Yale Daily News Magazine | May 2022

DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE Vol. CXLIV Issue 6

New Haven on the Mend THE METHADONE CLINIC CONFLICT

BY IDONE RHODES | PAGE 24

MAGAZINE MAY 2022 Dear readers, Welcome to Yale Daily News Magazine’s May issue! The last of the 2021-22 academic year, the May issue represents a diversity of perspectives amid a time of change in various Yale and New Haven communities.

Magazine Editors in Chief Claire Lee Marie Sanford Managing Editors Abigail Sylvor Greenberg Oliver Guinan Galia Newberger Associate Editors Isa Dominguez Sarah Feng Zack Hauptman Samhitha Josyula Margot Lee Dante Motley Ana Padilla Castellanos Idone Rhodes Magazine Design Editors Rachel Folmar Isaac Yu Photography Editors Zoe Berg Yasmine Halmane Karen Lin Regina Sung Vaibhav Sharma Illustration Editors Cecilia Lee Sophie Henry Copy Editors Josie Jahng Hailey O’Connor Chris Lee Yingying Zhao Caroline Parker Editor in Chief & President Rose Horowitch Publisher Christian Martinez Cover Illustration by Sophie Henry

Idone Rhodes, in her feature “New Haven on the Mend,” reports on the community response and controversy surrounding the APT Foundation’s recent purchase of a building in Newhallville, which the Foundation intended to use to establish a methadone clinic. Galia Newberger, in her insight “(Re)constructing Community,” explores the changing dynamics of the Jewish community at Yale during the renovation of the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life.

The issue also contains profiles of Mimi Chan, martial artist and the inspiration for Disney’s Mulan; Manuel Morán, Puerto Rican puppeteer; as well as professors John Grim and Mary Evelyn Tucker, senior lecturers and research scholars at the Yale School of Environment and pioneers of the school’s interdisciplinary relationship with the Yale Divinity School. In addition, this issue features four poems — the most we’ve ever published in a single issue! — each distinct in style and subject, from Ana Padilla Castellanos, Abigail Sylvor Greenberg, Cindy Kuang and Oscar Lopez.

Most importantly, we would like to say thank you — for your readership, your suggestions, your critiques and your support throughout this year. We hope your reading of the Magazine has been as rewarding as our production of it! The Magazine’s next issue won’t be until the fall, with primary leadership from Marie as Claire graduates in May 2022. Until then, take care and stay healthy, read Mag and have a restful summer!

Best, Claire Lee and Marie Sanford AKA Marie Claire :)

38 Sonnet (Exegesis) Abigail Sylvor Greenberg

30

(Re)constructing Community: A Look Into the Slifka Center Renovation Galia Newberger

Palm Sunday Oscar Lopez 9 | Profile ¡Viva Títeres! Manuel Morán’s “Invitation to Be” Jesse Roy 16 | Poem Orange Baby Ana Padilla Castellanos

4 A Girl Worth Fighting For Cynthia Lin

22 | Poem Afong Moy Teaches Provenance Cindy Kuang 24 | Feature New Haven On the Mend Idone Rhodes 32 The Walk Along Prospect Street Gavin Guerrette

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INSIGHT

(Re)constructing Community: A Look Into the Slifka Center Renovation

By Galia Newberger

Editor’s Note: Shortly before the publication of this story, the Slifka Center completed its renovations. Read our original story here:

O

n Wall Street, just past Blue State Coffee, stands the Slifka Center for Jewish Life. Once a hub for Jewish students and non-Jewish students alike looking to participate in religious programming, eat in Slifka’s celebrated dining hall or study in one of Slifka’s many light-filled spaces, Slifka has been closed for an ongoing renovation since November 2020.

While students still roam campus in Slifka’s iconic “Lox Et Veritas” T-shirts and partake in Slifka’s programs, students and staff agree that the absence of Slifka’s physical space is altering their relationship with Judaism at Yale.

4 | May 2022

“On campus, I’m a relatively-participating Jew,” said Enza Jonas-Giugni ’25. “I’ve been to both Chabad and Slifka events, but until now I had no idea that there was a space for Jewish students currently under renovation.”

Like other first years and sophomores who matriculated during or after fall 2020, Enza has never experienced an open and running Slifka center. In fact, she did not even know such a building existed.

Construction on the Slifka Center began in November 2020, and after a series of delays, some due to the ongoing pandemic, is slated to be finished by the fall. The kitchen and dining hall are being completely remodeled, with an expansion of dining capacity by over 20 percent. Construction is underway

for a new outdoor space, and the lobby is being redesigned and refurbished to accommodate more activity. Beyond practical improvements like the kitchen upgrade, the remodel has been designed to intentionally support people meeting and gathering in the building.

“We’re really trying to drive traffic into the space to reinforce that sense of community,” Slifka’s Executive Director Uri Cohen said of the renovation.

In addition to infrastructure upgrades, Cohen reported that a significant portion of the renovation budget has gone to security infrastructure. New security is being installed at building entrances and exits, and building vulnerabilities are being addressed.

The center was founded in 1995, uniting several other Jewish campus

Photos from Yale Daily News archives

INSIGHT

groups under one roof. Serving both as a program and a physical space, the Slifka Center has grown over its time at Yale to provide interdenominational Jewish religious and cultural programming, access to robust rabbinic staff, frequent community programming and Kosher dining. Cohen described Slifka’s building as a crossroads and a “gathering place, not just for the Jewish community, [but] the whole Yale community.”

Cohen emphasized that the Slifka Center’s physical building addresses two critical needs: safety and dining. After the discovery of antisemitic graffiti in the Kline Biology Tower this past fall, Cohen addressed a letter to the Slifka community describing the legacy and rise of antisemetism today. Echoing that statement, Cohen elaborated on Slifka’s role as a force against antisemitism at Yale. “Antisemitism is on the rise across the world and across the country,” Cohen said. “We’ve had antisemitic activity in New Haven and at Yale, so it’s really important that there be a physically safe space for the Jewish community, and for everyone.”

Reconciling the desire for Slifka to be an open and welcoming space with the building’s role in public safety, Cohen continued: “Everyone is welcome, except the people who are trying to do us harm.” Even the building’s physical presence, Cohen explained, has a role in fighting antisemitism. The building, he said, is able to fight antisemitism simply by existing, by educated nonjewish students about Judaism, and by being a welcoming space with open doors.

The second need the Wall Street building addresses is dining. To accommodate the needs of students who keep Kosher, the Slifka center typically serves meals seven days a week which students can access using their regular meal swipe. Extended dining hours and an on-site kitchen have made Slifka’s food popular across Yale, beyond just the Jewish community.

The building’s renovation has limited Slifka’s in-person dining services, but only “secondarily to COVID,” according to Cohen. “When the pandemic started, everybody’s needs changed,” Cohen said. “We couldn’t do the main things that Jewish

communities do, which is bring people together, namely over food. Those things turned out to be the worst possible things we could do from a public health standpoint. And because of the Jewish value of pikuach nefesh, making sure that we’re looking out for human life, we had to abide by those restrictions from a moral, ethical, Jewish perspective.”

“Everyone is welcome, except the people who are trying to do us harm.”

The transition from in-person to online, necessitated by both the renovations and pandemic restrictions, involved a lot of change for the Slifka community. Programming shifted online, and staff and student leaders had to identify new ways to make connections. “Individual relationship building changed a lot, and people’s needs changed a lot. There were a lot of people who were sick, or lost family and who were dealing with really serious life-cycle events that happened off-cycle because of COVID,” Cohen said.

All campus religious groups have faced similar challenges because of COVID-19, according to Associate Chaplain Maytal Saltiel, who works in interfaith programming in the Yale Chaplain’s Office. “Covid has just flipped everything upside down and made things very difficult, both in daily religious life, but also just in how we gather,” Saltiel said. “How can we be together in grief and mourning, also in celebration?

Saltiel echoed Cohen’s point about the

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INSIGHT inherent tension between religious gatherings and the desire to abide by safety restrictions. “We’re open and try to advocate for and work with our religious groups on campus,” Saltiel said. “But we are very cognizant of the life lost, of the dangers of COVID in some ways, and how our religious communities impact more than just our student community.”

Despite COVID-19’s impact on Slifka’s activity, the center has been operating out of a temporary location known as “Slifka North” at 105 Whitney Ave. A narrow, white-walled space, Slifka North looks very little like the Wall Street building. Students and staff have decorated with posters and couches, but the space remains sterile. Slifka North provides some physical gathering space for students and dining options for students who require kosher meals. On Sundays, during Slifka’s ever popular “Bagel Brunch,” where students can use their meal swipes for fresh bagels and mounds of lox, students pack into the small space to build their plates and eat, chatting and smiling, on Slifka’s couches and the tables outside. Perhaps most reminiscent of what typical life at Slifka looked like before fall 2020, Bagel Brunch is a poppy-seeded light at the end of the tunnel.

However, Cohen says Slifka North is not a perfect substitute for the Wall Street building, called “Slifka Main” in light of the renovation. “We didn’t have any good options for temporary space,” Co-

6 | May 2022

hen said. “We scoured every lead both on and off-campus. We thought we did well by finding a location only a seven-minute walk from Slifka Center, but it proved to be much more out-of-the-way than we had anticipated … So that’s been really hard.

Without a kitchen we’re much more limited with the food we offer, so it’s only made it more challenging to build vibrant community. When we’re back in the building we’ll have location, space, and awesome food to offer once again.”

The result of the less convenient location is having an impact on who shows up to Slifka programming. “It’s not Slifka’s fault that the building has been delayed, but it has resulted in the community being much more orthodox-centric than it otherwise

would have been,” said Ilan Dubler-Furman ’25. “It’s more annoying to go to things when the temporary location is far from campus.” Orthodox Jews, who typically practice stricter levels of observance, tend to be more likely to require kosher dining or frequent opportunities for religious services. As Dubler-Furman describes, while many of Yale’s Jews would not identify as Orthodox, programming at Slifka North largely attracts those who require it rather than those who seek it out, thus resulting in a more Orthodox-leaning group of Slifka “regulars.”

