Paola Santos

Paola Santos graduated from Yale College in 2025 with a B.A. in Humanities and certificates in Human Rights and Journalism. Originally from Los Angeles, California, and Managua, Nicaragua, her research focuses on historical memory, political exile, and press censorship in Central America and the Southern Cone.

 

Her senior translation thesis, “Juan Gelman’s Dibaxu: A Dialogue of Exile,” traced Gelman’s bilingual poetics as a form of political resistance against the junta, as he composed his poems in Ladino and self-translated into Castellano to resist erasure. Through Yale Law School’s Schell Center for International Human Rights, she contributed to research on gender-based discrimination with the United Nations Working Group on Discrimination Against Women and Girls (WGDAWG), and completed a capstone project examining how Jewish and Christian religious leaders in Argentina invoked theological language to resist the military dictatorship’s use of faith to justify state terror.

 

She also reported on opposition politics in Russia, authoring a longform profile on Alexei Navalny’s evolution from Yale World Fellow to the leading face of democratic resistance against Vladimir Putin, and how his organization continues to operate leaderless, in exile after his death.

 

Drawing on literary translation, investigative journalism, and international human rights law, her research at the University of San Andrés in Buenos Aires will further study interfaith resistance during Argentina’s dictatorship. She is particularly interested in how Jewish and Christian progressives invoked theological concepts—such as jilul hashem (desecration of God’s name)—to frame state terror as a moral transgression and reclaim ethical authority in the public sphere.