Like many academics, fifth-year doctoral candidate Laura Caicedo's (they/them) journey through academia has been complex and sometimes isolating. However, through a love for learning and teaching and through their efforts to find people at Cornell interested in intellectual discussions, Caicedo has used a literature-centric lens to find their community.
“I am Latinx, but before that, I am Colombian,” Caicedo said. Born in Cali, Colombia, Caicedo’s family moved to Miami, Fla. through political asylum, where they grew up. Caicedo said immigration has shaped who they are and what they study — during a fellowship year, they spent four months in Colombia, laying out the foundations, brick by brick, for their dissertation.
Caicedo uses personal narratives as a form of study while incorporating familial narratives at sites such as the Museo Casa de la Memoria (House of Memory Museum) in Medellin, Colombia, a multimedia archive of local violence. According to its website, the Casa de la Memoria is a political and social project known for providing a home “for the dialogue and amplification of voices of victims.”
Caicedo’s dissertation is tentatively titled "Memory's Home; Spatiotemporal Imaginaries in Latinx Literature,” which “examines the function of memory and home as concepts within Latinx literature, while also using them as lenses to analyze the narratives crafted around different Latin American countries and immigrant groups.” The first chapter of the dissertation will be based on personal memory and then tied to historical moments and literature. “Fruit of the Drunken Tree: A Novel,” Ingrid Rojas Contreras’ 2018 contemporary novel, is one of the pieces of work Caicedo utilized to tie everything together.
Caicedo came to Cornell after receiving an undergraduate degree in English from the University of Central Florida and a master’s degree from Wake Forest University. Though they originally wanted to study medieval literature, Caicedo found their place studying contemporary Latinx literature.
Their Wake Forest master’s thesis focused on Queer Latinx Temporality and the Memory-Making Process and is titled “Memory is All that Matters.” They have also written about time and temporality through contemporary literature lenses in “The Individual at the End of Time, and Paths Beyond,” published in the Summer 2021 Special Issue of the Latin American Literary Review (Volume 48, Number 96).
Caicedo said their professors and advisors have been essential to helping them on their academic trajectory. “I’ve always had professors who have been super helpful in keeping me on track.”
Studying your heart's desire can be difficult, even with a good support network. Caicedo said that studying humanities can be nerve-wracking in the current economic market, but they remain committed to teaching at a liberal arts college.
Caicedo has adopted a number of strategies to keep the academic journey from being lonely, especially for someone from a Latinx background at a predominantly white university such as Cornell. They co-write and research alongside peers and surround themselves with a broad range of people open to intellectual conversations from both academic and personal perspectives.
For Caicedo, switching to they/them pronouns during their second year here illustrated their comfort level in the community. “I was using she/her pronouns as protection, [but I was finding] it wasn’t necessary here.”
In addition, Caicedo finds that their comfort level at graduate school has increased over the years. “So much of the early parts of graduate school are incredibly precarious and scary, but by the third year, once I got over the hump, everything has been smooth since,” they said.
Although Caicedo remains focused on “making sure that the things I want to do come to fruition,” they remark on the privilege of learning and studying for a living: “[When I graduate], I will miss the opportunity to do the things that I am doing now.”
