Latin American & Caribbean Studies

International Institute, University of Michigan

LACS Events - Winter 2005

Thursday January 6

LACS will be co-sponsoring the visit of Lorrin Thomas, Assistant Professor of History, Rutgers University-Camden, who will speak on "How They Ignore Our Rights as American Citizens': Depression, Nationalism, and the Racialization of Puerto Rican Citizenship in the 1930s." on Thursday, January 6, at 4:30 PM in 3512 Haven Hall.

Thursday, January 13

LACS is also co-sponsoring, as part of the 2005 MLK Symposium, the visit of Michelle Serros, author of Chicana Falsa & How to be a Chicana Role Model, on Thursday, January 13, 2005 from 7:00pm - 9:00pm in the Vandenberg Room of the Michigan League. Appetizers and refreshments will be served.

Monday, January 31

Monday, January 31, at 5:00PM, in 4050B Frieze Building, The UM Department of Communication Studies Presents Faculty Candidate Markus S. Schulz from the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, New York University.

“Media and Mobilization Across Borders: An Analysis of the Chiapas Connections”

Indigenous peasants in the South-Eastern Mexican state of Chiapas rose up in arms on January 1, 1994, the same day that the North American Free Trade Treaty (NAFTA) took effect. The insurgency became a world-wide media event. Sympathetic activists staged demonstrations in Mexican cities and around the globe. How did the unlikely alliance between insurgent Mayan peasants in the Lacandon Rainforest and activists in post-industrial metropolises come about? How did it challenge dominant knowledge regimes? To what extend, and, if so, how, did it gain efficacy? What was the role of the different media interfaces? What lessons can be drawn from this case regarding the general relationship between movements and media? These questions are explored through media analysis and ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico, the U.S., and Europe.

Markus S. Schulz is Assistant Professor in the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University. Dr. Schulz won several national and international awards for his research including the Bielefeld Prize for the Internationalization of Sociology. His current work focuses on the social shaping of the Internet and its impact on transnational social movements, public discourse, and democratization.

February 4-26

The archive-based seminar “Getting the Documents to Speak: A Research Practicum on the History of Cuba and Brazil,” organized by Professor Rebecca Scott of the U-M Department of History, the U-M Law School and LACS will bring U-M students together with 10 Cuban students and 11 international faculty for 3 weeks of research and discussion in Havana in February, 2005. The first sustained encounter of Brazilian scholars of slavery with Cuban archives and historians, this event offers a remarkable opportunity for U-M researchers, and is itself a link in transnational networks of scholarly exchange.

Thursday, February 17th

As part of our usual Bate-Papo series, LACS will be hosting the first one this New Year, led by Professor Neil Safier on Thursday, February 17th from 12:00-1:00 pm in Room 2609 of the School of Social Work/International Institute Building. The title of this Bate-Papo is “Cargos e Cargas Tropicais: Livros, Remos, e Exploração na Amazônia Setecentista.”(Tropical Cargoes and Tropical Roles: Books, Rowers, and Exploration in Eighteenth-Century Amazonia.)

This talk will provide an overview of two elements of his current research project relating to eighteenth-century Spanish and Portuguese exploration of the Amazon River region. The first segment will address the presence (and absence) of the Amerindian rower within Portuguese travel narratives to Amazonia. In the second part of the talk, Professor Safier plans to discuss the use of portable field libraries by Portuguese naturalists and explorers, asking questions about how the presence (or absence) of written material during their journey changes the way in which they represent nature, natural history, and indigenous populations in their accounts.

Neil Safier is assistant professor in the Department of History and postdoctoral fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows. He received his doctoral degree in History from the Johns Hopkins University in 2003, where he completed a dissertation on the history of a French and Spanish scientific expedition to Quito and the Amazon from 1735-1745.
*The Bate-Papo is a series of informal meetings of students, scholars, and invited guests to discuss issues of broad contemporary interest. Conversations will be primarily in Portuguese, but accessible to beginning Portuguese students.

