BIOS/ Abstracts

Session 1

James E. Sanders (Utah State University)

Professor of History at Utah State University, earned his B.A. from the University of Florida and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh. His first book, published by Duke University Press, is Contentious Republicans: Popular Politics, Race, and Class in Nineteenth-Century Colombia. His new book is The Vanguard of the Atlantic World: Creating Modernity, Nation, and Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, also with Duke University Press (2014). He has lived and conducted research in Bogotá, Popayán, Cali, Mexico City, Guanajuato, Mérida, Quito and Montevideo. His current projects focus on rethinking the relation between capitalism and democracy in the nineteenth-century Americas and on challenging notions of American exceptionalism.

“Forgetting Democracy: Conrad’s Nostromo and the Erasure of Democratic History in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico and Colombia”

Why have we forgotten nineteenth-century Spanish America’s innovative experiments with democracy? Beginning in the 1870s and accelerating in subsequent decades, an intellectual and political current emerged in several parts of Latin America that sought to rewrite the region’s experiences with democracy and republicanism since independence. Around mid-century, many Mexicans and Colombians had expressed great optimism and confidence in their nations’ experiments with democratic republicanism; indeed, the public sphere regularly sounded with assertions that both nation-states were far more democratic than any European state. However, under projects of the Regeneration and the Porfiriato, newspaper writers and intellectuals argued that their societies’ democratic experiments had been great failures; instead of true republics, Mexico and Colombia had been shams and farces, suffering a debilitating anarchy only disguised as liberty. From being the proud bearer of modernity in the Atlantic world, Mexicans and Colombians cast themselves as less civilized, waiting to be tutored by the state to work for an economic modernity that would become increasingly elusive in the next century. However, instead of viewing this historical process as an intellectual project of a set of elites to recast and remember a history of democracy that suited their interests, many observers (including Joseph Conrad in his influential novel Nostromo) and scholars have accepted it as fact—that, indeed, Latin America had no real nineteenth-century experience of democracy. I will argue that Latin America was a democratic innovator in the nineteenth century, but that subsequent political movements (especially to exclude many of the lower class from the political sphere) successfully erased or denigrated the mid-nineteenth-century democratic past.

Carlos Jáuregui (University of Notre Dame)

Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. Author of Canibalia. Canibalismo, calibanismo, antropofagia cultural y consumo en América Latina, Casa de las Américas Award 2005 (Casa de las Américas 2005;

1

Iberoamericana 2008), Theatre of Conquest: Carvajal’s Complaint of the Indians in the “Court of Death” (Pennsylvania State UP 2008) and Querella de los indios en las Cortes de la Muerte (1557) de Michael de Carvajal (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2003). Coeditor of Heterotropías: narrativas de identidad y alteridad latinoamericana (Iberoamericana 2003), Colonialidad y crítica en América Latina (Universidad de Puebla 2007), Revisiting the Colonial Question in Latin America  (Iberoamericana 2008, con Mabel Moraña), Coloniality at Large. Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate (Duke UP 2008, with Enrique Dussel and M. Moraña) and Of Rage and Redemption: The Art of Oswaldo Guayasamín (Vanderbilt University 2008, with Joseph Mella y Edward Fischer).

“Ejercicios de desmemoria colonial III: Gonzalo Guerrero y la invención de la Riviera Maya."

Esta presentación examina la monumentalización de dos tránsfugas o aindiados (uno del siglo XVI y otro del XX) y propone la yuxtaposición de dos conquistas separadas y a la vez unidas por cuatro siglos de colonialismo y resistencia. Propongo la "iluminación profana" de una serie de despliegues historiográficos, simbólicos y estéticos en los cuales el pasado y el presente se entreveran; i.e. un corto circuito benjaminiano entre la conquista incompleta del oriente de Yucatán en el siglo XVI y su "nueva conquista" en los siglos XX y XXI, cuando se inventa la llamada Riviera Maya (Quintana Roo), un espacio re-territorializado como etno-naturaleza por la industria turística contemporánea. Además de extrañar esa odiosa invención, quisiera indagar, en ciertos monumentos, el índice secreto de luchas y derrotas pasadas que "no han dejado de ocurrir." Trabajaré con documentos de archivo y crónicas (s. XVI) sobre la conquista de los llamados mayas, así como con varias esculturas y murales del siglo XX que rememoran el pasado colonial y al mismo tiempo, velan el colonialismo presente; esto es, la des-posesión de la tierra, la mercantilización turística del paisaje y de los espacios arqueológicos, y la extracción de trabajo en la industria turística.

