For the final project in Audio Description (), students had the option to collaborate with their peers to create a script to describe a theatrical piece to a real audience. The course, taught by , has staged four previous projects, but this was the first to take on a musical—a new challenge that required nearly two months of preparation. Dr. García Vizcaíno noted that the experience was both fun and highly productive, giving students an invaluable hands-on learning opportunity.

Creating Inclusive and Engaging Theater

Preparation for audio describing La Llamada began with students going to the Repertorio Español to experience the show live. The Repertorio also provided a video of the performance, which students used for rehearsals. With 11 students participating, the script was divided into equal sections. During practice sessions, students collaborated to edit and refine each section until deciding on a final script.

This collaboration between Montclair and the Repertorio Español has allowed theater arts to become accessible to many more people. “After several years promoting these special performances, we have seen how important it is to open our doors to everyone and facilitate the access to plays and musicals without any barrier,” said Rafael Sánchez, Director of La Llamada and the Repertorio Español.

When asked about the importance of making art accessible, Anne Marsac, one of the students involved said, “It’s important because it reaches so many more people…It can be for all people because you can experience art in all different ways.” The audio description for them “was a cool experience because you had to be efficient with your words to best describe what the audience was seeing.”

Audio describing a musical presented unique challenges, so the team developed creative strategies to keep the narration engaging. While audio descriptions are usually usually given in a monotone voice, the students “broke the rule a little,” as Dr. García Vizcaíno explained, adding subtle shifts in tone to convey drama, laughter, and moments of mystery throughout the performance.

“One strategy was to choose words that were comical…The audience isn’t going to expect you to say that swear word or that irreverent adjective and it’s going to provoke humor,” said Dr. García Vizcaíno.

The dancing is an essential part of the story and also needed to be carefully described. Dr. Raul Galoppe, who was teaching about translating Broadway musicals into Spanish during the Spring semester, collaborated on this project and supported the team during the live performance.  He assisted with sound and guided the team describing dance sequences, helping students describe the dancing while allowing room for the music to shine through.

“You have to be very succinct in how you’re going to interject the description of the actions,” said Dr. Galoppe.

Pre-Show Experience

This project also includes a pre-show tactile experience which allows the blind and low vision audience members to feel key components of the production. “Sometimes, due to the tech specs of the productions, a tactile experience may be easier for the productions. But in the case of “La Llamada“, we had the chance to bring everyone on stage before the performance to have a real idea of space size, elements, materials, textures and colors,” said Director Sánchez.

The audience members were able to touch key objects, furniture and walk through where the band was set up. “In the case of La Llamada, where we have transformed the whole theatre into a cabin in the woods, including the sound environment, I think it helps everyone to feel part of the story they are experiencing,” said Director Sánchez.

Dr. García Vizcaíno has expressed great interest in continuing this program with the help of the Repertorio Español. Working to elevate communities and make theater arts accessible to everyone is just one of the incredible things students of the CHSS do.

Written by Vivvy Gundani

Hearing from Indigenous groups has “double meaning for students because maybe they’re not directly connected to the community but it’s like their neighbors in their country of origin or their parents or their grandparents,” says Calarota-Ninman, “that’s why I wanted to do it with this class specifically.”

She says the class goes beyond grammar and speech. “It’s building a bridge between who they are here in the United States and their heritage,” she says. “Many of them are born here and may lose contact with their past. So, in the class what I do is try to empower them, helping them understand that their bilingualism and their biculturalism is a gift and it’s precious.”

Rising sophomore Psychology major Andrea Cerna says she enrolled in the class to improve her communication skills. “I wanted to learn how to communicate better in Spanish with my family members,” she says.

Cerna, who is of Peruvian descent, says she learned from Indigenous speakers from Ecuador that the Indigenous languages of the two countries – quechua and Quichua or Kichwa – are quite similar.

She also says she was sad to hear from the group that because they are among the first to live in the U.S., their “whole tradition is not expressed here in the United States and even within the Hispanic community.”

“I found it very impactful,” she says.

Visitors from different Indigenous groups address Antonella Calarota-Ninman’s class.

Danny Tarifa-Ramirez, a rising junior Film and Television major of Venezuelan descent, says he, too, appreciated the discussion about keeping traditions and culture alive even as Indigenous groups also adapt to societal and technological changes. “They talked about how they have astrological apps for understanding harvests; I think that’s a good way they use technology for the benefit of their communities.”

