Conference on Américo Paredes
Music Hall
California State University, Los Angeles
Music Hall
California State University, Los Angeles
May 6-7, 2016
Sponsored by Cal State L.A.'s
Office of the President, the Gigi Gaucher-Morales Memorial Conference Series, the College of Arts and Letters, the College of Natural and Social Sciences, the Department of Chicano Studies, the Department of English, and the Emeriti Association, in conjunction with the University of California, Santa Barbara, the University of Texas at Austin, and the Américo Paredes Center for Cultural Studies at UT-Austin.
Sponsored by Cal State L.A.'s
Office of the President, the Gigi Gaucher-Morales Memorial Conference Series, the College of Arts and Letters, the College of Natural and Social Sciences, the Department of Chicano Studies, the Department of English, and the Emeriti Association, in conjunction with the University of California, Santa Barbara, the University of Texas at Austin, and the Américo Paredes Center for Cultural Studies at UT-Austin.
This conference is free and
open to the public.
Américo Paredes
(September 3, 1915-May 5, 1999) distinguished himself as a journalist,
novelist, short story writer, folklorist and as Professor of English and
Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. He also knew how to strum
the guitar and sing, Homer-like, the folk corridos (ballads) of legendary Mexicans who
rode and battled on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Admired by many and
held as one of the inspiring founders of Mexican American Studies in colleges
and universities across the United States, Paredes was an active advocate of
civil rights, educational reform, and improved social and economic
opportunities for Mexican Americans and members of other ethnic communities in
the United States. Born in Brownsville, Texas, Paredes was
elected President of the Texas Folklore Society and Vice-President of the
American Folklore Society. His life-long interest in Mexican American history
and culture motivated him during his early years to collect corridos from farmers and villagers living on
the Lower Rio Grande and on both sides of the Mexico-U.S. border, resulting in
his pioneering book “With His Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its
Hero (1958), and other
influential books on folklore, poetry, and narrative fiction, such as Folk Music of Mexico (1966); A Texas-Mexican Cancionero:
Folksongs of the Lower Border (1976); George Washington Gόmez (1990); Between Two Worlds (1991); Folklore and Culture of the
Texas-American Border (1993); The Hammon and the Beans and Other
Stories (1994), and The Shadow (1998). In 1991 Paredes was
honored by the government of Mexico with the Order of the Aztec Eagle Award in
recognition of his contributions to Mexican culture.
The 2016 Conference
on Américo Paredes includes ten keynote and featured speakers, two plenary sessions,
and four theatrical performances of plays by Chicano dramatist Carlos Morton. To
view the biographies and lecture abstracts of speakers, panelists and actors, scroll
down to the end of the online conference program. The 2016 Conference on
Américo Paredes is the result of the planning and close collaboration between
Mexican and Chicano faculty at California State University, Los Angeles, the
University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Texas at Austin. For questions on the conference, contact rcantu@calstatela.edu
Conference Program
Friday, May 6
Registration (free admission):
8:30-9:00 A.M.
Music Hall
California State University, Los Angeles
Words of Welcome:
President William A. Covino
9:00-9:05 A.M.
Music Hall
President William A. Covino (Cal State L.A.)
Introduction and Opening of Conference
Roberto
Cantú, John Cleman,
María Herrera-Sobek, and José E. Limón
María Herrera-Sobek, and José E. Limón
9:05-9:30 a.m.
Dr. María
Herrera-Sobek (UC, Santa Barbara)
Dr. José E. Limón (University of Texas at Austin)
Dr. John Cleman (Cal State L.A.)
Juan Carlos
Parrilla (Cal State L.A. Alumnus, English)
Richard Pérez
and Cristóbal Palma (Cal State L.A. Alumni, Chicano Studies)
Michael
Cervantes, Conference Photographer
(Cal State L.A. Alumnus, Chicano Studies)
Keynote Speaker
Friday, May 6, 9:30-10:45 a.m.
Music Hall
Richard Flores
Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs
for the College of Liberal Arts,
Professor of Anthropology and Mexican
American Studies,
C. B. Smith, Sr. Centennial Chair in U.
S.-Mexico Relations,
University of Texas at Austin
Title of Lecture:
“Américo Paredes, Walter Prescott Webb,
and the Antinomies of Theory”
Moderator:
José E. Limόn
University of Texas
at Austin
Dr. José E. Limón and Dr. Richard Flores (University
of Texas at Austin)
Dr. Alfredo Morales (Cal State L.A.)
Plenary Session #1
AMÉRICO PAREDES:
Folklore, Literature, and the History of
Greater Mexico
Greater Mexico
Friday, May 6, 11:00 A.M.-12:30 p.m.
Music Hall
Moderator: Iliana Alcántar, California State University, Los Angeles
Panelists:
1. “Rethinking Américo Paredes' notion of 'Greater Mexico'”
Rosaura Sánchez, University of California, San Diego
2. “Afterlives of the Border Corrido and the Corrido Hero: Narcocorrido and Narconovela”
Rosaura Sánchez, University of California, San Diego
2. “Afterlives of the Border Corrido and the Corrido Hero: Narcocorrido and Narconovela”
Monika Kaup, University of Washington
3. “The Politics of Ethnography: Américo Paredes and Insider/Outsider Research”
Alfredo Mirandé, University of California, Riverside
4. “Stirring Echoes: Critical Folklorism and Américo Paredes' Cancionero”
Elena V. Valdez, Rice University
4. “Stirring Echoes: Critical Folklorism and Américo Paredes' Cancionero”
Elena V. Valdez, Rice University
Dr. Monika Kaup
Dr. Elena V. Valdez and Dr. Alfredo Mirandé
Dr. Iliana Alcántar
Dr. Rosaura Sánchez
Dr. Alfredo Mirandé
Elena V. Valdez (doctoral candidate)
Dr. José E. Limón and Dr. Teresa McKenna
Luncheon Break
12:30-1:30 P.M.
Featured Speaker
Friday, May 6, 1:30-2:45 p.m.
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Oscar J. Martínez
Regents’ Professor of History
University of Arizona
Title of Lecture:
“The U.S.-Mexico Borderlands:
From Alienation to Integration”
Moderator:
Provost Lynn Mahoney
California State University, Los Angeles
Dr. Oscar J. Martínez
Plenary Session #2
AMÉRICO PAREDES:
Narrative, Poetry, and His Generation
Friday, May 6, 3:00-4:45 p.m.
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Moderator: Pablo Baler, California State University, Los Angeles
Panelists:
1. “Paradises
Lost and Found: Américo Paredes’ Literary South Texas/Mexico Border”
Susana de la Peña, New Mexico
State University
2. “In Defense of Francisco I. Madero: Felix Sommerfeld and U.S.-Mexican Cooperation on the Border”
Heribert von Feilitzsch, Historian, Mexican-German Relations
2. “In Defense of Francisco I. Madero: Felix Sommerfeld and U.S.-Mexican Cooperation on the Border”
Heribert von Feilitzsch, Historian, Mexican-German Relations
3. “Usos y abusos del español en
Generaciones y semblanzas de Rolando
Hinojosa”
Julio Puente García, University of California, Los Angeles
4. “Mexican Lives (Don’t) Matter: George Washington Gómez as Timely Discourse on Police Violence and Its Protection of Anglo Economic Interests”
Diana Noreen Rivera, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
5. “El alma adolescente en Cantos de Adolescencia de Américo Paredes”
Julio Puente García, University of California, Los Angeles
4. “Mexican Lives (Don’t) Matter: George Washington Gómez as Timely Discourse on Police Violence and Its Protection of Anglo Economic Interests”
Diana Noreen Rivera, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
5. “El alma adolescente en Cantos de Adolescencia de Américo Paredes”
María Cecilia Ruiz, University of
San Diego
Heribert von Feilitzsch, Julio Puente García, and Diana Noreen Rivera
Dr. Susana de la Peña
Friday, May 6, 5:00-6:00 p.m.
