A speaker you can't afford to miss: Julian Cardona

For many in the UVSC community last semester's "Leave To Enter" lecture featuring professors Aled Caldiero, Scott Carrier, and writer Charles Bowden was one of the best speaking engagements the school has seen. Bowden has been one of the most important voices on the issues surrounding the US/Mexico border.

Now UVSC will get a chance to hear from Bowden's collaborator Julian Cardona. Born in 1960 in Zacatecas, Mexico, Julián Cardona migrated to the border city of Juárez with his family as a small child. He attended school in Juárez, received vocational training, and worked as a technician in the maquiladora industry. In 1991, Cardona returned to Zacatecas to teach basic photography at the Centro Cultural de Zacatecas; two years later, he started his photojournalism career at El Fronterizo and El Diario de Juárez. In 1995, Cardona organized the group exhibition, "Nada que ver—Nothing to See,” in Juárez, featured in Harper's Magazine (Charles Bowden, “While You Were Sleeping: in Juárez, Mexico, photographers expose the violent realities of free trade) in December 1996. Photographs from this exhibition inspired the award-winning book, Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future (Aperture 1998). His photographs taken inside foreign-owned factories in Juárez were also featured in "Camera of Dirt" (Aperture 159, 2000).

Cardona will be showing some of his photos used in Exodus, the new book he compiled with Bowden. The lecture will be held on February 26 at 1 PM in the Ragan Theater. It is free and open to the public.

Minority enrollment on the rise at UVSC

Recently the Daily Herald ran a story talking about the state of minority populations in Utah's higher education institutions.

More minority students going to college (Daily Herald, August 4 2007)

The article says that only 9 percent of students in post-high school education are non-white. It goes on to point out that school's like UVSC are doing more to reach out to minority students interested in a college education.

And the recent numbers from the school's office of Institutional Research back up UVSC's increased focus on minority students. Since 2002 the school's percentage of non-white students has risen from just under 9 percent to almost 15 percent in 2006.