After months of waiting, Central High School alumna Emily Lemon has received her Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship assignment to travel to Argentina in March for eight months.
The Sewanee graduate said having those weighty words attached to her resume will be a chance to act as an informal ambassador to Buenos Aires, where she’ll assist university professors teaching English to education students.
“It gives a human face to America,” said Lemon, daughter of Rick and Miriam Lemon of Harrison.
Central High School graduate Emily Lemon has won a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship and in March will leave for Argentina for six months.Lemon said Latin America has had hard experiences with the United States over recent decades, and she hopes her presence with the Fulbright program will give a “human quality” to a relationship that for many Argentines has been limited to U.S. products and politics.
Lemon said Argentina was a natural choice to broaden her experience in the Spanish-speaking world. Her mother’s family is from Guatemala and Lemon has grown up with their language and traditions, like eating her grandmother’s tamales wrapped in banana leaves and drinking hot apple-pineapple ponche at midnight on Noche Buena, or Christmas Eve.
“We’re a pretty big family,” she said.
Since the Lemons moved here from California in 1994, all of her aunts, uncles and cousins have followed.
“Family is so important; having that strong base in my life, having a really rich culture,” she said.
Lemon said she gets the best of both worlds.
“I’m really happy to be from Chattanooga and from the South,” she said, and her parents – her father is from Utah – feel the same way.
“I think they’re really proud to be Southerners,” she said.
Lemon graduated from Sewanee in 2010 with a degree in international and global studies with a concentration in the Hispanic world.
She studied Muslim and art history in Spain and did women’s health and sexuality research in Guatemala last summer. She had applied for the Fulbright program in the fall of 2009, writing a few short essays describing her preference for Argentina.
Lemon said she’s looking forward to experiencing Argentine culture in more depth than just the local wine and famous beef.
“I’m a little nervous because they eat a lot of beef and I’m a vegetarian,” she said.
Lemon said she wants a taste of Buenos Aires inspiration akin to what impassioned Canadian band Metric’s lead singer Emily Haines, a favorite of Lemon’s.
She remembers vividly the descriptions of Argentina by a Sewanee political science professor who was a Fulbright scholar and an exchange student in Argentina; “the way that he talks about the country and how beautiful it was,” she said.
In the future, Lemon said she wants to enter the medical field, though she said whether that means medical school, a master’s in public health or she can’t know yet.
Eventually, she said, she’ll return to the South to turn cogs in the women’s health and minority health care spectrum.
“I think that’s where there’s a lot lacking,” she said. “I think it’s important to stay here.”