Cohen also acknowledged that the composition of who regularly attends Slifka might be different due to the relative inconvenience of Slifka North. “I think there is certainly an element of self-selection to the people that come to Slifka North regularly,” Cohen said.

“There’s no doubt that because it’s not convenient, it is often the case that folks who come to Slifka North are looking for something specific. When we’re back in the building we expect that students will once again visit for convenience and for a casual reason in addition to those who are looking for something specific.” Cohen elaborated that food, a minyan — a quorum required for religious practice, usually composed of 10 individuals — individual meetings or fellowship participation are the main reasons people regularly attend Slifka

INSIGHT North.“It’s not a place you’re just gonna drop by,” Cohen said.

ligious communities in these spaces,” she said.

Saltiel also expressed the challenges of finding space for Yale’s many religious groups. “Space at Yale is always a good question because it’s inherently political as well,” she said. “Our religious groups ebb and flow, so it’s hard to say how many there are in a particular year.” She mentioned various Protestant ministries, most of which, she said, are not associated with any kind of physical space. She said the Christian Union is an exception, and the University Church in Yale worships in Battell Chapel. Yale’s Muslim community uses the Musalla and the Hindu community has a Hindu prayer room, both of which are located outside of Saltiel’s office in Bingham Hall.

Slifka North, designed to serve the community as a temporary space, does feel high-

Saltiel, emphasizing the interfaith work that the Chaplain’s Office does, highlighted that having a specific physical space may not be all positive. “I think that there are benefits to having physical spaces, but I think there are also losses to having freestanding buildings and physical spaces.

And I think part of the loss is that there is not the regular interaction with other re-

“It’s not Slifka’s fault that the building has been delayed, but it has resulted in the community being much more orthodox-centric than it otherwise would have been.” ly temporary. But for some students, Slifka North is all they have known at Yale. “I have never been at school when there has been a building,” said Lia Solomon ’24. Solomon, who serves on Slifka’s student board, has

only been on campus since the renovation began. “It does feel like we as a community are decentralized,” she continued. “I think one difficult thing to do without a building is attracting Jews who don’t need the building for kosher food or worship but who do want to connect to their Jewish identities. I think given the circumstances Slifka staff and student leaders have been doing a great job but I do think that people are starting to lose hope in the building opening and therefore in being part of the community.”

Slifka Main, according to both Solomon and Cohen, does serve as a casual space for community. “I think the thing that people miss most is having casual social interactions,” Solomon said. “The building used to be a place where people would spend free time.” Cohen agreed, explaining that he sees Slifka North as very different from Slifka Main. He recalls Slifka Main as a place where people would drop by casually all the time, in between classes, if they had an extra 10 minutes, or just to study. “Nobody is coming to Slifka North just to study,” Cohen said. Cohen noted that Friday night Shabbat dinners — which have recently taken place in more convenient locations including Yale Law School’s dining hall and

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INSIGHT the Omni Hotel — have been well attended across the community, with “10 times” as many people as those who regularly go to Slifka North, indicating that Slfika’s interdenominational identity is not necessarily solely represented by who frequents Slifka North.

Despite the challenges Slifka is facing in its

two parts: the physical space and the essence of the organization. Regarding the physical space, it’s hard to see any sort of growth, Cohen said. Remembering the building as he inherited it, Cohen admits that contrasting a bustling community space with a construction site makes it hard to see Slifka’s upwards trajectory. “That’s difficult, but it’s very much like everything

to accomplish,” Cohen explained. “A lot of people were new when I joined, but we’ve had a lot of awesome people come to the organization.”

“I had felt that a casual space oriented towards fostering Jewish community was missing on campus,” said Jonas-Giugani.

“As someone who feels very culturally connected to Judaism but less religiously connected to Judaism, having a space like this

“Having a space like this that would allow me to connect with other Jewish students on campus any day of the week is something that I’m really looking forward to.” that would allow me to connect with other Jewish students on campus any day of the week is something that I’m really looking forward to.”

temporary space, the community has remained resilient. “The Slifka community has been great for me as an observant first year starting school,” Dubler-Furman said.

“I look forward to the building being open so that the community can be fully functioning.”

else in the world, which is that we’ve had a major speed bump, and it’s hard to recover from that, especially because the speed bump isn’t over yet.”

Cohen described the growth and evolution of the center in his three years since joining Slifka’s staff in terms of

“We’re much more consistent than we were, our language is much more encompassing of the breadth of what we’re trying

8 | May 2022

However, regarding the Slifka community, Cohen describes it as a “straight shot up.”

Cohen is looking forward to the building’s reopening as Slifka’s activity “on the ground” comes to match the “essence of the organization.” “I can’t wait to welcome everybody back, and I wish we had been able to welcome everybody back sooner. The whole point of the renovation is to support our mission, empower both our staff, students and the community, and the whole design advances that purpose,” he said.

“When the building reopens, we’ll have the mission, the people and the building working synergistically together, and at that point, I hope we’ll see what’s happening on the ground matching the institutional progression that has proceeded unabated all this time.”

¡Viva Títeres!

Manuel Morán’s “Invitation to Be” Jesse Roy Illustration by Jessai Flores

Tienes que comenzar a reírte para que dejes de hablar en preguntas.

Listen, the only way to stop questioning is to laugh … You have ‘questionitis’!

PROFILE

I

n Puerto Rican puppeteer Manuel Morán’s “latinized” reimagination of Pinocchio, “Viva Pinocho! A Mexican Pinocchio,” “pregunatitis” — or “questionitis” — is a curiosity that proves deadly. Morán’s Lobo, a scheming coyote and a stand-in for the “coyotes” who smuggle Latin American migrants to the U.S.,

the fences and searchlights of the border to el otro lado, the other side.

A superstar in the expansive world of Theater for Young Audiences, or TYA, Morán reinvented the story of Pinocchio in 2009, producing a full-length, musical play that playfully incarnates the threatening uncertainties of surviving as

Manuel Morán, the sole actor in "Viva Pinocho!," as Don G, Pinocho's father // Courtesy of Auger Dominguez

enchants a young Pinocho with promises of a world where “all your dreams come true.”

The coyote’s teasing interrogation brings Pinocho to pose too many questions himself, luring him from his studious, nearly-human life in Mexico, past

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an immigrant in America. For its twisted hypnotics, artful readaptation and insistence upon celebrating our loved ones, ourselves, and Latine diasporas, “Viva Pinocho!” is Morán’s favorite script. It also represents Morán’s radiant

repertoire of bilingual community-based musical theater which, as it translates classical tales, Latin American folklore

“We’re in this limbo, you know, in this in-between where we do not belong here, or we do not belong there.” and the storytelling legacy of Latinidad into children’s theater, transmits radical hope.

Since founding his TYA organization Teatro SEA — Society of the Educational Arts; also, in Spanish, an invitation “to be” — in New York City in 1985, Morán has crafted original theater expressly for thousands of kids and families, from the Lower East Side to San Juan. “We’re not trying to hide or sugarcoat reality,” he said, alluding to “Viva Pinocho!”

“That is undermining the kid’s mind. I am hoping that I could be touching people, touching their life and giving them a sense of purpose, to find themselves.” The challenge to stage stories that are culturally affirming for Latine kids, young adults and families historically neglected by U.S. arts institutions inspires Morán. He continued, “I feel that through

theater, I can say ‘it is fine to be bicultural, it is fine to be bilingual.’ It’s actually fantastic.

And … [you can] build your own reality.”

The story of Pinocho’s journey embodies Morán’s educational mission of offering kids truth, purpose and the creative fabric to craft their own realities. Marketed as a dreamy, lucrative “lugar muy bonito y divertido,” the “other side” turns out to be anything but: Pinocho encounters an amusement park, modeled loosely after Carlo Collodi’s Land of Toys in the Italian novel “The

// Courtesy of Auger Dominguez

PROFILE

marine, the narrator explains that “there are people who say” Pinocho returned home to study and support his father, while “otros dicen” that he returned to “al otro lado” to fight for immigrant rights and the eradication of the “Forgetful Disease.” Pinocho resists Uncle Sam’s exploitative demands to “pay off your debt,” instead using his bravery to fight for his community and his loved ones.

Morán grew up in Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, where he first discovered his love for puppetry in the patios of his elementary school. One day, the troupe of Puerto Rican puppeteer

across Puerto Rico to entertain kids — and a young Morán counted himself among them.

Complete with live musicians, actors and puppets, the company performed Lavandero’s “La Plenópera del Empache,” or “The Bellyache Opera,” a story of a young boy whose gluttonous appetite lands him a stomach ache, a fortune-telling and a punishment. “I was mesmerized. It was my first time actually seeing live theater … and that really gave me a purpose. I found my passion,” Morán recounts. Upon his return home, he revealed his ambitions to his family and began assembling boxes for puppet theaters from the spare

The skeleton mariachi singers “al otro lado,” in “Viva Pinocho” // Courtesy of Auger Dominguez

Adventures of Pinocchio,” where young migrant workers toil under the menacing grin, the lurid laser-blue gaze, and the deafening voice of Uncle Sam the “carnival operator.”

Here, all immigrant entertainers must constantly amuse and appear amused: marionette dancers “controlled by strings” suffer from fatigue and manipulation while skeleton mariachi singers afflicted by “forgetful disease” — or “dejar de ser” — forget the lyrics to “Cielito Lindo.” Meanwhile, not one character can pronounce Pinocho’s name correctly, a reminder of

his otherness as an extraño or, as Uncle Sam puts it, an “illegal alien.” With Uncle Sam’s betrayal, we realize the darkness of the Coyote’s insistence that Pinocho simply douse his uncertainties with laughter.

