This Hispanic Heritage Month, we are sharing highlights from three Vanderbilt Divinity students who participated in the Hispanic Scholars Program over the summer. In this series, you will hear how the program allowed them to better understand the cultural and faith traditions that inform Hispanic religious scholarship and helped them form bonds with students from across the world.
Sophie Esteves Varvella Vicente is a third-year M.Div. candidate concentrating in spirituality and social activism, with certificates in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx studies; and religion, gender and sexuality.
What were the highlights of your experience with the Hispanic Scholars Program this summer?
One of the highlights of my experience, being at HSP in Villanova, was during the World Cup and getting to experience the Brazil vs. Haiti watch party in downtown Philadelphia with new and old friends. There was something deeply joyful and affirming about being surrounded by people who understood the cultural significance of the moment. Everyone was dancing, yelling and celebrating together. It felt like being with your people. It was a reminder that academic spaces can also be places of cultural recognition, joy and belonging. That experience was especially meaningful because the program created a community where our Latiné identities were not something we had to explain, translate or compartmentalize, but something we could celebrate together.
How has your experience with the Hispanic Scholars Program — coupled with your coursework — advanced your research, scholarly interests and vocational pursuits?
My experience with the Hispanic Scholars Program, alongside my coursework at Vanderbilt Divinity School has helped me understand my scholarship and activism within a much longer history of lucha. Studying twentieth-century social movements reminded me that building a new world often happens at the pace of a snail. Change is slow, nonlinear and frequently frustrating, but that does not make the work any less necessary. That lesson has grounded me in my own scholarship and vocational commitments as I accompany and advocate alongside immigrant communities.
It has helped me resist the urgency to measure movements only by immediate outcomes and instead understand accompaniment, organizing, research and theological reflection as practices that contribute to struggles much larger than any one person.
The program has strengthened my conviction that scholarship can be accountable to the people and movements from which it emerges.
What have learned or gained from the experience that you didn’t expect?
Taking a class with historian Dr. Jorge Rodriguez was a gift. His teaching helped me recognize the essential role of memory keepers within social movements — the people who preserve stories, names, struggles, traditions and histories so that movements do not begin from scratch with every generation.
At the same time, I began to think more critically about the patriarchal dimensions of the practices and systems through which movements are often preserved. I left the course with a more nuanced understanding of what it means to remember and fight: whose stories become history, who is entrusted with preserving them, whose voices are missing and how we might practice differently moving forward. This has shaped how I think about both my scholarship and my own responsibility as someone participating in contemporary movements for liberation.
What would you say to other students looking to be involved in this program?
Programs like the Hispanic Scholars Program are essential to keeping Latinx theological education alive. Latinx students are too often excluded, marginalized or rendered invisible within traditional academic spaces, and programs like this help supplement the education we receive while creating space for scholarship that emerges from our histories, communities, and lived experiences. But these programs can only become what we need them to be if we participate in shaping them.
I would encourage other students to sign up, show up, ask difficult questions, build relationships and bring their full selves into the program. Our participation matters because we are not simply receiving an education—we are helping shape the kind of theological education that can respond to our present world and help us imagine and build the new world we know is possible.