Our Stories
Holly's Story
When I went to college, I had to pay for my own education. So, I worked full time all through undergraduate school, and I was very fortunate to work in an experimental program that was trying to salvage the life of kids in a low-income African American ghetto in Washington, DC. And I loved what I was doing, so I just went to social work school at Columbia. And so, then I was a social worker for twenty-eight years. Mostly, I, I'd always wanted to live in New Orleans.
And when I finished social work school, I moved to New Orleans. And I worked in, I have a very strong belief in the power of different professions working together. So, I tried to do interdisciplinary things with law and medicine, and I started public interest law firms. So, I did that kind of thing until I was asked to go to Boston University and teach in the social work school. And they wanted me to be part of beginning to develop international perspectives in social work.
And as part of that, I went on a faculty exchange to Cuba, and Cuba fascinated me so much that I stopped doing social work, and I just was spending all my time reading about Cuba and getting to know the people in Latin American studies at in Boston and the different universities. They have a collective there. And so, they all started saying, you need to go back and get a PhD in Latin American studies. So, in my forties, I went back to the University of Miami, and I got a PhD in international studies, with a focus on Latin America. And so, I went from being a social worker to being a professor of Latin American studies, But I needed, for family reasons, to be in Miami, and no one was ever gonna hire me to teach Cuban studies in Miami because there are 2,000 Cubans who are better qualified.
And so, I thought, you know, they'll hire me to be the librarian for Latin American studies maybe. And there was a postdoc in Latin American librarianship at Duke University. So, I did that one year, and then sure enough, they hired me in Miami to be the Latin American studies librarian. So, I really had three careers. First as a social worker, then as a professor of Latin American studies, and then as a librarian in Latin American studies.
And then I retired. But somehow, there's just something in me that that if if all of us aren't protected, if all of us aren't somehow safe and having a way to develop, if if you're having to just put all your energy into survival and you have no support and encouragement, then that's what produces dysfunction, personal dysfunction and societal dysfunction. And I sort of have always seen a connection between individual difficulty and group difficulty and societal difficulty, and I can't divorce myself from it.