Tuesday, October 30, at 6:30 p.m. at our Windham Technical High School location, 210 Birch Street, Willimantic, CT 06226.

The  Cultural Programming Committee presents a Hispanic Heritage Month event, This is Our Home: Voices from the Immigrant Rights Movement, a discussion featuring Kristin Fortier, Vania Galicia, and Chris Vials.  The event is free and open to the public.

Presenter’s biographies:

Kristin Fortier has worked in the Windham, Mansfield, and Coventry Public Schools systems for over fifteen years in a variety of positions, including as a one-to-one support provider for children with autism, a teaching artist/muralist, and an after school coordinator. Kristin holds a bachelor’s degree in painting and printmaking and has been a freelance muralist for over twenty years working in local schools, libraries, colleges and private residences.

Vania Galicia-Bacilio is a twenty-year-old undocumented immigrant who has lived in Willimantic,  Connecticut since she was three years old. She first began organizing when she was sixteen years old through a local organization called GROW Windham, which inspired her to become more involved in the immigrants’ rights movement. Since, she has been involved in the movement through several local organizations such as, Connecticut Students For a Dream, The Windham Immigrant’s Rights Coalition, Freedom at Eastern, and The Neighbor Fund. She is now attending Eastern Connecticut State University and working towards earning her English bachelor’s degree, and plans to use her degree to attend Law school in order to become an immigration lawyer.

 Chris Vials is an associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut-Storrs, where he is also the Director of American Studies. His broader research interests include class and racial formation, popular culture, ethnic studies, and working class cultural studies. Most of his work thus far has focused on the political left and its impact on US culture in the twentieth century. He is the author of Realism for the Masses: Aesthetics, Popular Front Pluralism, and US Culture: 1935-1947 (Mississippi, 2009) and Haunted by Hitler: Liberals, the Left, and the Fight against Fascism in the United States (Massachusetts, 2014).  He is also the editor of American Literature in Transition: 1940-1950 (Cambridge, 2017), and the co-editor of The U.S. Antifascism Reader with Bill Mullen, forthcoming from Verso Press in 2019.  He is a founding member of The Neighbor Fund and an active community member.