Rebecca Biron (Dartmouth College)

Dean of the College and Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. Her research and teaching interests focus on Latin American literary and cultural studies, literary theory, gender studies, and Mexican cultural criticism. She has published widely on the relationship between narrative and violence as it pertains to masculinity, Latin American urban history, and Mexican literature and film. She is the author of Mexico’s Modern Dreams (Bucknell UP, 2013) and Murder and Masculinity: Violent Fictions of 20th-Century Latin America (Vanderbilt UP, 2000), and editor of City/Art: the Urban Scene in Latin America (Duke UP, 2009). Her recent articles include “Holographic Buenos Aires: Urban Memory and New Technologies of Envisioning” in Technology, Literature, and Digital Culture in Latin America: Mediatized Sensibilities in a Globalized Era (Bush and Gentic. Routledge, 2015) and “NarCoMedia: Mexican Masculinities” in Letras Hispanas: Revista de Literatura y Cultura (Special Issue on Global Masculinities, Vinodh Venkatesh, Ed. 2015). Biron has published in PMLA; Latin American Literary Review; Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies;Discourse; Revista hispánica moderna; Género, Cultura y Sociedad; Revista de Estudios Hispánicos; Letras Hispanas;Curare: Espacio crítico para las artes; Feminist Studies; La palabra y el hombre; and

2

various essay collections. Currently, she is completing a book project, The Geopolitics of Form: Globalization and Film Trilogies in the Americas. She serves on the editorial boards of the Latin American Literary Review, Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, and Revista de Literatura Mexicana Contemporánea.

“Aiming High: Developing Dependencies at Mexico City's New International Airport”

Mexican President Peña Nieto officially announced the plans for the building of a new international airport in Mexico City on September 2, 2014. His speech highlighted the sleek, futuristic airport design, the economic benefits of the project, and the lack of social or environmental costs to build it. He asserted that the airport will eventually produce 600,000 new jobs, will not displace any fragile communities, and will be energy-sustainable. Public funds will pay for 58% of construction costs, while the rest will be privately backed. The principal architects for the project are Mexican Fernando Romero (Carlos Slim’s son-in-law) and Norman Foster (of London-based Foster+Partners). Mexico City’s grand new international airport offers a marvelous case study for investigating intersecting (in)dependencies among transnational travel and business on the one hand, and local infrastructural needs, historical-environmental costs, and economic effects on the other hand.

This presentation has two parts. First, I analyze the history of earlier proposals for airport expansion in Mexico City, compared to the development of this latest plan. Over the past two decades (since NAFTA), international investment in Mexican industries has been heavily concentrated along the border with the United States. While Mexico City continues to house global finance networks and the executive headquarters of transnational business interests, it is not a centralized location for industrial production. Peña Nieto claims that the new airport will quadruple the number of passengers who annually use the current Mexico City airport. Mexico City’s urban population has stabilized in the 21st century, after four decades of wild growth. Where will all these new air passengers come from? What will be their destinations? I show how the timing of Peña Nieto’s announcement makes evident that the new airport has more to do with Mexico’s symbolic standing on the global stage than with direct economic benefits.

The second part of this paper examines the pro-airport speeches and press releases, as well as expressions of popular resistance and skepticism regarding the development plan. I rely on these sources in order to identify the government's implicit theories regarding two relationships: the relationship between Mexico’s global capital city (finance) and its industrial periphery (labor); and the relationship between Mexico’s shattered global reputation (due to the narco-violence that surged under former President Calderón’s administration) and the need to reassure international investors that the Mexican government can maintain national infrastructure and economic stability. Whom does a shiny, efficient, high-capacity international airport benefit? What avenues of economic and political development does investment in the airport overshadow? Which social sectors bear the real costs of this enormous project? Globalization theory in many ways supplants the either-or of dependency/development. The new international airport, as both symbol and hub for increased globalized flows, illustrates the inextricability of dependency from development. It also exposes the radical interdependence of deep historical locality and high-flying futurism.

3

Session 2

Beatriz González (Rice University)

Professor González-Stephan is the Lee Hage Jamail Chair of Latin American Literature and full professor in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese. She received her B.A. from the Universidad Católica Andres Bello in Caracas in 1974, her M.A. in Hispanic-American Literature from the Instituto Pedagogico Universitario de Caracas in 1982, and her Ph.D. in Latin American Literatures from the University of Pittsburgh in 1985. She was the 1987 recipient of the Casa de las Americas literary prize for the best Latin American literature for her work La Historiografía Literaria Del Liberalismo Hispanoamericano Del Siglo XIX. She has published eight books, along with numerous articles and book chapters, and she is currently working on a manuscript titled "Cultura visual y tecnologías para las masas: a propósito de las Exposiciones Nacionales." Her forthcoming work is The Body Politic: Writing the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Venezuela. The undergraduate courses she has taught include "Mapping Latin American Culture," "The Latin American Short Story," "Macho Culture in Latin America," and "Latin American Women's Literature." She also teaches graduate courses such as "Civilization and Barbarism" and "(Un) disciplined Bodies."

Cuerpos transfigurados: violencias coloniales y el dispositivo fotográfico (s. XIX)

Al poner en contacto algunos archivos fotográficos de la segunda mitad del siglo XIX, archivos disimiles entre sí (parte de las fotografías de Christiano Junior tomadas en Brasil; tarjetas de visita venezolanas; el archivo inglés de las así llamadas “Hidden Mothers”; y el archivo peruano de niños muertos), se puede advertir como gramática común que la fotografía en su formato de tarjetas de visita, ocluye la ansiedad por edulcorar, borrar, o tapar literalmente la violencia, o bien de la esclavitud (en tiempos de fuertes debates abolicionistas), la sociedad tensionada por diferencias étnicas, y finalmente en forma alegórica transfigurar la muerte en aparente vida como última forma de violencia difícil de procesar. Estas oclusiones de una violencia que no es posible captar ni decir en la imagen fotográfica, se desliza y expresa, como todo lo represado, en los cuerpos patológicos, deformes, y tumorados de negros esclavos del archivo clínico de Ch. Junior, también leído en forma alegórica y a contrapelo de los demás archivos revisados. Usualmente la fotografía es analizada dentro de sus respectivos géneros (retrato, fotografía de tipos, paisaje) y ceñida al marco nacional. El esfuerzo de acercar archivos a un nivel transnacional y trasatlántico permite trazar una dinámica globalizada de una violencia menos obvia no representable. Por tanto, la pregunta central que nos hacemos es sobre aquella violencia que no se ve en determinado momento de la historia.