As a Spanish speaker, Tarifa-Ramirez says he was able to focus on learning linguistics and different Latin American cultures and cultural contexts. “The cultural references and how they vary from country to country, that was definitely important to me.”

As part of the class final, the students produced oral history projects. Cerna interviewed a Peruvian nurse about her career in various countries before her arrival in the U.S. Tarifa-Ramirez interviewed a Guatemalan and Venezuelan musician about “how his culture influenced his artistry and how his music is influenced by his culture.”

The projects are likely to become a part of Hola Montclair State (Historia Oral de los Latinos y Archivo digital) [https://holamontclairstate.org], which was launched last year by an interdisciplinary group with faculty from the Spanish and Latino Studies, Sociology, and Teaching and Learning departments. HOLA is “essential to preserve Indigenous cultures, languages and traditions, as well as stories of the Latino communities on campus and in New Jersey,” Calarota-Ninman says.

This collaborative effort began in 2023, when Calarota-Ninman invited a group of 12 Indigenous leaders from the various groups, including Kichwa, Tlapanec, Mije and Mam, to be interviewed by her Spanish 135 students and be part of the oral history project. Calarota-Ninman says the day was very meaningful for her and the students, who learned about the group’s stories, cultures, traditions and struggles.

“I decided to continue the collaboration with these leaders who have a lot to share and to teach,” Calarota-Ninman says. “Informing our community about this collaboration with leaders of different Hispanic Indigenous communities is very important. It will not only awaken interest in those students who are descendants of these groups but also will enrich our community with their knowledge and wonderful culture.”

Spanish Language Coordinator Antonella Calarota-Ninman, second from left, poses with Indigenous members who shared their experiences and language with her students.

Story by University Communications Staff Writer Sylvia A. Martinez. Photos courtesy of Antonella Calarota-Ninman.

Senior Jurisprudence, Law and Society major Nayelis Fernandez credits the Spanish for Law Enforcement class with helping her during her summer internship with a law firm. “It gave me a lot of confidence,” she says.

“When I started school, I really wasn’t speaking Spanish outside of my home, so I thought the class would challenge me, especially since I want to become an immigration attorney,” says Fernandez, who has since been hired as a legal assistant at the firm where she interned. “Even though the class was specifically for law enforcement, more on the criminal side, I really learned a lot. It challenged me, and it helped me with writing and speaking better.”

Fernandez says the class, taught by adjunct professor Mayra Badillo, not only helped her learn legal terms in Spanish but also maintain a certain level of professionalism. “Professor Badillo challenged us to speak as though we were working for a police department, so we would have to practice giving speeches to the community,” she says, adding that she expects the class to continue to assist her as she moves toward her goal of becoming an immigration lawyer.  “I want to be the voice for and help those people because they have no idea what the law is, and with immigration law, it’s constantly changing.”

Spanish for Law Enforcement is the most recent career-focused class added to the Spanish department’s roster, says Antonella Calarota-Ninman, Spanish language coordinator for the Spanish and Latino Studies department. There is also Spanish for Health Practitioners. Other classes, such as Spanish for Heritage Speakers, Spanish for Teachers and Spanish and International Business have been offered for some time; the latter by the Feliciano School of Business for many years.

While the department offers a robust roster of Spanish courses, including Negotiation Skills in Spanish, certificates in translation and interpreting and many classes for heritage speakers, Calarota-Ninman says she routinely tells students about the career-specific classes. “Imagine how useful it would be for you to satisfy a language requirement with a class that prepares you for your profession,” she says.

The Spanish for Law Enforcement class consists primarily of Justice Studies majors, says Badillo, a former lawyer in France and the Dominican Republic, who created the curriculum. She says her classes, numbering 30, consist of students interested in becoming police officers, lawyers and social workers. She presents them with real-life scenarios where they role-play and give people instructions in Spanish.

Badillo, who is married to a retired police officer, says speaking or understanding Spanish can mean the difference between life and death. “It’s important to speak Spanish when you are in the field of law enforcement.”

Adjunct professor Abigail Fana has Montclair Spanish courses to thank for her career at the University. Fana graduated with a BA in English, minors in Linguistics and Spanish and a certificate in Translation in 2020 and a master’s in Spanish and a certificate in Interpreting in 2022. While a teaching assistant working on her master’s, Fana started workshops where she led around 300 students per week in Spanish oral communication. Those workshops continue biweekly to this day with both professors and teaching assistants splitting duties.