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Robert M. Young
Film Director and Producer
And
Edward James Olmos
Actor, Producer, Director
Title of
Presentation:
“The Making of the Film The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez”
Moderator:
María
Herrera-Sobek
University
of California, Santa Barbara
Edward James Olmos and fans
Trying to screen a two-minute clip of the film
"The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez"
Edward James Olmos, Robert Young, and María Herrera-Sobek
Conclusion of the first day of the conference
Michael Cervantes and Edward James Olmos, Cal State L.A. alumni
Edward James Olmos and Pablo Baler
Edward James Olmos and Richard Pérez, Cal State
L.A. alumni
Saturday, May 7
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Featured Speaker
Saturday, May 7, 9:00-10:00 a.m.
Saturday, May 7, 9:00-10:00 a.m.
Music Hall
Omar Valerio-Jiménez
Univesity of Texas at San Antonio
Title of Lecture:
“Contesting Citizenship: Border Corridos,
Transnational Ties, and Intercultural Conflict”
Moderator:
José Anguiano
California State University, Los Angeles
Dr. Omar Valerio-Jiménez
Dr. José Anguiano (Cal State L.A.)
Featured Speaker
Saturday, May 7, 10:15-11:30 a. m.
Music Hall
Saturday, May 7, 10:15-11:30 a. m.
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José E. Limόn
Mody C. Boatright Regents
Emeritus Professor of American Literature
Univesity of
Texas at Austin
Title of
Lecture:
“Américo Paredes and the Latin American
Critical Tradition: The Road Not Fully Taken”
Moderator:
John Cleman
California
State University, Los Angeles
Dr. José E. Limón and Dr. John Cleman
Dr. Francisco
Lomelí (UC Santa Barbara)
Luncheon Break
11:30 a. m.-12:30 p.m.
Saturday, May 7, 12:30-1:00 p.m.
Music Hall
Featured Chicano Playwright
Title of Lecture:
Moderator:
Saturday, May 7, 1:00-2:00 p.m.
Music Hall
Four Theatrical Performances,
1. “It Was a Silvery Night"
2. "The Autobiography of Oscar Z. Acosta"
3. "Esperanza"
4. "Américo Paredes: In His Own Words"
Music Hall
Featured Chicano Playwright
Carlos Morton
University of California, Santa Barbara
Title of Lecture:
“Américo Paredes and the Beginning
of the Chicano Consciousness:
Scenes from Four Plays”
Roberto
Cantú
California State University, Los Angeles
Dr. Carlos Morton
Music Hall
Featured Theater Director
Guillermo Avilés-Rodríguez
California State University, Northridge
Four Theatrical Performances,
written by Carlos Morton:
2. "The Autobiography of Oscar Z. Acosta"
3. "Esperanza"
4. "Américo Paredes: In His Own Words"
Featured Actors:
Raúl Cardona
Marita De La Torre
Eric J. Marq
Will Rian
Featured Speaker
Saturday, May 7, 2:15-3:15 p.m.
Music Hall
María Herrera-Sobek
Associate
Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity,
and Academic Policy
University of California, Santa Barbara
and Academic Policy
University of California, Santa Barbara
Title of Lecture:
“Uncle Remus con Chile:
Critical Race Theories in the Hermeneutics
of Américo Paredes’s Jokelore Collection
Moderator:
Roberto Cantú
California State University, Los Angeles
Dr. María
Herrera-Sobek
Featured Speaker
Saturday, May 7, 3:30-4:30 p.m.
Saturday, May 7, 3:30-4:30 p.m.
Music Hall
Claudia Sadowski-Smith
Arizona State University
Title of Lecture:
“Américo Paredes
and the Work of Border Writing”
Moderator:
Iliana
Alcántar
Califona State University, Los Angeles 
Dr. Iliana
Alcántar
Dr. Claudia Sadowski-Smith
Saturday, May 7, 4:45-6:00 p.m.
Music Hall
John Holmes McDowell
Indiana University
Title of Lecture:
“Transitionality:
The Border as Barrier and Bridge”
Moderator:
John Cleman
California State University, Los Angeles
Dr. John Cleman
Dr. John Holmes McDowell
End of Conference Group Photos
--Conclusion of Conference--
Keynote and Featured Speakers:
Biographical Information and Abstracts
Keynote Speaker
Keynote Speaker
Richard Flores
Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs for the College
of Liberal Arts,
Professor of Anthropology and Mexican American Studies,
C. B. Smith, Sr. Centennial Chair in U. S.-Mexico Relations,
University of Texas at Austin
Abstract
The works of
Américo Paredes continue to reveal important critical perspectives and
scholarly interventions for intellectuals working in the present. I will expand
on this key intellectual tradition by contrasting the work of Paredes, which is
rooted and wed to his South Texas sensibilities and experiences, with that of
the frontier historian, Walter Prescott Webb. Those familiar with Parades’ work
will recognize Webb as the recipient of Parades’ ironic and pointed jabs for
his disparaging remarks about Mexicans. And who can forget Paredes’ critical
musing on what Webb’s remarks might have looked like if not buffered by their
academic context?
This
presentation explores the relationship between Paredes and Webb, tracing their
own intellectual perspectives as a way of deepening our understanding of two
formidable scholars of the Southwest. This exploration has led me to understand
their bodies of work, while critically disjunctive on a number of key issues,
as deeply intertwined with, if not embedded inside, the early currents of
modernity. In fact, I have come to see Paredes and Webb as emblematic of the
larger tensions and transitions occurring in wider society at the time.
I will present,
in part, an argument for reconsidering the relationship between Paredes and
Webb, moving from one shaped primarily by ethnic and racial conflict to one
founded on different understandings of, and as a result, responses to, the
forces of modernity. It is my suggestion, therefore, and the thesis of this
essay, that we cannot understand the relationship between Paredes and Webb
without fully engaging the implications and limitations of the intellectual and
social milieu that underlies their work.
Finally, a more
relevant issue emerges. Along with rethinking the work of Paredes and Webb, I
want also to suggest a secondary, if not more critical, agenda: the current
production of knowledge. A task of intellectual recuperation like this requires
that our findings not exist as part of the project of the past, but stand as a
resource for the production and evaluation of work in the present. As such,
what is the relationship between the legacy of Paredes and Webb in modernity
and our work today? If, as I will demonstrate, the work of Paredes and Webb
represents two distinct, even oppositional, moments in the production of
knowledge in modernity, what might those of us working in today’s global world
learn about our own intellectual practice?
Biographical background
I am currently
Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs for the College of Liberal Arts and
Professor of Anthropology and Mexican American Studies at the University of
Texas at Austin where I hold the C. B. Smith, Sr. Centennial Chair in U.
S.—Mexico Relations. I work in the areas of critical theory, performance
studies, semiotics, and historical and cultural anthropology. I am a native of
San Antonio, Texas, and received my B.A. from the University of Notre Dame and
Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1989. I am the author of
Remembering the Alamo: Memory, Modernity, and the Master Symbol (University of
Texas Press, 2002), Los Pastores: History and Performance in the Mexican
Shepherd’s Play of South Texas (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), editor of
Adina De Zavala’s, History and Legends of the Alamo (Arte Público Press, 1996).
In addition, I have published essays in American Ethnologist, Cultural
Anthropology, American Literary History, Radical History Review, and in the
edited volume, Latino Cultural Citizenship, published by Beacon Press.
In addition to
my scholarly work, I have extensive experience in the area of curriculum
development and international studies, particularly in Latin America and the
Middle East. I oversee UTeach-Liberal Arts, the college's secondary teacher
preparation program in social studies, English, and foreign languages. More
recently, I have developed the college’s new effort in international affairs,
The Global Initiative for Education and Leadership. UT Global delivers
high-quality educational training and consulting to governments, higher
education institutions, schools, businesses, and nonprofits worldwide.