Brodwyn Fischer (University of Chicago)

I am a historian of Brazil and Latin America, especially interested in cities, citizenship, law, migration, race, and social inequality. My first book, A Poverty of Rights (Stanford, 2008), examined how weak citizenship rights and residential informality came to define urban poverty, popular social struggles, and the political dynamics of inequality in modern Brazil. It received book awards from the Social Science History Association, the Urban History Association, the

4

Conference on Latin American History, and the Brazilian Studies Association. A volume I coedited with Bryan McCann and Javier Auyero, Cities from Scratch (Duke University Press, 2014), explores the many ways in which poverty and informality have shaped the Latin American urban experience. My essay for the volume, "A Century in the Present Tense," argues that the historical dynamics of Brazilian urban poverty have been obscured by a marked tendency to see informal cities as symptoms of current crises rather than historically dynamic phenomena in their own right. In my current project, Understanding Inequality in Post-Abolition Brazil, I ask when—and if—social inequality came to be defined as Brazil’s central sociopolitical problem. Drastic inequalities have always defined Brazilian society, and the struggle against inequality has long shaped the political left. But in Brazil’s late nineteenth century, issues of hunger, disease, landlessness, and freedom often loomed larger for the very poor than inequality per se, and the combination of weak public institutions and private monopolization of power and resources rendered access to vertical social networks vital. In such a context, inequality was often the root cause of social misery, but access to one’s unequals was often the only way to survive it. This tension endured throughout the twentieth century, becoming a defining feature of Brazilian modernity. In tracing inequality’s confounding history, this project illuminates the sinuous logic of poor people’s political mobilization in Brazil, often revealing significant agency in actions once regarded as symptoms of false consciousness or ignorant dependence. Yet Understanding Inequality also indicates some of the paradoxical ways in which struggles for survival and social mobility have historically reinforced rather than disrupted larger inequalities.

“Navigating Inequality in the Relational City”

Much of what we think we know about the history of urban space, politics, and social movements in Latin america is modeled around the trajectory of North Atlantic cities, where industrialization, political liberalism, and urban expansion converged to create distinctive models for urban progress and rights-based citizenship. But in Latin America, as in many cities across the global south, public space and public power functioned differently than they did in the North Atlantic, and vertical social relationships have remained far more important mediators of economic opportunity and social and political mobility. In cities such as Recife, Brazil — where industrial development was relatively weak, where public social services were minimal, where slavery persisted until the late 19th century, and where liberal institutions were forged to accommodate private power — this tendency was particularly acute. In this paper, I will use the specific case of Recife to propose alternate paradigms for urban modernization and social movement, with broad relevance to the historical study of urban inequality across Latin America.

Christopher Dunn (Tulane University)

Professor Dunn holds a joint appointment in Spanish & Portuguese and the African and African Diaspora Studies Program at Tulane. He is also a core member of the Stone Center for Latin American Studies. His research focuses on cultural politics during the period of the dictatorship, national and regional discourse, popular music, race relations, and black culture in Brazil. He is the author of Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture(University of North Carolina Press, 2001). He is co-editor with Charles Perrone

5

of Brazilian Popular Music and Globalization(Routledge, 2001) and co-editor with Idelber Avelar of Brazilian Popular Music and Citizenship (Duke UP, 2011).

“Spaces of the Carioca Counterculture, 1970s”

My contribution will focus on the spatial dimensions of the youth counterculture, which flourished in urban Brazil during a period of authoritarian rule. In particular, the unique topography of Rio de Janeiro provided spaces of relative freedom from the state's repressive apparatus. I will discuss the particular significance of south zone beaches as a space of congregation, the hillside neighborhood of Santa Teresa, and the north side dance halls that gave rise to a Brazilian soul dance scene known as Black Rio. 