Saturday Feb 19th, 2005

Roots of Brazil Performance

Michigan Union Wolverine Room, 3:00pm. Open and free for everyone to watch and participate!

Tribo Afro Bahiana de Capoeira Angola Tradicional presents: RETURN OF CAPOEIRA ANGOLA: BLACK TRADITIONS OF BRAZIL IN THE U.S with Mestre Caboquinho from Bahia Brazil, Contra-Mestre Biriba from Miami, FL, and special guest Titos Sompa from Brazzaville, Congo. This workshop/lecture series will focus on understanding the traditions behind the Afro-Brazilian art-form of Capoeira that has spread from Brazil to U.S as well as other parts of the world. Capoeira Angola is a 500 year old Afro-Brazilian dance/defense used to escape the perils of slavery. The workshops will address how Capoeira is portrayed in the U.S versus its tradition in Brazil. Participants will learn the music and movement behind this art-form as well as its history lead by Mestre Caboquinho. There will also be a workshop exploring the roots of these traditions from the Congo by Titos Sompa in which music/movement will be presented. The last day will be a performance of members of Tribo Afro Bahiana de Capoeira Angola Tradicional, Mestre Caboquinho, Titos Sompa and workshop participants. For registration/info: please e-mail capoangoladetroit@prodigy.net/ or call 734-697-1563. Free for U-M students!

Monday February 21

A few days later, on February 21, LACS will also be co-sponsoring, together with the Department of History, and the Atlantic Studies Initiative, a lecture by Professor Richard Kagan entitled “Urban Culture and Civic Identities in Iberia and Iberoamerica.” This event will be held in 1360 East Hall from 10:00-11:30 am on February 21.

Richard L. Kagan, Professor of History and Romance Languages and Literatures at the Johns Hopkins University, is a distinguished scholar of early modern Spain, Iberoamerica, and the Atlantic World, and author of numerous studies of Spanish culture in Iberia and the Americas. He has written on the legal, educational, and political cultures of Spain in the reign of Philip II, and has also published extensively on urban history, the history of cartography, and, most recently, the Spanish Inquisition. He is currently working on the role of history and royal historiographers at the court of Philip II.

The lecture will be given as part of History 347 (Colonial Latin American History). Following this lecture, he will be available for informal discussions over coffee (11:30 at Espresso Royale on South University) and will then proceed to lunch with graduate students (and interested faculty, if space permits). For those interested in early modern Iberian history, visual culture, and the representation of space and place in the Atlantic world, we very much encourage you to take advantage of Professor Kagan’s visit to Ann Arbor.

Tuesday, March 8

LACS is co-sponsoring the presentation “Lagrimas de Cocodrilo/Crocodile Tears,” in which Ingrid Rivera, activist & performance artist, presents monologues on one woman's struggle with childhood sexual abuse, lesbianism, and raising a female child in the midst of recovery. This event will take place from 8:00-10:00pm, in the Residential College Theater.

Thursday March 10

LACS has invited Professor Susan Stokes (Political Science, University of Chicago) to give a talk as part of the International Institute Lecture Series on Democratization, (De)Centralization, and Governance. She will speak on “Democratic Consolidation and a Culture of Skepticism in Latin America” at 7:00 pm on March 10, in Room 1636 of the School of Social Work/International Institute Building.

Susan Stokes is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Chicago Center on Democracy at the University of Chicago . She is author of Trust and the Consolidation of Democracy (w ith Matthew Cleary, 2005); Mandates and Democracy: Neoliberalism by Surprise in Latin America (2001); Cultures in Conflict: Social Movements and the State in Peru ( 1995); and three edited collections on comparative democratic processes around the world. She has received numerous grants and fellowships for her work on politics, democracy and clientelism from organizations such as the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the MacArthur Foundation.