Keynote Speaker
John Holmes McDowell
Indiana University
Abstract
The life and
work of Américo Paredes centered on the border separating and linking Mexico
and the United States, extending the political boundary into a rich metaphor of
peoples and cultures in recurring cycles of contact and conflict. I propose
“transitionality” to capture the positioning of Paredes and to think through
the complex semiotic properties of the border as a cultural phenomenon,
beginning with Paredes’s influential formulation of the Texas-Mexican border as
a zone of cultural production and continuing with a dash of my own research
into the bicultural heritage of Chicano children and into the narcocorrido as
yet another cultural form that simultaneously accentuates and erases this
border. What transitionality points to is a paradoxical reading of the border
as both barrier and bridge, as terminus and connector, and indeed, I’d nominate
paradox as the trope of the border.
Biographical background
John Holmes McDowell, professor and chair of Folklore and
Ethnomusicology at Indiana University, specializes in the study of traditional
and emerging vernacular performances as they participate in processes of play,
commemoration, and heritage formation. He is the author of Poetry and Violence: The Ballad Tradition of Mexico's Costa Chica
(University of Illinois Press, 2000) and the forthcoming ¡Corrido! The Living Ballad of Mexico’s Western Coast (University
of New Mexico Press), as well as numerous articles, including “‘Surfing the
Tube for Latin American Song: The Blessings (and Curses) of YouTube,” Journal of American Folklore 128 (2015):
260-272.
Featured Speaker
María
Herrera-Sobek
Associate Vice Chancellor for Diversity,
Equity, and Academic Policy
University of California, Santa Barbara
Abstract
Within Américo Paredes’
wide-range of interests in viewing and comprehending the world surrounding us
is the concept of humor. Humor,
encapsulated in jokelore texts collected by Paredes via extensive fieldwork
sessions, provides us with an opportunity to explore his profound insights and
his perceptive identification of the importance of this folklore genre as a
unique epistemological tool for communities living under oppressive conditions.
In this presentation, I explore issues of humor as transnational and
transethnic/transracial constructs manifested in the jokelore collection titled
Uncle Remus con Chile (1993). Using
critical race theories, I underscore how humorous short narratives are
effectively deployed as a form of resistance and self-preservation in dealing
with the hostile environment that surrounds the marginalized Mexican American
community in the Rio Grande Valley in the state of Texas but can be applied to
other communities under siege. Consider for example the recent barrage of
racist invectives the powerful and wealthy Republican candidate running for the
presidency of the United States, Donald Trump, uttered against Mexican
immigrants characterizing them as “criminals and rapists.” The Mexican/Mexican
American community in different states (and in Mexico) immediately resorted to
their cultural heritage and created a caricature of Trump as a piñata with the
implication that people could beat the piñata and shred it to pieces. At the same time, one can read the Trump
piñata as a humorous, satirical, visual text.
Freud’s seminal
psychological studies on the human condition include theories on humor. However, Freud seldom, if ever, included race
within his publications on jokes. Paredes, on the other hand, is keenly aware
of humor and, more specifically, humor that function as a weapon against racial
discrimination and the adverse social, economic, educational, and political
conditions in which Mexicans and Mexican Americans found themselves after the
Mexico – United States War of 1848. In my analysis and hermeneutics of the
English, Spanish and bilingual jokelore texts encompassed in Paredes’
collection, contemporary critical race theories confirm the Tejano scholar’s
prescient vision regarding his understanding of how humorous texts encapsulate
a community’s creativity in their quest to unmask discriminatory and oppressive
social orders.
Biographical background
María Herrera-Sobek is Associate Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity, and Academic Policy and a Professor in the Chicana and Chicano Studies Department at UC, Santa Barbara. She holds the Luis Leal Endowed Chair in Chicano Studies. She taught at UC, Irvine for several years and has been a Visiting Professor at Stanford and Harvard Universities. She is the author of numerous books including The Bracero Experience: Elitelore versus Folklore (1979); The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis (1990); and Northward Bound: The Mexican Immigrant Experience in Ballad and Song (1993); Chicano Renaissance: Contemporary Trends in Chicano Culture (with Maciel and Ortiz, 2000); and Santa Barraza: The Life and work of a Mexica/Tejana Artist (2001). Santa Barraza: Artist of the Borderlands (2001) and Chicano Folklore: A Handbook (2006). She has edited or co-edited several books including: Violence and Transgression in World Minority Literatures (with Ahrens Rüdiger, Karin Ikas, and Francisco A. Lomelí, Germany, 2005) and Perpectivas Transatlánticas en la Literatura Chicana: Ensayos y Creatividad (with Francisco Lomelí and Juan Antonio Perles Rochel, Spain 2005).
Featured Speaker
Oscar J.
Martínez
Regents’
Professor of History
University of
Arizona
Abstract
This
presentation provides long-term historical context for the social, ethnic, and
cultural conflict evident in many of the works of Américo Paredes. The relationship
between Mexicans and European Americans has oscillated between alienation at
one extreme and integration at the other.
Similarly, the relationship between Mexico and the United States,
especially in the borderlands, reveals high levels of both conflict and
harmony. Four simultaneous and, at the
same time, evolutionary tendencies stand out in that relationship: alienation,
coexistence, interdependence, and integration.
Biographical background
Oscar J. Martínez is Regents’ Professor of History at the University of
Arizona. He has authored and edited many books and articles, book chapters, and
reviews. His most recent works include Mexico’s Uneven Development (Routldege,
2015), Troublesome Border (2nd
edition, University of Arizona Press, 2006), and Mexican Origin People in the United States (University of Arizona
Press, 2001). Presently Martínez is
preparing a second edition of his book Border
Boom Town: Ciudad Juárez since 1848
(first published by UT Press in 1978).
Another book manuscript entitled, “Rich Lands, Poor Lands: Why Some Nations Are Rich and Others Poor,”
is at the advanced research and writing stage. Martínez has served on the
boards of several journals and professional associations. He is a former
president of the Association of Borderlands Scholars and a founder of the Journal of Borderlands Studies. Martínez
is a Cal State L.A. alumnus.
Featured Speaker
Robert M. Young
Film Director, Producer
Robert M. Young, one of our
foremost independent filmmakers, has an award-winning body of work that
includes classic documentaries and acclaimed feature films, such as Nothing But A Man, Alambrista!, Short Eyes, Rich Kids, One Trick Pony, The Ballad of
Gregorio Cortez, Extremities, Dominick and Eugene, Triumph of the Spirit, and Caught.
Mr.Young’s
numerous awards include: Cannes’ Camera
d’Or, San Sebastian’s Golden Concha
for Best Film, Cuba’s Golden Coral
for Best Film, Venice’s Primo San
Georgio and The City of Venice Prize,
an Emmy, three Peabody Awards, two George
Polk Memorial Awards for Journalism and an Academy Award Nomination for Children of Fate: Life and Death in a
Sicilian Family which also won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. Mr. Young
has also been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
One
of his earliest documentaries, Secrets of
the Reef was named by Time Magazine “one of the ten best films of the
year.” And his film for CBS: Eskimo:
Fight for Life, won an Emmy as Best Documentary of the year. As a
writer/director/cameraman and associate producer for the acclaimed NBC White Paper series, he made Sit-In and Angola: Journey to a War. For the latter, he walked 400 miles
behind Portuguese lines with Angolan rebels to film the first encounters of
their war. Both films received the George Polk Memorial Award as well as being
cited in a Peabody Award to NBC. The Angola film also received the Overseas
Press Club Citation for Best Foreign Reporting of the year. Young’s next film, The Inferno portrayed slum life in
Palermo, Sicily so powerfully that NBC declined to air it. In 1993, Young’s son
Andrew and his daughter-in-law Susan Todd, incorporated the NBC film into their
film Children of Fate: Life and Death in
a Sicilian Family, for which they received an Academy Award Nomination.