PLENARY SESSION

José Manuel Valenzuela Arce (Colegio de la Frontera Norte, Tijuana, Mexico)

Doctor en Ciencias Sociales con especialidad en Sociología por El Colegio de México y profesor-investigador del Departamento de Estudios Culturales de El Colegio de la Frontera Norte desde 1982 a la fecha. Miembro del Sistema Nacional de Investigadores (Nivel III) del Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología. Sus investigaciones han abordado temas relacionados con cultura e identidad, fronteras culturales, movimientos sociales, culturas juveniles, sociología urbana y cultura popular. Además fue fundador de El Colegio de la Frontera Norte (1982) y del Departamento de Estudios Culturales, del cual fue director de 1990-1993 y de 1999 a 2003. También fue director de la Unidad Regional Norte de Culturas Populares (Baja California, Baja California Sur, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Durango) de 1993 a 1994 y fundador de la Unidad de Tijuana de 1993 a 1994, además fue Director de la Revista Frontera Norte de El Colegio de la Frontera Norte de 1995 a 1998. Sus trabajos han sido publicados en español, inglés, portugués, italiano, catalán, alemán y francés. Se ha presentado en Estados Unidos, México, Venezuela, Colombia, Chile, Río de Janeiro, Bolivia, Sao Paulo, Guatemala, Panamá, Argentina, Perú, Cuba, Berlín, Italia, España e Indonesia. Ha publicado 25 libros, 13 como autor único y 12 como coordinador y coautor. Uno de ellos obtuvo el premio Internacional “Casa de las Américas” Cuba 2001; 3 de ellos han sido premiados con la mención honorífica del Premio Nacional de Antropología Social Fray Bernardino de Sahagún. Recientemente recibió la Beca Guggenheim 2005 que otorga la John Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Pertenece al Paseo de la Fama de Tijuana. También ha sido autor de 44 capítulos en libros y 41 artículos en revistas académicas. Sus obras han sido de gran importancia para la comprensión de los procesos socioculturales que definen a la frontera México-Estados Unidos y a los movimientos juveniles en América Latina y Estados Unidos.

“Necropolítica y juvenicidio en América Latina”

El juvenicidio inicia con la precarización de la vida de las y los jóvenes, la ampliación de su vulnerabilidad económica y social, el aumento de su indefensión ciudadana y la disminución de opciones disponibles para que puedan construir una plataforma reflexiva que acompañe la justa indignación que recorre diversos escenarios latinoamericanos caracterizados por el artero

6

asesinato de personas que poseen identidades desacreditadas que les vuelven vulnerables frente a las fuerzas del Estado y frente a grupos paramilitares o del llamado crimen organizado.

El juvenicidio alude a la condición límite en la cual se asesina a sectores o grupos específicos de la población joven. Sin embargo, los procesos sociales derivan en la posibilidad que miles de jóvenes sean asesinados, implica colocar estas muertes en escenarios sociales más amplios que incluyen procesos de precarización económica y social, la estigmatizan y construcción de grupos, sectores o identidades juveniles desacreditadas, la banalización del mal o la fractura de los marcos axiológicos junto al descrédito de las instituciones figuras emblemáticas de la probidad, la construcción de cuerposterritorios juveniles como ámbitos privilegiados de la muerte, el narco mundo y el despliegue de corrupción, impunidad, violencia y muerte que le acompaña y la condición cómplice de un Estado adulterado o narcoestado (Valenzuela, 2009,2010,2012), concepto que alude a la imbricada relación entre fuerzas criminales que actúan dentro y fuera de las instituciones o, para plantearlo de manera más directa, dentro de un imbricado colaboracionismo entre figuras institucionales y miembros del crimen organizado.

Session 3

Javier Auyero (University of Texas-Austin)

Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Professor in Latin American Sociology at the University of Texas-Austin. His main areas of research, writing and teaching are urban poverty, political ethnography, and collective violence. He is the author of Poor People’s Politics (Duke University Press, 2000), Contentious Lives (Duke University Press, 2003), Routine Politics and Violence in Argentina (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Patients of the State (Duke University Press, 2012), and, together with Débora Swistun,Flammable. Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown (Oxford University Press, 2009). Together with Philippe Bourgois and Nancy Scheper-Hughes, he is the editor of Violence at the Urban Margins (Oxford University Press 2015). His new book, In Harm’s Way. Interpersonal Violence at the Urban Margins, co-authored with María Fernanda Berti, was recently published by Princeton University Press. He is also the editor of Invisible City. Life and Labor in Austin, Texas (University of Texas Press, 2015). He is currently conducting research on public contention around fracking in Texas.

“Violence(s) at the Urban Margins: A political/relational Ethnography” Based on 30 months of collaborative fieldwork in a relegated area of metropolitan Buenos Aires, this talk examines the sources, uses, and forms of interpersonal violence at the urban margins. Contrary to established ways of thinking about interpersonal violence, the talk will show that diverse forms serve more than just retaliatory purposes and concatenate with one another beyond dyadic relationships. This presentation will also argue that violence among the marginalized is deeply political in a three-fold sense: a) It is entangled with the intermittent and contradictory form in which the state intervenes in territories of urban relegation, b) It has the potential to give birth to collective action that targets the state while simultaneously signals it as the main actor responsible for the skyrocketing physical aggression, and c) It provokes paradoxical forms of

7

informal social control as residents  rely on state agents who are themselves enmeshed in the production of this violence.

Amanda Holmes (McGill University)

Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at McGill University. Recent book-length publications include “Crossing Borders and Identities in Hispanic Cinema” (guest editor for the Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, Spring 2012); Cultures of the City: Mediating Identities in Urban Latin/o America (anthology) co-edited with Richard Young (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010); and City Fictions: Language, Body and Spanish American Urban Space (Bucknell University Press, 2007). She is currently working on a book project on the politics of architecture in New Argentine Cinema.

