Multilingual student journal calls for submissions

Entremundos, a student-led Spanish and Portuguese journal, offers students a place to embrace diversity and publish their work.

“There is definitely a diversity of students and a diversity of international students that want to get their voices heard,” editor-in-chief Karisa Shiraki said. “There’s a lot of poetry in the most recent volume where it talks about the diversity that does exist.”

The online journal accepts all forms of media produced by BYU students, including research papers, photographs, films and poems, in both Spanish and Portuguese. The journal also publishes papers written in English that focus on issues relating to Spanish and Portuguese topics.

Each volume has a theme, and the upcoming volume will focus on “incertidumbre,” or uncertainty. Shiraki said the theme was fitting because college-aged students feel a lot of uncertainty.

“There’s a huge bridge between adolescence and adulthood, and you’re trying to figure out who you are,” Shiraki said. “It’s being on that precipice of change.”

Along with those feelings of uncertainty, the journal’s staff also see this as an opportunity for BYU students to submit works that deal with spirituality or their missions for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, according to BYU student Perla Escobar who works on the journal. 

“There might have been a time where you took a picture of something on your mission that might reflect the topic (of uncertainty),” Escobar said. “Art is interpretation, so if you feel like it does, just submit it.”

The journal accepts submissions from not only students in the Spanish and Portuguese department but any BYU student who wants to write either in Spanish, Portuguese or English about a relevant topic.

“To find an outlet where you can share what you think, I think it’s important,” Escobar said.

Originally, the journal was a print journal called La Marca Hispanica. When it was revamped a few years ago, the Spanish and Portuguese department changed the title to Entremundos and moved to solely publishing online, according to the journal’s faculty advisor Mac Wilson.

“(Entremundos) refers to the idea of language learning,” Wilson said. “You do feel sort of either between two worlds or a part of two worlds.”

The submission deadline for the journal’s next issue is Dec. 20.