But Morán intentionally offers Pinocho a way out from the play’s tragedies — family separation, immigrant labor and cultural exploitation, the menace of “dejar de ser” — with a chance to define his own future and for the audience to define theirs. Upon Pinocho’s triumphant rescue of his father from a U.S. Navy whale-sub-

Teatro SEA’s “Bellyache Opera,” originally conceived by Leopoldo Santiago Lavandero // Courtesy of George Riverón

Leopoldo Santiago Lavandero (1923-2003) paid Morán’s school a visit. A vigorous TYA advocate, former director of the Yale Dramat and the subject of Morán’s dissertation, Lavandero founded the Miniteatro Infantil Rural, a “rolling theater” that traveled far and wide

materials of his father’s furniture store. As early as third grade, Morán had a show up his sleeves. And thankfully, Morán’s family supported his vision — phrased carefully, at the time. “I had promised my mom: okay, I cannot be a lawyer or a medical doctor, but I

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PROFILE said. While Teatro SEA welcomes families often into its live theater at the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center in Manhattan, some of its most fruitful work comes from performing in hundreds of schools, parks and libraries. “We are in the communities … there’s never been a disconnection between our community and the creators.” Bringing theater to where kids reside might not carry the glamor of SEA’s well-equipped theater, but meeting them where they are — sometimes long distances from the nearest arts center — energizes theatergoers and the theatermakers alike. On numerous visits, young spectators and their caretakers have

Dr. Morán as Juan Bobo in “The Encounter of Juan Bobo and Pedro Animal” // Courtesy of Javier Gonzalez

will be a doctor of theater!” he reminisced with a chuckle. At 16, Morán entered the University of Puerto Rico’s drama program, then continued his postgraduate studies of educational and musical theater at New York University.

Now an award-winning TYA director, producer, actor and playwright with a child of his own, Morán wishes to inspire kids just as the pioneering Lavandero did years ago. This April, Morán and his company relaunched his puppet festival Títeres pa’l campo — “Puppets for the Countryside” — in Puerto Rico, where they performed and workshopped in schools, plazas, libraries and theaters, some located in his hometown of Vega Baja. Teatro SEA is also active in Stamford, Connecticut, where they performed Morán’s latest play, “César Chávez and the Migrants,” in late April at the Charter Oak Cultural Center.

Morán says that the thrills of youth theater depend first and foremost on community access. “The majority of the work that we do, it doesn’t happen on stage,” Morán

12 | May 2022

“We have lost so many grandpas and grandmothers … [these past two years].

Who’s talking to the kids about that?” approached Morán to share tales from their youth. Morán said, “Some people come to us and say, ‘Ah, my mother used to tell me this story … what are you going to do with that story?’”

Such adventures can spark revelations: when Morán decided to make a play about Pedro Animal, a Dominican folktale passed down orally, the interviews he conducted with elderly Dominicans in Washington Heights’ senior centers helped him reconstruct the legend. Sitting beside Morán, they regaled him with memories and jokes — some more bawdy than others. “They were feeding me with stories,” Morán said.

After much research, his comedic puppet show “Pedro Animal Falls in Love” emerged as the romantic end — to be performed this May at the Charter Oak Cultural Center in Stamford, Connecticut. And one might read “Los Grises,” one of Morán’s more recent works, as a love letter to elderly storytellers. This pantomimed, Bolero-, Tango-, Mambo-swinging play celebrates senior community members who take their audiences down their “memory lanes.” In “Nico y el súper abuelo,” a child struggles with the loss of his abuelo, finding healing in soccer and cello, his grandfather’s own beloved hobbies. “We have lost so many grandpas and grandmothers … [these past two years],” said Morán. “Who’s talking to the kids about that?”

What fuels Morán and his company’s creative work is the people they serve, and a desire to bring pride and laughter — real, freeing laughter, worlds away from the sort demanded by Lobo the Coyote — to their largely bilingual, immigrant communities. Amid a lack of representation in

Dr. Morán as Watchman, the narrator of “Viva Pinocho” // Courtesy of Auger Dominguez

PROFILE theater, young Latine audiences often find themselves lacking the “feeling that they are owners of something,” said Morán. He continued, “We’re in this limbo, you know, in this in-between where we do not belong here, or we do not belong there.” Thanks to the vibrant visibility — a tango-dancing Cinderella in “Cenicienta Tanguera” — enchanting rhythms — a band of Mexican guitarristas in “César Chavez” — and even the fragrant aromas of Moran’s productions, the immersive medium of puppet theater helps reverse these anxieties. “Not only do you hear the expressions, the accents, the rhythms, the smells [of our cultures] — in some of those cases we include real food!”

As Morán’s vast repertoire illustrates, for a diaspora or a neighborhood or a child or a

Bears and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which some might consider tired relics of the Western canon, Morán sees as worthy blueprints whose “Latinized” rewriting can fulfill his communities’ needs.

“Some people like to look at [my rewritings, and say,] ‘What? You’re doing classical tales?’” Morán said. “Yes! Because for me, they are a tool to motivate new audiences to come to the theater and to see something you know.” Hence Morán proposes Pinocho’s sombrerito and the airs of “Cielito Lindo” as a cure to the “Forgetful Disease” and the elegant tango dancing and live Argentinian band in “A Tango Dancing Cinderella.” Even the molcajete sitting on the three little bears’ dining table reveals Teatro SEA’s attunement to the details that allow spectators to feel at home

Scene from “Juan Bobo Falls in Love” // Courtesy of George Riverón

wooden puppet to build their own reality, the past needs reimagining — an endeavor of immense educational value. In these efforts, Morán finds utility in classic European children’s folktales: stories like Cinderella, Pinocchio, Goldilocks and the Three

— and feel that they own the story.

The smiling, arm-waving “Watchman” narrator, present only at the beginning and end of “Viva Pinocho!”, attests to the warmth Morán conveys to his audience.

“Ahhh it’s you … acérquense, no tengan

miedo! Don’t be scared, it’s just me,” he hollers in his opening salutation to the audience in SEA’s theater. Morán’s cheery welcome brings families into a chorus of chuckles and even compels a youngster, conquistado el miedo, to scream blissfully: “meeeeeeeeeeee!” And in a burst of music, the Watchman renders each of the suitcases washed up in his “Lost & Found Station” into a jukebox boasting melodies from across Latin America. Finally, Morán’s deft shape-shifting in “Viva Pinocho!” adds another layer of familiarity to the show: his presence is constant but ever-changing as he adopts every one of the play’s characters, masked, marionette-wielding or, as the Watchman, his face fully visible.

Still, much of Morán’s most empowering work belongs to what he calls “cultural preservation,” the puesta en escena of folktales rooted in the oral traditions of Caribbean and Latin American indigenous peoples. “I’m very committed to my culture,”

“For a diaspora or a neighborhood or a child or a wooden puppet to build their own reality, the past needs reimagining — an endeavor of immense educational value.” he explained, and SEA’s modern reclamation of centuries-old folktales — like Puerto Rico’s “Juan Bobo” and Cuba’s “Cucarachita Martina” — reconnect families

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PROFILE

SEA’s production of “Proyecto Pura Belpré” // Courtesy of George Riverón

with their own culture. For one, Lavandero’s “Bellyache Opera,” the same show that captivated Morán as a young boy, now features in SEA’s original repertoire, accompanied by an array of Afro-Puerto Rican plenas, a bomba-inspired genre of popular song some label as a periódico cantado, steeped in humor. Often, Morán discovers some adults attending his shows without kids. Their justification? “They’re all [like], ‘no, no, we’re coming to see the show by ourselves. We want to remember [this] story that my mother told me.” The pleasure of seeing age-old folklore revived onstage through music and dance calls out to just about every generation.

For Morán, preserving the culture also means celebrating Latine heroes and heroines.

“We need heroes, we need people that look like us, that sound like us, and that … have

14 | May 2022

done extraordinary things,” he said. This is where SEA’s collection of biográficos come in: Morán has produced puppet shows dedicated to Frida Kahlo, Roberto Clemente and most recently, César Chavez. In each production, actors personify the icons themselves, or embody them through puppetry.

Regardless, a puppeteered partner is always on hand — literally.

In one scene of “Mi superhéroe Roberto Clemente,” a salute to the baseball player and humanitarian, actors lift up a puppeteered Clemente gracefully to the moon, where he dreams of playing ball — only to descend softly into his mother’s arms, swaying to the rhythms of her song. Morán’s play even represents Clemente’s tragic death — after a plane crash, his body was never found — leading to conversations with young spectators

about how they’ve worked through family tragedies. “In my case,” Morán added, “I always try to end in a celebration because I feel even if there’s a tragedy, we are [still] celebrating [their legacy].” In another production, “The Pura Belpré Project,” an actor dressed as Belpré, the first Puerto Rican librarian in New York City and a pioneer of Latine youth theater, reenacts her magical “Bilingual Story Hours” in parks, schools and libraries — just as Belpré did decades ago. Morán hopes to center his next biográfico on Miriam Colón, his late friend and the founder of the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater. “I feel that she has not been given the credit … We are doing theater in the United States, Latino theater because her — she opened the doors for all of us,” he said.

The centering of actors as well as puppets — as Morán reminded me, “it’s not [purely] a puppet show” — serves to make las bellas artes a living genre where the intimate relationship an actor, puppet, and audience share feels as loving and as human as if Myrta Silva, Celia Cruz or even Juan Bobo themselves were living and breathing before the crowd.

“La Cucarachita Martina,” a worldwide sensation native to Cuban folklore and resurrected by Belpré in New York’s public libraries decades ago, is the story of a cockroach who, wooed by a parade of creatures, finally chooses to marry a mouse. Morán’s rock-and-roll recreation of Martina is a testament to his theater’s reverence for music and dance: in her first

song, Martina sings the first lines of “La Cucaracha,” a Mexican folk song that parodies, for one, cockroaches’ inability to walk on two legs: “La cucaracha, la cucaracha-a-a-a … ya no puede caminar-r-r, porque no tie-n-e, porque le fa-a-lta-

“In the joy of Morán’s Martina, there is something especially liberating: the play’s silliness, from its towering puppeteered dalmations to its outspoken hens to its emcee’s buoyant steps, invites its audience to take a deep breath and laugh.” a-a-a-an — las dos patitas de atrá-á-ás.”

