Mind over Monsters by Sarah Rose Cavanagh

Author:Sarah Rose Cavanagh [Cavanagh, Sarah Rose]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2023-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

I HAVE PURPOSE: IMAGINARTE

This is the story of how Esteban Loustaunau found his vocation. His vocation, fittingly enough, is helping college students find their vocations.

Esteban is a professor of Spanish at Assumption University in Massachusetts, where he is also director of a sophomore vocation program called SOPHIA and founding director of their Center for Purpose and Vocation. A Latin American studies scholar, his first book is Telling Migrant Stories: Latin American Diaspora in Documentary Film. His path to his present moment was not a direct one, but it was one that was always infused with a sense of purpose. Esteban and I have been colleagues for over ten years and friends for a shorter time than that, but when he agreed to let me interview him about vocation in higher education, I was delighted to first hear his origin story.

He finished graduate school in the late nineties, and his first job was as an assistant professor of Spanish at Augustana College, a small Lutheran-affiliated liberal arts school in western Illinois. The school is in an area that is called the Quad Cities because the Mississippi River divides four towns, two on each side—Iowa on one, Illinois on the other. About a mile from campus is a large Mexican American neighborhood called Floreciente, which means “flourishing.” As both John Deere and Tyson have large facilities nearby, multiple generations of people from the same area in Central Mexico live and work there in farming and meatpacking. The neighborhood has an active community center called Casa Guanajuato, which is named after the state most of these neighbors had come from.

One day Esteban showed up at Casa Guanajuato and simply said, “I’m a professor at Augustana. How can my students and I help?” They immediately put this gentle, eager man to work and found ways for him to involve his students in work that combined community service with their learning goals. One of Esteban and his students’ first efforts was to clean up a local park. The park was abandoned because it was right at the city limits of two of the towns, and no one wanted to claim responsibility. Esteban, his students, and the community worked together to clean up the park and then apply for and receive grants to fund playground equipment like swings for the children.

Born of this early success were other initiatives threading Esteban’s students and the community together, like an after-school tutoring program in the elementary school. People would say to Esteban, “Oh, you’re doing community-service learning!” And in the beginning he would be confused—”I’m doing what?” He was just operating as he did in other avenues of life, seeking and growing purpose in himself and in others wherever he saw need.

And then he met his future wife. They fell in love, they got married, they had twins. And looking at the connected communities around them, they realized they wanted to raise their children close to family, and so they began searching for jobs in New England, where his wife’s family resided.

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