Student Spotlight: Elizabeth Barahona

The Human Rights Certificate program asserts that human rights cannot be isolated into one or even a few disciplines and draws on concepts and lived experience of scholars, practitioners, journalists, and communities struggling to defend their rights. The following profile of Duke alum Elizabeth Barahona examines the impact the Human Rights Certificate has had on her trajectory.

What first drew you to the Human Rights Certificate Program?

I was really focused in undergrad on human rights and labor rights. My major was History, my minor was Latino Studies, and my certificate was Human Rights. And I was at Duke from 2014 to 2018. I was organizing on campus, so I think that’s the first thing that drew me. I wanted to be in an academic environment that contributed to that way of thinking.

I also really loved that it was small and how it was led by its three professors. What really drew me in as an undergrad was the fact that there was a traveling component. We got to go to Mexico for at least a week, and it had a big Latin America focus. I’m Mexican and Colombian, so all of those things together sort of made it perfect for me to do.

Can you talk about the connection between your studies and your activism while at Duke?

I was a junior and I was leading a big campus protest as president of the Latino Students Association. We had teamed up with different organizations on campus, and we were actually boycotting a recruitment program that’s done every year at Duke.

We did a lot of the upfront labor for it, and we were boycotting because we had a list of demands. We wanted workers on campus to make $15 an hour. We wanted a Latino space that wasn’t in the basement between two bathrooms in the Bryan Center. We wanted a Latinx faculty member—specifically a Latinx historian. There was Latin American history, there was the Human Rights program, but there wasn’t really Latinx history on campus.

As a result of those demands and boycotting the recruitment program, top administrators negotiated with us, and they opened the faculty position. We also got a more permanent and bigger space in the Bryan Center. Being in the Human Rights Certificate really inspired me with the work we were doing and the stories we were learning about folks in Latin America protesting their oppressive conditions. 

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What lessons from the program stayed with you through graduate school and into your teaching?

The class was really small, maybe ten or fewer students, which allowed for really personal attention. Every week we would read a different history text, monograph, or memoir that helped us understand human rights in a Latin American context, from the colonial era to the present. All of that was super important in my intellectual journey.

We traveled to Mexico City and Puebla and met with Indigenous communities, visited museums, and had these amazing cultural exchanges. Everything we did was thoughtful and ethical and pushed us to challenge ourselves.

That experience made me think, being a professor is pretty cool. You inspire students, make a big change in their lives, and get to do meaningful work with colleagues you respect. I pictured myself doing something like that in my career.

How did your advocacy evolve after leaving Duke?

Leaving the program and leaving my experience organizing with peers, graduate students, and professors gave me the training and confidence to continue that work. At Northwestern, we organized and unionized as graduate workers. I was the department liaison to the union in my first and second year, and by my third and fourth year, we won unionization and got a fair contract.

During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in Chicago, I was involved in that as well—really thinking of the Human Rights Certificate as the core of my inspiration and confidence. It helped me understand the privileges I hold and the ways I could safely be on the ground protesting, especially when some of my peers couldn’t because they were undocumented or not U.S. citizens.

Toward the end of my time in graduate school, I also got involved in public history. Students from Chicago were protesting the Chicago History Museum because there was no Latino history there, even though Latinos make up a third of the city. I worked with community members, high school students, and local groups to build and curate an exhibit on Latinos in Chicago.

Those formative years as a young adult were so important because they helped me understand my privileges and learn from historical examples of resistance that I still carry with me.

Any final thoughts about the program?

It’s a gem at Duke. In so many majors, like public policy, economics, computer science, you can get lost in the crowd. Programs like the Human Rights Certificate offer a small, intellectual space where you can really ask the small questions you need to ask as an undergrad to grow and develop as a critical thinker.

It helps you feel confident as a scholar, to connect the 15th century with the 21st, and to think about ongoing human rights issues, like the Palestinian genocide, in a deeper and more empathetic way.

Even if you don’t go into a human rights or civil rights career, the program helps you grow in empathy and understanding. It’s just a gem of a program, and I hope it continues that way for the next 20 years.