The Spanish vocabulary words for the day are: encanto, entusiasmo, y energía

To illustrate the concepts behind these words, please study the example of Associate Professor of Spanish-American Literature and Culture, Andrés Lema-Hincapié. He describes himself like this: "I am a little like Borges and Cervantes. In the first part of Don Quixote, Cervantes was so eager to read that he would read every single piece of paper he found on the street, because beauty could be there, in a chocolate bar wrapper. And Borges said the same: beauty could be everywhere."

Encanto: charm

From the first moment you meet Lema-Hincapié, he is friendly, gracious, and generous. He credits this to his Colombian heritage: "Colombians are xenophile. You are a foreigner—we love you. It's probably a vice but it's much better than being xenophobic."

Lema-Hincapié's background is in philosophy—his BA, the first of two MAs, and the first of two PhDs are all in philosophy. This influences the way he teaches language and culture. "I approach these subjects through a philosophical lens. At the beginning it's hard for some students, but they end up loving it. The class is a lab of ideas. My students don't learn from me, they learn with me," he says. "We bring the ideas we have thought about during the week and then we test them. Some of them are more plausible than others, but we are learning together. We are creating knowledge together."

Lema-Hincapié conducts his classes like a study abroad staycation, where students experience not only Spanish language immersion but Ibero-American cultural immersion. It starts with his syllabi, he says, "With American students, when you don't give them topics for their oral presentation or papers, they are lost at first. In South American countries or in Spain, if the professors imposed topics, the students would kill you. They are lost at first, but later they understand; only if knowledge is driven by passion is it meaningful. When you enter my classroom we are on Spanish-American coordinates."

Throughout his career he has shared his love for and knowledge about Ibero-American culture in every way possible. For ten years he brought students to Buenos Aires, home of Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges, for six weeks at a time for Spanish language and cultural immersion. More recently, he has been bringing students to his own homeland of Colombia on short cultural immersion trips. Three years ago there was a trip to the city of Cartagena de Indias, a city which he describes as "beautiful, even uncanny. You enter the historic district and you are in the 16th, 17th century. Even the smells are from another time, it's extraordinary."

Entusiasmo: enthusiasm

Lema-Hincapié talks about everything with a twinkle in his eye and love in his voice. He finds beauty everywhere he looks, but says, "It's harder for us to feel the beauty of our own mother tongue. We can feel beauty when we listen to another language. The mother tongue is too close to us. We need distance to feel beauty. When you learn another language, you feel the beauty in that language and eventually you can come back with a different understanding of the beauty of your own language."

Lema-Hincapié has a hand in many pots, and somehow he keeps them all from burning. This is especially important in his Cuisine and Culture course. Inspired to immerse students in the flavors of the cultures they study, he was at first stymied by CU Denver's lack of facilities...but he didn't give up. Last year he found a way to book space in the Metropolitan State University's Springhill Suites Hospitality Center (which houses study kitchens). Because he finds "out of the box" ways to solve problems and study culture, his students recently learned the recipe for a the traditional Cuban dish Moros y Cristianos, Christians and Moors, a simple dish of rice and beans loaded with cultural legacies. Lema-Hincapié is not above taking his lessons down to the most basic levels, saying, "Some of our students don't know how to cook rice, so they are improving their way of eating while learning."

Always looking for ways to share knowledge and bring people together, hardly a moment of the school year goes by when Lema-Hincapié is not putting together a new initiative or planning a campus event. In 2013, he used a CU System Diversity and Excellence Grant and a grant from the President's Fund for the Humanities to pair student mentors with campus housekeeping staff for a sixteen-week program offering instruction on computer basics, written English, and written Spanish. He hosts cultural weeks, film screenings, and symposiums on too many topics to keep track. Because of his efforts, last year the Catalan filmmaker Ventura Pons himself came to Auraria during the first Ventura Pons International Conference. Again this April, Lema-Hincapié will organize a second Ventura Pons cultural event where his upcoming book about the filmmaker will be presented at a roundtable discussion and three or four films will be screened.

Energía: energy

Without a doubt, Lema-Hincapié is an educator who is most engaged when sharing his passions with students and the community, but he is also a scholar and an academic. Last year he edited the first book ever devoted to Ventura Pons' filmography with a colleague from the University of Wyoming, Professor Conxita Domènech. This will be his second book published in two years about Spanish cinema. Despite All Adversities: Spanish-American Queer Cinema, which he edited with Cornell professor Debra A. Castillo, was published last December by the State University of New York Press. His resume includes several other book titles, dozens of scholarly articles, and translations of important authors such as Umberto Eco.

The Gabriel García Márquez Project is another ongoing endeavor that Lema-Hincapié is deeply invested in. The professor and his colleague and friend Conrado Zuluaga, one of the most important scholars on García Márquez in Colombia, are working in conjunction with the Denver Public Library to establish a Gabriel García Márquez bibliography and collection. They hope, through donations, to create a substantial subsidiary collection to the main García Márquez archives, which were recently purchased by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin. There have also been Gabriel García Márquez cultural weeks where the author's three branches of work—fiction, journalism, and film— have been celebrated with screenings of film adaptations of García Márquez literary works and cultural symposiums.

Lema-Hincapié is invested in getting his students to know these masters and their masterpieces. He is willing to spend his energies to compete for their attention, which is so divided these days, he says, "We are in another age culturally. They are surrounded by technology and images, not by literary works. They don't want to read long books. They are used to movies, video games, chatting in short lines." So as a way to hook them in to masterpieces of literature, Lema-Hincapié is offering a class that pairs literary classics with their film adaptations, introducing students to the power of comparison to tease out ideas and to two vocabularies of cultural criticism—literary and film critique. "When you push students to be cultural detectives, they like that. If they have to solve an important mystery, it promotes their attention and understanding."

Because he has energy left over after writing books, organizing academic conferences, and teaching a full course load, in the future Lema-Hincapié would also love to introduce students to cultural critique by creating a student-run online cultural radio hour. In his vision, this would be a place for students and the Denver community to seek out music, literature, film, and other events tied to Latino culture on campus and locally in Denver and report on these happenings. Of course, Lema-Hincapié has 4 or 5 years of experience himself as a cultural radio presenter. It's just another on the long list of his talents.

Because a conversation with Lema-Hincapié is like a moment swept away to someplace a little sweeter and more beautiful—where life has just a little more encanto, entusiasmo, y energía—his students learn more than just language and culture from him. They learn to be more beautiful people.

Rianna Riegelman is a CU Denver and CLAS alumna (1999) with a BA in English Writing. She works as a writer, editor, and graphic designer in Denver and Boulder.