When a Spanish professor left the University, Fana was asked to teach and has now taught Spanish I for three semesters. She’s also currently teaching Translation I while a professor is on sabbatical. While other opportunities have arisen, she is happy teaching Spanish I. “I feel like I can make a bigger difference teaching Spanish I and encouraging students, emphasizing how important it is, teaching them culture and things like that,” Fana says.

Fana also co-led the Spanish interpretation for Montclair’s first Spanish simulcast of Commencement this year with her friend Richard Solis ’23 MA, whose master’s is also in Spanish.

“There were good, positive reviews,” she says, noting that the three ceremonies racked up almost 6,000 views despite not being advertised. “This is really great because it was the first time that they had ever done this, and it really helped people because there are so many Hispanics,” she says. Fana is  hoping for even more listeners during the 2024 Commencement, for which she will be interpreting.

Meanwhile, she and Solis are currently working on another first – translating the University’s website, beginning with the FAQ pages – “also a pretty big, important step,” she says.

In addition to the many course offerings by the Spanish and Latino Studies department, Montclair also has a Spanish journalism class, Reportando las Noticias. The class is unusual in that it is available to all majors.

“It’s open to the campus community, so anybody can take the class,” says Thomas Franklin, an associate professor in the School of Communication and Media. “No matter what your major is, what your area of interest is, and no matter what your language proficiency is, we welcome everybody.”

The class, which started in 2019 after two students pitched the idea, is offered in the spring semester. “The idea is that most people speak or understand some Spanish, and the competency in Spanish varies quite a bit,” says Franklin, who co-leads the class with a Spanish-language media professional. While much of the class is in English, “there was a good amount of Spanish spoken and instruction in both languages.”

Translation News Service

Also employing both English and Spanish is the , a project of Montclair’s Center for Cooperative Media made possible through a $75,000 grant from New Jersey Civic Information Consortium (NJCIC). Now in its second year, the service provides translation of English-language news articles into Spanish for publication in Spanish-language publications.

The service was piloted with funding from the Democracy Fund and the NJCIC in 2020 prior to the presidential election with election-related content translated in Spanish to help increase “voter participation in the Latino community,” says Anthony Advincula, the ethnic and community media coordinator at the Center for Cooperative Media. It started with seven English- and Spanish-language media partners.

What the participating news organizations discovered, he says, is that there was value in translating other stories as well. “The Spanish-language news outlets don’t have the same resources that the mainstream media have to cover these stories,” Advincula says, “So, it became all types of stories – from breaking news to investigative news, rather than just election-related content.”

Today, the translation service boasts 12 English- and Spanish-language media partners. They include: NorthJersey.com, NJ Advance Media/NJ.com, Asbury Park Press, Press of Atlantic City, NJ Spotlight News/NJ PBS, Front Runner New Jersey, The Latino Spirit, New Jersey Hispano, Americano Newspaper, CATA Radio and Reporte Hispano.

“The main goal of this is really to narrow that information gap because we realize that there’s still language barriers in the Latino communities and a lack of nuanced and informed reporting from their language and perspective,” Advincula says.

New Jersey Hispano Editor Maricarmen Amado says the service has been helpful to her digital and print newspaper. “The stories have been prepared for larger newspapers with larger teams, resulting in stories with more depth,” she says, adding that the feedback from Spanish readers has been positive.

Given her journalistic background, Amado translates the stories. “It’s easy for me to understand and translate,” she says. “It’s not just translated but written in the way that Hispanics speak.”

The largest beneficiary of the translation services “is our community,” Amado says.

Story by Staff Writer Sylvia A. Martinez. Photos by University Photographer Mike

Peters.

Edited by Raúl A. Galoppe
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SUMMARY
A tribute to Henry W. Sullivan in celebration of his 80th birthday, this volume encompasses a wide spectrum of Hispanic literary scholarship to honor a prolific scholar whose contributions have been extensive, not only as a Golden Age Hispanist but also as a devoted Lacanian scholar, literary critic, translator, poet, novelist, playwright, and composer. The title of the collection comes directly from Sullivan’s recent study on tragic drama in the Golden Age of Spain. Even though the “ghost” he attempts to lay there is the critical controversy around defining and classifying tragedy among Spanish classic comedias, the label extends and applies to Sullivan’s lifelong commitment to the relevance of Spanish drama of the Golden Age within the universal canon, especially from an English-language perspective. Moreover, his arguments are easily applicable in defense of the Humanities and the significance of Literature amid the unwelcome structural changes in Academia.

El placer de matar a una madre by Marta López Luaces, Published by Ediciones B, Penguin Radom House

Marta López Luaces, a professor in the department of Spanish and Latino Studies, will be presenting her book along with professor Nuria Morgado from State Island College.

