Cultural Pride Night, an experience that has become as much of an icon on Rensselaer’s campus (for Latino Heritage Month) as a traditional Latino meal, will be promoted by La Unidad Latina, Lambda Upsilon Lamda, Fraternity Inc. on Tuesday, September 17, at 7 pm in the West Hall Auditorium.
Cultural Pride Night always has one main goal, to encourage diversity and “to let the Rensselaer community see all the cultures on campus, while finding ways to get people to interact,” said LUL Treasurer Antonio Borges.
LUL is celebrating seven years of cultural pride this year and promises that it “should be bigger than the last couple of years,” said LUL President Christopher Hernandez.
This year’s talent pool includes a Malaysian group, singers, and poets. Although Cultural Pride Night encourages people to showcase their talent on stage, LUL has made a way for others, who might not want to perform, to participate in a constructive manner by creating cultural displays, showcasing flags, donating food, and dressing in traditional garb.
LUL also believes in reaching out to the surrounding community and continues to do so, even with Cultural Pride Night, by contacting a Troy High School guidance counselor in order to persuade their students to be a part of this well-recognized celebration.
Hernandez only sees positive results from the partnership, “as [the night] gets bigger and bigger, we try to introduce a larger community.”
He went on to say that as a fraternity, and as students, they truly feel love for RPI and its surrounding community and just aim to make things better by making the campus culturally.
Events traditionally promoted by LUL are not geared towards increasing their fraternity body but “if we don’t throw them then no one else will,” said Hernandez.
Throughout the course of Latino Heritage Month, LUL’s name will be attached to a number of events, with other organizations, as well as alone. They will be sponsoring a 50-50 raffle from which some of the proceeds will go towards getting new computers and software for Troy’s Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA); the other fifty percent will go to the raffle’s winner.