“Dangerously Secure: Inside the Gated Communities of Argentina”

In the last decade, author Claudia Piñeiro and filmmakers, Lucrecia Martel and Celina Murga have critiqued the rise of the Argentine gated communities in their filmic and textual representations. Claudia Piñeiro’s Las viudas de los jueves (2005) demonstrates parallels between the violence that permeates both the enclosed community and the political realities of the neoliberal government. Lucrecia Martel’s short film, “La ciudad que huye” (2006), emphasizes the divisive politics of inside and outside through experimental filming techniques such as breaking the screen into several frames. Ana y los otros (2004) by Celina Murga accentuates the economic discrepancies underscored by this lifestyle in her portrayal of teenage class conflicts in the country. These works represent the borders crossed in these communities; fear, violence and the evolution of enclosed relationships lead to the construction of insipid and pernicious neighborhoods. Through a reading of these works, this paper seeks to understand the significance of elite enclosures in Argentina, their isolation and the inevitable production of new segregated cultures within their walls.

Ernesto Capello (Macalester College)

Ernesto Capello joined the Macalester faculty in 2008 and is an Associate Professor of Latin American History. Born in California, Professor Capello was raised in Quito. He received his PhD from the University of Texas in 2005 and served on the faculty of the University of Vermont before coming to the Twin Cities. Professor Capello teaches introductory, intermediate and advanced courses in Latin American history that emphasize the intersection between local and global identity, racial difference and power, and the relationship between arts, politics, and the state. He also offers courses specifically targeting the history of the Andes, the Amazon, and modern urban history. His scholarship emphasizes transnational imaginaries and encounters, urban history, visual culture, and the history of cartography. These currents intersect in his first book, City at the Center of the World: Space, History, and Modernity in Quito (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011) which posits six chronotopes - or narrative configurations of space-time - that provided a framework for Quito residents to navigate the challenges of a city undergoing the dislocation of nineteenth and early twentieth-century modernization. His writings have

8

appeared in various journals in the United States, Europe, and Latin America including the Latin American Research Review, City, Araucaria, and Procesos. He is currently developing two new book projects, one investigating commemorative French and Ecuadorian cartographic collaboration in the early twentieth century and another examining hemispheric responses to Nelson Rockefeller’s 1969 Presidential Mission to Latin America.

“Parisian Obelisks in Quito: The Consumption and Re-Imagination of French Commemorative Architecture and Geodesic Science in the Ecuadorian Andes”

Imported Egyptian obelisks are perhaps the most salient symbol of Western imperial grandstanding. Their reproductions, however, not only stand as emblems of power (e.g., Washington monument) but also as symbols of geodesic measurement of the curvature of the Earth, dating back to an 18th-century French mission to the Ecuadorian Andes to measure the arc of the equatorial meridian. This paper considers the twentieth-century revival of this tradition in Quito as a commemorative gesture consuming and re-imagining a second French mission to Ecuador (1901-1906). While these monuments ostensibly celebrated the broader linkages between French and Ecuadorian science, their planning and orientation drew upon the celebrated place of obelisks within the Parisian cityscape while also incorporating the participation of a series of Parisian bureaucrats, diplomats, and artists organized into the Comité Franco-Ecuatoriano and, later, the Comité France-Amérique. This paper considers the evocation of Parisian tenets of commemoration, the French imaginary of the Orient, and the Ecuadorian desire to celebrate its own role in international science by tracing the history of these monuments in Quito. The paper focuses primarily upon two monuments – the 1913 Alameda Park monument in the city center and the 1936 Mitad del Mundo monument on the Equator. Both were informed by the aesthetics of Parisian intellectuals yet reflect the distinctive fashion of their times. The former follows the belle époque aesthetic typical of its sculptor, Paul Loiseau-Rousseau, whereas the latter evokes a constructed, universal indigeneity operating in between Andean and MesoAmerican motives, reflecting both the interests of its designer, Ecuadorian geographer Luis Tufiño as well as his colleague, Parisian anthropologist Paul Rivet, who had collaborated on the commemorative French geodesic mission. By telescoping upon these two monuments, the paper seeks to consider the shifting roles of Parisian commemorative urban design as read, consumed, and imagined in the Ecuadorian capital.

Session 4

Ariela Schachter (Washington University in St. Louis)

Ariela Schachter joins the Sociology Department for the fall 2016 semester as Assistant Professor. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Stanford University in 2016 and her B.A. from Rice University in 2009. Her research focuses on immigration, race relations, and inequality in the United States, and primarily uses experimental and causal inference methods. Ariela is currently exploring how immigrants and native-born Americans understand and relate to one another, using a combination of survey and field experiments, and longitudinal survey data. Her first paper from this project, “From ‘Different’ to ‘Similar’: An Experimental Approach to Understanding Assimilation,” (forthcoming in the American Sociological Review)

9

uses a conjoint survey experiment to examine how native-born, non-Hispanic White Americans react to immigrants and their descendants as they achieve social mobility. Ariela’s work has been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and Stanford University, and has been supported by Stanford's Laboratory for the Study of American Values. In 2015 she was awarded the Aristide Zolberg Student Scholar Award from the American Sociological Association’s Section on International Migration.