Please RSVP for this event on !

The book will be sold at the event!

About the Book
El placer the matar a una madre (The pleasure of killing a mother) explores the oppression of women under the Spanish dictatorship that lasted from 1939 to 1975. The novel takes places between 1972 and 1975, the year the dictator, Franco, died. In 1972, Miriam is accused of killing her mother and is confined to a sinister psychiatric hospital. There, Miriam will learn that many women accused of being crazy were women who broke the social norms of the regime. In the mental hospital, Miriam will meet other women, some locked up by their own families for no other reason than not fitting into the roles allowed to women, that of wife and mother. Under Franco´s dictatorship women who broke from social norms (single mothers, lesbians, women with mental disabilities, even women raped by a family member) were sent to mental hospitals. These women were deemed sick. The official discourse was that they were helping them; yet by sending women to mental hospitals, the regime was masking the oppression of these women. The international community understood political dissent exclusively in terms of political ideology, and not as social dissent: women and members of the LGBT were left to their own devises. Even in such a horrible place as a mental hospital in Franco’s dictatorship, Miriam is able to create real friendships with other women. It is through these friendships that she begins to see a different future for herself beyond that allowed by the regime.

About the Author, Marta López-Luaces
Marta López-Luaces (A Coruña, Spain, 1964) is a poet, novelist and translator. She holds a Ph. D. in Spanish and Latin American Literatures from NYU (2000). As a novelist she published El placer de matar a una madre (Madrid: Penguin Random House, Ediciones B, 2019) and Los traductores del viento (Madrid: Vaso Roto, 2013). Los traductores del viento was awarded the International Latino Book Award 2014. She published four books of poetry and a plaquette: Distancias y destierros (1998), Las lenguas del viajero (2005) and Los arquitectos de lo imaginario (Valencia, Pre-Textos 2011), the plaquette is entitled Memorias de un vacío (2000) and Después de la oscuridad (Valencia: Pre-Textos, 2015. Los arquitectos de lo imaginario was finalist for the prestigious Ausiás March Award (2011). In 217 Tigres de Papel published Y soñábamos con pájaros volando an anthology of her poetry. Her work has been published in numerous anthologies in Latin America, Spain and the United States. A selection of her poetry work was translated into Rumanian and published under the titled Pravalirea focului (Orient-Occident, 2010). Her poetry has also been translated into Italian under the title of Accento Magico (San Marco, 2002). Translated into French a selection of her work was published in the journal étoiles déncre. Revue de femmes ern Méditerranée, 2007. The translator Gary Recz just finished translating Los arquitectos de lo imaginario into English. Selections of her poetry work have also appeared in English in the following anthologies: New Poetry from Spain (Talisman, 2012), Poetic Voices without Borders 2 (Gival Press, 2009), and Revel Road’s chapbook series (2004). Her poetry has also been published in English in Mandorla, Tamame and Literary Review. She has translated into English Robert Duncan’s Selected Works, under the title, Tensar el arco y otros poemas (Madrid: Bartleby, 2011), A Table of content by Dorothea Tanning (Madrid: Vaso Roto, 2018) and And For Example by Ann Lauterbach. She along, along with Johnny Lorenz and Edwin Lamboy have translated and published, and showcased the work of new generation poets in New Poetry from Spain: An Anthology (New Jersey: Talisman House, 2012). Marta López Luaces is also an active New York City poet, novelist, and translator engaged in promoting the encounter between English and Spanish-language writing in the United States through a bilingual poetry series she curates at the New York Public Library, Tompkins Square.

About Nuria Morgado
Nuria Morgado is Professor of Hispanic Studies at The College of Staten Island and The Graduate Center of The City University of New York (CUNY). Her research includes modern and contemporary Hispanic literature, cultural studies, comparative literature, and the relationship between literature, culture, and philosophy. She has edited and co-edited several books and published numerous essays, book chapters, interviews, and book reviews both nationally and internationally. Professor Morgado is part of the Academic Committee of the Miguel Delibes Chair, founded by The Graduate Center (CUNY) and Universidad de Valladolid (Spain). Additionally, she is Full Member of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language (ANLE) and Correspondent of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE). Professor Morgado is also the co-founder of Letras Hispanas: Revista de Literatura y Cultura, the book review editor of the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, and the editor-in-chief of Boletín de la Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española (BANLE), the ANLE’s academic journal. Moreover, she serves on several editorial boards.