{"id":27161,"date":"2023-09-29T08:00:20","date_gmt":"2023-09-29T12:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/?p=27161"},"modified":"2023-10-03T11:30:49","modified_gmt":"2023-10-03T15:30:49","slug":"nashieli-marcano-hispanic-history-month","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/nashieli-marcano-hispanic-history-month\/","title":{"rendered":"A \u2018holistic journey\u2019 from Puerto Rico to Furman\u2019s library"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hispanic Heritage Month at Furman<\/a>
\nRead more stories >><\/a><\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

Nashieli Marcano\u2019s<\/a> professional and scholarly pursuits have taken her throughout the United States, from Puerto Rico to Greenville, South Carolina, and from NASA to the James B. Duke Library<\/a> at Furman University.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s been quite a journey,\u201d she said. \u201cI treat my career as a holistic thing. Everything connects somehow.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her balancing act between science and the humanities began with earning both a B.A. in foreign languages and a B.S. in engineering technology from the University of Central Florida. In Cape Canaveral, Marcano worked in technical operations for a company that handled the operations of<\/span> the space shuttle fleet. Her academic interests led her to an M.S. in library and information studies at Florida State University, an M.A. in Spanish at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, a Ph.D. in Hispanic languages and literatures at the University of Pittsburgh and a graduate certificate in digital public humanities at George Mason University in Virginia.<\/p>\n

Her resume includes faculty and library positions in both humanities and STEM fields at universities in Florida, Ohio, Georgia, and South Carolina, leading her to Greenville in 2021 and her current position as archivist for digital collections<\/a> at Furman University Libraries.<\/p>\n

Childhood in \u2018a modern colony\u2019<\/h3>\n

Marcano\u2019s lifetime of travel began when she was a baby.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Nashieli Marcano dressed as a bailaora (flamenco dancer) at age 7 in Isla Verde, Puerto Rico.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cMy parents are both from Puerto Rico, and they had gone to Mexico to study,\u201d she said. After all, explained Marcano, college students in the early ’70s who were interested in social justice and sought a central place to reflect on events transpiring in Chile, Argentina and Brazil, went to Mexico City and experienced student life at the\u00a0<\/span>UNAM<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

About a month after her birth in Mexico, family members brought Marcano back to Puerto Rico, where she grew up. Her mother, Eda Correa, was an academic librarian, and<\/span> her father, Pablo Marcano Garc\u00eda<\/a>, had become involved in the island’s nationalist political activism and\u00a0movement, seeking independence from the United States.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you know some of the history of the island, you\u2019d recognize it as\u00a0a modern colony,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

After occupying the Chilean embassy in San Juan for 22 hours in 1978 and demanding freedom for Puerto Rican political prisoners, Marcano\u2019s father became a political prisoner himself, she said. He was sentenced to 22 years in a federal prison in upstate New York and was released after seven years. He<\/span> is now a celebrated Puerto Rican artist whose paintings have been exhibited worldwide<\/p>\n

\u2018Always more work to be done\u2019<\/h3>\n

After more than three decades in the U.S., \u201cit\u2019s hard to say that I belong in a particular group,\u201d said Marcano, who joined a growing Puerto Rican population<\/a> in Orlando, Florida, in 1990. \u201cBut that gives me the flexibility to negotiate and cultivate<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>identity and belonging<\/span> among different communities. I could relate to white folks, Black folks and Latinos. At the end of the day, there\u2019s no home for me, but that\u2019s just part of the journey as a displaced Puerto Rican. I\u2019m comfortable with that realization.\u201d<\/p>\n

Learning about scholarly and community projects such as a collection of oral histories<\/a> of Colombian textile workers in Greenville helped attract Marcano to Furman, she said. She has been expanding Furman\u2019s digital collection in areas related to diversity, equity and inclusion, leading an audit<\/a> of archive materials \u00a0to ensure they reflect those who access them. Other projects include developing the LGBTQIA+ @ Furman<\/a> digital timeline and creating a coordinated oral history plan for faculty, staff and the community.<\/p>\n

With the strategic diversity plan<\/a> and other initiatives, Furman has shown \u201csome great progress compared to other institutions where I\u2019ve been, and we have to take advantage of that,\u201d said Marcano. \u201cThere\u2019s always more work to be done.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hispanic Heritage Month<\/a> \u201cis a moment of reflections and appreciation of our contributions to the campus community,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s a rich and heterogenous culture. Latinos are a valuable part of the Furman and Greenville communities, and of the American fabric<\/span>.<\/span>\u201d<\/p>\n

She added: \u201cThis is perhaps the place where I felt the most welcomed \u2013 <\/span>as a librarian, period, as a professional and a human being.”<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During Hispanic Heritage Month, digital archivist Nashieli Marcano reflects on balancing between STEM and humanities and navigating among many cultures in the U.S.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":27438,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[70],"tags":[1120,2227],"class_list":["post-27161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-diversity-equity-and-inclusion","tag-hispanic-heritage-month","tag-james-b-duke-library"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27161\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}