PERUVIAN STUDENT ASSOCIATION - UIUC
Enhancing our relationships with the community at UIUC was a primary goal for Peruvian students who are currently pursuing academic goals at undergrad and graduate programs at the University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign. Therefore, during the beginning of Fall 2017 we had several conversations with the objective of creating a Student Association to exchange with the UIUC community part of our traditions and culture. As part of this commitment, we founded the organization with a total of 7 members, and we started performing different activities to introduce our tradition to the university community. These activities were depicted by presentation during events such as Quad Day, Involvement Fair, International Week at YMCA, Cooking with the Chef Event and participation within the speaker series at the Asian American Cultural Center at UIUC with the Peruvian Night entitled “Peru: Treasures and delights of a millennial culture”. Along with these activities, we share cooking activities with different organizations such as GLOBE and some of its members, who showed interest to learn more about the Peruvian gastronomy and its magical secrets.
Along the group of Peruvian Students, some other entities of the University of Illinois at UIUC contributed to the achievement of the activities scheduled by the Peruvian Student Association, such as La Casa Cultural Latina, the Asian American Cultural Center, and the Office of Inclusion and Intercultural Relationships OIIR - UIUC, and the Center for Latin American and Caribean Studies. Some of the activities shared with members of the UIUC community are shown at Showcase 1 attached below.
Showcase 1 - Peruvian Student Association activities: Fall 17 & Spring / Fall 18
Performing activities as a Treasurer member of the organization facilitated the connection with some other areas of involvement at UIUC, such as the Office of Registered Organizations, and the YMCA at UIUC, which recognized our participation and advocacy to integrate the community and promote cultural exchange. This recognition motivated us to enhance the scheduled activities and increase our involvement at UIUC for cultural advocacy. Such is the case of the conference we presented to the Catholic Illini group at UIUC with the intend of share main aspects of our culture to former volunteers who travel to Peru during March 2018 to perform volunteering work.
One of the most interesting activities we performed, an that generated lot of expectation within the UIUC community was the Peruvian Night called: “Peru: Treasures and delights of a millennial culture” which was performed on April 2018. The activity, described as a cultural night, included tasting samples of different flavors of the Peruvian gastronomy such as “Papa a la Huancaina” and “Aji de Gallina”, along with national drinks like “Inka Cola”. Moreover, this cultural night was a great opportunity to talk about history, interesting facts, gastronomy, ecology, traditions, tourism, geography and flora and fauna diversity of the Peruvian Culture. This diversity was represented by different speakers, who belong to different areas of Peru and were able to share part of their most characteristic aspects of their regions. In fact, the scope of the presentation was entirely comprehensive, since covered aspects of the Peruvian culture from the north to the south by dividing the three main natural regions: coast, Andes and rainforest (from the west to the east). In addition, this activity generated the participation of 90+ guests who attended the cultural night, and provided very good reviews that motivated us to perform more activities like this. This cultural night was accomplished thanks to the efforts of AACC and La Casa Cultural Latina, and some of the pictures are presented at the showcase 2 below.
