Sara Bert '06 (Liberal, Kan.) returned home this summer for a reason other than to relax and enjoy the nice weather. Bert, who was awarded an Emerson Grant this year, is studying the ways in which the different ethnic groups present in Liberal are interacting or not interacting.
After she and her mother were threatened by a group of young Hispanic men in a grocery store parking lot last year, Bert took a positive spin on this experience and decided to learn about the racial problems and difficulties existing in her hometown.
"Over the last 10 years, the population has shifted dramatically so that the Hispanic community now makes up slightly over 50 percent of the population of Liberal," Bert explained. "I was intrigued by how the community would deal with such a dramatic and fast change, and I think the situation here has repercussions for all of America—I believe that history is being made in these small rural towns."
After researching and learning about the behaviors of ethnic groups, Bert, a theatre and creative writing major, plans on turning the project into a performance piece in which she will attempt to contextualize and express the stories the people of Liberal have shared with her.
Bert described her summer experience as "liberating," and said that a main purpose of the project was to make her peers at Hamilton College more aware of the struggles that people in the middle of the country are having every day, to understand multiple cultures and to live together in functional and healthy communities.
"It's one thing to say that you are accepting of many different kinds of people, but it's another to go up and talk to people that you perceive as different from yourself, especially when the boundaries that society has set between that person and yourself are almost physically intangible," she said.
Hamilton students have been awarded Emerson Grants to collaborate with faculty members during the summer on topics ranging from forgery in the arts to Nietzsche's influence on the Harlem Renaissance.
-- by Katherine Trainor