Despite the “Cucaracha” anthem’s insistence that Martina and her kin cannot walk, Morán’s cucaracha can walk — and stand, dance, sing, fly, twirl, hover — with just as much liveliness as the show’s

PROFILE ebullient emcee who, clad in a green suit and Converses, narrates Martina’s adventures.

In the joy of Morán’s Martina, there is something especially liberating: the play’s silliness, from its towering puppeteered dalmations to its outspoken hens to its emcee’s buoyant steps, invites its audience to take a deep breath and laugh.

As Morán explains, the landscape of children’s theater has shifted dramatically since the time of Belpré, Lavandero, and Colón. Governmental and institutional investment in children’s theater has dwindled in recent decades, making Martina’s musical reincarnation — whose folkloric value might not appear “relevant” to every corner of the funding world —

ever more radical. Today, youth arts are among the first to fall victim to budget cuts, and the powerful rarely fail to sideline children’s theater. “[The prejudice against TYA] is really ridiculous,” Marón lamented. “Because it takes the same amount of work, the same amount of resources … You know, why are we seen as a second class kind of theater?” Meanwhile, since the turn of the century — and amid natural, financial and political disaster — Puerto Rican youth arts programs are more under-resourced than ever.

Despite these frustrating realities, the same hope that Morán instills in Pinocho motivates his own reactions to TYA’s neglect: “[My solution is] basically doing more!” he

said. For Morán and his company, “more” means co-hosting puppet festivals in Puerto Rico and showcasing the island’s artists; bringing the Pura Belpré Project to every corner NYC; resurrecting Lavandero’s late director’s “Miniteatro Infantil Rural” in order to reach young Puerto Ricans in the farthest corners of the island; co-curating a museum exhibit at the University of Connecticut’s Ballard Institute on the history of Puerto Rican puppetry; directing a documentary that chronicles pan-Caribbean puppetry and interviews its stars; transforming his plays into a series of books; organizing virtual talleres and theater festivals to teach a generation of young learners how to build

puppets and dance to capoeira, bomba, and plena and calling for New York City budget justice and BIPOC arts investment.

On March 21, Teatro SEA celebrated the International Day of World Puppetry by debuting Morán’s latest play on Chavez — “it’s not a holiday, but for us puppeteers it is.” In our conversation, Morán didn’t hide his passion for his art form: “Puppets are magical … They’re an amazing theatrical resource,” he told me. And for anyone intent on exploring puppetry, Morán’s advice is reassuringly simple: “There’s not a science to it.

It’s really learning by doing, so don’t be afraid to dig into it.”

Morán, flanked by puppeteered animals, as the emcee in his “La Cucarachita Martina” // Courtesy of Xavier J. Araújo

Yale Daily News | 15

POEM

Ana Padilla Castellanos

It started like this: during my first visit the doctor ordered a test and told me there’s not enough iron in my blood. It’s hereditary, mom said before packing her supplement in my suitcase — she’ll buy another one when there’s money.

It started with: lack. Now, every morning I juice oranges on my desk, cutting board propped between French books because she said vitamin C helps with absorption. Someday, I want to give her the most expensive of oranges, peeled, no pith. I want to say pith when she’s crying, her laugh a wet chuckle I can always replay.

16 | May 2022

// Catherine Kwon

Yale Daily News | 17

PROFILE

A Girl Worth Fighting For CYNTHIA LIN

E

xcept for when she was sleeping, 9-year-old Mimi Chan did not spend a lot of time in her house in Orlando. After school, she would find herself inside the iron gates of the Wah Lum Temple, hands and feet at ready stance as her father ran through a series of kung fu drills. The Wah Lum Temple is a kung fu and tai chi school founded by her father Pui Chan and mother Suzy Chan. In the early 1980s, the temple was still considered a “small family business.” Now with hundreds of practitioners, Wah Lum Temple tours internationally. In 2020, the Chans celebrated the temple’s 50th anniversary in the United States.

At 44 years old, Mimi is the current chief instructor at the Wah Lum Temple. Her husband, Oscar Agramonte, helps her run the business. Before Mimi, her father Pui Chan led the temple. In 2012, Mimi produced and directed a documentary on Pui, called

18 | May 2022

“Pui Chan: Kung Fu Pioneer,” during what she calls her “brief” foray into Hollywood. Pui was the first to bring the wah lum system of kung fu to America — in Boston — 50 years ago. The documentary tells the story of Pui, from the time he apprenticed under Grandmaster Lee Kwan Shan in Canton at age four, his move to America in his early twenties, his marriage to Suzy in Boston and the establishment of the Wah Lum Temple in Orlando, Florida in 1980.

Mimi started kung fu at the age of 3. Growing up, Mimi wouldn’t get home until after the adult kung fu classes were done at 9 p.m., when her parents could drive her home. After her own classes for children, she lolled about the temple, exploring the developing compound. “By no means did I spend my time wisely!” she said, despite the fact that she practiced the kung fu foundations for 10,000 days — the number of days needed for mastery of the moves according to her father’s Wah Lum Handbook.

These kung fu foundations were the backbone for her roles in Disney’s 1998 “Mulan” and “Mortal Kombat Conquest.” At 16, she walked into the office of Mark Henn, a Disney animator who drew the princesses Ariel,

Belle, Jasmin, Pocahontas and Mulan.

Henn, with the Disney Mulan team, was in Orlando looking for martial artists to use as inspiration for their illustrations for “Mulan.” When Mimi walked in, Mark Henn said, “It was like Mulan had walked into the room.”

Even Mimi found the similarities uncanny: “I do kung fu, she does kung fu. Her father did kung fu, my father did kung fu,” she said.

With her background, it’s not difficult to see how “Mulan” was modeled after her. In the movie’s finale, when Mulan fights an invading Hun on the roof of the imperial palace, she strikes a series of poses — the sweep, the straight sword and fan moves — all part of the kung fu foundations. Mimi choreographed the fight. On her podcast, The Sifu Mimi Chan Show, she talks about how surreal it was seeing her movements — the twist of the paper fan, the spinning of the sword — captured in animation.

Mimi started The Sifu Mimi Chan Show in 2017. The show was originally called “Culture Chat,” and Mimi would bring on “interesting people” to chat about their journeys, lifestyles, professions and cultural backgrounds. The people included a consulting producer on Marvel’s “Hawkeye,” a comics writ-

PROFILE er and artist on “Wonder Woman,” and a U.S. Secret Service agent. In response to popular demand, Mimi eventually recorded an episode talking about her own life and modeling for “Mulan.” In the episode, Mimi says that a common question she gets is which aspects of Mulan’s character bear the most resemblance to Mimi.

Oscar points to the scene where Mulan is under the cherry blossom tree after the matchmaker rejects her. When Mulan’s father, Fa Zhou, joins her on the stone bench, she turns away. Fa Zhou points to an unopened cherry blossom. “This one’s late, but I’ll bet, when it blooms, it will be the most beautiful of them all,” he says.

Mimi said she was a terrible student when she was little. She didn’t take kung fu seriously, so it took longer for her to improve. Like the cherry blossom, she was kind of a “late bloomer.”

“I know we are fighting for not having stereotypes with Asian Americans, but I will say some of them do exist for a reason. I was in a strict household,” she said. Her father was her sifu, which roughly translates to “teacher.”

A little more than half a century ago, Pui Chan gave a watchman a bottle of whiskey in exchange for rope and a promise to turn a blind eye when he slid down the side of the ship and into the murky New York Harbor. If he had jumped into the water, the noise would have alerted the ship captain and immigration officers, who had forbidden him to set foot into Chinatown without a visa. He told two friends who’d left with him from Hong Kong to pull up the rope afterwards. The ship departed the next day.

Pui wasn’t from Hong Kong. He was born in Shajing village in Canton in 1938, now known as Guangzhou — southern China. When Pui was 9, communists imprisoned his parents. In 1956, when he was 18, Pui swam from Communist China to Hong Kong and boarded a merchant ship bound for America. His ship reached New York, but his application was denied without

a visa. So Pui slid down the ship, with only $24 in a plastic bag. He told himself he would not stop swimming until he saw shore. By the time he could make out the Newark Liberty International Airport, he’d swum close to a mile.

“I take a taxi go to Chinatown. First time, he go to 42nd Street. I told them this is not Chinatown!” he says in the documentary.

Eventually, Pui reached Manhattan. He found his way to Boston, where he took on a job as a cook for a few years.

In the 1970s, Pui opened a kung fu school near Boston’s North Station. Pui had trained under Grandmaster Lee Kwan Shan — the fifth generation disciple of the Wah Lum System — in Guangzhou. Pui was the last and youngest — at 4 years old — of Shan’s disciples. Pui recalls that there was no electricity at the school, so they would have to use kerosene lights. Now, in his 80s, Pui responds with energy to Mimi’s i n te r v i e w ques-

tions in “Pui Chan: Kung Fu Pioneer.” “One time, Lee Kwan Shan kicked above the light, and it blew out. Everyone thought his kung fu was very powerful because of this one kick!” he says.

Pui’s kung fu school in Boston was open to all, not j u s t the

Chinese, which made it controversial in the kung fu community. Not everyone

thought that kung fu should be taught to “foreigners.” But one event in the early 1970s changed the mindset of the Chinese com-

PROFILE munity. A close friend of Pui’s, also a grandmaster, had taken on a Caucasian student by the name of Paul Vizzio. Vizzio was set to fight against a Taiwanese martial artist.

The night of the fight, hundreds crowded into a gym in New York’s Chinatown. Bets were made.

There was a stark divide in the audience, exacerbated by newspaper headlines which framed the fight in terms of race: white versus Chinese.

“At the time, it was a real fight. You had to sign a contract that if you died, [you] wouldn’t sue,” Pui says. By the end, the Taiwanese fighter was bloodied and had been knocked out so many times that he was struggling to stay upright. Vizzio was declared the winner. Members of the kung fu community reconsidered the place of “foreigners” in kung fu; they saw how well Vizzio, a white man, had learned the art. Pui’s decision to open his school to people outside of the Chinese community was suddenly becoming normalized in America. What was more, Pui’s kung fu school was becoming well-established in Boston North Station.