Friday, March 11- Sunday, March 13

American Culture, Latino/a Studies and World Performance Studies, in co-sponsorship with LACS and other departments, announce a 3-day performance workshop with Josefina Baez (Winter 2005 Artist in Residence), “Performing the Self: Taking It Very Personal (What You See Is Just Not What You Get).” The workshop is free and open to the first 20 UM students, faculty, and staff who register; participants are required to attend all 3 days and wear comfortable clothes; no previous experience necessary. General objectives: to create a physical score as well as a performance text based on autobiographical data; to learn physical training techniques and create a personal practical routine including a variety of sources, such as hatha yoga, Tibetan rituals, and Meyerhold's Biomechanics; the workshop will be layered with writing exercises, triggering-creating a personal literature, a seed for a performance.

Josefina Baez is an Afro-Dominican actor, writer, and educator from La Romana, DR, who has lived for many years in New York City. Founder and director of Latinarte's Ay Ombe Theatre Troupe Collective, her multidisciplinary, intercultural work is influenced by Eugenio Barba's theatre anthropology, Indian dance (Kuchipudi), Oriental calligraphy, and the language of the streets. She is currently touring NYC houses and apartments in her Apartarte/Casarte Performance Dialogue project and in Dominicanish, a solo piece published in 2000 by I Ombe. Workshop times and places : Friday, March 11 (11 am-3 pm), first floor ballroom, Haven Hall; Saturday, March 12 (1 - 5 pm), AC Performance Space G634 Haven Hall; Sunday, March 13 (1 - 5 pm), AC Performance Space G634 Haven Hall. For more information and to register, please contact: Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, lawrlafo@umich.edu.

Wednesday March 16 - Saturday March 19

Please mark your calendars and come enjoy the Rhythms of the Atlantic World: Rituals and Remembrances International Conference to be held from March 16-19, 2005 at the Michigan League of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. LACS is co-sponsoring this culminating event that is part of The Atlantic Studies Initiative's year-long focus on The Art-Full Atlantic--Rhythms of the Atlantic World: Rituals and Remembrances. The Atlantic Studies Initiative has gathered scholars and artists from the far corners of the Atlantic -- Brazil, West Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and the United States to perform and discuss the ways music and dance provide trace marks of the movement of peoples and ideas around the Atlantic, both transforming peoples and being transformed in the process. The conference is multidisciplinary and multinational/regional. At the same time, it spans the centuries during which the Atlantic has transformed the world.

Monday, March 28

LACS is co-sponsoring Maylei Blackwell, Assistant Professor of Chicano/a Studies at UCLA who will give the Women's Studies Dorothy Gies McGuigan Lecture entitled "Tongues of Fire: Lessons from the Life and Work of Gloria Anzaldúa." Professor Blackwell is an activist scholar whose current research and teaching examines how racial and sexual differences shape the challenges and possibilities of transnational organizing in the Americas by focusing on how women of color in the U.S. and indigenous women in Mexico organize to resist conditions created by globalization. She is completing a book on early Chicana feminism entitled Contested Histories: Chicana Feminisms in Movement. The McGuigan Prizes are awarded for the best undergraduate and graduate essays on women and/or gender written at the University of Michigan. The Prize competition honors the memory of Dorothy Gies McGuigan, a distinguished U-M alumna. This event will be held at 4pm in the Rackham East Conference Room.

Wednesday, March 30

In the Third Floor of Haven Hall, on March 30th, from 4:00-5:30 pm, LACS is co-sponsoring the opening of the electronic photographic exhibit and reception for the work of Martin Cohen, entitled "Congahead: A Visual Archive of the Latin Music Scene in New York – The Photographs of Martin Cohen: 1962-1980." Martin Cohen is best known for his role as founder and operator of the company Latin Percussion. He pioneered the local manufacture of congas, bongos, cowbells, and other instruments that could no longer be brought from Cuba after the revolution of 1959. Working with musicians in New York, Cohen helped to fashion a material culture for Latin music that is now largely taken for granted – instruments with interchangeable parts and a consistent feel and sound. Latin Percussion also helped to consolidate key commercial practices in Latin jazz and salsa. Since the early 1970s nearly all of the top Latin percussionists, and many ensembles, have worked with Cohen through a system of sponsorship and mutual promotion. This exhibition represents a sampling of the personal archive of photographs that he took over the course of his participation in the evolving Latin scene.

