Students in Global Studies class highlight Latino businesses in Alamance County

Did you know you can find food from El Salvador and Mexico, coffee from Costa Rica and groceries (including piñatas!) from Mexico and other Latin American countries in different businesses throughout Alamance County?

Now you can easily find this information, and more, thanks to the work of 25 students registered in the course GST110 The Global Experience (section BG), taught by School of Communications Assistant Professor Vanessa Bravo.

As part of their assignments for the global course, the students visited restaurants, grocery stories, bakeries and other businesses that target Latino customers as their main clients—although they serve all Alamance County residents in general—to gather information about the businesses. The students collected basic facts about the businesses, described each one, and took pictures at each place.

With those materials in hand, they wrote short articles and uploaded them to the website, Better Alamance Wiki.

This “wiki,” a website that is maintained by many contributors, is a project started and maintained by Assistant Professor of Communications Derek Lackaff. Past Lackaff’s students in different courses have contributed articles to this wiki as well as students from Assistant Professor Julie Lellis.

Bravo’s class took the task of reflecting the presence of a growing Latino-oriented business sector in the community, consistent with the fact that about 16 percent of the population of Alamance County identifies itself as of Latino or Hispanic origin.

The businesses featured include, among others, restaurants El Carbonero (Salvadoran), La Cocina (Mexican), Cancun (Mexican) and La Fiesta (Mexican). The wiki also has articles about organizations such as Centro La Comunidad in Burlington and El Centro de Español at Elon. Elon’s Irazu Coffee Shop is also featured in the wiki.

In total, students contributed 16 articles about Latino-oriented businesses to the Better Alamance wiki. Check them out at http://wiki.betteralamance.org/All_Pages.