Student newSpaper of the univerSity of Southern California SinCe 1912 | www.dailytrojan.com | vol. 180, no. 49 | monday november 4, 2013
InDEX 4 · Opinion 5 · Lifestyle 8 · Classifieds 9 · Crossword 12 · Sports
Culture
by Sheridan watSon
daily trojan
Alan Prieto, a native of Mexico, and
Daily Trojan staff member, has never
felt comfortable with calling himself
Latino at USC. Though the university
has a large Latino community, with
more than 20 student groups geared
toward Latino students, Prieto feels
as if the organizations often force all
who fall under the Latino umbrella
into one entity.
“I don’t like the term Latino or
Hispanic, let alone Chicano — it’s very
homogenizing to a whole culture,”
said Prieto, a senior majoring in art
history and critical studies. “Let’s
try to differentiate between being
Mexican and being Latino.”
Before his move to the United
States in the seventh grade, Prieto
commuted to a California school from
Mexico five days a week and learned
English and Spanish simultaneously.
His upbringing shows just one facet
of the diverse Hispanic and Latino
community at USC, a community that
has grown to represent 14 percent of
the entire USC student population.
This 14 percent is made up of
thousands of students who come
from many countries and cultures.
From second-generation Mexican-
Americans to first-generation
Peruvian- and Ecuadorian-Americans
to Brazilian internationals, the USC
Latino student body is one of variance.
But that diverse student body is often
blurred.
“It’s not like I’m trying to be political
about it and want to try and avoid
being a part of those organizations,”
Prieto said. “I just don’t think that
they represent who I am.”
Prieto’s issue is not uncommon.
He’s one of many students who said
they found themselves marginalized
into being categorized as “Latino.”
“Although these students tend
to have many things in common,
they themselves are very diverse as
our community is represented by
Mexico, Central America, South
America, Dominican Republic, Cuba
and Puerto Rico,” said William Vela,
director of USC’s El Centro Chicano,
a department in the USC Division
of Student Affairs aimed at helping
the Latino community at USC, in an
email to the Daily Trojan.
Geography is not the only element
dividing Latino students. About 50
million Hispanics and 11 million
undocumented immigrants currently
reside in the U.S., according to the U.S.
Census Bureau and the Pew Research
Center. In California alone, about
38 percent of the state’s population
identify as Hispanic or Latino
according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
“Then you have folks who are
multiracial, first to fourth-generation,
various religious affiliations as well
as social class variance, amongst
tons of other factors that make our
community extremely diverse and
not monolithic,” Vela said in an email.
Many students feel the term Latino,
as unifying as it can be to a segment
of the population, is also limiting to
the diverse cultures that lie under its
domain. As Latinos at USC have faced
numerous challenges ranging from
misconceptions and to friction within
the community, many students said
identity plays an important role in
their lives.
“Who’s thIs guy?”
“When I hang out with my friends,
they all speak Spanish,” said Isadora
Costa, a junior majoring in economics.
“But I don’t.”
Costa, an international student
from Brazil, found that in the United
States, the terms Latino and Hispanic
are often used interchangeably, even
though it is possible to be considered
Latino but not Hispanic, Hispanic but
not Latino, or both.
Those who identify as Latino have
cultural roots in a Latin American
country in the Western Hemisphere,
while Hispanics are those who speak
Spanish, which can include people
from a number of countries around
the world. But many students feel
that the diverse Latino student body
at USC is often written off as solely
Mexican.
Jessica Vidal, a senior majoring in
political science and sociology, has
often been mistaken for Mexican
even though she is a first-generation
American whose family is originally
from Ecuador and Peru.
“I always get mistaken for Mexican
on campus,” Vidal said. “When I first
got to USC it was the strangest thing
that everyone automatically assumed
I was Mexican because I was Latina.”
But the perception of
homogenization doesn’t capture the
many countries that the term Latino
applies to.
“A lot of the time, people think,
‘Oh Latino, oh you’re Mexican,” said
Priscilla Hernandez, a sophomore
majoring in international relations.
“[Latinos] are very similar in some
aspects but we’re so different in
others; we have different types of
culture, different types of food,
different traditions — even the way
we speak is different.”
Hernandez grew up in West Covina,
Calif., a town with a population of 53.2
percent Latinos according to the U.S.
Census Bureau.
“People are multiracial,”
Hernandez said. “I think people
just don’t know. They haven’t really
learned a lot about Latin American
history.”
Stephanie Aceves, co-assistant
director of the USC Latino Student
Assembly, said that LSA is trying to
change this misconception.