Friday/Saturday April 1-2

The conference “What’s New: Transatlantic Luso-Spanish Debates and the Market of Ideas” (April 1-2), a two-day symposium organized by the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, and the Atlantic Studies Initiative in collaboration with LACS will examine the importance, scope and effects of recent institutional and epistemological shifts in the field of Iberian (Spanish and Portuguese), Latin American and Caribbean cultural studies. The event will run from 9:00 am - 7:00 pm on both days, with a performance by Josefina Baez on the 2nd at 8:30pm.

The participants for this event are: Jossiana Arroyo from the University of Texas, Austin; Vincent Barletta, University of Colorado, Boulder; John Beverly, University of Pittsburg; William Egginton, University of Buffalo; Bradley Epps, Harvard University; Jean Franco, Columbia University; Joseba Gabilondo, University of Nevada; Adrianna Johnson, University of California Irvine; Jeff MacSwan, Arizona State University; José Quiroga, Emory University;Gustavo Remedi, Trinity College; Vivaldo Santos, Georgetown University; Jacqueline Toribio, Penn State University; Hernan Vidal, University of Minnesota; Teresa Vilarós, Duke University. From Michigan, the participants are: Steve Dworkin, Gustavo Verdesio, Larry Lafontain-Stokes, Cristina Miguez, and Wilfredo Valentin-Marquez.

Monday, April 4

The History Department and LACS are co-sponsoring the Arthur Aiton Lecture for which Greg Grandin will be speaking about "The Camel not in the Koran: The Latin American Roots of the Bush Doctrine" at 4:00 pm in Room 1636 of the School of Social Work/International Institute Building (a small reception will follow). The talk will examine how the US in the 1980s used Latin America to regroup from the ideological, economic, and military crises of the previous decade, and in so doing, honed the three elements -- punitive idealism, Christian populism, and free market absolutism -- that give today's imperialism its moral energy."

Greg Grandin, a current recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim and Charles Ryskamp ACLS fellowship, is an associate professor of history at New York University . He is the author of The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation (Duke 2000), which won the Latin American Studies Association Bryce Wood Prize, and of The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America and the Cold War (Chicago 2004). He has written on human rights, political violence, social movements, and U.S.-Latin American relations, including a review essay in a recent Harper's on the resurgence of neo-imperialist historiography. He is currently working on a book tentatively titled Empire's Workshop: The Latin American Roots of the Bush Doctrine, to be published by Metropolitan Books.

Saturday, April 16

LACS will be showing a film screening of “The Agronomist,” followed by a discussion and Q&A session with Producer Daniel Wolff, and comments by Professors Richard Turits (U-M) and Laurent Dubois (MSU). From Academy-Award winning filmmaker Jonathan Demme, "The Agronomist" tells the story of Haitian national hero, journalist, and freedom fighter Jean Dominique, whom Demme first met and filmed in 1986. As owner and operator of his nation's oldest and only free radio station, Dominique was frequently at odds with his country's various repressive governments and spent much of the 80's and early 90's in exile in New York, where Demme continued to interview him over the years. Dominique fought tirelessly against his country's overwhelming injustice, oppression, and poverty but it was Dominique's shocking and still-unsolved assassination in April of 2000 that gave the director the impetus to assemble more than a decade's worth of material into a celebration of this dynamic man and his legacy.

THE AGRONOMIST, a portrait of a remarkable man, his extraordinary wife, and their beloved nation, represents a labor of love for Demme and is his return to the non-fiction arena, joining an extensive body of documentaries. The versatile filmmaker won his Best Director Oscar for the 1991 thriller, "Silence of the Lambs," one of the rare films to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, Actor, and Actress. Demme just finished shooting his next feature film, "The Manchurian Candidate," with Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep in starring roles. Run time: 91 minutes; Rated PG-13 for some violent images and nudity.

