The Outstanding and Fierce Promoter Jeannette Noltenius is Keeping Art and Culture Alive
This pandemic is not stopping Salvadoran Jeannette Noltenius from promoting art and culture in the community. In fact, her reach has amplified worldwide now that she migrated her events to an online platform.
After retiring, Jeannette created Casa de la Cultura El Salvador in Washington, D.C. in 2015 with a group of Salvadoran Americans to educate, promote, and celebrate Salvadoran and Salvadoran American arts, culture, history, and development. Casa de la Cultura El Salvador is a 100% volunteer effort. “We all work for free to give joy, reflection, and respite to the world!” she says.
Jeannette received a MA in Counseling Psychology, and later after the civil war in El Salvador, she went to France and received an MA in socio-economic development and a Ph.D. in Social Sciences from the Sorbonne Université in Paris. She worked in public health for 30 years in policies and empowerment of Latino Communities against the predatory practices of the tobacco and alcohol industries. She also worked 12 years at the Pan American Health Organization in Latin American on issues of health planning, environmental health, and adult health.
Now, she is the director of Casa de la Cultura El Salvador, where not only the Salvadoran culture is promoted, but also the culture from all Latin America. La Casa de la Cultura is still creating events amidst the pandemic; you can follow them on Facebook, on Instagram, or see more information on their website here.
Jeannette urges artists to get in touch to showcase their work. “You don’t need to be Salvadoran to be highlighted. Last year we had Cuban, Mexican, and Guatemalan art exhibits. We hope to have a Central American Art Exhibit at the University of Maryland and in various galleries in the area,” she says. “We need spaces where to hang exhibits; we need schools that want to receive our poets and writers.”
Besides learning about what Dignidad Literaria means to her and her take on the pandemic, you can learn more in the interview below about Peña Cultural de los Viernes and how you can get involved.
“ART gives us back our humanity” — Jeannette Noltenius.
¡Qué viva el arte!
You are a fierce promoter of culture, especially Salvadorian culture in the DMV; can you tell us about your journey as a cultural ambassador?Art has always been an essential part of my life. I learned how to play the piano, dance ballet as well as Can-Can as a child, wrote and acted in plays, dances, and the like. Art has been a refuge, a connection to the world, and a window to humanity. I love plays, opera, film, music, and art exhibits and have taken advantage of what Washington, D.C. has to offer.
When I retired in 2015, a friend of mine, the architect Francisco Altschul, was the Salvadoran Ambassador to the U.S. and wanted support from civil society to create a robust art and cultural program at the Embassy; so, he remodeled a room at the Embassy. We formally created a Board of Directors and got approval to be certified as a 501-C3 organization.
Since then we have held over 110 events and have partnerships with universities, the Smithsonian, adult education schools, schools, community groups, churches, etc. and arts collectives and efforts in the DMV and El Salvador.
Can you tell us about Peña Cultural de los Viernes? Casa de la Cultura has an agreement with the government of El Salvador to work at the Consulate and the Embassy in the DMV to promote arts and culture here in the U.S. and El Salvador. We have held 26 Peñas Culturales de los Viernes in tandem with the Literary Collective Alta Hora de la Noche at the Salvadoran Consulate in Silver Spring. We have a guest poet, a musician, and an open microphone. We have celebrated all of the Latin American countries and their poets in the DMV. In collaboration with others, we have had two Peñas honoring Guatemala and its marimba, Argentina and Tango, Peru and its dances and poets, and Caribbean countries, Puerto Rico, Dominican poets, etc. We have sponsored adults and children plays as well with Teatro de la Luna at the consulate and have had several art exhibits and film festivals. We have an average of 50 to 100 attendees.
What can the rest of us do to help promote literature and culture? You can read and join book clubs, enjoy what is around you, go out and enjoy music, dance, plays, in other words: consume arts and culture. This will enrich your life, give you joy, and get you in touch with your inner humanity and your creative self.
What does Dignidad Literaria mean to you? This is, in my view a recent term in response to having writers who do not belong to the Latino community write about Latino issues. This is what is called “cultural appropriation” and a way to sell books by using other peoples’ lives and cultures. It is important to have writers from our communities write about our experiences, if not the lenses and the points of view are those of the majority and not of the people who are living their own “immigrant” experience and/or minority experience, be it racial perspective, LGBTQ+ perspective and/or poor or minority in every way. Dignidad Literaria, is about preserving our own DIGNITY, our own identity, and feeling proud of who we are and who we have become in the U.S. and/or in the world.
