By Mina Khadem
This Spring we will be publishing a series of spotlight articles about multilingual students and faculty at DU. These articles are based on interviews that Dr. Kamila Kinyon and a group of multilingual students conducted about interviewees’ lived experiences, including continuing connection to heritage languages, role as writers and teachers at DU, and thoughts about multilingual and multicultural identity. This project is funded by a Faculty Research Fund Grant awarded to Dr. Kinyon for 2023-25. We welcome this opportunity to celebrate DU’s multilingual community.
The current political, social, and international context is reminding us of the importance of our international students who bring diverse thinking, and rich experiences and insights about the world outside of our bubble. Clara Brunner Ampuero, a Ph.D. student from Chile and Switzerland, is among these international students; she has made an impact in all the countries to which she is connected. As someone whose experiences are embedded in the movement and interaction between countries, cultures and languages, Clara offers a unique perspective into what it means to be an advocate for others, how a multicultural background shapes who you are, and how the “reflex” to use boxes to organize how we see the world limits our ability to understand what is truly going on around us.
Clara’s mom is originally from Chile and her dad is from Switzerland. So she was born in Chile and then moved to Switzerland but managed to maintain her connection to Chile through yearly trips with her family. Her unique international background has given her the opportunity to learn and speak five languages: Spanish, French, German, English, and Greek.
Growing up, Clara’s first language was Spanish, which she spoke with her mom and dad. However, she quickly learned French in kindergarten thanks to her exposure to the language from her dad. As a result, Clara explains she speaks Spanish with her mom, French with her dad and a mix of both with her brothers and family at home, making her pretty much equally fluent in both languages. Furthermore, as Switzerland has four official languages, she started to learn German in elementary school and continued studying German until the end of high school. Since she was twelve, she has also been speaking English thanks to school and a 3-month linguistic experience in New Zealand. Finally, Greek is her most recent addition to her multilingual background, which she is learning thanks to her partner being Greek. And although Latin is not considered a living language, Clara has also studied Latin in school.
Despite her extremely multicultural background, Clara explains that she fit right in when attending school and classes in Geneva, Switzerland, due to its own international reputation and high levels of immigration. In fact, in one of her classes of twenty students, seventeen of them had different nationalities and spoke languages other than French. Therefore, it is clear that Clara’s world, social circle, education, and culture are deeply rooted in the celebration and interconnections of diversity, languages, and nationalities. However, Clara explains that due to her personal and familial connections to Latin America, Chilean and Latino culture play a dominant role in her international identity: “So I would say, culturally… I have always identified much more as a Latin American person.” In this way, Clara explains that she has been able to connect much more emotionally with other Spanish-speakers, specifically in Latin America, than with French-speakers.
During the interview, Clara shared a story about how she, at a young age, was exposed to different Spanish dialects and vocabulary. For example, the different words used to say jacket: “chamarra” versus “chaqueta”. This early exposure to different languages, dialects, and her bilingual brain, she explains, has made her like a sponge to learning other languages, such as Greek. Impressively, Clara explains that she has drawn and made connections between the Spain-Spanish pronunciation and the Greek one, which has helped guide her internalization and understanding of Greek. “So if I change my ‘s’ and I adjust it from Latin American Spanish ‘s’ to Spain Spanish ‘s,’ then I have the perfect pronunciation in Greek…So when I’m in Greece, I can pass very easily as a Greek with almost no accent”.
In a similar way, Clara shared that after spending time with her childhood best friend at their home, where their native language was Swedish, she managed to pick up some phrases and began to understand the language. While she was not able to learn Swedish officially, her openness to learning and listening, even in simple, subtle ways, is incredibly impressive.
As a person who has watched her mother immigrate and integrate, and who has experienced this process herself, Clara explains that she has developed a “deep sensibility for the history of an immigrant” and the many challenges that immigrants face. This aspect of our international world and her personal connections to these stories inspired her to write her master’s thesis on the challenges adult immigrants from Colombia face when moving to the French part of Switzerland. She observed that whether immigrants have children, certain physical characteristics, and linguistics play important roles in shaping the experiences of Colombian immigrants in Switzerland. Clara, in fact, shares that she herself and members of her family have experienced many of these challenges firsthand, which has changed the way they were and are perceived by the people around them.
Clara explained that growing up she has always been very aware of her privilege to be as connected to different parts of the world as she is, through study abroad, bilingual schooling, and plane travel. But she has and continues to use this privilege to inspire her and drive her to give back to the world by studying and pursuing her Ph.D. in higher education, with the intention to support vulnerable groups and students. For example, she shared that when she was in Geneva, she worked as a substitute teacher and worked directly with refugees from Ukraine and the Middle East. In this way, her ambition to help people through research, her drive to continue learning, and her partner—who was already living in Denver—influenced her decision to continue her studies at DU. Therefore, she is now interested in researching and exploring how faculty implement inclusive practices in the classroom to support students, such as those with learning differences, who are international students, or first-generation students.
She, like many others with multicultural backgrounds, represents the opportunities that diversity offers to our communities and how these unique perspectives help build bridges across borders. However, Clara explains that her multicultural appreciation and background often faces challenges in and outside the classroom, particularly when it comes to labeling—and therefore, limiting—identities. These “boxes” that we tend to use in the US to sort and identify people may often limit our abilities to relate, help and engage with others. For example, Clara explained that when she came to the US she discovered that she was considered “mixed race,” which contradicted many of her previous understandings about her identity, because she suddenly was reduced to the boxes “Swiss/White” and “Chilean/Latina.” She explains that these boxes and these assumptions about identity are limiting and fail to recognize the complexity of people with multicultural backgrounds. It is never black and white.
Clara and her story reminds us that humility is often the most important part about being a researcher, student, and general person who wants to help people who are both close and far away. Her international background, she explains, exposed her to many harsh realities, inequalities, and discrepancies that people from around the world face. In this way, she grew up prepared with the skills of flexibility, understanding, and ambition that have allowed her to connect with many groups—even if she does not speak their language— and have shaped her as an advocate for many. In this way, Clara emphasizes that while there are many resources at DU that allow multicultural and multilingual students to explore connections with one another and the campus, there are still ways in which these resources can improve. She explains that even helping to connect students and community members one-on-one over coffee can help.
In the end, Clara emphasizes that students must value and celebrate their backgrounds, because it opens doors to opportunities, families, and passions. Multicultural perspectives, she explains, open one’s eyes to the world, to empathy, and to understanding. Finally, she states “I also would encourage students who have an accent to not be ashamed of it. It just shows that you have mastered more than one language, which is a gift.”