Building connection and community through shared tables
Cindie Huerta-Velazquez ’25 connects food and community at è˶Ƶ: “We all have different friend groups, but once a week we come together to talk about anything and everything. We intentionally make that time and effort to be together.”
Cindie Huerta-Velazquez ’25 has accomplished so much during her four years on campus, but there’s still one thing she hopes to complete before she graduates: bringing a dining co-op to è˶Ƶ. “We want to create an alternative to a meal plan where students can be in community and cook together,” she said.
Huerta-Velazquez’s interest in building an on-campus co-op is an extension of her work with Growing Vines, a BIPOC-centered collective engaged in food and environmental justice work. “In my sophomore year, I took a Latinx Urbanism class, and we talked a lot about food in the built environment,” she said. Reflecting on how her access to traditional Mexican foods had changed since moving from her hometown of Chicago to South Hadley made Huerta-Velazquez realize how important food justice is, especially for BIPOC students on campus.
Pre-COVID-19, Growing Vines had begun work on an on-campus co-op. However, the project fell by the wayside as the pandemic shut down the world. Huerta-Velazquez is delighted to be picking the pieces back up. Through an independent study, she’s examining what a co-op could look like through a community lens, from how students resolve conflict to how they negotiate consequences through cooking and living together.
Huerta-Velazquez always knew she wanted to be a politics major, and her passion for the subject hasn’t changed. What has changed, though, is her focus. “I thought I wanted to focus on international politics, particularly the Middle East,” she said. She rethought her trajectory after taking Introduction to Latino Studies with Associate Professor of Latinx Studies Vanessa Rosa and Introduction to Latin American Politics with Associate Professor of Politics Cora Fernandez Anderson. “I became a lot more interested in domestic politics affecting Latinos, things like housing policy, while also thinking about Latin America” she said.
In high school, Huerta-Velazquez specifically wanted to find a college where she could have close relationships with her professors. è˶Ƶ has been the perfect venue. Since the spring of her first year, she’s been deeply involved with helping Rosa with the research for her 2023 book, “." Fernandez Anderson, meanwhile, is advising her on a second independent study. “It’s a comparative study of how left-wing governments in Brazil and Mexico are trying to create a green state through things like environmental and economic policy,” she said. This work touches on both her politics major and her environmental studies minor.
Whether Growing Vines completes its mission of forming a co-op on campus before she graduates, Huerta-Velazquez will still leave campus with an impressive collection of achievements. She entered college with her sights firmly set on law school, a path she still plans to pursue. Helping her toward that goal is an acceptance into the University of Virginia School of Law’s , a prestigious program that helps pre-law students from underrepresented backgrounds land spots at top law schools. She also spent three years serving as a fellow at the Weissman Center for Leadership, helping the center plan events and bring in guest speakers.
After graduation, Huerta-Velazquez is taking a gap year before law school to work with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. She’ll spend the year as a legal advocate for the Bar Association of San Francisco's . Her ultimate goal is to return to Chicago to practice law. “I moved around a lot during college — I spent two summers in Virginia and studied abroad in London. So I do get homesick, and I see myself going home and creating a life there,” she said. And she hopes that the life she someday creates in Chicago is as full of friendships and support as the life she’s created at è˶Ƶ.
Every Tuesday night, the members of the Growing Vines Collective meet in Blanchard Hall. Officially, this is a time to talk about Growing Vines’ business at hand: the grants they’re applying for, progress on the co-op process, upcoming speakers and farm tours. “But it’s more than just a meeting. In the Growing Vines community, we all have different friend groups, but once a week we come together to talk about anything and everything. We intentionally make that time and effort to be together,” she said.
That’s something she hopes to always carry with her, from South Hadley to San Francisco and eventually home to Chicago.