During this time, Pui also met Suzy, Mimi’s mother. She was the lead singer at a restaurant Pui and his friends often frequented. Pui, whose English was not

good, would request for her to sing “Guantanamera” again and again, hoping she would remember him. It worked. Pui and Suzy married in Boston in 1977, not far from Pui’s kung fu school.

But Pui and Suzy didn’t stay long in Boston. Snowstorms were frequent in the Northeast. “When Mimi was born, she was born between two snowstorms,” Suzy says in the documentary. That year — 1978 — the snow came down hard, covering even the tops of the Chan house’s doors. The roads

20 | May 2022

PROFILE were blocked. Pui and Suzy were able to make it to the hospital in time, but no friends could come visit.

The weeks following Mimi’s birth, the family cuddled by the fireplace. The snow had gotten into the house through the cracks between the windows. There was no electricity. “It was so cold that I thought we could die in Boston if we continued like this,” Suzy recalls. A few years later, Mimi’s younger sister Tina was born 26 weeks early. She was small enough to fit in the palm of Suzy’s hand.

The family decided to move to Orlando. In Orlando, there would be no cold, no snow and the roads would never be closed if Tina had a medical emergency.

“There were definitely times that I felt like the path that was laid out for me was not necessarily my own.

I made a decision though, in my teen years, that this was what I was meant to do. But even today, as a forty plus year old, there’s a pressure to carry on my father’s legacy,” said Mimi.

In “Pui Chan: Kung Fu Pioneer,” Oscar calls Mimi the “scion” of Pui Chan.

“If you think about a lot of family owned companies, the next generation sometimes doesn’t take care of it as well as the first one because they’re not as invested in it. But Mimi’s been doing kung fu her whole life. It’s who she is,” he says.

Mimi remembered one rare occasion when both Mimi and her father were at home as opposed to at the temple. Her father ran into the house, waving his arms. He had planted a starfruit tree.

“You are going to be so happy, this tree will have a lot of fruit. You really likey,” he said. Outside, Mimi stared at the stick dug into the ground, the feeble branches and the one leaf dangling from them.

“Where’s the fruit?” she said.

“In 10 years, you are going to be really happy. You 100 percent have a lot of fruit,” he responded.

Mimi would have preferred if Pui had just gone to the grocery store like her friends’ parents to get her some fruit. She also would have preferred to

play with the neighborhood children or hang out with her friends at a party she’d had to decline yet again because she had temple duties.

“As a young child, it’s kind of one of those things that you don’t know anything different, so you just do it,” she said of kung fu classes. “I’m not saying I had this oppressed childhood — my parents found a balance — but I was at the temple a lot.”

Mimi is now in her 40s, and Pui, in his 80s. Mimi doubts Pui will ever retire.

“I think for him, retiring means he’ll get to the school at 7 a.m. instead of 6:30 a.m.,” Mimi says in the documentary.

Pui gives the impression that he is always in motion. Although he sits still during Mimi’s interview in the documentary, his face, his eyebrows, and even the way he widens his mouth and lifts his head when he exclaims, “Ayah!” makes him appear intensely alive.

He and Mimi share this characteristic. “My father is very charismatic,” Mimi said. “A social butterfly.”

Oscar adds that Pui works tirelessly to maintain the temple. “If you had never met him or never known Master Chan, and you would have come here on a typical early morning, you’d think he was like the hired help, some kind of janitor or something because he comes here, cleans, does yard work,” Oscar says in his interview with Mimi in the film.

After his morning of building bamboo fences, clearing leaves from the temple grounds, planting new trees and clearing the gutters on the roof, Pui also likes to tend his fish in the pond at the temple.

“I would say I really enjoy being out by the fish pond. And having some solitude there,” Mimi said, laughing. “If I wasn’t in charge of running everything.

Maybe I just like the idea of peace.”

The Wah Lum Temple in Orlando, Florida is still a family business, Mimi said. Its leadership has passed to Mimi and her husband, Oscar, although Pui and Suzy are never too far from the temple. But it is no longer a “small” family

business. In 2017, the Chan family went on a 24-day cruise from Rio de Janeiro to Orlando to study kung fu and philosophy. On the way, they stopped in Brazil for a Wah Lum Grand Opening Tour with Sifu Antonio, who leads the Wah Lum school in Rio. In the same year, the family took another cruise to Germany where they had their second grand opening. Moreover, the annual Chinese New Year lion dance shows have taken Mimi and the Wah Lum Demo Team to perform at Walt Disney World, Universal Studios and Epcot Center.

Most recently, the temple held its Wah Lum Kung Fu of USA’s 50th Anniversary Virtual Exhibition. Production took place between 2019 and 2020 and was made public in late 2020. The exhibition was lively and theatrical.

It started with drums. And then the stage turned black. Flickering white lights appeared, illuminating whiteclothed bodies that flowed through kung fu forms. They stopped, then gathered together, closing fists over the balls of lights until, one by one, they disappeared into the darkness. Then, drums again. As the light flashed on, lion dancers swathed in yellow and red costumes swayed to the beat of the drums and cymbals and cackling firecrackers.

“I was not a natural performer like my father,” Mimi said. She asked me if I remembered seeing her father perform his solo routine in the documentary. I said I did, and she said, “I feel like he has a certain charisma and a natural showmanship. Me, I use technology and choreography and musical timing and then hopefully make something beautiful out of it.”

“Individually, I still think my father is the better performer,” Mimi said.

She paused, considering. “We’re different. I guess that’s not really fair to myself, right? I found my own way in Wah Lum.”

// SOPHIE HENRY Yale Daily News | 21

POEM

Afong Moy Teaches Provenance After Sally Wen Mao’s ‘The Diary of Afong Moy’

Cindy Kuang when the poacher knocks on my door, arms crossed with collections, I do not hear his tranquilizers hit the window panes, I am high on the chandelier, body slung over crystal droplets when he pierces the glass with shouts, tracks mud on my floors, I fork my tongue to guide him to the precious porcelain, dusted with my family’s ashes watercolors of curved mountains and rivers while he slits formal words with his breath praising me a good American I dare him to claim as much as he can, as I rock back and forth in epileptic flashes, show him how to hide from thick Japanese boots, how to muffle your mouth in embroidery while your sisters are being touched a few feet away, I show him rivers running out to ruin prayers, lifeless pupils dropped into shot glasses as aphrodisiacs, I drop down to his ear to ask, do you still want this? when I promise every hand that smears our ink will die in ownership and debt, splintered in black rot like this, I say, fingers furled, crippling his hands in stone, this insolvency clause, my final sale.

22 | May 2022

// Sophie Henry

Yale Daily News | 23

FEATURE

New Haven on the Mend Connecticut’s Methadone Clinic Conflict and Battle Against the Opioid Crisis

BY IDONE RHODES Photos by Sam Feibel

O

n Dixwell Avenue in New Haven’s Newhallville neighborhood, a large billboard reads: “STOP THE APT FOUNDATION FROM RELOCATING TO NEWHALLVILLE.” When the APT Foundation, a Connecticut not-for-profit organization that provides addiction treatment services, purchased 794 Dixwell, a building at the corner of Dixwell Avenue and Elizabeth Street, in January of this year, they planned to use the space as their new foundation headquarters as well as a substance use disorder treatment facility and methadone clinic. The foundation’s intention to purchase the building was not disclosed to community leaders beforehand, and massive pushback from the Newhallville community has complicated the foundation’s plans to move into the neighborhood.

Newhallville, a neighborhood on the New Haven-Hamden border, is home to longtime residents who care deeply about their community. The neighborhood is battling a variety of systemic issues: poverty, violence and lack of access to healthy foods, amongst others.

The area’s residents view the APT Foundation’s move into the neighborhood as yet another roadblock to progress. “We are looking to move forward … in a more posi-

24 | May 2022

tive community … with things that can help us and support us … and not stress our community where it’s going to go backwards,” said Jeanette Sykes, chairwoman of the Newhallville-Hamden Strong movement.

“Methadone is an inexpensive, long-acting opioid that, when administered properly and consistently, can allow those recovering from opioid use disorder to stabilize and resume daily life with a decreased risk of overdose should they relapse.”

The APT Foundation, founded in 1970 by Herb Kleber, a former faculty member of the Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry, is one of the oldest addiction treatment programs in the United States. The foundation

uses a holistic treatment approach and provides mental health counseling, primary care, housing assistance and vocational training to its patients, in addition to the implementation of pharmacological treatment methods such as methadone maintenance. “At the APT Foundation, we have a very integrated care model,” shared Jeanette Tetrault, a Yale professor of medicine and public health and a staff physician at the foundation. “We provide on-site primary care … as well as having a distinct role in the management of substance use disorder with our patients. We also provide integrated care for things we commonly see in patients with substance use disorder, like HIV and hepatitis C treatment.” Opioid use disorder is not an illness with a wholesale treatment, and the foundation combines a variety of methods to best suit their patients’ needs.

Medication treatment for substance use disorder has proven to be one of the most effective rehabilitation methods for opioid use disorder. Methadone is an inexpensive, long-acting opioid that, when administered properly and consistently, can allow those recovering from opioid use disorder to stabilize and resume daily life with a decreased risk of overdose should they relapse. Robert

FEATURE

Heimer, a professor of epidemiology and pharmacology at the Yale School of Public Health, described it as the “gold standard treatment for opioid use disorder.” Methadone works by fulfilling a biological need which has been produced by long-term opiate use. Methadone maintenance, the prescription use of methadone, doesn’t get users high, it simply allows people to feel normal again and to lead their lives without debilitating cravings or discomfort that might encourage some to return to illicit drug use. Other treatments such as buprenorphine and naltrexone are available as well.

