Six freshmen students at Yale have founded a Latino Men’s Union with aims of "further unifying Yale's Latinx community" , the Yale Daily News reported Monday.
One of the Union’s co-founders, Yale freshman Brandon Tejada, told the Daily News that a lack of unity among Latino students inspired him to help establish the organization.
“Personally, coming to Yale, I thought there would be stronger connections within the Latinx community,” Tejada said.
With the goal of forging stronger bonds among Latino men, as well as in communities both on Yale’s campus and in New Haven, the new club holds weekly brunch meetings, reported the Yale Daily News.
But according to College sophomore and Latinx Coalition External Co-Chair Caleb Diaz, the need for a male-centric student group within Penn’s Latino community simply isn’t pressing.
“Every group that’s a part of LC addresses a specific need of the community, and we already address everything that the Latino Men’s Union at Yale addresses,” Diaz said in a phone interview with the Daily Pennsylvanian, calling to mind “machismo” — an expectation of hyper-masculinity in Latino culture that Diaz deems sexist.
Diaz added that a gender-specific club does exist at Penn, Mujeres Empoderadas, which focuses on the empowerment of Latina women. Mujeres Empoderadas “represents a marginalized or underrepresented part of our community,” Diaz said.
According to Forbes, 11 percent of Yale’s current student body identifies as Hispanic or Latino. At Penn,this figure is 9.8 percent.
Diaz said he hopes to learn from other Universities at the Latinx Ivy League Conference, to be held at Yale next weekend.
“It’s going to be a great conversation,” Diaz said. “I’m going to learn a lot that I can bring back here."
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