Jacqueline Jimenez-Polanco
Thursday January 31, 2008
4:30 pm
Kreindler Auditorium (Room 041) Haldeman Center
Free and open to the public
Cosponsored with the Dickey Center for International Understanding and part of the Dartmouth Centers Forum's programming on Class Divide.
Jacqueline Jiménez Polanco was born in 1962 in the Dominican Republic... She identifies herself as a black, spiritual, feminist and intellectual androgynous-lesbian woman, a transnational by principle and a Dominican York by privilege... Her spiritual, intellectual and political development, and her trans-migratory process have been constant in her life; her mentors, colleagues and friends in Santiago, Santo Domingo, Madrid, San Juan, Chapel Hill, and New York are her best witness.
Her love for the social sciences, humanities and arts emerged at the age of seven when she said that she would become a lawyer and a pianist. She took piano, violin, and guitar courses during her childhood and adolescence. She reluctantly dropped the formal music classes in her late teens when, in the lack of family support to acquire a piano, her quest for intellectual development competed with her love for music in a traditionally education-oriented society with restricted art and music resources. She continued, however, nurturing her love for the arts through taking several musical appreciation courses with Professor Julio Ravelo and working as a museum guide under the constant advice of her mentor Dr. Carlos Dobal Márquez (lawyer, political scientist, art collector and anthropologist).
She has been the curator of museum programs, and lesbian, gay and straight artist exhibits at universities and galleries in New York and Santo Domingo, the facilitator of lesbian writing workshops and women's performances. Inspired by the admirable constant work of Dominican/Latina women-writer/editor pioneers like Dr. Daisy Cocco De Filippis and Dr. Juanita Díaz (Ramos), she coordinated and edited the anthology, Divagaciones bajo la Luna/Musing under the Moon: Voces e Imágenes de Lesbianas Domincianas/ Voices and Images of Dominican Lesbians (Santo Domingo: Edigraf, 2006).
She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and Sociology, a J.D. in Law, M.A. in Political Science & Constitutional Law, and in Comparative Law; and a Post-Doc in Migration, Asylum & Refugee's Law. She currently works as an Associate Researcher at CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, The City College of New York.
In her need to understand and accept that the real liberation is in the inner being due to the changing essence of human nature, she initiated in Hatha Yoga in 1999, Vipassana and Mantra Yoga meditation in 2000, and Ayurveda auto-massage in 2006.