Father and son together received the Best Cinematography Award at the Sundance
Film Festival.
Young
has made numerous other prize-winning documentaries. Among them are The Maze, In the World of Sharks and the National Geographic Specials, Man of the Serengeti, Bushmen of the Kalahari and The Great Apes. In 1964 Young lived in
an igloo above the Arctic Circle to capture the winter life of the Netsilik
Eskimos. The project was sponsored by the National Science foundation and the
Ford Foundation. It is the most accurate record of their traditional life. A
one-hour version was shown on CBS and received an Emmy for best documentary of
the year. His first dramatic film for television, JT received a Peabody Award.
For his first narrative feature, Young co-wrote, co-produced and photographed Nothing But a Man, winning two major
prizes at the Venice Film Festival, as well as making numerous ten best lists. Nothing But a Man, also distinguished by
being Malcolm X’s favorite film, was elected to the Library of Congress
National Film Registry in 1994. Young’s first fictional feature film as
writer/director and cinematographer, Alambrista!
about a young Mexican who illegally crosses into the United States, won the
coveted Camera d’Or for Best First
Feature at the Cannes Film Festival and Best Feature at the San Sebastian Film
Festival. A Director’s cut of Alambrista!
is currently being released through the sponsorship of the Ford Foundation.
Some of Young’s theatrical feature films
are:
Rich Kids, staring John
Lithgow, Katherine Walker
Extremities, staring Farah
Fawcett
One Trick Pony, staring Paul Simon
The Ballad of
Gregorio Cortez,
staring Edward James Olmos
Short Eyes, staring Miguel
Pinero
Triumph of the
Spirit,
staring Willem Dafoe, Robert Logia, Edward Olmos
Dominick and
Eugene,
staring Tom Hulce, Ray Liotta, Jamie Lee Curtis
Caught, staring Maria
Conchita Alonso, Edward James Olmos
Human Error, staring Xander
Berkeley, Robert Knott, Tom Bower
Young
also produced American Me with Edward
James Olmos. He also produced and photographed The Plot Against Harry for which he received an Indie Spirit
nomination for Best Picture as well as Best Cinematographer. Young’s other
features include: Talent for the Game,
Saving Grace, We Are The Children, Roosters,
and Showtime’s Slave of Dreams and Solomon and Sheba, both filmed on
location in Morocco. He also directed several episodes of ABC’s Nothing Sacred. His theatrical feature
film Caught received an Indie Spirit
Nomination for Best Director. He also directed a dramatic Imax film that is now
in release: Panda: The China Adventure,
set in China in 1936. He has directed for ITVS a fictional film True to the Game, written by a young
African-American woman about life in Harlem. He also directed La Estrella, an hour episode for the
program American Family, and two episodes of Nothing Sacred, starring Kevin Anderson.
He
co-directed Walkout, a feature film
for HBO. His latest directed films are five episodes of the TV series Battlestar Galactica, for which he was
awarded a Peabody. He studied at MIT before serving in the Navy during WW II as
a photographer’s mate. He graduated in 1949 from Harvard. He is married to Lili
Young and has five children and five grand-children.
Robert M. Young and Edward James Olmos
Featured Speaker
Edward James
Olmos
Actor, Director,
Producer
Edward James
Olmos
has achieved extraordinary success as an actor, producer and humanitarian. The
Tony, Emmy and Academy Award® Nominated actor is probably best known to young
audiences for his work on the SYFY television series “Battlestar Galactica”
(2003-2009) as Admiral William Adama. He also directed the HBO movie “Walkout”
in 2007, for which he earned a DGA Nomination in the Outstanding Directorial
Achievement in Movies for Television category.
Olmos’
career in entertainment spans over 30 years. In that time he created a
signature style and aesthetic that he applies to every artist endeavor, often
grounding his characters in reality and gravitas. His dedication to his craft
has brought him attention across the industry and with audiences worldwide.
Originally
a musician, Olmos branched out into acting, appearing in many small theatre
productions until portraying the iconic El
Pachuco in “Zoot Suit.” The play moved to Broadway and Olmos earned a Tony
nomination for the role, which he played again in the 1981 film version. Olmos
went on to appear in the films Wolfen,
Blade Runner, and The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez before
starring in his biggest role to date, that of Lieutenant Martin Castillo in the
iconic 80’s television series “Miami Vice” opposite Don Johnson and Philip
Michael Thomas. During his time on the Michael Mann series, Olmos earned two
Golden Globe and Emmy Award nominations, resulting in a win from each. In 1988,
Olmos was nominated for an Academy Award® and won the Golden Globe for his
portrayal of Jaime Escalante in Stand and
Deliver. He directed and starred in his first motion picture, American Me (1992).
Other
credits as an actor include the motion pictures My Family/Mi Familia; Selena,
which was a breakout film for Jennifer Lόpez; and In the Time of Butterflies, in which he played Dominican Republic
dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. In television he enjoyed a recurring role as
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Roberto Mendoza in the NBC drama “The West Wing,”
portrayed a widowed father in the PBS drama American Family: Journey of Dreams,
and recently directed the YouTube program “The Short Film BP Doesn’t Want You
To See,” featured on Larry King/CNN.
Edward
James Olmos is an international advocate, spokesman, and humanitarian working
with organizations such as Thank You Ocean, Project Hope Foundation, Children’s
Hospital of Los Angeles, The Boy’s and Girl’s Club of America, The River
Keepers, Dr. Andros’ Diabetic Foot Global Conference, and he speaks up to 150
times a year in schools, universities, and corporations. Olmos
has been a longtime advocate of diversified roles and images of Mexican
Americans and Latinos in the U.S. media, and is a major pioneer of literacy in
the Latino community. Olmos is a Cal State L.A. alumnus.
Featured Speaker
José E. Limόn
Mody C. Boatright Regents' Emeritus Professor of American Literature
Univesity of
Texas at Austin
Abstract
This paper
explores the relationship of Américo Paredes to what in 2004, Alicia Ríos
defined as the Latin American critical tradition, a tradition deploying
multiple genres but centered on the essay. For her this tradition begins
roughly with Simón Rodríguez and Andrés Bello in the earlier 19th century,
reaches a kind of high point with José Martí and José Enrique Rodó in the later
19th, and continues through the twentieth century and into our own time in
figures such as Roberto Fernández Retamar and Carlos Monsiváis. In 1997 José
Saldívar positioned Paredes within this critical tradition by way of his
fiction, poetry but mostly the always germane, “With His Pistol in His Hand…”,
the latter reading keyed to some degree on my earlier 1992 analysis of its
critical essayistic character. In this 2016 paper, I argue that while there is
considerable validity in Saldivar’s positioning, it also has its limitations.
As an alternative and departing from the final chapter, “Valor Civil,” of my
2012 book, Américo Paredes: Culture and Critique, I argue that Paredes’
relationship to the Latin American critical tradition might also be described
as a road not fully taken, a missed opportunity to fully live out this
tradition for the “nuestra América” on this side of the US-Mexico border. The
argument centers on Paredes’ wholly overlooked 1963 essay, “Texas’s Third Man:
The Texas-Mexican” first published in the liberal political journal, The Texas
Observer, but also takes into account the specific socio-historical moment from
1945 to 1965.
