ENFOQUE

INSIDE THIS ISSUE

The Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies at Indiana University

fall 2015 newsletter

355 N. Jordan Ave. Bloomington, IN 47405 | clacs@indiana.edu | www.indiana.edu/~clacs | 812-855-9097

2 - Saludo del Director3 - New Director & Visiting Scholars 4 - Gerard Aching & Original Chocolate 5 - Valentina Napolitano5 - Undergraduate Open House

6 -7 - Undergrad Essay Contest Winners 8 - Vicky Unruh (El Foro) 9 - Carlos Sandroni (El Foro) 10 - Rebecca Dirksen (El Foro)11 - Stephen Selka (El Foro)

11 - Student Accomplishments12 - Carlos Alzugaray Treto13 - Faculty Accomplishments 14-15 - New Affiliated Faculty

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SALUDO DEL DIRECTOR

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It has been a semester of transitions at CLACS:Taking over the directorship from Shane Greene in July, I’ve found amazing staff people in Alfio Saitta (Associate Director), Katie Novak (Academic Secretary) and our four graduate assistants Eli Konwest, Nick Greven, Sierra Funk and Jordan Reifsteck, and it’s been great to meet our Maya lecturer Quetzil Castañeda and Haitian Creole Associate Instructor David Tezil, as well as so many CLACS affiliates. And then there is the new Global and International Studies Building into which we moved in August. Alfio and Katie have managed the move seamlessly, weeding through files and packing and unpacking loads of boxes so that at the beginning of the semester we were ready to go. Overall, we’ve done well in terms of securing office space and work space for our GAs and for visitors. Although we lost our “casa” and have less storage space, we’ve gained a great conference room right next to us, we are easier to reach, and we have certainly more light and modern furniture. We are sharing space with other area studies centers and modern languages and cultures departments, and it’s been fun to explore new collaborations and connections. Come see for yourself and visit us, if you haven’t yet! This semester got very quickly very busy: we have hosted four Research Forum lectures, a lecture co-spon-sored by Religious Studies on Pope Francis, a book presentation, and an open house and study abroad showcase for undergraduate students. We have organized conversations with our standing research groups, the Brazilian Stud-ies Group and the Minority Languages and Cultures Projects for future events. We have also hosted two wonderful visiting scholars, Haitian linguist Rochambeau Lainy, who came with a grant from the Open Society Foundation, and Brazilian ethnomusicologist Carlos Sandroni, this year’s Fulbright Brazil Musicology Chair at the Jacobs School and CLACS. Carlos also organized “Batuque,” a concert in collaboration with the Latin American Music Center and Butler University’s women’s choir. More CLACS collaborations with the Latin American Music Center are in the works for the spring, stay tuned. As a Caribbeanist by training, I am glad to report that we have formed an excellent working relationship with the Creole Institute under the leadership of emeritus Professor Albert Valdman. We also have been part of an initia-tive on IU-Cuba partnerships, led by CLACS affiliate Gerardo González, dean emeritus and professor at the School of Education, and special adviser to President McRobbie on Cuba. One outcome was the visit, in November, of Cuban diplomat and educator Carlos Alzugaray Treto, who presented two talks on Cuban-American relations. At SGIS, we are actively shaping our role in the larger “global and international” panorama. Our graduate stu-dents invite you to their first ever graduate conference focused not on Latin America but on the Global South, to take place in March 3-4, 2016. We are also working with other centers towards a framework of “critical area studies” in this post-Cold War and post-Title VI federal funding era. I’ve known CLACS this semester as a hub of remarkable presentations and discussions on questions of intan-gible heritage, chocolate, diasporic religious practices, the politics of trash, and so much more. More than ever, we are a project in progress, I look forward to working with all of you on it!

-Anke Birkenmaier

CLACS moved to a new building on campus in early August of this year, the Global and International Studies Build-ing (see front page picture). Located south of Wells Library near the intersection of 10th Street and Jordan Avenue, the new location has already proved to bring an increase of student traffic through CLACS, which is on the second floor in the east wing of the building. The house at 1125 E. Atwater is now being used by the College of Arts and Sciences for community outreach. For more information and to view more pictures of the new building, visit sgis.indiana.edu/gisb/.

