c/o Talia Rodriguez
When Talia Rodriguez ’24 recalls her childhood, two things come to mind: sports and food. Growing up in Garrett Park, Maryland, Rodriguez spent much of her time trying every sport under the sun and growing particularly fond of basketball and soccer. When not playing these two sports, she found herself in the kitchen cooking with her family, experimenting with tomato sauce recipes in sixth grade before working her way toward vegan fruitcakes for her mother. Not only did food and cooking bring her family closer together, they also were the catalysts for many of her dearest relationships at the University. From making dumplings with her Women’s Solidarity House housemates to preparing dishes like focaccia, bibimbap, and tamales for the Wesleyan Jewish Community as the Shabbat cooking coordinator, food connected Rodriguez to her peers. Cooking provided a sense of purpose when everything seemed hopeless back in 2020, her freshman year.
“When I was first a freshman…I felt so overwhelmed by the world,” Rodriguez said. “There [were] so many horrible things going on, and it felt like there was no real way to do anything to help solve anything. And I was like, ‘Might as well just give up’…. Cooking [was] such a simple but also huge way to impact other people’s lives [and] kind of brought me out of that.”
Rodriguez considers her younger self to have been very queer-coded. Between her math teacher’s reports that she disliked being paired with boys for assignments and her being drawn to a book with two lesbian characters without yet understanding why, she grew up in a community that, while largely tolerant of LGBTQ individuals, had very few visibly queer people.
“I spent a lot of my middle school years super boy crazy, but that compulsive heterosexuality where I would be in class, staring at boys really embarrassingly,” Rodriguez said.“I tried that on. Did not fit.”
Coming into high school, Rodriguez met a group of students who were more comfortable with diverse gender expressions. While none of them were openly queer at the time, they all eventually befriended and came out to one another during sophomore year.
“It [was] like, ‘Oh, that makes so much sense,’” Rodriguez said. “I think being friends with them and having a group of people I felt comfortable expressing [myself] around was super crucial. I think meeting people at Wes and having the privilege of having had gay friends in high school was huge…as well as many other privileges of growing up in a place where being gay was okay and having accepting parents.”
Rodriguez wanted to take a girl to prom in her junior year of high school and decided to come out to her parents. No longer having to hide such a large part of herself from them, she felt a weight lifted off her shoulders.
“I think coming out helped our relationship,” Rodriguez said. “It brought us closer. There [was] a part of me that they weren’t seeing, and being able to open up about that and be honest about it made it better…. When I was younger, I was so paranoid about my parents seeing my phone or seeing my texts. And now, I mean…being Gen Z is like, you don’t want anyone holding your phone, it’s too incriminating. But if my mom was looking through my camera roll, I [wouldn’t] really mind, it is what it is. I think overcoming that has been very positive to our relationship.”
Since coming to the University, Rodriguez has had an invaluable share of transformative experiences. From living in 200 Church her freshman year alongside students she remains close with today (and getting smacked in the shoulder by a bat) to directing a student-written theater production—a queer, Jewish play titled “Leave If No Response”—in her junior year, Rodriguez is grateful for the people who have given her a memory box filled with laughter, light, and worldview-expanding conversations.
“I think there is an interesting myth about the college experience,” Rodriguez said. “In the white, American, suburban mindset, you come to college, you grow so much, [you] read all these cool things, you do all this new stuff…. That’s totally the narrative that I grew up with, and in a lot of ways, I’ve been really lucky to receive that. But I think…it’s so clear that Wesleyan is run like a business and students are treated both like consumers and workers, and not necessarily students. And so I’ve also tried to use my experience at Wesleyan to think critically about the way the University functions and operates, while also acknowledging that I am privileged in not necessarily facing all of those challenges.”
As a sociology and theater double major, Rodriguez has spent much of her time exploring interpersonal relationships, the ideologies that pervade them, and the historical factors behind the prevalence of these ideologies through various mediums. She is currently in the final stretch of writing her senior thesis: an analysis of Miami, Florida and its history of Jewish and Cuban immigration, its construction as a place of “pleasure and paradise” alongside real estate development and foreign investment efforts, and its parallel to the securitization process of Israel over time. While the first two chapters are more standard in format, the third chapter of her thesis is a play set at a New Year’s Eve party thrown by Miami-born rapper Pitbull. Rodriguez is grateful to her advisor, Assistant Professor of Sociology Abigail Boggs, for encouraging her to present her research in a medium she has worked so considerably with at the University.
“Originally, it was just going to be about Miami,” Rodriguez said. “And then Oct. 7 happened—Israel’s human rights violations in Gaza [are] happening. And because I was writing so extensively about the Jewish community of Miami, I knew that I couldn’t [not talk about it]…. But it is definitely a process. I always thought [that] I would write about something queer. I kind of thought for one moment that I would write about queer families and queer family formations, queer friendships, homoerotic friendships, all that. And then, I don’t know…. sometimes it’s nice to keep things in your personal life and have other things in your academic life. But I’ve written my fair share of papers and essays and plays about gay stuff.”
Back in high school, Rodriguez wrote her senior English project on María Irene Fornés, a Cuban-American lesbian playwright whose work she had fallen in love with. Of all the classes she has taken at the University, Rodriguez considers “Following Fornés: Creativity, Intimacy, and Imagination,” a class on the same playwright taught by Assistant Professor of Theater Katie Pearl, to be among her favorites. Other standout classes for her include “Introductory Sociology” and “Advanced Research Seminar: I Write What I Like” by Boggs and Associate Professor of Sociology Robyn Autry respectively.
“Professor Katie [Pearl]’s wife, [filmmaker Michelle Memran], was the documentarian of [Fornés]…. so she had tons of knowledge,” Rodriguez said. “We learned all about her, and alongside that, we did our own creative project, which was super fun. In [“Introductory Sociology”], I had so many ‘whoa’ moments, like, ‘Oh god, this is how things are?’…. Professor Autry is super awesome and has a really unique perspective. I took [“I Write What I Like”] last semester, and I think thinking about writing from a sociological perspective is super cool. Both were very niche but also allowed us to explore a lot of different topics.”
After graduation, Rodriguez has two goals she would like to achieve: play recreational basketball and eat sushi semi-regularly. She is thinking of returning to D.C. but dreams of competing in a queer women’s basketball league in New York, even though she does not want to live in New York. She remembers the loneliness she felt while studying abroad her junior year and dreads the thought of being away from loved ones in a time of collective anger and grief. Threaded through these goals, thoughts, and dreams is a hopeful vision of community: to be surrounded by people who share her values and who come from different backgrounds, supporting one another in whatever way they can.
“If [you’re queer and] you feel like you’re lonely, be around community, but also, media, movies, TV, books, music…there always is a way to feel connected,” Rodriguez said. “I’ve heard really good things about fanfiction. I haven’t looked into it yet myself. Shout out to my team, my buddies at Wes…. But it is hard, you know? Life is hard. Being queer can be hard…. People talk about [how] queer people go through a second puberty, that kind of thing…. But being in any kind of relationship [can help], I think.”
Ryan Wong can be reached at rwong01@wesleyan.edu.