Biographical background
José
E. Limón is
the Mody C. Boatright Regents Professor of American Literature (Emeritus) at the University of Texas at Austin. Limón has published in major scholarly journals and
authored four books: Mexican Ballads and Chicano Poems: History and
Influence in Mexican-American Social Poetry (University of California Press,
1992); Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in
Mexican-American South Texas (University of Wisconsin Press, 1994); American
Encounters: Greater Mexico, the United States, and the Erotics of Culture
(Beacon Press, 1998); and, Américo Paredes: Culture and Critique (University of
Texas Press, 2012). A new book, Neither
Friends, Nor Strangers: Mexicans and Anglos in the Literary Making of Texas,
is in progress. In his former position as Professor of English and Anthropology
at the University of Texas at Austin, he directed thirty PhDs to completion
with twenty-eight of these currently in tenure-track positions across the
country from Brown University to UC-Santa Cruz.
Featured Playwright
Carlos Morton
University of California, Santa Barbara
The
work of Américo Paredes has been known for its critical representations of the
daily life of the “Mexico-Texan” who has been a victim of an injustice,
dispossessed of ancestral lands, and denied the rights of citizenship and
economic opportunities enjoyed by most Americans. Questions of social justice
and border conflict are thus central themes in Paredes’s work, frequently
written in the modes of irony and satire. As a tribute to Paredes, I will show
scenes from four plays dealing with la
vida cotidiana of the Mexican American people during the 1940’s and 50’s in
the U.S.A. The first selection, “It Was a Silvery Night,” is based on a short
story by Tomás Rivera about a young boy who goes out into the night for an
encounter with the devil. Along the way he stumbles upon an old man who played
the character of the devil in a Pastorela.
The second piece is based on the writings of
Oscar Z. Acosta (The Autobiography of a
Brown Buffalo, The Revolt of the Cockroach People) and describes his sexual
encounters with “all the little blonde girls named Alice” that he met in the
course of his life, including his first wife, Betty. A third piece is taken
from a libretto for the opera “Esperanza” based on the film Salt of the Earth that details the
marriage of Ramόn Quintero and his wife Esperanza. In this piece the couple,
working together, are able to successfully defeat a powerful mining corporation
in Silver City, New Mexico during the height of the McCarthy era.
The fourth and last piece is about an incident
in the life of Américo Paredes which dramatizes his “border thinking,” defined
by Paredes as a “checkerboard of consciousness” that shapes the lives of
Mexican Americans who must live with a composite of identities, with a sense of
not belonging, and always being on the wrong side of the divide.
Biographical background
Carlos Morton has over one hundred
theatrical productions, both in the U.S. and abroad. His professional credits include the San
Francisco Mime Troupe, the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Denver Center
Theatre, La Compañía Nacional de México, the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre,
and the Arizona Theatre Company. He is the author of The Many Deaths of Danny Rosales and Other Plays (1983),Johnny Tenorio and Other Plays (1992),The Fickle Finger of Lady Death (1996), Rancho Hollywood y otras obras del teatro
chicano,(1999), Dreaming on a Sunday
in the Alameda (2004), and Children
of the Sun: Scenes for Latino Youth (2008).
A former Mina Shaughnessy Scholar and
Fulbright Lecturer to Mexico and Poland, Morton holds an M.F.A. in Drama from
the University of California, San Diego, and a Ph.D. in Theatre from the
University of Texas at Austin. Morton has lived on the border between
Mexico and the United States since 1981, teaching at universities in Texas,
California and Mexico. He is currently Professor of Theater at the University
of California, Santa Barbara.
Featured Theatre Director
Guillermo
Avilés-Rodríguez
California State University, Northridge
Guillermo Avilés-Rodríguez is a Lecturer in the Chicana/o Studies
department at Cal State University, Northridge and a PhD student in the UCLA
School of Theater, Film and Television where he is a Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellow.
He holds a BFA from the University of Utah and an MFA from the Masters program
at UCSD Theater and Dance department. He has collaborated with Cuban theater
collectives such as Teatro márgenes del
río in Havana, Cuba, and with
Spanish-language theater groups in Los Angeles, including Grupo malayerba from Ecuador, Yuyachkani from Perú, and Teatro de los Andes from Bolivia. He has
translated La Razón Blindada by
Argentinian author, actor and director Arístides Vargas, El Deseo by Mexican playwright Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda, and many
other portions of American operas and plays such as Hopscotch an Opera for 24 Cars, and Ochre and Onyx: The Langston Hughes
Project by Lynn Manning. Guillermo has directed many original, traditional, and
experimental plays in both academic and community settings. He is the proud
creator of Meet Me @Metro, a
site-specific transit oriented theatrical extravaganza performed along the L.A.
Metro rail line. Some of Guillermo’s directorial and literary highlights
include directing A Bicycle Country
by Nilo Cruz at Cal. State University, Long Beach for the META Student
Organization, writing two Student Discovery Guides commissioned by
Center Theatre Group: En un sol Amarillo,
and Culture Clash's Palestine, New Mexico.
His latest published article “Theatre and Transit: A Transit-Oriented
Site-Specific Triptych” is featured in the latest issue of Theatre Forum.
Cast of Actors
Raúl Cardona originated the role of Oscar Zeta
Acosta in the 2015 Company of Angels production of Brown Buffalo. Other
Theatrical credits: “El Pachuco” in Zoot
Suit, “Bandido,” The American
Melodrama of Tiburcio Vásquez; Fame;
Selena Forever; Lalo Guerrero y Las Ardillitas; La
Pastorela; Veteranos, A Legacy of Valor; Mummufied Deer; Mundo Mata;
Corridos Remix; Restless Spirits; Romeo &
Juliet; Meet Me @ Metro; and 26 Miles.
Marita De La Torre is a filmmaker and actress who has
concentrated on acting and producing since graduating from the Theater programs
of Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, and TX A&M- Kingsville. In 2013 she embarked on producing “Lodo”
after teaming up with her fellow filmmakers from the award-winning short film,
“Botes Al Amanecer.” Now living in Los Angeles and a member of the National
Association of Latino Independent Producers, Marita has also begun work on
writing and producing a feature-length film.
Eric J. Marq is a proud Chicano artist who currently lives in Palm Springs, California, where he is an active member of the arts scene. His film credits include a recent appearance in Disney's "McFarland, USA" starring Kevin Costner. He is always excited to get back on the stage doing work that gets him back to his roots. Socially focused art is how he keeps sharp when he is away from film. Through his community work he has discovered a new love and appreciation for the arts.
Will Rian is an Actor, Writer, and Director. His most recent film credits include Abstraction, an action heist film and winner of multiple local film awards; The Custodian, and Ub(w)er Stories. He recently wrote and directed Valor, a Vietnam coming of age piece for the Arena Theater. Will has an MFA in Screenwriting from the University of California, Riverside, and is currently working on a second MFA in Acting here at California State University, Los Angeles.
Featured Speaker
Claudia Sadowski-Smith
Arizona State University
Abstract
Américo
Paredes’s groundbreaking work in folklore and Chicano studies has made significant
contributions to the tradition of Chicana/o border writing. This work’s setting
in the US-Mexico borderlands is so closely interlinked with its subject matter that
it cannot be easily moved to another place without distortion or loss of significance.
At the turn of the twenty-first century,
the tradition of border writing has expanded to include a variety of new literary
titles and authors. This presentation will examine Paredes’s place in the evolution
of border writing and then focus on its more contemporary expressions, such
as work by Richard Yáñez, Ana Castillo, Reyna Grande, Graciela Limόn, and Luis Alberto
Urrea.
Biographical background
Claudia Sadowski-Smith is Associate Professor
of English ar Arizona State University. She is the author of Border Fictions: Globalization, Empire, and Writing
at the Boundaries of the United States (University of Virginia Press, 2008),
and the editor of a special Comparative American
Studies issue on comparative border studies (2011), as well as of Globalization on the Line: Culture, Capital,
and Citizenship at U.S. Borders (Palgrave, 2002). In addition, Sadowski-Smith
has published in American Quarterly, South Atlantic Quarterly, Comparative American Studies, Arizona Quarterly, Diaspora, Population, Space, and
Place, and the European Journal of Cultural
Studies.
