She grew up listening to pop music, cheerleading and playing with Barbie dolls. Culturally, she is an American girl who graduated in the top 25 percent of her high school class and looks just like any other Texan.

But legally the student, we’ll call her Esperanza, knows nothing of the country listed on her birth certificate.

The annual Sakura festival brought Japanese song, celebration and sushi to campus Thursday. The traditional festival is sponsored by the Japanese Language and Culture Club, and is a commemoration of spring.

“Japan is one of America’s greatest economic allies, and yet, we understand so little of them,” said Wyatt Taylor, international studies senior and the organization’s president. “I think it’s important everyone understand more of everyone’s culture and not be so ethnocentric.”

Being “sick” is not necessarily a bad thing for competitors at Hip Hop Congress’s freestyle battle and showcase next week — it’s the complete opposite.

National Book Award winner and novelist, William Vollmann is much acclaimed for tackling graphic subjects using a means many authors refuse — experience.

Vollmann has smoked with Cambodian prostitutes, run with Afghan guerrilla forces, broken into rail yards to hop trains and will give a reading of his work, followed by a question and answer session at 3:30 p.m. Thursday  in the Alkek Library.

Art submissions from Australia were not what Rand Renfrow planned for when he put together his first book, Everything’s Okay, I Drew This for You.

The 16-page, hand-screened art book features submissions from all over the globe. The cracker box-size book contains doodles and professional sketches depicting anything from robots to headless people, all containing the phrase “Everything’s okay, I drew this for you.”

The ASG presidential debate between candidates Chris Covo, Brice Loving and Trenton Thomas demonstrated moments of clarity to some students but for others mimicked rhetorical dodge ball.

Steven Williams, biochemistry senior, submitted a question asking how ASG funds would be responsibly appropriated in the incoming administration.

The replies he received were not what he had hoped.

Ray Duncan was raised as a self-described “walker of two worlds”—one of American culture and the other American Indian .

Now, he hopes to pass on the story and a legacy, dispel myths and empower a new generation.

The third annual Native American Cultural Awareness Conference was Wednesday. It was a collaboration of the Native American Student Association, Four Winds Intertribal Society Inc. and university sponsors.

Taryn Davis, former Texas State student, still keeps her husband’s clothes in her closet. She still keeps his combat boots by the front door and his purple heart on the wall.

Davis does this knowing he will never come home. Davis was 21 years old when her husband Michael Davis was killed in Iraq. The news of his death began her journey of healing. It led her to create the American Widow Project documentary and start a national tour to share a little-told story.

For nearly two weeks now, Josefina Ibarra, the sophomore whose 18 year-old sister Samantha died in a tragic car accident on Highway 123, has been petitioning on campus with a handful of clipboards and Samantha’s Quinceñera picture.
Ibarra has collected almost 900 signatures from students, employees and student senators in a petition for the state to build shoulders and turn lanes on the highway. But the student with perhaps the most important signature has politely declined.