Tuesday, April 19

LACS is holding a brownbag presentation led by Kathleen Lopez, and entitled “Coolie, mambí , and citizen: Chinese incorporation into the Cuban nation, 1874-1909” at 12:00 pm in Room 2609 of the School of Social Work/International Institute Building. This presentation will examine the integration of Chinese migrants into Cuban society during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In particular, Ms. Lopez will demonstrate the daily interactions that occurred between former indentured laborers and former slaves as both aimed to become citizens of the new Cuban nation. The Chinese and their descendants formed interracial alliances through baptism and marriage, acquired property, and engaged the legal system. They participated side by side with whites, blacks, and mulattos in the Cuban struggles for independence from Spain (1868-1898). As the discourse surrounding Cuban independence incorporated the Chinese into a new raceless, classless citizenry, the “coolie” status of the Chinese in Cuba seemed to have become part of the past. Yet, with the birth of the republic, the Chinese faced new restrictions against immigration and continued pressure by both U.S. and Cuban authorities.

Kathleen López is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History, writing her dissertation “Migrants between Nations: The Chinese in Cuba, 1874-1959.” Her dissertation examines the transition of Chinese from indentured to free laborers in the late nineteenth century, and the formation of transnational communities in the early twentieth century. She has engaged in archival work and oral interviews in both Cuba and China .

Friday/Saturday April 22-23

A two-day conference (April 22-23), “The State of Gender and History Research in Latin America,” organized by LACS and history doctoral students and faculty as part of the U-M program “Global Turns and Gender Returns,” will focus on the state of gender and history research in Latin America. Despite the heightened attention on questions of gender, there have been few dialogues that facilitate discussion between scholars working in different Latin American countries. This conference will provide a forum for dialogue among scholars working from several different institutions across the Americas.

This conference has been generously co-sponsored by the History department, IRWG's Global Turns & Gender Returns Program, the Atlantic Studies Initiative/English department, the Center for the History of Medicine, the Science and Technology Studies Program, Rackham Graduate School, LSA, and the Women's Studies Department.

***Announcements***

CAPOEIRA CLASSES: Study the Afro-Brazilian art of dance and defense with Mestre Caboquinho from Bahia, Brazil. Classes are on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 7:30 pm, in Trotter house (1443 Washtenaw). CAPOEIRA is and Afro-Brazilian dance/self-defense that developed in Brazil 500 years ago to escape life of slavery. It uses traditions of dance to disguise its nature as a defense art-form and is a cultural art-form of Brazil. For more info: www.tabcat.org

BRAZIL EXCHANGE PROGRAM. The Office of International Programs will be reactiving its exchange programs with the Federal universities in Bahia and Minas Gerais for the Fall 2005 term. As in the past, students will be expected to participate in the appropriate summer intensive language programs in Bahia and Belo Horizonte as a way of improving their Portuguese and getting accustomed to the sites. The application deadline for the summer language programs, as well as the exchanges, is February 11, 2005.

CALL FOR PAPERS: The first annual Meeting of Midwest BRASA (Brazilian Studies Association) will be held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on Saturday, April 16. This meeting is meant to provide an annual forum for Brazilianists to present their research and engage in dialogue with colleagues teaching and residing in the Midwest and elsewhere. There are morning and afternoon sessions on Language / Literature / Culture and on Social Sciences (including History). The keynote speaker will be BRASA President, Professor Timothy Power (Political Science, Florida International University). Faculty, graduate students and independent scholars are invited to submit abstracts for presentation on any field. Please send inquiries and abstracts to Professor Severino Albuquerque at sjalbuqu@wisc.edu. Abstracts are due February 14, 2005. All meetings are open to the public and there is no registration fee. BRASA membership is not required and participation is not restricted to Midwest residents.

LACS Events - April/May/June 2005

Quick links:

UM conference on Gender and History Research in Latin America (April 22-23).