Featured Speaker
Omar Valerio-Jiménez
Univesity of
Texas at San Antonio
Abstract
Nineteenth-century corridos
from the U.S.-Mexico border are wonderfully rich sources for the exploration of
cultural change, identity, and regionalism. In particular, the folksongs from
the South Texas-Northern Mexico border contain expressions of residents’
transnational ties, intercultural conflict, and citizenship claims. These
corridos are critical primary sources for scholars interested in studying
communities that did not leave many written documents containing their views on
ideology and citizenship. My presentation will analyze songs about Ignacio
Zaragoza, Ulysses S. Grant, and Juan N. Cortina, which were recovered and first
analyzed by Américo Paredes. It will demonstrate that Tejanos in the nineteenth
century embodied multiple identities,
demonstrated regional pride, and expressed nationalist sympathies. Although
outsiders viewed border residents’ identities as contradictory, the local
residents’ self-perception as Mexican nationals, Americans, and Tejanos all at
the same time appeared unambiguous to them. Mexican Texans expressed a
political affinity with the United States, but also felt connected to Mexico,
just as Mexican nationals had links to the United States. My analysis will also
show that Tejanos were influenced by and understood the ideological issues
involved in the U.S. Civli War and Mexico’s war against French intervention. In
addition to the corridos’ international and local influences, the settings of
the songs demonstrated transnational bonds, as the songs were performed at
various cross-cultural events, including at Cinco de Mayo festivities in which
American citizens (Mexican Texans) celebrated Mexican nationalism in an
American border town. Ultimately, the songs served as reminders that the
processes of state formation of both nations influenced, but did not completely
shape, the identities of Mexicans in the political and cultural borderland of
south Texas.
Biographical background
Omar S. Valerio-Jiménez was born in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, and
grew up in Taft, Corpus Christi, and Edinburg, Texas. After graduating from
MIT, he worked as an engineer for five years before returning to graduate
school at UCLA, where he obtained his master’s and doctorate degrees. He has
taught at universities in California, New York, Texas, and Iowa. Currently, he
is an Associate Professor in the History Department at the University of Texas
at San Antonio..
In River of Hope, Omar
S. Valerio-Jiménez examines state formation, cultural change, and the
construction of identity in the lower Rio Grande region during the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. He chronicles a history of violence resulting from
multiple conquests, of resistance and accommodation to state power, and of
changing ethnic and political identities.
His family’s history along the United States–Mexico border
partly explains the origins of River of
Hope. Valerio-Jiménez’s ancestors hail from the borderlands of Coahuila,
Tamaulipas, and Texas.
Valerio-Jiménez is also a co-editor of Major Problems in
Latina/o History (Cengage Learning, 2014), an anthology of essays and
primary documents on Latina/o History. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Women’s History, Estudios Mexicanos/Mexican Studies, and
the Journal of American Ethnic History.
He has also contributed chapters on Latinos, the American West, and the Spanish
borderlands to various anthology collections including Migrants and Migration in Modern North America, A Companion to
California History, America on the World Stage, Latinas in the United States, and
The Atlas of the U.S. and Canadian
Environmental History. He is also a co-editor of the Latina/o Midwest
Reader (University of Illinois Press, forthcoming in 2016), a collection of
articles on the history, politics, and culture of Latinas/os in the Midwest.
Finally, he has a forthcoming article on Latinos in early twentieth-century
Iowa that explores acculturation, labor, and gender relations. His longer-term
project is a transnational study of the U.S.-Mexican War that examines memory,
identity, and civil rights.
Conference
Panelists, Titles of Presentations,
and Abstracts
“Paradises
Lost and Found: Américo Paredes’ Literary South Texas/Mexico Border”
Susana de la Peña, New Mexico
State University
Although much has been written about Américo Paredes as an
eminent borderlands scholar, little if any attention has been given to a border
of a different kind in his literary works: the convergence—in the psyche and
world of his characters coming of age and growing in consciousness—of elements
of the supernatural, uncanny, and everyday/“real.” The neo-Gothic literary
genre proves useful, for example, in the reconstruction
of the colonized identity of the young protagonist struggling to create an
alternative self within the patriarchal system of the border town in “Over the
Waves is Out.” Paredes situates his narratives among characters that straddle
the margins of geographical and spiritual borderlands while negotiating
journeys across the terrain of socially constructed roles in a quest for
self-determination and agency. The protagonist in The Shadow encounters multiple ghosts and hauntings from an
historical past amidst the ruins and losses of the post-1848 Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo and even later during the 1910 Mexican Revolution. In the betwixt and between
realms characteristic of being on the borderlands lies the liminal space of
ambiguity as well as opportunity for metamorphoses of the child/adult,
otherworldly/real, past/present, present/future, and prescribed/invented that
gives voice to what Wendy Faris has defined as the “defocalized” narratives often associated with magical realism and with Latin America's Boom generation. It is these flowerings of identity,
consciousness, and re-visioned history, amidst the losses of childhood and
innocence, in the short stories and novels of Américo Paredes that I explore in
my presentation.
“Afterlives of the Border Corrido and the Corrido Hero: Narcocorrido
and Narconovela”
Monika Kaup, University of Washington
This
paper explores Paredes’s theories of Greater Mexico and the folk tradition of
the border corrido by investigating
its latest contemporary offshoots—the narcocorrido
and the emerging genre of the narconovela.
Narconovelas are fiction about themes
of drug business and drug trafficking, and the culture flourishing in this
environment—forces that have become ever more prominent in countries such as
Mexico or Colombia in the past decades. The narcocorrido
is a popular musical genre that arose with norteño
bands such as Los Tigres del Norte and Los Tucanes de Tijuana in the 1970s. An
adaptation of the classic Mexican border corrido,
the narcocorrido glorifies the drug
trafficker as a latter-day incarnation of the corrido hero.
Taking as my examples two recent narconovelas from
northern Mexico, Yuri Herrera’s Trabajos
del reino (2010) and Carlos Velásquez’s La
biblia vaquero: un triunfo del corrido sobre la lógica (2008), I will
explore 21st-century updates of the continuities between the
traditional border corrido, the narcocorrido, and modern fiction from
the Greater Mexico borderlands. In his pathbreaking studies on the border corrido, Paredes defined the corrido hero as a social rebel against
racist and class oppression—the Mexican common man fighting against Anglo
injustice “with his pistol in his hand.” Further, in both With His Pistol in His Hand and subsequently in A Texas-Mexican Cancionero, Paredes clarifies
that “in the traditional scale of values, the smuggler was seen as an extension
of the hero of intercultural conflict.” In
addition, Paredes also forged continuities between Chicano fiction and the
border corrido as “the folk base of
Chicano literature” (Ramón Saldívar): in his twin border novels of the Lower
Border, respectively set in Brownsville and near Matamoros during the early 20th
century, George Washington Gómez and The Shadow, Paredes employs the ethos of
the corrido hero “with his pistol in
his hand” to construct a psychology of modern mexicano identity in the borderlands.
