Dr. David Delgado Lopez

Dr. David Delgado Lopez is an Instructor of Spanish in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages. His research explores cultural production from the Iberian Peninsula, particularly Spanish contemporary poetry, novel and film, through the lens of space analysis and ecocriticism focusing on the representation of working-class voices and the deconstruction of the traditional literary canon. In his literature and culture classes, Delgado aims to forge a sense of community, to enhance cultural competence, and to practice a communicative approach.

David’s Diggs Project draws from these objectives as it reconstructs memories from the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in order to better understand how this event has shaped our lives, our educational goals, and our relation to culture, memory, and spaces. Drawing inspiration from both Elizabeth Jelin’s Los trabajos de la memoria (translated to English as State Repression and the Labors of Memory) and the photographical essay El monte no tiene ojos, pero ve (The mountain has no eyes, yet it sees) by Spanish visual artist Miriam Mora, students were invited to create a visual map of our collective experience during the early months of COVID-19 using the visual archives we all keep in our cell phones and social media, and to describe in a short essay what those images and videos meant to them at the time, and how they remembered those. His intention was to demonstrate Jelin’s thesis that memory can be a collective effort or labor, as it is through a communal experience that we are able to create a sense of community and belonging, which David finds crucial to overcome difficult and even traumatic experiences. Despite the uniqueness of each experience lived by our students, the process of remembering happens in human beings embedded in networks of social relations, groups, institutions, and cultures, allowing us to design a multi-authored audiovisual report. The production of these short essays and visual maps not only allowed students to produce real content in Spanish, the target language of instruction, but it led to a conversation that allowed us to see the different perspectives each individual had throughout the pandemic, offering as a good example of critical and inclusive pedagogy as it lets us better understand each other, our backgrounds, and how we can contribute to create a more accessible learning space.