Carleton Spanish department celebrates multigenerational connections
Spanish professors celebrated their connections with Elsa Snowbeck ’25 and Diane Mancini ’94.
This spring, Carleton’s Spanish department hosted the comps presentation of Spanish major Elsa Snowbeck ’25 — her parents (both Carleton alumni) attended the event, and the Spanish faculty were delighted to learn that Elsa’s mother, Diane Mancini ’94, was also a Spanish major! This multigenerational connection shows the lasting impact of world language education at Carleton and beyond.
“My Spanish major opened up the world to me, from Morelia, Mexico in 1992 with HH [Humberto Huergo, professor of Spanish] to the Peace Corps in Guinea-Bissau, and then to a Spanish linguistics program in Illinois,” Mancini said. “It has connected me with people from all over — The Basque Country! Colombia! Cuba! Uruguay! — and there’s always something new to learn and a different way to think. Everywhere I go there are good people. What a treasure.”
“My Spanish major has exposed me to literature and films that have expanded my world many times over and introduced me to people who are resisting oppressive systems in an incredible variety of ways,” Snowbeck said. “Spanish has endowed me with a political imagination and challenged me to envision a better world in the tradition of a myriad of scholars and people who have done so before me.”