As Mark Cameron Edberg has argued, the narcocorrido is both a corrido and a cynical simulacra of the corrido
in that it is both a truly popular phenomenon as well as a construct of the
music business. The narcocorrido has
co-opted the cultural persona of the corrido
hero—his bravery, and the collective meaning of his struggle as a popular
hero—in part because of the popular appeal of narco culture in Mexico, which offers a rare escape from poverty to
wealth and access to social mobility that is otherwise foreclosed. My paper
will focus on the way that—to adapt Saldívar—the narcocorrido figures as the “folk base” of the contemporary narconovela from northern Mexico. Velázquez’
La biblia vaquera, subtitled Un triunfo del corrido sobre la lógica,
concludes with a fictional analogue of the corrido’s
stock despedida, two epilogues
constructed from references to the iconic narcocorrido
about drug trafficking and betrayal, “Contrabando y traición.” The bulk of the
narrative is a metafictional and fragmentary collection of seven short stories,
some of whose protagonists are adapted from corrido
stock characters, including a story that refashions the assassination of
Burrough’s wife in Mexico as a corrido,
“El Corrido de Guillermo Tell.” For its
part, Yuri Herrera’s Trabajos del reino
features the rise and downfall of a poor narcocorridista
summoned to serve as court poet of sorts among the entourage of a drug kingpin,
who is disgraced over a corrido he
composes in solidarity for his boss’s betrayal.
“The
Politics of Ethnography: Américo Paredes and Insider/Outsider Research”
Alfredo Mirandé, University of
California, Riverside
This essay examines the impact of Américo Paredes (1977)
on ethnographic field research and the role of insiders and outsiders in
conducting research in minority communities.
While Paredes was critical of anthropological, distorted depictions of
Chicana/o culture, he also humorously chided Chicana/os for being “overly
sensitive” and rejected the charge of racism leveled against Anglo
ethnographers. Paredes also cautioned
ethnographers to be leery of the native “trickster” and aware of the informant
as a potential performer of folklore.
The paper addresses problems, issues, and dilemmas
that arose when a Mexican national, ostensibly fluent in Spanish and English,
undertook research on the muxes of Juchitán, a third gender, in an indigenous
Zapoteco community in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. More broadly it speaks to the problems and
issues that surface when well intentioned but colonizing outsiders seek to
carry out ethnographic research in subordinated communities and inadvertently
establish unequal, hierarchical, and potentially exploitative relationships with
the people they are studying.
Although a bilingual, bicultural Mexican national, my
research was limited by the fact that I was a colonizing outsider who was
neither muxe, Zapoteco nor fluent in the local language and culture. In the end, my relationship with respondents
proved to be unequal and hierarchical when I unwittingly imposed a Western
conception of time, punctuality, and reciprocity on indigenous respondents and
in the process discovered that the most significant insights were obtained, not
in scheduled formal interviews, but in informal spontaneous interactions.
“Usos y abusos del español en
Generaciones y semblanzas de Rolando
Hinojosa”
Julio Puente García, University of California, Los
Angeles
A partir de la publicación de su libro With His Pistol in His Hand (1958),
Américo Paredes comienza a desarrollar su teoría sobre “Greater Mexico”,
concepto empleado en ese momento histórico para definir la zona fronteriza del
suroeste de los Estados Unidos habitada históricamente por grupos identificados
con la cultura mexicana. Paredes concibe Greater
Mexico “[as] a historically determined geopolical zone of military,
cultural and linguistic conflict [between Mexicans and Anglos]” (Calderón
22).
Dicha zona de conflicto es recreada por Rolando Hinojosa
en Generaciones y semblanzas (1977),
la segunda entrega de su Cronicón del
Condado de Belken. En esta obra, el idioma español aparece como elemento
principal en la construcción de un espacio único, que a su vez expresa una
identidad méxico-tejana. No por coincidencia, Hinojosa ha comentado que sus
“narraciones no se mantienen unidas por la trama sino más bien por lo que los
personajes dicen y cómo lo dicen” (“A Sense of Place” 21). A través de la
creación del Condado de Belken, poblado por mexicanos bien consientes de la
importancia del español, Hinojosa recupera simbólicamente una pequeña pero
significativa parte de los territorios mexicanos arrebatados por Estados Unidos
durante el siglo XIX. Y a la misma vez, reinserta en la historia de este país a
la población mexicana al manifestar explícitamente su antiguo arraigo en
tierras hoy en día estadounidenses.
Tomando en cuenta la importancia del idioma español en
Generaciones y semblanzas, en la
presente ponencia se exponen los usos y abusos que hacen de él tanto mexicanos
como anglosajones. En primera instancia, me interesa mostrar cómo para los
anglosajones el uso del español significa una estrategia que por un lado
enmascara una realidad violenta ejercida sobre los mexicanos, y por el otro,
les permite mantener su hegemonía política, judicial y económica por medio del
engaño. Por otro lado, me propongo exponer cómo para los chicanos del “South
Ward”, la pérdida del español muestra su falta de voluntad que a mediano plazo
provoca una desconexión cultural con la tradición mexicana del Condado de
Belken. Así mismo, para concluir, analizo la función con la cual cumple el
personaje Tomás Imás, chicano que “recupera” el español en la novela.
“Mexican Lives (Don’t) Matter: George Washington Gómez as
Timely Discourse on Police Violence and Its Protection of Anglo Economic
Interests”
Diana Noreen Rivera, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
The heightened
national awareness of police violence against the Black community can, in part,
be accredited to several factors. Organizations like Black Lives Matter utilize
the Internet and social media to maintain a continual discourse on the subject
of police violence. News outlets like CNN simultaneously see a cultural
responsibility and commercial value to reporting on police violence against
Black communities. And, most recently, at Democratic Primary Debates,
Presidential hopefuls Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton cite police violence
against Black communities as reason for police reform. While the aforementioned
factors sustain a necessary and critical dialogue on the failure of law
enforcement and democracy to protect and serve Black communities, once again,
the discourse adheres to a White/Black racial binary that omits police violence
committed against Latino communities.In my presentation, I assert Paredes’s George Washington Gómez corrects this
national myopia as it opens up a narrative space that critically documents
historic acts of police violence against the Mexican body politic of south
Texas. As part of the novel’s critical documentation, I consider the intersections
of State sanctioned police violence, capitalist economy, and the social
conditions of working class Mexicans in the novel. To this end, I contend that
Paredes engages in a discourse that implicates police violence (or more broadly
speaking, "the Law," to account for the actions of vigilante rinches, Jonesville police,
national law enforcement agencies and the legal system) as a form of systemic
violence against Mexicans that historically protects Anglo economic interests.
Anglo capitalists in south Texas desired a fearful, suppressed body of working
class Mexicans to be used and discarded at the whim of economic necessity.
Therefore, I read Paredes’s novel George
Washington Gómez’s many instances of policing as Paredes’s commentary on
how “the Law” enforced and maintained these social, racial, and even gendered
conditions among the Mexican community. Moreover, my presentation considers the
detrimental affects and effects police violence has on titular character
Gualinto/George Gómez’s subjective identity. While literary critics have
largely attributed Gualinto’s unsettled psyche and anti-heroic assimilation to
his educational experiences, I assert Gualinto’s run-ins with police, from his
childhood to young adulthood, also underscore his mono-cultural assimilation
into White society. I trace Gualinto’s encounters with police as he witnesses
and becomes cognizant of the fact that Mexican lives don’t matter to law
enforcement out to serve Anglo interests. Ultimately, these factors, plus a
significant section in the novel where Gualinto is literally in the manner of
Althusserian “interpellation” hailed by a Jonesville policeman, contribute to
why he polices his own people at the novel’s end.Diana Noreen Rivera, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
“El
alma adolescente en Cantos de
Adolescencia de Américo Paredes”
María Cecilia Ruiz, University of
San Diego
En este trabajo me acerco al primer libro de poemas de
Americo Paredes, Cantos de Adolescencia,
que el escribió entre los 17 y los 21 años. El libro fue publicado en 2007 por
Arte Público Press. La edición fue preparada con una introducción excelente por
B.V. Olguín y Omar Vásquez Barbosa, quienes también se encargaron de traducir
los poemas al inglés. Me acerco a los poema para indagar en la adolescencia del
poeta, más precisamente en el alma adolescente del poeta, puesto que es su alma
la que el poeta adolescente se esfuerza por captar, describir y compartir.
