Professor To Retire After Three Decade Long Teaching Career At MDC

By Juan S. Gomez and Nikole Valiente 

When Nerys Torralbas started her academic endeavors at Miami Dade College, she had her sights set on becoming an optometrist. 

That was the plan—until she joined Café Cultura, the literary arts magazine at Hialeah Campus.

Within a year, Torralbas was the publication’s editor-in-chief and she switched her major to English after realizing writing was her passion. 

Thirteen years later, Torralbas credits Café Cultura co-advisor Ivonne Lamazares for guiding her toward her calling. 

“She really helped me [and] always saw potential in me,” said Torralbas, who currently serves as the associate director of Learning Resources at Hialeah Campus. “She really made that push for me to make that first step.”

Torralbas is one of the hundreds of students Lamazares has influenced during her three decades at Miami Dade College. In August, the 61-year-old English professor is slated to retire. 

“I’m retiring now because, although I love teaching, I want to have more time with my family,” said Lamazares, whose husband Steve Kronen retired from MDC in 2021 after serving as a librarian at West Campus for 14 years.

Love What You Do

Lamazares was born in March of 1962 in Havana, Cuba. She was raised by her grandparents; her mom passed away when she was three and three years later, her dad left for the United States.  

When she was 13, Lamazares and her grandparents moved to Spain for three months before immigrating to Hialeah. 

“Migrating was both, I would say liberating since it gave me a lot of opportunities I wouldn’t have had in Cuba, but it was also traumatic,” Lamazares said. “I didn’t know what I was doing.” 

When she arrived in the U.S., Lamazares was pushed back two academic years because she didn’t speak English. She used that setback as fuel to master the English language. 

At Hialeah Senior High School, the teenager practiced English by singing the songs she heard on the radio and reading her textbooks methodically. 

A few years later, Lamazares found her passion for teaching by working as a tutor at the North Campus writing center. 

“I remember tutoring an older man who had come back to school, and I was teaching him how to write an effective paragraph and I realized…this is what I want to do for the rest of my life,” Lamazares said. “It was just so fulfilling.”

Two years after graduating from North Campus Lamazares earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Barry University in 1984. One year later, she earned a master’s in English from Florida International University. 

 In 1986, Lamazares began working as an English professor at North Campus. She encouraged students to dissect novels by John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf during class discussions. 

“[Professor Lamazares] is someone who is very patient and believes in the potential of everyone,” Torralbas said. “She’s very kind, patient, warm, and always wants to push you to dig deeper as a student and as a critical thinker.”

But after 17 years at North Campus, Lamazares took a job teaching creative writing at the University of Central Florida. 

However, six years later, professor Lamazares had an epiphany: Her mission was to educate the community that raised her. She returned to South Florida in 2007 to teach English at Hialeah Campus.

“I just wanted to come home,” Lamazares said.

Passion Project

Less than a year later, Lamazares and English professor Victor Calderin joined forces to create Café Cultura. 

“It was grassroots. We were looking [for] students who wanted to get their work out there,” Calderin said. “We really had to learn everything from scratch because we had never done anything like a magazine before.”

To help with the process, Lamazares and Calderin reached out to Marta Magellan, who at the time served as advisor to the Kendall Campus literary magazine, Miambiance. 

With Magellan’s help and the publications’ first designer, John Muñiz, the duo taught students how to lay out the magazine, establish deadlines and promote Café Cultura. 

The hard work paid off. In the summer of 2008, the magazine published 1,000 copies of its inaugural volume. It featured 64 pages bonded together in a saddle stitch style. The volume’s theme honored the campus’ coffee culture.

Since its creation, Café Cultura has earned three Crown Awards from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association and dozens of awards from the Florida College System Publications Association.

One of  professor Lamazares’ students more than three decades ago— Kennedy Everett, now an English professor at Hialeah Campus—will fill her role at the magazine.

“[Café Cultura] fulfilled what I want to do as an educator, which is to mentor students and help them find their paths, express themselves and be creative,” Lamazares said.

Happy Retirement

Outside of the classroom Lamazares has proven to be a prolific writer. 

Twenty-two years ago, she published her debut novel The Sugar Island. It’s a coming-of-age story that follows the life of Tanya, a five-year-old who flees Fidel Castro’s political regime in Cuba in the 1960s. 

The story, which was inspired by Lamazares’ personal immigration journey, has been translated into seven languages. 

“I wanted to write about my childhood,” Lamazares said. “It was kind of, you know, an act of translation to write about your childhood now as an adult.”

Lamazares has also published short stories and non-fiction for Latina Magazine, The Southern Review and A Century of Cuban Writers in Florida—an anthology of Cuban writers which includes Felix Varela and José Martí. 

Her work has earned her three Florida art fellowships and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. 

During retirement, Lamazares plans to publish a second novel—The House of Ruth. The book is about two sisters who reunite in Cuba after growing up in different cultural environments. 

Lamazares also plans to volunteer as a tutor for Miami-Dade County Public Schools and travel to Japan, Germany, Chile and New York.

“I want her to do everything that she’s ever wanted to do,” said Lourdes Gonzales who served as editor-in-chief of Café Cultura five years ago. “She deserves more than anyone else to just be joyful and have time to do anything she wants.” 

Staff writer Olivia Valkenburg contributed to this story. 

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