While the medical community has understood the effectiveness of methadone for treating opioid use disorder since the 1960s, stigma, ethical concerns and an abstinence-only mindset within the community itself has left methadone as a highly regulated substance. Methadone can only be admin-

istered at special clinics, such as those run by the APT Foundation, which are sequestered from general medical services. “A state like Connecticut has 7,000 to 10,000 people a year who are getting abstinence-based treatment and having their tolerance reduced,” Heimer pointed out. If those people relapse and come into contact with fentanyl, their bodies are much less prepared to take on such a potent substance, leading to fatal overdose. Those in methadone treatment programs are less likely to relapse in the first place because their chemical cravings are being met, and if they do relapse, their tolerance is higher, so they are at a lower risk of overdose. The treatment is often used in conjunction with therapy or counseling.

The APT Foundation uses an open access model, meaning the clinics accept walk-in patients for voluntary treatment and counseling regardless

of their ability to pay. “We really, really work hard not to turn patients away from treatment and also to keep them engaged in care,” Tetrault explained.

The organization treats 8,000 people every year, and people from outside of New Haven commute into the city to receive treatment at their clinics.

For several decades, New Haven has been in the throes of an opioid crisis that has only grown from year to year, parallel to national trends. Twenty-eight percent of Connecticut’s drug overdose deaths since 2015 have taken place in New Haven County, despite the city making up just under a quarter of the Connecticut population. The Connecticut Department of Public Health has tracked the number of unintentional overdose deaths in the state since 2015, which are accessible through a data dashboard. The number of drug-related deaths rises every year, with a 12 percent increase between 2020 and 2021. The

Yale Daily News | 25

FEATURE

COVID-19 pandemic increased the already-growing number of people using drugs and dying from drug use.

The New Haven Harm Reduction Task Force, founded in 2020, oversees many of the city’s harm reduction programs. “Harm reduction aims to decrease economic and social burdens and help save lives by equipping drug users with the tools necessary to keep themselves and the community safe,” Andressa Granado, an opioid community health worker on the New Haven Harm Reduction Task Force, said. “This could mean providing folks with drug checking supplies such as fentanyl testing strips, or making clean syringes available to prevent the spread of HIV or HEP C.” Their work includes facilitating syringe collection sites, medication take back days and awareness campaigns which aim to foster a sense of community and destigmatize substance use disorder. “Addiction is a community issue, and it requires community compassion and response.”

Increased prescription of opioids in the 1980s and 1990s to address the United States’ undertreated chronic pain problem sowed the seeds of today’s drug epidemic. “The medical establishment and the insurance companies created a situation that the pharmaceutical industry leapt on— it greatly expanded access to pharmaceutical opioids,” Heimer explained. Around 2011, new regulations significantly reduced the amount of pharmaceutical opioids available, but the problem really only started there.

“We didn’t increase treatment. … We just cut people loose,” Heimer said.

“Some people stopped using [opioids] … Some people couldn’t, so they had to find alternatives.” Many people develop a chemical dependence on their prescribed opiates or get them from a

26 | May 2022

friend or family member with a prescription. When these prescriptions run out, some people turn to illegal drugs to avoid withdrawals.

In the last decade, the proliferation of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids on the illicit drug market has further caused overdoses to soar.

Since 2015, fentanyl has been a leading cause of drug-related deaths in Connecticut; it was involved in 71 percent of fatal overdoses. Fentanyl is much stronger than other drugs such as cocaine or heroin and is often mixed in with other substances to make a cheaper product that is also more potent and addictive. Many users are unaware that the drugs they have been sold contain fentanyl.

The city of New Haven, along with other major urban areas in Connecticut such as Hartford, Bridgeport, and Waterbury, has become a hotspot for fatal overdoses. These cities have a far greater instance of drug-related deaths than the cities, towns and suburbs they neighbor. This is in part due to the concentrated populations of these cities, but the design of the state’s public and social service infrastructure contributes to these numbers as well. “New Haven is the magnet for the poor, displaced, and evicted people whose drug use in the suburbs makes their continued living in the suburbs unsustainable,” Heimer said. “Public health, education, housing, transportation — all those things are sort of seen as city or state responsibility.”

Methadone treatment is daily for many patients, so they are required to return to a clinic every day to receive treatment. Due to this model, methadone treatment becomes inaccessible to many who are not easily able to visit a clinic every day. Connecticut’s Department of Mental Health and

Addiction Services categorizes treatment programs by region. Five out of nine of Region Two’s methadone treatment programs are located in New Haven. These nine clinics, four of which are run by the APT Foundation, are intended to service 36 cities and towns in southern central Connecticut. New Haven is grappling with the drug use of not only its own residents, but also the residents of surrounding communities, and its opioid treatment programs take on regional responsibilities, as other communities without reduction and drug use prevention programs rely on New Haven for medical services and treatment programs.

The APT Foundation’s proposed headquarters location “is [in] one of the areas in Newhallville that is making a really strong comeback,” said Barbara Vereen, a local representative of Newhallville and an organizer of the Newhallville-Hamden Strong coalition. “We built a park in that area. The businesses are coming back and thriving. We worked very hard to push in that area to make sure that we cleaned up.” The park in question was once the “Mud Hole,” a vacant lot central to Newhallville’s drug trade.

It is now a community greenspace site, in essence a public park, called the Learning Corridor. A Connecticut transit bus stop near the clinic is across the street from this park. The Lincoln-Bassett Community School, a public elementary school, is just down the block.

“Bringing in a methadone clinic can set our neighborhood backwards,” Vereen added. She enumerated her concerns: patients will have to wait outside the clinic for their treatment, needles will be discarded around the clinic, the infrastructure of the area is not prepared for the in-

FEATURE

flux of traffic from outsiders coming to the clinic and the building is not in an accessible spot for those coming from outside the city. “We’re a neighborhood that’s dealing with trauma and to put something that’s going to cause more trauma and cause more issues is not good.”

Katurah Bryant, a licensed alcohol and drug counselor and the former assistant clinical director at the Connecticut Mental Health Center in the substance abuse treatment unit, shares these concerns. She believes that neighborhoods like Newhallville, those that are “already economically and financially depressed, largely because we do not receive funds that other neighborhoods receive,” are often taken advantage of as spaces for opioid treatment programs.

The relationship between Newhallville and the APT Foundation was contentious from the start. Newhallville residents expressed frustration that the APT Foundation was not in touch with their community representatives before purchasing the building. Lynn Madden, president and CEO of the APT Foundation, states that the foundation was looking at the building and its zoning alone without considering the surrounding community in their search for a new location. All their other clinics are currently in leased buildings, so the foundation was looking for a space they could purchase. Community members maintain that APT’s lack of consideration of the profile of the area is irresponsible.

The APT Foundation has long been a source of controversy in New Haven

more broadly. “Their foundation has a track record for how they do business in black and brown communities,” Bryant said. City residents see the foundation’s clinics as hotspots for violence as well as drug use and solicitation.

They expressed frustration over patients’ behavior while waiting outside the clinics for treatment as well as their conduct on the New Haven Green and other places they may visit on their

“We’ve created a system that makes it hard to expand [the clinic system] and that makes communities nervous when you say, ‘I want to put a methadone program in [your] neighborhood.’” way to or from treatment centers. The clinic the APT Foundation currently runs in the Hill Neighborhood has been the subject of complaints and outrage due to allegations of increased crime and violence, drug selling and use and public health hazards such as dirty needles around the site.

Some New Haveners believe the clinics attract more people with substance use disorder to the city and are

frustrated by what they view as poor community-membership on the part of the foundation’s leadership. “We’ve created a system that makes it hard to expand [the clinic system] and that makes communities nervous when you say, ‘I want to put a methadone program in [your] neighborhood,’” Heimer said. As neighborhoods that house opioid treatment programs will see an influx of people with opioid use disorder coming into their communities for treatment, clinics become “associated with the notion of all these drug users hanging around, and there is some truth to that.” People remain afraid of or misunderstand what having people with substance abuse order in their neighborhoods means for their communities; some may also be ignorant of the fact that members of their own communities are struggling with addiction.

At a monthly meeting of the Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management Team in 2018, Madden refuted many of the allegations against the foundation, citing its important work in the community and the steps it has taken to address concerns and be in communication with the neighborhoods that house its clinics. Her comments were not well received by the New Haveners at the meeting, particularly those who live or operate businesses near the APT Foundation’s clinics. The foundation’s unresponsiveness to previous attempts by community members to reach out has left some skeptical about the organization’s commitment to mending its relationship with the city.

Yale Daily News | 27

FEATURE Since the public became aware of the sale of the Dixwell Avenue property at the beginning of January, Newhallville has united to oppose the foundation’s move with rallies, public hearings, letters of support from surrounding communities and a petition that has gathered over 1, 000 signatures from local residents. Per the Yale Daily News’ reporting from a protest at the proposed Dixwell Avenue site in early February, community leaders and concerned citizens gathered to speak out against the APT Foundation’s move into Newhallville with impassioned speeches about the crime, violence and other negative impacts that the clinic would bring to the community. Both New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker and Hamden Mayor Lauren Garrett were in attendance. “We are reaching out and gaining support from the Greater New Haven Area. We are reaching out to our legislators to ask for their support,” Vereen shared.

In their petition, Newhallville-Hamden Strong proposes finding “alternate solutions to treating county patients suffering from addiction.” “I’m not going to put [the clinic] in another community because I don’t believe any community should have it,” said Sykes.

“There are appropriate industrial areas that it should be in where everybody can get support.”

Opinions are divided regarding the impact of a clinic more accessible to Newhallville residents. “It’s better to have a treatment program in your neighborhood than to have drug users who are unwilling to go elsewhere for treatment continue to be drug users in your neighborhood,” explained Heimer.

On the other hand, Bryant said, “I mean we can always, always, always use more, but there’s adequate spaces … places that are more appropriate for this kind of service than down the street from an elementary school or near the corner where children have to catch the bus.”

Bryant cites other programs that are available to the citizens of Newhallville seeking treatment in the broader New

28 | May 2022

Haven area, such as the Connecticut Mental Health Center and MAAS CASA. Opioid treatment programs, particularly those which offer medication treatment, are highly stigmatized spaces. The APT Foundation’s mission may in fact be better suited for a different location, but viewing these clinics as inherently dangerous or detrimental spaces can contribute to a larger narrative which disparages people with addictions in their journey to treat a chronic disease. “I wish no one felt

“The clinic system not only precipitates the insufficiency of treatment availability but also promotes the misconceptions associated with opioid use disorder by physically separating these services from general medical care.” that way. Look at what we are providing, what we are doing,” Tetrault said.

