Newberry Seminar in Borderlands and Latino Studies, April 2: Saturday Mini-Conference

 *Saturday, April 2, 9:00AM - 3:00PM
Saturday Mini Conference
*Lunch will be provided for this conference. Please RSVP by Thursday,
March 31.

*The Newberry Seminar in Borderlands and Latino Studies*
Co-sponsored by Northwestern University's Program in Latina and Latino
Studies, the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre
Dame, the Center for Latino Research at DePaul University, and the Katz
Center for Mexican Studies at the University of Chicago

All papers are pre-circulated electronically to those who plan to attend
the seminar in person. For a copy of the paper, e-mail Heather Radke at
scholl@newberry.org <mailto:scholl@newberry.org>,or call (312) 255-3524.

*Panel One: Politics and Violence*
Commentator: Geraldo Cadava, Northwestern University

*"We have no rights because we have no vote:" Mexicans in the Deep
South, 1900-1910
Sarah Cornell, University of New Mexico*
This essay examines the experiences of thousands of Mexican workers in
Louisiana and Mississippi. This moment sheds light on how Mexicans
disrupted the South's black-white binary and evolving economic
relations. I discuss why Southern planters sought Mexican labor
specifically, the conflicts that developed between planters and
Mexicans, especially those held as peons, and the strategies workers
used to negotiate the South's systems. Rarely invoking their legal
status as white, Mexicans used other strategies to claim rights with
varying success. I also outline how Mexicans used these events to foment
opposition to the Diaz regime, linking it to U.S.-style white supremacy.

*Chicano Lynching's Erasure and Representation: Narrativizing a Usable Past
Annette Rodriguez, Brown University*
Abstract to Come

*
Panel Two: Culture and Performance*
Commentator: Jason Ruiz, University of Notre Dame

*A Contest for Community: La Prensa's Annual Musical Popularity Contests
Christina D. Abreu, University of Michigan*
Focusing on the relationship between the colonia de habla española de
Nueva York and the mass culture industries, this paper examines the
annual musical popularity contests and fundraising festivals sponsored
by La Prensa, New York City's most prominent  Spanish-language daily
newspaper, between 1941 and 1959.  I argue that a review of the contest
rules and results as well as analysis of the performers and public(s)
who attended the fundraising showcase celebrating each year's winners
offers a micro view into the macro processes of community development,
political and cultural citizenship, and racial and ethnic identity
formation.  This paper contends that the diversity of performers and
audiences participating in the contests and festivals points towards a
community much less homogenous and unified than previously understood.

*On Transborder Folk Performance: Greater Mexico, Postmodernity and
Chicana/o Cultural Studies
Alex E. Chávez, University of Notre Dame*
This paper interrogates the intellectual project of Chicana/o Cultural
Studies in an attempt to dismantle the conventional "symbolic
anthropology" of ethnic-Mexican culture and in its stead recuperate a
grounded vision of the always-emergent forms of life and quotidian
aesthetic practices that abound in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. With a
focus on folk-music performance, oral poetry, and verbal play among
Mexican immigrant communities, Chávez unearths how their situated
discursive features invoke deep epistemic interventions that fracture
the transborder imaginary -- a social field contoured by
institutionalized (state and non-state) knowledge apparatuses central in
maintaining social borders that racialize, isolate, and render
vulnerable an entire group of people.
*

Panel Three: Legal Borders*
Commentator: Marc Rodriguez, University of Notre Dame

*A Fence, Quails and Ocelots on the U.S.-Mexico Border: The Caloboz Land
Grant
Guadalupe T. Luna, Northern Illinois University*
This Seminar addresses the intersection of federal immigration policy
with the present property rights of homeowners residing in near
proximity to the nation's southernmost geographical border. This
intersection is long rooted in the past historical struggles of former
property holders who sustained land losses following the United States
War against Mexico. Grounded in legal and historical evidence this
Seminar rejects the formal record that the innumerable land losses
following the war accrued because of the conflict between two legal
systems. Linking the past with the present this Seminar provides a
contemporary example of an Indigenous landholder confronting the
historically based burdens of landownership in the region. Specifically
the United States is constructing a fence across the nation's
southernmost geographical border. This Seminar will thereby focus on the
present opposition of a holder of a land grant held in her family since
Spain and Mexico governed the region. In comparison wealthier and public
based properties escaped the harm and burdens of the fence, its
purported intent and purpose. Ultimately and in sum this Seminar
underscores the human rights struggles of Indigenous populations to
retain their property interests under the jurisprudence of United States
legal systems.