How is this pandemic affecting your work? We have had to cancel all events. We have an exhibit currently at GALA Theatre and it is there without the public. So, we have pushed ourselves to the airways. We have been inviting poets to do Facebook live on our Facebook page: casadelaculturaelsalvador and have had the Peña Cultural of March online with great success.
We have poets presenting their work weekly. We have created art exhibits just for our Facebook page; we are organizing eight workshops via Zoom for poets and poetry lovers to learn how to read poetry in public and on the Internet! We are doing this with Teatro de la Luna. We are as busy as ever.
How does your literary community normally look like? And how does it look like now? We were involved in several efforts in support of Book Festivals, but these were canceled, so the poets who normally are brought to D.C. to present, have had to stay home!
We have book readings, poetry readings, music presentations, academic presentations, and art exhibits. All of it is now being moved to Facebook.
One door closes, one door opens and we move on. We are reaching many people around the world, so our outreach has changed. People are now coming to us to ask us to host them. We don’t go to them; it is now a more open and welcoming platform; more democratic, if you will, collaborative and participatory. We have had an open mic in our Peñas, now we have open mics on the airways…
What is your favorite thing about your literary community? Seeing people writing their own thoughts and sharing them. I love to see creativity being utilized! This makes me so happy.
Do you have any how-to-deal-with-anxiety tips to share with the rest of us? Think: this too shall pass. This is just temporary and it is a chance for us to reflect, think about how privileged our lives are, we are not at the border of Europe with two or three kids on tow trying to save our lives from bombs. We are not at the U.S. border hungry, tired, and frightened with no way into the U.S. and no way back. Our anxieties are minimal compared to those who are truly struggling.
We are not at hospitals deciding who shall have a respirator and who will die without one because there aren’t enough of them. We are not health care workers on the front lines of this Pandemic. We have nothing to worry about in relative terms.
We need to look at art exhibits online, hear opera, singing, dancing, readings, etc. and thank the world that there have been artists and writers, who give us books to read, painters who created masterpieces for us to enjoy, museums to visit online… theater online…
ART gives us back our humanity, ART reflects humanity, ART and CULTURE assure us that through millennia humans have survived because ART HAS survived and it is our witness to our struggles, wars, pandemics, epidemics, death, migration, mass refugees… all of it. Literature is history, it puts a face on history, and it makes us feel the events of the past.
What are you currently working on? We are planning what we are going to do in El Salvador. We have three exhibits there right now, Nicolas Shi at the MARTE Museum the most important museum in the country, we have two other exhibits by Alfredo Milian about Migration El Camino de la Bestia in smaller towns such as Suchitoto and San Miguel. We are working with youth in La Libertad so that they learn the value of art in their lives. We are working on carrying on an exhibit in Berlin Usulutan, hopefully, this year, if not the next. Of course, we continue our work online.
What is your most essential comfort food? Anything with carbohydrates: rice, pasta, beans, tortillas, bread, cookies, and all the bad stuff. I will roll out of this quarantine…
How can we keep each other safe? Call those you love, Facetime them, share movies that you like, pages you like, etc.
What are you currently reading?
Immigration Reform, The Corpse That Will Not Die by Charles Kamasaki
Spirit Run, A 6000-Mile Marathon Through North America’s Stolen Land, by Noé Álvarez and I just finished en español Tiempos Recios by Mario Vargas Llosa, about the 1954 ouster of President Jacobo Árbenz by the CIA and commercial interest of the United Fruit Company.
In terms of poetry: Night Sky With Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong; amazing poetry about war, exile, and reckoning.
John Keats: Selected Poems edited by John Barnard.
And on my list rereading: El reino de este mundo by Alejo Carpentier.
Any books that you would like to recommend to us? La mansión del olvido by Mario Bencastro.
Any TV shows/movies that you would like to recommend to us? (We’ll add them to our social distancing list). On Netflix, The Resistance Banker, about a Dutch banker who creatively resisted the Nazi occupation.
What type of music is in your playlist? Old fashion…Boleros…
Any work-from-home tips? Enjoy your solitude… learn to live with yourself and your mistakes. We are only human.
Anything else you would like to add? No hay mal que dure 100 años, ni cuerpo que lo resista…This too shall pass.