“On the other hand, constantly pushing treatment programs into residential neighborhoods may not be the right answer. In a perfect world, methadone, which is an evidence-based treatment for a highly morbid condition, would not be segregated from the rest of health care.”

An alternative use for the Dixwell Avenue space as a community wellness and education center is now on the table, and Rev. Boise Kimber and the New Haven-based mental health organization Clifford Beers were awarded a $2 million state grant to go towards the proposed Resilience Academy. “It can be used for a fresh food market. It can

be used for … mental health services for the community. It can be used for … our children in this community. Just by being a black or brown person in America you are traumatized, so we need healing spaces,” Bryant said. “I mean there’s so many things that can go into that space — meeting spaces, education spaces, training spaces.”

In response to plans for Resilience Academy, New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker announced that the APT Foundation would put their applications for zoning approvals for the Dixwell Avenue building on pause to see if they can find another suitable location to move to. Discussion between local government, Newhallville residents and the APT Foundation to resolve this issue is still ongoing. Another press conference and rally led by members of the Newhallville-Hamden Strong coalition, called the “Hour of Prayer,” took place outside the site on May 21. According to reporting from The New Haven Register, Kim Harris, president of the Newhallville Community Management Team, said at the event: “We are in solidarity… This (battle) is going to have a huge impact on who we are and where we live. … There’s been a unification in Newhallville that is here to stay.”

As Newhallville gathers support to keep the APT Foundation out of their neighborhood, they are also building a coalition within the New Haven community that has the power to inhibit the mission of the APT Foundation more generally. The foundation’s clinics in commercial areas such as Long Wharf have been cause for complaint in the past, as has the mere presence of people from these programs at bus stops and on the New Haven Green.

Wherever the foundation moves, the community’s concerns will follow.

Conversely, the opioid epidemic is showing no signs of slowing down, and communities in New Haven are going to have to bear the responsibility of treating citizens with opioid use disorder.

FEATURE The situation in Connecticut is representative of a nationwide drought of opioid treatment programs, or OTPs. For example, “the Veteran Affairs health care system has a total of 33 OTPs nationally,” Gabriela Garcia, director of the Opioid Treatment Program for the Virginia Connecticut Healthcare System, said. The clinic system not only precipitates the insufficiency of treatment availability but also promotes the misconceptions associated with opioid use disorder by physically separating these services from general medical care. “Limiting treatment to these clinics can be a barrier because A) they could not be available, and B) people feel the stigma, and they don’t want to go there.”

Heimer believes there is a much more effective model for methadone distribution, one that is already in practice for many other prescription drugs. He proposes allowing patients to pick up their monthly supply of methadone at their local pharmacy and to administer the drug themselves. “We have so demonized drug users that we don’t think of them as capable of self-control,” Heimer explained. However, research demonstrates this is a misconception.

When visiting clinics daily for treatment became untenable due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, or SAMHSA, loosened methadone regulations to allow for take-home self-administration of the drug. “Clinics are probably implementing different approaches at this point, with the loosening of federal guidelines … during COVID,” said Garcia. “We have people coming to clinic once a week or every two weeks that in the past might have come much more often.” A study led by Heimer at the Yale School of Public found that this model did not lead to an increase in methadone overdose-related deaths or reduce the number of people participating in treatment. “I have a patient who said: ‘My family now thinks this is just a treatment. I get a prescription every 30 days. I take my medication every day. They finally don’t look at methadone as a problem,” Tetrault shared. This methadone maintenance model is far less intrusive to the daily lives of patients. Experts are

advocating for an indefinite continuation of these pandemic-induced practices, but the path to reform is slow.

The clinic-based system for methadone distribution creates a plethora of hurdles to successful treatment. Opioid treatment programs become stigmatized, unwelcoming spaces, and the clinics are often too far and few between to be easily accessible. Whether the travel time is too long to make the trip on such a regular basis or impedes patients’ ability to maintain jobs and mend relationships or people feel disrespected in the communities and spaces they have to be in to access treatment, the current model can deter people from starting or maintaining treatment, as Garcia explained. Creating more opioid treatment programs may alleviate the issue of accessibility, but this plan would not be easily achieved given how difficult it is to establish these clinics, as evidenced by the current situation in Newhallville.

By integrating pharmacological treatments for substance use disorder into the broader medical community, an interprofessional approach across medical disciplines becomes more feasible, allowing holistic care for the illness itself, as well as its associated comorbidities. “If there were changes in regulations around methadone, we could link it to things like federally qualified health centers. We could link it to hospital-based clinics. We could link it to pharmacies,” Tetrault shared. “Then none of this would be an issue.” Recontextualizing opioid use disorder as a chronic disease, one which requires consistent, accessible, evidence-based treatments such as methadone, will bring us closer to meeting this epidemic where it’s at and offering communities the help they need.

“Drug user stigma has taught us all the wrong ways to think, feel and talk about people with substance use disorder, and it has affected our policies, funding and programming meant to assist individuals and families,” Granado said. “Until we fundamentally change how we decide the amount of respect, dignity and care that people are deserving of, regardless of their drug use status, we will continue to hurt the communities we are trying to help.”

Yale Daily News | 29

POEM

// Kim Lagunas

Oscar Lopez The choir renders hosannas of seashores and crashing surf, hoping the Ocean will talk back. Fishers of men throw nets over the worshipers’ heads, try capturing a devotion paid for in blood. For now, though, the folding and bending of palm leaves into crucifixions will suffice. Washingtonia robusta, or Mexican fan palm: a tree that’s known the Valley for as long as our abuelos and bisabuelos have. In the screeching pew, I look to my family, watch them make a dead man’s prophecy out of a living thing’s crown and I pray for His return, and saltwater, and the knowledge needed for palm folding.

Today, my uncle makes my cross, but I am not gentle enough with it, and so I unravel Calvary as the choir’s music rises, exploding into exultant Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

I join with them in song, sending my voice in search of clouds deep enough to hold my shame, that which is most Catholic in me.

My family and I hold washingtonia robusta leaves to our chests while we pray, make Mexican fan palm a talisman for the dispossessed. Their leaves rising and curling ‘round the open air, bathing in the blueness of the sky. Not natural, but naturalized, making away with the misnomer of citizenship.

I cannot tell my beloveds that I feel my skin being pulled tight over my skull, diaphanous as it hangs from my cheekbones like curtains doing a piss-poor job of hiding a writhing tongue. There, in a twisted bed, I ask Jesus, my Jesus, to please take the thoughts away, and the Spirit moves, bends my arms and fingers crooked.

Yale Daily News | 31 23

The Walk Along Prospect Street Gavin Guerrette Spotlighting the Unique Connection between the Yale School of the Environment and the Yale Divinity School

Photos by Lily Dorstewitz 32 | May 2022

PROFILE

T

he walk “down the hill” on Prospect Street from the Divinity School — the highest geographical point on Yale’s campus — to the School of the Environment, has been described by students as representative of their experience of the unique relationship that exists between the two graduate schools.

“I always felt like I was moving through a portal as I went up and down the street, because the social and intellectual environment is so different at the two schools,” said Elizabeth Allison, an early student of the religion and ecology joint degree program.

Allison explained that students get the “perennial” through spiritual and ethical exploration at the Divinity School and the “urgent” through the study of environmental degradation and injustice at the School of the Environment. Somewhere during that walk between classes, the students are equidistant from both schools, and many feel that it represents the broader intersection of their disciplines.

As these students walk up and down the street, they embrace the scientific and the spiritual, surrounded by a world dense with meaning in both directions.

Yale, like many universities throughout the world, offers a wide range of joint degree programs for its graduate students.

Joint degree programs are characterized by enrollment in two concurrent graduate programs offered between graduate schools in pursuit of one degree. The Yale School of the Environment offers 11 joint degree programs which its joint degree website explains “are ideal for students interested in applying environmental management frameworks to particular research or professional contexts beyond the scope of YSE’s traditional offerings.”

The Yale Divinity School also has seven joint degree programs.

Most joint degrees offered at Yale and elsewhere are considered practical with respect to professional applicability. But

there is one School of the Environment and Divinity School joint degree program which does not at first glance appear to be as practical as its counterparts: the joint degree in religion and ecology. Professors John Grim and Mary Evelyn Tucker, jointly appointed senior lecturers and research scholars at the School of the Environment have championed the necessity of the degree. Science and policy are necessary, they said, but not entirely sufficient, in addressing the environmental crises we face today. From their view, the incorporation of religious and ethical frameworks is crucial to understanding and appealing to the factors that motivate substan-

In addition to the joint degree program, which typically has an enrollment of five students per year, the cross listed courses offered between both the School of the Environment and the Divinity School are open to all students from any of Yale’s graduate schools as well as undergraduates from Yale College.

"Science and policy are necessary, but not entirely sufficient, in addressing the environmental crises we face today.”

“The conjunction between the two schools has been really powerful in helping to galvanize interdisciplinary research and the ways in which environmental changes and harms are affecting communities and the religious responses of those communities,” said Sam King DIV ’22, a masters student in religion and ecology and a research associate at the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology.

tive change. Tucker and Grim have spent much of their careers expanding this field of interdisciplinary scholarship as the co-founders and directors of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, a forum that hosts conferences and publishes research from a range of religious and environmental scholarship which has been based at Yale since 2006.

Yale is one of the only universities in the country to offer a degree program of this kind and as such serves as the center for activism and scholarship rooted in the relationship between religion and ecology.

A New Approach The relationship between the Divinity School and the School of the Environment at Yale has been a formative experience for students because it exposes them to a new method of thinking about environmental issues that they carry with them throughout their education and professional career.

Tucker and Grim have heavily emphasized interdisciplinarity in their role as jointly appointed professors and co-directors of the Forum on Religion and Ecology. This interdisciplinary network has created an environment where students feel more comfortable to explore new approaches to environmental issues.

