In Pursuit of Beauty
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| Evelyn Salazar (BA ’09) stands over her research display, The Family Grows: Beauty in Latin America, shown to members of Congress last May. |
In a large room of the United States Capitol, Evelyn Salazar (BA ’09) stood watch over her research display, The Family Grows: Beauty in Latin America. Anxious, she waited for her appointment with Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who’d been delayed in an intelligence meeting. The road that brought Salazar from Chicago’s outlying neighborhoods to Capitol Hill was long and unlikely, but one that she navigated with ambition, intelligence, and no small amount of guidance.
Salazar’s parents came to Chicago from Mexico. They moved frequently. They struggled. They saved money so that they could send Salazar and her two brothers to college. “My parents always told us,” she says, “the harder you work, the more you get out of life.” Following her parents’ advice, she studied hard and graduated from high school on the Southwest Side. Salazar was the first person in her family to attend college, and she was a commuter, a background similar to thousands of students who have attended Loyola.Her career at the University was to be anything but typical.
MEETING A MENTOR
Along with her roster of typical firstyear courses, Salazar, winner of a Hank Family Endowed Scholarship, enrolled in a philosophy course with Dan Vaillancourt, who has taught for 37 years at both Loyola and Mundelein College. Salazar immediately impressed him—so much so that he asked her to work with him over the summer.
Vaillancourt’s area of expertise is in aesthetics, the philosophy of beauty. He views beauty not as a universal constant, but as a cultural construct, and argues that different cultures view beauty differently. At the time, he was in the midst of a major undertaking: writing and researching a book on beauty in non-Western cultures, Beauty: The Sources.
To complete his work, Vaillancourt needed to research beauty in Latin America, but a lack of Spanish skills proved to be an obstacle. Salazar, who is fluent, began translating research and writing e-mails to aestheticians in Latin America. As she continued to work with Vaillancourt, her importance to the project grew, as did her own interest in the field. She worked with Vaillancourt for the rest of her career at Loyola, eventually making a contribution that altered the course of the research.
THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER
Vaillancourt was plumbing the depths of beauty in Islamic cultures when Salazar proposed that he devote an entire chapter of his book to concepts of beauty in Latin America. “Honestly, I thought Latin American aesthetics was too close to what we think of as the ‘Western’ idea to merit much of a comparison; but she thought differently,” says Vaillancourt. Salazar dug deeper, reading articles by philosophers from Chile, Cuba, and especially Mexico, and she kept challenging Vaillancourt’s assumptions. “She told me, ‘Dan, you’re wrong. It’s different,’ until, you know what? She proved it.”
Salazar contended that concepts of beauty in Latin America diverged from Western concepts early in the 20th century. They then evolved through three stages, Utopian Roots, Theoretical Constructions,
and Critical Parings. These three stages, each represented by a group of likeminded philosophers, can be assigned to a single prominent spokesman— Antonio Caso, Radoslav Ivelic, and Orlando
Hernández .
“In Western philosophy, beauty is connected to pleasure, but in Latin America beauty is perceived as being ineffable, regardless of whether it is pleasing,” Salazar explains. “Beauty’s power to send the viewer closer to the eternal trumps its power to delight the senses.”
THE FRUITS OF SUCCESS
Salazar’s work having become an important chapter in Vaillancourt’s book, the professor invited her collaboration on other projects as well, including co-authoring two articles that were published in scholarly journals. Their research partnership came full circle when they investigated
beauty in another part of the world entirely. “When we studied aesthetics in Africa, it all came together,” says Vaillancourt.“We looked at the Yoruba tribe in Nigeria and wefound similarities between their concepts of beauty and those of Latin America. As that tribe was a major source of slaves who were brought to Cuba, Central America, and Brazil, it lends support to Evelyn’s original theories.”
With Salazar’s college career coming to an end, having already achieved an exceptiona level of success, as well as degrees in political science and English, Vaillancourt encouraged her to submit an abstract of her work on Latin American aesthetics to the Posters on the Hill, a federal program that highlights undergraduate research. Salazar’s abstract was accepted and she was selected to present her findings before members of Congress.
POSTING ON THE HILL
The weekend before graduating magna cum laude, Salazar and her parents drove to Washington DC on a trip funded through the Loyola Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program. “It was so overwhelming,” she says of the experience. “Everything was new to me. I’d been to other conferences, but knowing that this was for members of Congress made me so nervous.”
Although Salazar was unable to meet with Senator Roland Burris himself, she was taken to his office and spoke with an assistant about the importance of funding undergraduate research, and how all of her grants and scholarships were privately, rather than government, funded.
Later, she displayed a research poster in a room in the House of Representatives, where she met with Jan Schakowsky, Congresswoman of Loyola’s district. “She was really proud that a student from her district, and from Loyola, was at Posters on the Hill.” Salazar was one of only a handful of researchers in the humanities in a program dominated by the sciences.
TO KANSAS AND BEYOND
While Salazar intends to pursue a law degree, after graduation she entered the Teach for America program and will be teaching in Kansas City. “She’s the top student I’ve ever had,” says Vaillancourt. “But not because she was the most brilliant. She is brilliant, but she has also such discipline, such commitment. When she says she’ll get it done, she does. What we hope to have at Loyola, she has it.”
Caso, Ivelic, and Hernández would surely agree; that’s a beautiful thing.