Latino students reflect on
their complex roles at USC
Hispanic/Latino students
account for 14 percent of
USC’s student population.
| see latIno, page 2 |
humanitieS
by david ahia ii
daily trojan
Doheny Memorial Library
hosted “Lewis Carroll Outsiders,”
an annual conference on the
lasting influence of Lewis Carroll,
mathematician and writer of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,
on Saturday.
Attendees of the event were
greeted by a sculpture of distorted
Alice in Wonderland characters
when they entered the foyer of
Doheny Library. Karen Mortillaro,
sculptor and head of the Lewis
Carroll Society of North America’s
planning committee, created these
Conference on
Lewis Carroll
attracts artists
Attendees of the annual event
included sculptors, authors
and video game creators.
| see WonDErlanD, page 3 |
jessica Zhou | Daily Trojan
Down the rabbit hole · Author Raul Contreras signs copies of his book,
Alice’s Bloody Adventure in Wonderland at Doheny Memorial Library.
by emily GoldberG
daily trojan
Though USC Viterbi School of
Engineering assistant research
professors Yu-Han Chang and
Rajiv Maheswaran won’t be seen
scoring slam dunks on national
television, their experience in
computer science could make
them more knowledgeable about
basketball than players in the
National Basketball Association.
Starting this season, NBA
teams will have access to
mountains of analytical data
thanks to motion-tracking
cameras developed by STATS LLC.
Chang and Maheswaran have
developed a software program
that will help teams make sense
of these numbers.
“The data from the NBA
will give teams the numbers,”
Maheswaran said. “But we can
turn the numbers into insight and
helpful information that non-experts
and non-technical people can
understand.”
The software system, called
Eagle, will give teams information
about where rebounds are most
likely to fall, how to best defend
pick-and-rolls, how to create
the most efficient lineups and
more. Chang and Maheswaran
have licensed Eagle to the Los
Angeles Clippers and three other
NBA teams through their startup
company, Second Spectrum.
Chang and Maheswaran each
have more than a decade’s worth
of experience working in pattern
recognition and motion data
technology. The duo’s previous
experience includes projects for
the Department of Defense and
the National Science Foundation.
“I like to say it was great to
transition from tracking military
targets to tracking our favorite
players on the court,” Chang said.
The developments for Eagle
began in the Viterbi Startup
Garage, a resource for Viterbi
students to learn how to turn their
research into successful business
ventures. The team’s first work
won the Best Research Paper
Award at the 2012 MIT Sloan
Sports Analytics Conference.
“The conference gave us a
lot of publicity and we realized
there was a clear need in the
marketplace for someone to turn
these numbers into something
insightful and understandable.
We wanted to create a product to
address that,” Chang said.
Major League Baseball has been
using similar motion-tracking
data for roughly a decade, but
only recently has technology
allowed for this information to
be used for faster-paced sports
such as basketball. Chang,
Maheswaran and their students
have become pioneers in utilizing
this information for basketball.
“We’re hoping this is going
to be a Moneyball moment,”
said Tal Levy, a junior majoring
in computer engineering and
computer science. “This will be a
time when teams can make more
informed decisions instead of
solely rely on preconceived ideas,
and I’m excited to see where it will
go.” Levy became involved with
the Second Spectrum team when
Eagle was still in the research
stages last fall.
Currently, only professional
teams have access to the STATS
data that the Eagle system
utilizes. Maheswaran anticipates,
however, that motion-tracking
data will become common at
the college level soon. Second
Spectrum would welcome the
opportunity to bring Eagle to the
collegiate level and especially to
USC, said Chang.
“We would certainly be
interested in helping our home
team out when that chance comes
around,” he said.
Chass Bryan, a sophomore
guard on the USC men’s basketball
team, recognized some potential
benefits of utilizing Eagle at USC,
but was conf licted about how
much of an impact it could make.
“A lot of basketball is numerical
values, seeing who is most
efficient and where strengths
and weaknesses are, so in that
respect the software would be
useful,” he said. “But when you’re
on the court you’re not thinking
mathematically, and at a point
you have to let the talent speak
for itself.”
Despite any doubt from
athletes, Apratim Ghosh, an MBA
student at Marshall, has been
working at Second Spectrum for
two months and is optimistic
about the success of Second
USC researchers bring data to the NBA
Viterbi engineers have
developed software to help
players make sense of data.
| see Data, page 3 |
reSearCh
Check out the third of the Daily
Trojan’s three part series
“Latino students refl ect on their
complex roles at USC”
Latino@USC