UM / MSU Atlantic History workshop (sessions in East Lansing and Ann Arbor, May 13-14, 2005): http://www.msu.edu/~atlantic.

Saturday, April 16

Tuesday, April 19

Friday/Saturday April 22-23

Thursday, April 28

There will be a LACS Year-End Celebration from 3:00-5:00pm in 1636 School of Social Work/International Institute Building. Everyone is invited! Our graduating LACS seniors will briefly present their thesis projects. Music and food will follow! Please join us in supporting our students!

Sunday May 8

LACS will participate in the Hispanic festival at the Detroit Zoo, from 10:00am-4:00pm. The Detroit Zoo will be celebrating the diversity in our community with a "Summer Like Nowhere Else at the Detroit Zoo." There will be pinatas, arts and crafts, authentic food, Hispanic community resource groups and a lot more.

Friday/Saturday May 13-14

The History Department of Michigan State University and the History, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Departments, together with the Atlantic Studies Initiative at the University of Michigan, will jointly host an Atlantic History Workshop entitled “The Age of Revolution in the Atlantic World” on May 13 - 14, 2005. The Friday sessions will be held at the Kellogg Center in East Lansing, and the Saturday sessions in 1014 Tisch Hall at the University of Michigan. A small, international group of innovative scholars has been invited to present chapters from works-in-progress on a variety of subjects from recent research on various quarters of the Atlantic world--North America, West Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America --in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. We invite all of you to visit the conference website ( http://www.msu.edu/~atlantic ) for further details on these events and for access to pre-circulated papers and other materials. Given the workshop format of the conference, participants are expected to read the papers before the sessions, which will begin with a short commentary but will involve discussion rather than presentation of the papers.For those that wish to attend, please email our conference coordinator Eric D. Duke at atlantic@msu.edu who will then pass on the username and password required to access the papers on the website. For additional questions, please email atlantic@msu.edu.

Thursday June 23, 2:00 pm, in room 2609 International Institute/School of Social Work

Latin American & Caribbean Studies, the Program in American Culture, and the Circulo Andino Micaela Bastidas present a public talk BY Dr. Tirso Gonzales (Indigenous Resource Center of the Americas, UC-Davis, and Atinchik, a Peruvian NGO) on “Coloniality and the Erasure of Place: Cultural and Biological Diversity in the Americas.”

ABSTRACT: The Americas encompass a rich spectrum of races and ethnicities. In this region there are as many definitions for “place” as there are cultures – along with their underlying ontologies, epistemologies, and worldviews. Place, as opposed to space, is a specific construction resulting from the interaction between local culture and nature. Space, on the contrary, is associated with colonial and post-colonial globalization (regimes, discourses and practices) and its disregard for place/locality. “Culture seats in places.” For most Indigenous Peoples, place is intrinsically related to land, the countryside, the rural, the forest. In spite of 500 years of colonial and post-colonial domination, the importance of place is central to the production and reproduction of indigenous cultural and biological diversity. This presentation aims to call attention to a process that began with colonization and today has become global: the erasure of place. Identifying the local/regional peculiarities of placelessness, and working towards its reversal, may be accomplished by affirming and/or rethinking place by means of decolonization, thereby inaugurating a process of re-indigenization. Issues such as “indigenous” and “non-indigenous” in relation to land, territory, land tenure patterns, agri-cultures, thus begin to amplify current discussions of these concepts with respect to conventional agriculture and development.

Tirso Gonzales, Ph.D., is an Indigenous scholar, educator, and activist from Peru, former consultant with the World Bank, researcher and lecturer at UC-Berkeley and UC-Davis, and is knowledgeable in traditional healing and medicinal plants of the Amazon.

Grants and Awards:

Professor Richard Turits has been awarded the Herbert Eugene Bolton Memorial Prize for the best book in English on Latin American History for his book Foundations of despotism: peasants, the Trujillo regime, and modernity in Dominican history (Stanford University Press, 2003).

For more information on events as they draw nearer call LACS at 763-0553
or e-mail at lacs.office@umich.edu