“From ‘Different’ to ‘Similar’: An Experimental Approach to Understanding Assimilation” How do native-born Americans make sense of immigration-driven diversity? Assimilation theory claims that the structural mobility of immigrants and their descendants will ultimately lead to established populations developing a sense of similarity and shared in-group status with individuals previously considered outsiders. Yet existing work offers little systematic evidence as to whether and how immigrants’ structural gains—in terms of language ability, socioeconomic status, neighborhood integration, or intermarriage—shape native-born Americans’ subjective understandings of social relations and group boundaries. We also lack systematic evidence on how the growth of a large undocumented population is influencing native-born Americans’ understandings of and relationships with immigrant-origin individuals. To fill these critical gaps, I draw on a 2015 nationally-representative survey experiment to capture how native-born Whites perceive similarity with and difference from immigrant-origin individuals. I assess native-born Whites’ receptiveness to relationships encompassed in structural assimilation by asking respondents to select preferred neighbors and indicate interest in friendship with hypothetical immigrant-origin individuals. I also ask respondents to rate how similar they consider each hypothetical individual to be to themselves, allowing me to directly measure this more symbolic, subjective dimension of assimilation and group relations. By including both types of outcomes in the same experiment, I am able to compare White Americans’ willingness to participate in structural assimilation (e.g., by being neighbors and friends) to their subjective perceptions of immigrants’ symbolic belonging within American society.

The experiment uses a conjoint design to create profiles of hypothetical individuals that vary along multiple dimensions. This approach allows me to causally identify the relative importance of different kinds of characteristics especially relevant to perceptions of similarity and difference in contexts where immigrants settle: race, nativity, legal status, language ability, socioeconomic status, civic engagement, and related characteristics. The results reveals that White natives are generally open to relationships with immigrant-origin individuals, with the exception of Blacks and particularly undocumented immigrants. Yet they simultaneously view all non-Whites, regardless of legal status and related characteristics, as very dissimilar to themselves. This disconnect suggests that for non-White groups, structural assimilation occurs without full symbolic acceptance, and that regardless of race, undocumented immigrants’ path to social acceptance is completely blocked. If the ultimate outcome of assimilation is a conversion from ‘different’ to ‘similar,’ then both legal status and Whiteness continue to be prerequisites to full group membership. The results offer optimism about the potential structural mobility of legal immigrants and their descendants, while simultaneously suggesting that explicitly racialized lines of division remain just below the surface.

10

Debra Castillo (Cornell University)

Emerson Hinchliff Chair of Hispanic Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature, and former director of the Latin American Studies Program (two separate terms). She is past president of the international, interdisciplinary Latin American Studies Association. Among the courses she teaches regularly are Hispanic Theater Production (Teatrotaller) http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/spanl301/, Cultures and Communities, and Bodies and Borders. She is the holder of a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellowship, which is Cornell University’s highest teaching award, and is granted for excellence in undergraduate teaching. Perhaps the course with which she has been most identified is “Hispanic Theater Production.” http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/spanl301/ She has taught this course except when on leave for over 20 years, and coordinates summer productions as well on a volunteer basis. Graduate and undergraduate students, as well as some community members participate. Under the troupe name “Teatrotaller,” three times a year the group chooses a play from a Spanish, Latin American, or US Latino/a writer in Spanish or Spanglish and brings it to full production (generally presented in August/September, November, and April). The group has achieved an international reputation for excellence, and has accepted invitations to present their plays in various regional universities (Tufts, Penn State, Barnard, Syracuse) as well as in festivals in Mexico, Canada, Israel, Ecuador, Romania and Belgium. She is the author, co-author, translator, or editor of a dozen books and over 100 scholarly articles. She specializes in contemporary narrative from the Spanish-speaking world (including the United States), gender studies, and cultural theory. Her books include The Translated World: A Postmodern Tour of Libraries in Literature, Talking Back: Strategies for a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism, Easy Women: Sex and Gender in Modern Mexican Fiction, and (cowritten with María Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba) Border Women: Writing from La Frontera. Her latest single-authored book is Re-dreaming America: Toward a Bilingual Understanding of American Literature. More recently, she has been collaborating with colleagues in the area of South-South cultural studies, especially focusing on border studies in the hemispheric American context and partition studies in south Asia, represented in a recent co-edited volume with Comparative literature alum Kavita Panjabi (Cartographies of Affect: Across Borders in South Asia and the Americas, Worldview Press 2010) and her work with Anindita Banerjee, both in scholarly publications and co-taught courses. She has also been very interested in exploring the new possibilities for knowledge exchange beyond the traditional print book. Her co-edited volume with Christine Henseler, Hybrid Storyspaces, represents this strand of her work, and points toward the challenges and opportunities represented by the new media ecologies of the 21stcentury—something she is also vigorously exploring in her administrative and pedagogical roles, ranging from participation in co-taught, live videostreamed courses with international participation, to her advocacy for new platforms for academic exchange. She is an active member of the editorial boards of many journals, and is also past editor of Diacritics, current Senior Consulting Editor of the Latin American Literary Review, and the former Book Review editor for Letras Femeninas. She is past president of the Asociación Internacional de Literatura y Cultura Femenina Hispánica, serves or has recently served on the boards of the Cornell University Press, the North Carolina Series in Romance Languages and Literatures, and the State University of New York Press (where she co-edits a series on Genders in the Global South). Debra is profoundly committed to mentoring at all levels, and is amply compensated through sustained dialogue with exciting young scholars. She has enjoyed the privilege of working

11

closely with over one hundred graduate students (mostly PhD), and has been the chair or co-chair of a little over fifty graduate student committees. While not everyone has chosen an academic career, most of her former students have ended up teaching and doing research in some combination. Some of them are located in far-flung sites like Kolkata or Buenos Aires; most are in Spanish programs in the United States, including people at liberal arts colleges, state universities, and distinguished private research institutions.

