As a member of the largest class of fellows selected as recipients of E. Kika De La Garza Fellows Program honors, Cynthia Bejarano will spend the week meeting with leaders from different agencies of the United Stated Department of Agriculture.
Source: United States Department of Agriculture
WASHINGTON, July 8, 2024 – The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) today welcomed 32 faculty and staff from Hispanic-Serving Institutions and Hispanic-Serving School Districts around the nation to the 2024 class of E. Kika De La Garza (EKDLG) Fellows.
The EKDLG Fellows came to Washington, D.C. to learn how USDA services and programs can benefit them, their students, and their communities. This effort is part of USDA’s commitment to advance equity in professional development opportunities and build a more diverse pipeline into public service and the agricultural sector. “This year’s class of fellows is the largest so far and a testament of the program’s success,” said Dr. Lisa R. Ramírez, director of USDA’s Office of Partnerships and Public Engagement.
E. Kika De La Garza Education, High School, and Science Fellows will spend one week meeting with leaders from different USDA agencies in the Washington, D.C. area learning more about national and regional issues, policy making and research. Following that weeklong session, E. Kika De La Garza Science Fellows will spend an additional week collaborating with top scientists from USDA’s Agricultural Research Service, Food Safety and Inspection Service, or the U.S. Forest Service.
Since the E. Kika De La Garza Fellows Program was established in 1998, USDA has hosted more than 400 faculty and staff, in a key effort to strengthen relationships with Hispanic-Serving Institutions. All E. Kika De La Garza fellows are faculty or staff at Hispanic-Serving higher education institutions (HSIs) or Hispanic-Serving School Districts (HSSDs). These are higher education institutions and K-12 school districts with Hispanic student enrollment of 25 percent or more. Currently, there are more than 600 Hispanic-Serving Institutions nationally serving more than 2 million students.
The E. Kika De La Garza Fellows Program is part of USDA’s Hispanic-Serving Institutions National Program, which is committed to supporting a 21st century agricultural workforce through professional development, workforce development and exposure to opportunities for faculty, staff and students. Through this program, USDA also partners with the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities to provide high quality internship experiences, placing more than 3,000 interns since 1994. This program demonstrates USDA’s commitment to ensuring equitable access to the Department’s programs, services and resources by underserved groups.
USDA touches the lives of all Americans each day in so many positive ways. In the Biden-Harris Administration, USDA is transforming America’s food system with a greater focus on more resilient local and regional food production, fairer markets for all producers, ensuring access to safe, healthy and nutritious food in all communities, building new markets and streams of income for farmers and producers using climate smart food and forestry practices, making historic investments in infrastructure and clean energy capabilities in rural America, and committing to equity across the Department by removing systemic barriers and building a workforce more representative of America. To learn more, visit www.usda.gov.
From her biography published on NMSU website:
Cynthia Bejarano (she/her/ella), a Regents Professor and the College of Arts and Sciences Stan Fulton Endowed Chair, her publications, research interests and activism focus on a myriad of borderlands issues through activism and scholarship including migrant and immigrant advocacy, working to end gender-based violence and feminicides, farmworker advocacy, and critiquing the militarization/securitization of the border and its impact on border people. Bejarano has engaged in and written extensively on these issues including working for migrant and immigrant rights.
For her dedication in and outside of the classroom, she has received the Donald C. Roush Excellence in Teaching Award, the 2010 Governors Award for Outstanding New Mexico Women, and the Critical Educators in Social Justice (CESJ) Special Interest Group’s Community Advocacy Award among others. As a farmworker advocate since the 1990s, she serves as the NMSU Principal Investigator of the U.S. Department of Education’s College Assistance Migrant Program since 2002. The program has served nearly 600 first-year farmworker students at NMSU.
As an anti-feminicide activist, Bejarano co-founded Amigos de las Mujeres de Juárez (2001-2011), and in 2014, Bejarano served as a tribunal judge specializing in international human rights and gender-based violence for the Tribunal Permanente de los Pueblos in Chihuahua City, Chihuahua, Mexico. To date, she works with several human rights groups in Chihuahua, Mexico. Her publications include, Que ònda? urban youth culture and border identity (2007), Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas (2010), and numerous peer-reviewed scholarly articles, chapters, and creative works. Currently, she is co-creating with Dr. Sylvia Fernandez, “Fuerza Feminista” a feminist and transborder digital humanities project that documents, contextualizes, and will make digitally accessible the activist and feminist participation of the first local feminist movements in the Paso del Norte Region. This project is in collaboration with Dr. Julia Monarrez Fragoso from COLEF Ciudad Juárez. Bejarano is also working with co-editor, Cristina Morales on an anthology, Frontera Madre(hood)©, a collection of mothers, activists, and scholars from across the U.S.-Mexico border to be published with the University of Arizona Press in 2024.
(Photo: Courtesy NMSU)
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[…] 2024 Class of E. Kika De La Garza Fellows arrived in Washington, D.C., and was greeted by neighbor and Deputy USDA Secretary, Xochitl Torres Small. Another neighbor was invited to be in attendance as a visiting Fellow, Cynthia Bejarano. (see Story) […]