“The type of contract that I have in the Intendancy of Canelones It goes until December 2023 where I only have teaching hours and I have been working on a project in which I have competed since 2019″, said Leticia Rodríguez, current coordinator of the Candombe Dance training – taught by the Canarian community together with Sodre -, who Last week she was appointed by Carolina Cosse to head the Secretariat for Racial Ethnic Equity and Migrant Populations of the Municipality of Montevideo.
“When I was offered this position in Montevideo, the most important thing is that I put the condition that I am going to end my contract in Canelones. What worries me fundamentally is the group of students who are in this process,” said the future hierarch to The Observerafter the director of Culture of Canelones, Sergio Machín, emphasized that “in the middle of the championship, nobody likes to lose a player.”
The appointment – coordinated with Rodríguez both by the general secretary of the commune, Olga Otegui, and by the mayor Cosse herself – generated discomfort in the Yamandú Orsi environment, while hovering over a political background in which both communal chiefs are emerging as the favorites to the internal one of the Broad Front in 2024.
“When I received the news, what I did immediately was convey the situation to the mayor (Orsi), because it has to do with issues that transcend the strictly cultural. This issue has to be handled at other levels,” said Machín, director of Culture for the Canary Islands commune..
The official involved, Leticia Rodríguez, said in this regard: “What we are looking for from my professional level is a clearly ordered transition, a work stage must be closed.”
“It bothered me a lot the owner in the sense that I am not a thing, I am a person, and I already have enough history in my ancestors for them to continue reifying me. Everything that has to do with academic development I have achieved on my own merits. What I am trying to do is an orderly transition,” insisted Rodríguez, who, as already reported The Observer Monday, has experience in social activism for 20 years and is a person recognized in the environment for his work for Afro women, in addition to being a member of the Thematic Unit of Culture of the Broad Front.
Rodríguez reported that he lived through “the entire process” of the commune’s Ethnic Racial Secretariat, “from the first nomination of Néstor Silva, through Beatriz Santos, to Elizabeth Suárez (who resigned this year).”
“(The designation) It is a process from the civil society organizations that fought impressively so that there would be a mechanism of racial equity, and the only mechanism that is with the Afro-descendant population is the Racial Ethnic Secretariat of Montevideo. There is no other. The project in Canelones has to do with an academic pilot where I only had teaching hours,” he claimed.
Asked about the political background of the situation, Rodríguez replied that “what matters is the process of closing an orderly transition and teamwork taking shape, as has already been done, a team of more than ten people working on this since a long time ago”. “The other things don’t matter to me,” she said, adding that her concern is being “the representative of civil society organizations in the Secretariat,” which deals with a “very complex situation for which precisely other mechanisms have been neglected. “.
From the IM they indicated that they would not make political comments for this note.