“Mexicans in Manhatitlan”

It no longer needs to be argued that New York is a crucial center of Latin American culture for the early 21stcentury. Literary gatherings and cultural events occur in the context of a cosmopolitan backdrop and with the participation of a very wide range of published and aspiring Latino/a and Latin American authors. Likewise, if the quintessential modernist gesture is walking in the city—think of James Joyce in Dublin, Walter Benjamin in the arcades of Paris—New York City, famously the only walking city in the USA, would seem to be a fitting heir. Yet, in many ways the comparison to any European context falls short, and may be profoundly misleading. In the United States, the potential readership for books in Spanish is a small percentage of the reading public as a whole, but nonetheless equivalent to the markets of several Latin American countries combined (Remeseira 187-88), and New York City is the publishing center of the country. Unlike Paris in its heyday, where Spanish was always a marginal, hit or miss phenomenon, the Latin American literary presence in New York, as authors like Boullosa and Remeseira have acutely observed, has a deep history, buttressed by the fact that 30% of New Yorkers are Spanish speaking, and that this is the second largest Latino/a city in the USA (after Los Angeles) with almost 4.5 million people of Latin American descent, 70% of them born outside the USA. The phenomenon I want to explore here is the simultaneous ubiquity and invisibility of Mexico in New York City, as indexed by the sounds and phantom sights of Mexicans and Mexicanidad, as they contribute to the reconfiguration of an urban landscape already deeply imbued with Caribbean voices.   

KEYNOTE LECTURE

Alejandro de la Fuente (Harvard University)

Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics; Professor of African and African American Studies; Director, Afro-Latin American Research Institute, Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. A historian of Latin America and the Caribbean who specializes in the study of comparative slavery and race relations, Professor de la Fuente joined Harvard University after holding faculty appointments at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of South Florida in Tampa, and the University of Havana. His works on race, slavery, and Atlantic history have been published in Spanish, English, Portuguese, Italian, German, and French. He is also the curator of two art exhibits dealing with issues of race:Queloides: Race and Racism in Cuban Contemporary Art(Havana-Pittsburgh-New York City-Cambridge, Ma, 2010-12) and Grupo Antillano: The Art of Afro-Cuba (Santiago de Cuba-Havana, 2013, ongoing). Between 2007 and 2012 de la Fuente served as a Senior Co-Editor of Hispanic American Historical Review. Professor de la Fuente is the author

12

of Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century(University of North Carolina Press, 2008), and of A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (University of North Carolina Press, 2001), published in Spanish as Una nación para todos: raza, desigualdad y política en Cuba, 1900-2000 (Madrid: Editorial Colibrí, 2001), winner of the Southern Historical Association's 2003 prize for “best book in Latin American history.” He is the editor of two bilingual (English-Spanish) volumes,Grupo Antillano: The Art of Afro-Cuba (Pittsburgh, 2013) and Queloides: Race and Racism in Cuban Contemporary Art (Pittsburgh, 2011) and of a special issue of the journal Debate y Perspectivas titled “Su único derecho: los esclavos y la ley” [“Their Only Right: Slaves and the Law”] (Madrid, 2004). In 2004, Law and History Review published a "forum" on de la Fuente's article “Slave Law and Claims-Making in Cuba: The Tannenbaum Debate Revisited.” This article was also debated in the Workshop "Comparative Slavery in the Atlantic World: The Tannenbaum Thesis Revisited" of the Atlantic History Seminar at Harvard. Professor de la Fuente is the founding Director of the Institute of Afro-Latin American Studies at Harvard and the faculty Co-Chair, along with Professor Jorge Domínguez, of the Cuban Studies Program. He is the Senior Editor of the journal Cuban Studies.

“The New Field of Afro-Latin American Studies”

This presentation explores the coming of age of a new, multidisciplinary academic field centered on the histories, cultures, and experiences of people of African descent in Latin America. How has this field evolved? What are its key questions? What do we learn about race and racism when we study them from Latin America? The field has developed in tandem with a variety of racially defined social, cultural and political movements that, taking advantage of democratization processes since the 1980s, have transformed how Latin Americans think about their region, culture and history. These movements have challenged traditional discourses on race and nation and demanded legislation and policies to address discrimination. As knowledge producers, how are activists shaping the research agendas of the future?