Paredes describe en el prólogo su adolescencia como
una etapa de transición, de “metamórfosis”, caracterizada por ceguera y
desequilibrio. A la vez fue una etapa, dice, de primeras experiencias hacia la
adultez: primeras pasiones, primeros sentimientos patrióticos, primeros
ideales, primeros amores, primeras luchas de ideas, etc. Escribe, “Es el tiempo
en que el pensamiento se entabla una lucha entre la horda de ideas en embrión
que allí habitan – lucha por conseguir un lugar definido y permanente en la
conciencia del individuo.” A continuación lo que resalta es precisamente su
biculturalismo, ser ambos mexicano y americano. Explica, hablando de si mismo
en tercera persona, “se sintió un
momento mexicano y al otro puro yanqui. Pero con la adolescencia llega el
tiempo de las decisiones.” Es decir, sabemos por lo que sigue y por el
contenido de los poemas, que decidió explorar y amar su identidad mexicana, y
de allí el patriotismo ya referido.
Rosaura Sánchez, University of California, San Diego
I want to take up Américo Paredes' notion of “Greater Mexico”: its trajectory within Chicano/a critical discourses, its limitations, and ultimately to see how the construct of “Greater Mexico,” bound up as it is with unstable identities and social location, is represented and plays out in Paredes' own work, George Washington Gόmez, particularly in the character Gualinto. Paredes' notion of Greater Mexico is at its origins a cultural nationalist construct that Ramón Saldívar has taken further and analyzed as a “transnational imaginary.” For Saldívar it is “an imaginary social space consisting in transnational communities of shared fates” (59). It is undoubtedly a cultural time-space construct, born out of proximity to Mexico and recent immigration from Mexico. This imaginary space of an imagined community historically linked to a territory called Mexico after 1821 is of a much more ephemeral nature for those of Mexican origin born in the U.S., miles from the border. This transnational space does not always have the cultural nostalgic pull that it has for recent immigrants or border residents, as Paredes himself signaled in his novel George Washington Gómez. Gualinto might have grown up as a child fully conscious of this cultural transnational space but when he grows up and moves away, for him the border is a site of danger, of menacing Mexicans allied to fascist forces, and of ignorant Chicanos. In a sense, in the novel George Washington Gómez, Paredes ultimately deconstructs his own notion of a “Greater Mexico.”
“Stirring Echoes: Critical Folklorism and Américo Paredes' Cancionero”
Elena V. Valdez, Rice University In my paper, I read Américo Paredes' A Texas-Mexican Cancionero: Folksongs of the Lower Border (1976) through the analytic lens I call critical folklorism, which sheds light on just how central folklore has been to the making and re-making of Chicana/o studies since before the Chicano Movement. I argue Paredes's Cancionero exemplifies one way in which people of Mexican descent have written from the place of colonial difference, a concept I borrow from Walter Mignolo, Nelson Maldonado-Torres and other Latin American theorists. For evidence, I unpack the theory of folklore Paredes expresses in his Cancionero and compare it to Chicana/o Movement activists' reconfiguration of folkloric material for their nationalist project. Scholars often overlook Paredes' Cancionero, and I hope to reinvigorate interest in this work and others like it by introducing the concept of critical folklorism. This paper stems from my dissertation project, which traces the ebb and flow of folklore as an analytic in the field of Chicana/o studies and proposes we make a return to it as a valuable site of inquiry because it remains central to Chicana/o cultural productions and political motivations to this day.
“In Defense of Francisco I. Madero: Felix Sommerfeld and U.S.-Mexican Cooperation on the Border”
Heribert von Feilitzsch, Historian, Mexican-German Relations
Felix Sommerfeld, a German native, military veteran, mining engineer, and highly sophisticated naval intelligence officer aptly studied and manipulated local people along the Mexican-American border during the Mexican Revolution for his ends. He successfully recruited agents on both sides of the border and thwarted the efforts of Pascual Orozco and his Científico backers to overthrow the government of Francisco I. Madero in 1912. Amazingly, the German secret agent did this with the help of the U.S. Justice Department and local law enforcement, American business interests in New York, and lobbyists in Washington D.C. Thousands of actual and potential revolutionary recruits ended incarcerated for years. Sommerfeld's organization along the border in 1912 is the largest foreign secret service operation ever mounted on U.S. soil. Sommerfeld made this possible because of his cunning organizational skills and his intimate knowledge of the unique culture along the Mexican-American border, one of the central topics of Américo Paredes' scholarly work. I will outline the layers of cooperation between Sommerfeld's organization, local residents, and U.S. agencies in this critical fight for survival of the democratically-elected government of Francisco I. Madero.
"Ashes on the Rio Bravo"
A Tribute to Américo Paredes
A Tribute to Américo Paredes
Songs by Flaco Jiménez
"El mojado sin licencia"
"La mojadita"
Conjunto Acordeones de Tejas
Dr. Jeanine “Gigi” Gaucher-Morales
The Gigi Gaucher-Morales Memorial Lecture
Series has been established by the Morales Family Lecture Series Endowment in
memory of the late Dr. Jeanine (Gigi) Gaucher-Morales, who passed away on May
20, 2007. Born in Paris, France, Dr. Gaucher-Morales was a professor emerita of
French and Spanish at Cal State L.A. She taught from 1965 to 2005, thus
devoting four decades of her academic life to Cal State L.A., where her
friends, students, and colleagues knew her as Gigi.
During her long and productive tenure at
this campus, Gigi taught generations of students the literature and culture of
France, of the Anglophone world, and of Latin America, including the Caribbean.
With her husband, Dr. Alfredo O. Morales, also professor emeritus of Spanish,
she co-founded, directed, and served as advisor of Teatro Universitario en
Español for almost 25 years, bringing to Cal State L.A. annual theater
productions based on plays stemming from different traditions and languages,
such as the Maya (“Los enemigos”), Colonial Mexico (“Aguila Real”), Spanish (“Bodas
de sangre”), French (“The Little Prince”), and English (“Under the Bridge”). In
addition, Gigi was the founder at Cal State L.A. of Pi Delta Phi, the national
French honor society. She was recognized and honored by the French government
for her contributions to the knowledge of French civilization in Latin America
and the United States. Gigi was also honored by her peers at Cal State L.A.
with the 1991-1992 Outstanding Professor Award.
On March 7, 1997, Gigi was recognized by
the Council of the City of Los Angeles, State of California, with a resolution
that in part reads as follows: “Be it resolved that by the adoption of this
resolution, the Los Angeles City Council does hereby commend Dr. Jeanine ‘Gigi’
Gaucher-Morales valued Professor of Spanish and French at California State
University, Los Angeles for her vision and her gift to the people of Los
Angeles and for contributing to the richness of multi-cultural arts in Los
Angeles.”
Every spring quarter, the Gigi
Gaucher-Morales Memorial Lectures will honor Gigi’s academic ideals as a teacher,
colleague, and mentor. The lectures will respond to Gigi’s diverse yet
interconnected interests in civilizations of the world, such as Mesoamerica and
those of the Andes, Latin America, Asia, and Francophone America, from Canada
to Haiti. Gigi embodied the highest academic standards in a range of academic
fields that were truly global and interdisciplinary. The Memorial Lectures
shall serve as a forum for distinguished guest speakers who engage vital topics
of our age in a world setting, thus offering students, staff, and faculty at
Cal State L.A. an opportunity to be critically exposed to different areas of
study and artistic traditions that constitute the highest cultural aspirations
of humanity. On May 5-6, 2017, the Gigi Gaucher-Morales Memorial Conference
Series will sponsor a conference on Mexican writer Alfonso Reyes (Monterrey,
Nuevo León, 1889-1959). For more information, visit: http://alfonsoreyesatcalstatela.blogspot.com/
