It Started With a Shoulder Tap

Growing up in the va y ven (back and forth) between New Jersey and the Dominican Republic, I always knew I would go to college. My exile-turned-immigrant mother’s motto was saber es poder (knowledge is power), and by my senior year at Memorial High School I had won multiple state-level writing awards. I assumed I’d stay close to home—majoring in journalism or creative writing at a New York or New Jersey school.

So when my beloved guidance counselor, Lillian Cave, insisted I join a group of students she was taking to the NAACP College Fair at the New York Coliseum in fall 1983, I mostly went along for the field trip. After all, I already had my college plans—but saying yes changed everything.

Although I regularly visited New York City, I wasn’t prepared for the enormity of the convention center, the sheer number of schools represented, or the crowds of high school students from across the region. My classmates and I huddled together, taking it all in and getting our bearings. That’s when Kim Wilson ’81, Smith’s first Black admission officer, tapped me on the shoulder and asked, “Excuse me, miss, have you heard of Smith?”

“Smith who?” I replied. I had never heard of Smith—or any women’s college. Unperturbed, Ms. Wilson regaled me with stories of famous Smith alums. At first, I listened out of politeness as she rattled off names I was unfamiliar with. But I snapped to attention when she mentioned Sylvia Plath ’55 and Gloria Steinem ’56. I was already an avowed feminist who wanted to make a living as a writer; the school that educated Plath and Steinem was a place I wanted to know more about. I took the materials home, pored over them, and talked with my guidance counselor. She encouraged me to apply, saying, “Smith will change your life.” As always, she was right. Smith has changed my life.

Smith was where I cut my teeth as a feminist anti-racist and anti-imperialist activist and organizer—and made lifelong friends in the process. Smith introduced me to fields of study that deepened and enriched my work in economics and public policy. It was where Professor Nancy Saporta Sternbach encouraged me to submit my poetry to a national peer- reviewed literary journal—which accepted it, officially making me a published author. And it was where I was told I should consider applying to graduate school, which led me back home to pursue a doctorate in sociology at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

Eight years later, I was finishing my coursework, teaching as an adjunct at multiple CUNY campuses, mothering a toddler, and pregnant with my second child. A Smith friend suggested I apply to the Mendenhall Research Fellowship Program. It was Smith’s iteration of the Five College Minority Fellowship, whose goal was to draw faculty of color to the area so they might subsequently apply for tenure-track jobs at the consortium schools. I was awarded the fellowship for the 1998–99 academic year and joined the Smith faculty in fall 1999. I became the sociology department’s first tenure-track woman of color faculty member and the college’s first official hire in the field of Latino/a studies. I was tenured in 2007, promoted to full professor in 2017, and appointed editor of the journal Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism shortly after.

Over the course of more than four decades, I’ve known Smith as a student, an alum, a faculty member, and a journal editor. I’ve experienced six presidencies—those of Jill Ker Conway, Mary Maples Dunn, Ruth Simmons, Carol Christ, Kathleen McCartney, and Sarah Willie-LeBreton—and witnessed the college evolve throughout them. The Smith student body, faculty, and staff are notably more diverse today than when I was a student in the 1980s. The curriculum is global, multilingual, interdisciplinary, and intersectional. And the college is leading by example in affordability by meeting students’ full financial aid needs through grants and scholarships rather than loans. This has a particularly notable impact on women of color and first-generation graduates, given the intractability of the racialized gender wage gap.

As a Latina feminist scholar, educator, and editor whose life’s work has been devoted to growing the critical and innovative fields that brought me and countless others like me into the academy, I have been dismayed by the current climate of disdain for vulnerable populations. Because of what I learned and now teach at Smith, I am more committed than ever to Sophia Smith’s vision of “reforming the evils of society” through our work “as teachers, as writers, as mothers, as members of society.” In that work, I am fortified by a global alum community that embraces and advances the humanism at the heart of Sophia’s vision. At a time of pointed political attacks on everything Smith stands for, I am proud to be here—and there’s nowhere I’d rather be.

Ginetta E. B. Candelario ’90 is a professor of sociology and of Latin American and Latino/a studies at Smith.

This article appears in the Summer 2025 issue of the Smith Quarterly.