Moderators:

Stephanie Kirk (Washington University in St. Louis, RLL)

Professor Kirk’s  principal teaching and research interests are the literature and culture of colonial Mexico, with a focus on gender studies and religion. She is the author of two books: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Gender Politics of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico (Routledge, 2016) and Convent Life in Colonial Mexico: A Tale of Two Communities (Florida UP, 2007). She has also published numerous articles and essays on gender and religious culture in colonial Mexico, and on the life and work of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. She has edited two collected volumes: Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas (Penn Press, 2014, co-edited with Sarah Rivett) and Estudios coloniales en el siglo XXI: Nuevos itinerarios (IILI, 2011). She is currently preparing a translation and critical edition of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora’s convent chronicle Paraíso occidental. Stephanie Kirk is the editor of the Revista de Estudios Hispánicos.

13

Diana Montaño (Washington University in St. Louis, History)

Assistant Professor of History at Washington University. Her teaching and research interests broadly include the construction of modern Latin American societies with a focus on technology and its relationship to nationalism, everyday life, and domesticity. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled Electrifying Mexico: Cultural responses to a new technology, 1880s-1960s. It looks at how ordinary citizens (businessmen, salespersons, inventors, doctors, housewives, maids and domestic advisors) used electricity, both symbolically and physically, in the construction of a modern nation. It looks at how these “electrifying agents” first crafted a discourse for an electrified future and secondly, how they shaped its consumption. It shows how these agents of modernity promoted and created both imaginary and tangible notions of this technology. Taking a user-based perspective, this study reconstructs how electricity was lived, consumed, rejected, and shaped in everyday life.

Catalina Freixas (Washington University in St. Louis, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts)

Freixas has more than fifteen years of experience in teaching design studios and seminars, and has focused her research on sustainable design. Through her writings, Freixas has redefined the phenomena of post-industrial cities as metamorphic cities, metropolises that take on transformation through eco-urbanism, which advocates a shift from conventional planning goals of economic and population growth to environmental sustainability and increased quality of life. Through her research, Freixas attempts to create a new set of metrics to evaluate shrinking cities through the lens of the “Three Pillars” of sustainability: Economic Development, Environmental Protection and Social Equity. Freixas is also a two-time recipient of The Divided City – A Mellon-Funded Urban Humanities Initiative, which have allowed her to research issues of segregation in post-industrial cities, such as St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Detroit, through the lens of sustainability, inclusion and community resiliency. She continues to devote herself to promoting sustainability via her research, teaching and practice.

Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado (Washington University in St. Louis, RLL/LAS)

Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Washington University in Saint Louis. His research focuses on the relationship between aesthetics, ideology and cultural institutions in Mexico, with a particular focus on literature and cinema. He is the author of El canon y sus formas. La reinvención de Harold Bloom y sus lecturas hispanoamericanas (2002); Naciones intelectuales. Las fundaciones de la modernidad literaria mexicana (1917-1959) (2009); winner of the LASA Mexico 2010 Humanities Book Award; Intermitencias americanistas. Ensayos académico y literarios (2004-2009) (2012); and Screening Neoliiberalism. Transforming Mexican Cinema 1988-2012 (2014). He has edited and co-edited nine scholarly collections, the most recent of which are Democracia, Otredad y Melancolía. Roger Bartra ante la crítica (with Mabel Moraña. 2015) and the forthcoming A History of Mexican Literature (with Anna Nogar and José Ramón Ruisánchez, 2016). He has published over forty scholarly articles on Mexican literature, culture and film, and on Latin American cultural theory.

14

Coordinators:

William Acree (Washington University in St. Louis, RLL)William Acree is Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures. His research centers on the cultural history of Río de la Plata. He is completing a book on the Creole Circus and modern popular culture in the region. His first book, Everyday Reading: Print Culture & Collective Identity in the Río de la Plata, 1780-1910 (2011; Argentine edition in Spanish 2013), was awarded the LASA Southern Cone Studies Section 2013 Humanities Book Award. He is the editor of The Gaucho Juan Moreira (2014), and co-editor of Building Nineteenth-Century Latin America (2009), Jacinto Ventura de Molina: los caminos de la escritura negra en el Río de la Plata (2010), and Empire’s End: Transnational Connections in the Hispanic World (2016). Acree taught at San Diego State University prior to coming to Washington University.

Mabel Moraña (Washington University in St. Louis, RLL/LAS)

William H. Gass Professor de Artes y Ciencias en Washington University St. Louis, donde dirige el programa de Estudios Latinoamericanos. Durante diez años fue Directora de Publicaciones del Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana. Ha sido profesora invitada en las Universidades de California, Santa Cruz; Harvard; UNAM, y en instituciones de Argentina, Ecuador, Uruguay, Colombia, etc. Ha dictado cursos y conferencias en universidades europeas, norteamericanas y latinoamericanas y en Corea del Sur. Sus publicaciones incluyen más de cuarenta libros entre los que se cuentan Arguedas - Vargas Llosa. Dilemas y ensamblajes (2013) (Premio Katherine Kovacs del MLA y el Premio Iberoamericano de LASA), Crítica impura (2004), La escritura del límite (2010), Inscripciones críticas. Ensayos de crítica cultural (2014), Bourdieu en la periferia (2014) y Churata postcolonial (2015) y libros colectivos como Dominación y resistencia en Bolívar Echeverría.

15