F&M Stories

When Sofia Portillo transferred from Drexel University to Franklin & Marshall College in her sophomore year, the first-generation student from York County made a tactical move to apply as a history major.

“I figured, ‘I like history and it's not a popular major, so perhaps I will have a better chance of getting in,’” Portillo, now a senior, says.

She unexpectedly found the major required two history classes in that first semester, one of which was Associate Professor Laura Shelton’s introduction to colonial Latin America.

“I thought, ‘Whatever, I’ll just suck it up for this one semester, take these history classes, and then I’ll switch,’” Portillo recalls.

“But I just loved the class.”

In fact, she completed the required and optional class essays. Captivated by Shelton’s teaching – “I felt a real connection there” – she took more history classes.

Portillo used the resources offered at Shadek-Fackenthal Library to start her sleuting.

Professor Shelton says, “As a student, Sofia has proven that she has outstanding sleuthing skills, and as a history major, interested in Latin America, she is eager to hone her skills at paleography."

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After frequenting Shelton’s office hours and peppering her with questions about an academic career, the professor invited her to apply to become a Hackman Scholar, funded in part by an endowment created by William Hackman ’39, and his wife, Lucille.

A joint history and international studies major, Portillo has worked as a Hackman researcher the last two summers, assisting on Shelton’s book manuscript—“Midwives and the Making of Modern Medicine in Provincial Mexico.”

“As a student, Sofia has proven that she has outstanding sleuthing skills, and as a history major, interested in Latin America, she is eager to hone her skills at paleography (the deciphering and dating of historical manuscripts),” Shelton says.

Portillo transcribed and analyzed documents Shelton collected in Jalisco and Sonora, Mexico, writing summaries of infanticide cases and transcribing interviews with nurses, midwives and relatives of rural midwives.

She also edited, fact-checked, and proofread the manuscript’s rough draft and reviewed with Shelton collected images of midwifery, child birth and infanticide between 1800 and 1930.

The work prepared her for her senior thesis research in El Salvador’s capital of San Salvador. She traveled there last spring with her Floridian aunt and uncle, visiting libraries and archives to investigate the Miss Universe Pageant that El Salvador hosted in 1975.

“A student massacre occurred in San Salvador,” Portillo says. “From what I understood, it was in response to the Pageant because the public funding it received was used for private resorts and tourist attractions. It’s a poor country, this is the Cold War era, and there’s a lot of unrest.”

When she started digging for information, librarians told her she was misinformed, that people believed at the time that student protests and the massacre were linked to the Pageant because newspapers were censored by the government.

“They wanted to distract the international media from what was occurring on the campuses,” Portillo says. “I was asking questions like, ‘Were college campuses at the heart of the national uprising?’” 

Portillo’s father fled El Salvador during the civil war and sought asylum in the United States, but she would never hear about the history of her father’s country.

“I asked my dad, ‘Why were you guys fighting? Why did you come here?’ because I was trying to understand my family’s history,” she says. “But he always said, ‘I don’t know why we were fighting. My parents told us to leave, so we left.’ He was 13.”

“A student massacre occurred in San Salvador. From what I understood, it was in response to the Pageant because the public funding it received was used for private resorts and tourist attractions.”

Sofia Portillo

When Portillo went to El Salvador‘s National Archives for documents, it was closed.

“No one could give me answers on when it would open,” she says. “I don’t know if it was because I was coming from the United States or because my project was about the civil war, but I definitely felt a little bit cold-shouldered by the handful of places that I had gone to looking for documents.”

She managed to collect 190 documents from the University of El Salvador and the University of Central America for her thesis on student movements leading up to the civil war.

“I initially felt a little sideswiped when I couldn’t get the information I was looking for, especially when they told me my whole project wasn’t really a project,” Portillo says. “They haven’t done a good job of reconciling with their past.” 

Having lost her father in January of this year, she says El Salvador was an emotional trip for her.

“This was my chance to reconcile those things with my past,” Portillo says. “I knew I wanted to go; I knew I needed to go – getting to see people who look like me, meeting family who I’ve never met before—I just feel so glad that I had the opportunity and that my professors pushed me.”

Why F&M?

As a York, Pa. resident, Sofia Portillo knew about F&M, knew it was expensive, but didn’t think about applying.

But at Middlebury College, the alumna interviewer was former F&M Anthropology Professor Monica Cable, who now works for the U.S. Department of State.

“We hit it off really well, and when I decided to leave Drexel, I scheduled a Zoom meeting with Dr. Cable and told her I was thinking about F&M among other colleges,” Portillo says.

Cable shared the dynamic student experience at F&M, which was close to home, an important plus for Portillo, and she decided to apply.

Portillo is engaged at F&M—House adviser at Weis College House, an executive board member with the cultural club Mi Gente Latina, and a research assistant. She visits F&M’s Center for Career and Professional Development regularly for guidance.

“I maximize every resource I can from F&M,” she says. “I just love it here. I think it’s the best decision I could have made for myself.”