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Classic Program
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Crossing Borders
Volume 8, Number 2 - Spring 2010
Affirming Lives and Sharing Stories Through Culture
talking with Asela de Laguna
Two years ago, Asela Rodriguez de Laguna began reading for fun. Not for theory. Not with professorial pen in hand.
“My training is in comparative literature,” says Laguna, a longtime member of the People & Stories/Gente y Cuentos board and a professor of Spanish at Rutgers/ Newark. “I joined a group of friends and began to revisit the works of Nobel laureates, literature from Germany, from England, to read for the sake of paying attention to the story and enjoying the act of reading.”
They discussed Bernard Schlink’s The Reader; they read The Savage Detectives (Laguna devoured it in Spanish) and a French novel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog. In one novel she loved, Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters, a character says, “Funny this is, in the end, all our stories…they’re the same. In fact, no matter where you go in the world, there is only one important story: of youth, and loss, and yearning for redemption. So we tell the same story, over and over. Just the details are different.”
Laguna kept that quote. “This, I think, is what Sarah [Hirschman, founder of People & Stories] has discovered.”
It was at a meeting with Hirschman—in 1983, at a conference Laguna had organized on images of Puerto Ricans in literature—that Laguna first heard about People & Stories. Several years later, as a member of the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, Laguna attended a few sessions and became a passionate supporter of the program.
“I remember very well that people with no background or training in literature—many of them had not completed even high school—were enthused by reading these stories and were engaged in a discussion that transcended the personal impressions of what they read.
“I thought the method Sarah developed and that has evolved through the years is an excellent pedagogical tool to make people react, speak and comprehend the reading. They start with the text, with the story. And from there, the experience of the reader begins to open to different horizons.”
Laguna grew up hearing occasional stories from her grandmother. Now that she is a grandmother herself, she wishes she had more stories to pass on to her grandchildren, who are eleven and three. Such tales, she says, not only sustain culture but affirm the lives of their tellers.
In another favorite book by Dave Eggers, “that theme is reiterated: Why do we have to tell our story? Because, in the end, it is in the eyes of others that our lives become validated…Look at the program’s title: People & Stories. The writing is what has saved people and those stories for the readers.”
In her professional life, Laguna is working on a project about Christopher Columbus, tracking his transformation as a literary character in the United States. As a board member, Laguna has lent her expertise in grant writing, her connections to Portuguese and Spanish community groups and her perspective as a Latina. She would love to see People & Stories/Gente y Cuentos branch out to Portuguese-speaking readers and hopes that, even in this arid economic climate, funding for humanities and literature will keep flowing.
“Even in our very technological and sophisticated world, there is so much to tell…People [in P&S/GyC groups] will feel motivated to speak because the story is handing them a way to talk about what they have never spoken publicly.”