership with other migrant communities in the city. Collaborations with other Trinity faculty members, and connections with similar oral history projects at institutions like the University of Texas at Austin, continue to enrich her work and support the development of Caribbean studies at our institution.
– Jackeline García Alvarado