CLACS MOVES TO A NEW HOME

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Carlos Sandroni is an Associate Professor in the Department of Music at the Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil. He studied guitar and sociology in Rio de Janeiro (his native town) and ethnomusicology in Paris. His main research topics are the history of samba, the history of Brazilian popular music, and traditional music from Brazilian Northeast as intangible heritage. He published two books: Mário con-tra Macunaíma – cultura e política em Mário de Andrade (1988), on the work of the Brazilian musicologist and writer Mário de Andrade (1893-1945), and Feitiço decente – transformações do samba no Rio de Janeiro, 1917-1933 (2001), on the history of samba in the early XXth century. He co-edited, with Márcia Sant’Anna, Samba de roda no recôncavo baiano (2007), and with Sandro Salles, Patrimônio cultural em debate (2014). Sandroni’s work has appeared in Virtual Brazilian Anthropology, Cahiers de Musiques Traditionnelles, Ethnologie Française and elsewhere. He was the president of the Brazilian Ethnomusicol-ogy Society between 2002 and 2004.

Rochambeau LAINY is an Associate Professor at the State University of Haiti, where he teaches semantics, psy-cholinguistics, pedagogy, linguistics and literature. His main research topics are the semantics, cognition, and pathology of language acquisition. He studied Creole and French literature at the State University of Haiti and linguistics and pedagogy at the University of Rouen in France (2002-2010), where he wrote his thesis, Temps

et aspect dans la structure de l’énonciation rapportée: comparaison entre le français et le créole haïtien (2010). In 2015, he wrote a novel in Haitian Creole entitled Absans-Prezans Koyali (2015), and his most recently published article is titled, “Des actions pour renforcer l’accès des locuteurs du créole haïtien aux progrès intellectuels, techniques et scientifiques” (2013). He is an elected member of the Academy of Haitian Creole since 2014 and is currently working on the project: “Analogy in the process to form the words and the mainning in the Creoles of the Caribbean; a comparison between the Creole of Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique and Guyane.”

CLACS welcomed a new Director in July 2015, Anke Birkenmaier. Dr. Birkenmaier received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 2004. She is a specialist in Latin American and Caribbean literature and culture. Her work has focused on the intersections between literature and modern mass media, on avant-garde movements in Latin America, and on critical race and cultural studies in the Americas. The author of Alejo Carpentier y la cultura del surrealismo en América Latina (2006) (Premio Iberoamericano, LASA) and co-editor of Cuba: un siglo de lit-eratura (2004) and Havana Beyond the Ruins. Cultural Mappings after 1989 (Duke UP, 2011), Birkenmaier has a long standing interest in building relations between Cuba, its diaspora, and

the United States. At Indiana University, Birkenmaier has served as Associate Director of the Latino Studies Program, where she co-organized, together with the IU Cinema, a bi-annual Latino Film Festival and Conference (2012 and 2014). She also has co-directed a study-abroad program in the Dominican Republic (2013 and 2015) and is looking forward to promoting more student and faculty exchanges with Latin America at CLACS.

NEW CLACS DIRECTOR

VISITING SCHOLAR CARLOS SANDRONI

VISITING SCHOLAR ROCHAMBEAU LAINY

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In Fall 2015, CLACS invited student submissions for its first annual Undergraduate Student Essay Contest. Partici-pants were instructed to produce original essays that highlighted study abroad experiences in Latin America or the Caribbean during the 2014-2015 academic year. The first prize winner was Anne Riley, a senior in the Department of Anthropology who is also a CLACS Undergraduate Certificate student for her essay about her independent travel to Peru. Second prize went to Becca Reeder, a senior majoring in Speech-Language Pathology and Spanish, for her essay about her participation in the IU-CIEE Santiago, Dominican Republic study abroad program. Their essays can be found starting on page 6.