“There was this sense of openness that, by virtue of me being in both programs at the same time, professors were more willing to let me explore the ideas that I wanted to,” said Anna Thurston DIV ENV ’19, a former joint degree student and current research associate at the Forum on Religion and Ecology.

This freedom has also prompted students in the joint degree program to embrace nontraditional avenues of discussion

Yale Daily News | 33

PROFILE and research to the environmental crises our planet faces today. In the scientific community, there is a widespread understanding of the managerial solutions for ecological problems — the technical decisions regarding things such as resource allocation, fossil fuel usage, forestry initiatives, etc. — but there is a lack of motivational components, such as religion or ethics, being incorporated into these same discussions, as Tucker has explained. The discipline of religion and ecology seeks to understand and utilize what motivates in-

dividuals towards implementing ecological solutions. The joint degree in religion and ecology combines a technical approach with a moral or faith-based approach so that students of the program have an understanding of both dimensions.

This combined approach does not, however, represent a rejection of the necessary and scientifically supported solutions to environmental issues; rather, it represents a willingness to explore what can motivate people towards these solutions.

“There has been a realization among these students that we need more than just kind of managerial or bureaucratic responses to the crisis,” said Willie Jennings, an as-

“The incorporation of religious and ethical frameworks is crucial to understanding and appealing to the factors that motivate substantive change.” sociate professor of systematic theology and africana studies at the Divinity School.

“We really need to be thinking very deeply about its underlying philosophical and theological problems.”

Yale Divinity School 34 | May 2022

The students of this program are encouraged to make it their own through the coursework, research, and fieldwork that they partake in while enrolled, said Thurston. As Grim explained, “This is a new field and people have to invent themselves.

They almost have to invent the positions that they are going to fulfill with this degree.” The joint degree program often attracts people who have a strong vision of how they might take up this interdisciplinary work in their own fields — whether as a priest, a forester or an academic, there

Yale School of the Environment are unmistakable benefits to the unique education that this joint degree program provides.

The History of Religion and Ecology at Yale While Grim and Tucker acknowledge their role in progressing the interdisciplinary movement, they see Thomas Berry, a professor they studied under at Fordham University and a longtime mentor, as being foundational to the work they are doing today. Grim and Tucker, who are married,

PROFILE met as students of Berry and have continued his work in various directions. In addition to several other projects, they have co-authored a biography of his life and produced an Emmy award winning film called “Journey of the Universe” which is inspired by Berry’s essay, “The New Story.”

However, the formal relationship between religion and ecology began at Harvard University. Grim and Tucker organized a series of 10 conferences on world religions and ecology hosted by the Center for the Study of World Religions at the Harvard Divinity School between 1996 and 1998.

The conferences, which had over 800 collaborators including leading scholars, theologians, religious leaders and environmental specialists from around the world, produced 10 volumes of articles written for the conferences. These articles would go on to serve as the foundation of a new field of study in religion.

“If we had done the conferences but not published the books, religion and ecology would not have been as well seeded,” said Tucker. “It really gave people the chance to get a feeling for what religion and ecology is all about.”

While Harvard was working to develop an environmental studies program, Tucker and Grim sought a university with a strong environmental foundation that could provide more comprehensive support to the ecological dimension of their work. At this time former Dean of the Yale School of the Environment — then called the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies — James Gustave Speth, had invited Grim and Tucker to Yale to establish a more formal relationship between religion and ecology at the University. With its century-long history of environmental study and a receptive faculty and administration, the School of the Environment was an ideal candidate.

Speth recognized the value in their work, saying “Their reception at YSE was a natural [one] it seemed to me, given the imper-

ative of a new consciousness in addressing the environment,” and brought Grim and Tucker to the University in 2005. With the help of faculty members Margaret Farley of the Divinity School and Steve Kellert of the School of the Environment, who also went on to play mentorship roles for students of the program, the joint degree program in religion and ecology was established.

As Attridge explained, Tucker and Grim’s joint appointments, along with cross-listing courses between the schools and offering the join-degree program, helped formalize the Divinity’s School’s long-held tradition of combining the theoretical and the practical.

“Given both their backgrounds — Mary Evelyn in Eastern religions and John in native American religions — it made an awful lot of sense,” Attridge said about Grim and Tucker’s joint appointments. “That proved to be a very fruitful relationship and has stimulated a lot of student interest at the Divinity School regarding issues of environmental ethics and the like.”

The Yale Forum on Religion and Ecolo-

gy was also established in 2006 with the arrival of Tucker and Grim. It has since played an active role in promoting the study of religion and ecology in academic and religious communities. The forum has hosted several conferences since it was founded at Yale, generating a wide range of scholarship in the growing field of religion and ecology. The forum has published as well as publicized numerous books and research articles, compiling a comprehensive body of work for the field of religion and ecology that can be found on their website. Students of the joint degree program also work closely with Tucker and Grim through the Forum on Religion and Ecology as research associates. The forum has always been at the academic center of the religion and ecology movement, but Tucker and Grim have undertaken an effort to make their work more accessible through a series of massive open online courses titled, “Religion and Ecology: Restoring the Earth Community.” On the coursera platform, Tucker and Grim have 13 courses covering a wide range of world religions and their Journey of the Universe project, with over 30,000 students.

Yale Daily News | 35

“[Grim and Tucker] are a real treasure here at Yale and a real force in the global conversation about this relationship between religion and ecology.”

Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, Pioneers of Interdisciplinary Thinking Both current and former students, faculty colleagues and deans of the School of the Environment and the Divinity School applaud Grim and Tucker for their dedication to engaging with the natural world, their students and their scholarship. The effect that this engagement has had is tangible in the enthusiasm of their students and admiration of their colleagues. Tucker and Grim have facilitated an environment for their students where they are welcome to experiment and encouraged to draw on personal experience, teaching the substantive material of religion and ecology to their students, but also showing them that there are different ways to think about and discuss the natural world and their place within it.

“Mary Evelyn and John are really at the core of the intersection between the two schools. There is a lot of community around them as professors and mentors alike,” said Jordan Boudreau ’19, an architectural designer and environmental educator who took many of Tucker and Grim’s classes as an undergraduate. “[Tucker and Grim] were the two most important professors in my college career and I think they have also been really meaningful to a lot of other people.”

Jennings agreed with Boudreau on the positive impact of Grim and Tucker on students and faculty alike at Yale. “They are a real treasure here at Yale and a real force in the global conversation about this relationship between religion and ecology,” he said.

“They were doing it before it was the cool thing to do, before everyone was clamoring for interdisciplinary scientists.”

36 | May 2022

Samuel King, a research associate at the Forum on Religion and Ecology and a third-year master’s student in religion and ecology, is in accordance with Jennings: “Professors Grim and Tucker have been absolutely transformative in being bridge builders between the School of the Environment and the Divinity School, and more profoundly, between ways of knowing — between a more quantitative, reductionistic bottle of science and a more holistic view of religious communities and the values of religions and cultures throughout the world.”

PROFILE “They are part of the bedrock of the broader field of religion and ecology beyond Yale. There is tremendous respect for the foundation that they have laid for these interdisciplinary dialogues on the whole, not just for religion and ecology,” said Rachel Holmes, the first student of the joint degree program and an urban forestry strategist for North America at the Nature Conservancy. “They were doing it before it was the cool thing to do, before everyone was clamoring for interdisciplinary scientists.”

The Student Experience The experience of students at the intersection of the School of the Environment and the Divinity School is intellectually diverse, providing them with a space especially conducive to powerful conversation amongst one another and the formulation of a new way of looking at the world. Students gain an exposure to the world religions and their ways of understanding the environment through the curriculum of the joint degree program and the Forum on Religion and Ecology.

“I think it helped me and the other students destabilize or question the relationship that our modern capitalist world has with the natural world,” Boudreau said about the joint degree program. “The Western capitalist world has a very exploitative and extractive relationship with nature that is made to feel natural. I learned through those courses that there has been such a plurality of ways that people have understood their relationship with the natural world and with local ecosystems.”

In many ways, joint degree program students are encouraged to bring their relationship with their faith, their past experiences, as well as their personal interests to the table for discussion with their peers. While students enrolled in the dual degree program tend to lean towards one end of the religion and ecology spectrum, the program allows them to incorporate their interests and expand their views in both directions.

“In my cohort of those of us who were pursuing dual degrees, we all came at it from very different perspectives,” Thurston said. “Some came with a more religious perspective — I had a classmate who was getting ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church who wanted to be able to speak on environmental justice issues. I was going in with a more environmental humanities perspective. But you can really see how it could attract different people based on their end goals.”

Student organizations such as FERNS — Faith, Environment, Religion, Nature, Spirituality — or the Graduate Conference in Religion and Ecology at Yale — GCRE — an annual interdisciplinary graduate conference

organized by graduate students of the two schools, are further examples of how students might incorporate their various interests outside of the classroom.

With an understanding of both the technical and motivational solutions to the environmental issues we face today, the students of the joint degree program bring a unique perspective to the ways in which we interact with the environment and one another. While students of the program often have vastly different interests, they are equipped to serve the environment in a way that few other students in the world are.

POEM

Sonnet (Exegesis) Abigail Sylvor Greenberg A critic at The New York Times, referencing another critic, has dubbed this era A “no-context context.” It’s because of “semiotics” and Lil Nas X wearing three outfits At the Met Gala. I just learned what exegesis means.

I guess I have a lot to feel sorry about. Wanting too badly to be in good Places with good people and not being very discerning about my definition Of “good.” Wanting to talk about text like a man, With the longest, most distended sentences, Wanting a vertical belly button and a low hairline.

Everything bad happens at once, makes a tall wreckage At my feet. I wait for some gale to blow it over.

This will be the year I stop writing about men. There are three in This poem, if you count the two critics. I assume the two critics are men.

I don’t think a woman would say “no-context context.”

I think women are born in context and never really change.

38 | May 2022

POEM

// Cate Roser Yale Daily News | 39

¡Viva Títeres!

Manuel Morán’s “Invitation to Be” JESSE ROY | PAGE 9