GERARD ACHING BOOK READING

Gerard Aching, Professor of Africana and Romance Studies at Cornell University, read from his newest book, Freedom from Liberation: Slavery, Sentiment, and Literature in Cuba on October 29th. In this book, Aching explores the complexities of enslave-ment in the autobiography of Cuban slave-poet Juan Francisco Manzano (1797-1854) and complicates the universally recognized assumption that a slave’s foremost desire is to be freed from bondage. Unlike other slave narratives that presented the African slave as maintaining a universal desire for freedom that trumped all other feelings and wishes, Aching utilized Manzano’s life to present the slave as individuals maintaining just as much complexity and depth in character as any other person, and who built and maintained their own social hierarchies and familial relationships. Thus they were emotionally invested in their surroundings in such a way that seems to contradict

predominant notions of freedom and bondage that were found in slave narratives in the U.S. Aching’s analysis of Manzano’s autobiography added a new layer of complexity to these fascinating resources that took on substantially different characteristics depending on the region in which they were produced.

On October 22nd, CLACS hosted an event in combination with the IU Food Studies Institute and the College of Arts and Sciences featuring fifth generation Maya farmer Juan Cho who gave a talk entitled “The Original Chocolate: A Gift of the Rainforest.” Mr. Cho gave a charming presentation on the history of chocolate production in Belize. Having worked for his family’s chocolate enterprise all of his life, Mr. Cho not only covered chocolate production but also pointed to a number of ways in which that work could connect with rainforest conservation efforts. One example of overlap between the business agenda and concerns for conservation is the commitment to us-ing traditional stone tools. To highlight this aspect of his work, Mr. Cho demonstrated several stone tools and explained how they are utilized in chocolate production. As part of the chocolate tasting portion of the event, Mr. Cho provided squares of dark chocolate as well as hot cocoa with a similar taste and consistency as coffee. Faculty, staff, students and friends got to take part in a little bit of Maya culture in the United States and, along the way, became informed about the larger mission to educate through sustainable tourism programs in Belize.

THE ORIGINAL CHOCOLATE: A GIFT OF THE RAINFOREST

UNDERGRADUATE ESSAY CONTEST

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The 2015 Undergrad Open House, held on October 13th, was quite a success and was the largest, best attended Open House to date. This year it was held in the lounge of the Global Studies building, allowing CLACS to better include representatives from other centers and departments. The highlight of the event was the addition of the Study Abroad Showcase in which students could learn about CLACS summer programs to Jamaica and Yucatán, Mexico as well

as other programs through the Office of Overseas Studies. As part of the showcase, the winners of the Study Abroad Essay contest were announced. Students also learned about the academic opportunities available through CLACS including the CLACS certificate and minor. Mostly, undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff were able to mingle in a relaxed, fun environment while viewing the film “The Battle of Chile” and a slideshow featuring photographs taken by CLACS affiliated faculty and students. And as if that wasn’t enough, an added bonus was delicious tamales and salsas provided by local chef Bivi. CLACS looks forward to similar events in the future!

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On November 5th, Associate Professor of Anthropology Dr. Valentina Napolitano from the University of Toronto, gave a presentation at CLACS on her research about Latin American immigrants living in Rome and their relation-ships with Catholicism. Dr. Napolitano’s talk was titled “Pope Francis and Catholic Borderlands,” and dealt mostly with material in her recently published book, Migrant Hearts and the Atlantic Return: Transnationalism and the Roman Catholic Church, but also highlighted the specific influences Pope Francis, as a Latin American Pope, is hav-ing on Catholicism. Dr. Lessie Jo Frazier of the IU Gender Studies department provided remarks and reflections after the presentation. Dr. Napolitano’s research points out the differences in understandings about Catholicism that exist within the Catholic Church and amongst its adherents, especially about different figures of worship like La Virgen de Guadalupe. Dr. Napolitano’s research focuses on critical Catholic Studies as well as the Anthropology of migration, traces, and borderlands. She is also the author of Mujerci-tas and Medicine Men: living in urban Mexico.

VALENTINA NAPOLITANO

UNDERGRADUATE OPEN HOUSE

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UNDERGRADUATE ESSAY CONTEST

Understanding Modern Culture in an Archaeological Site

1st Prize Winner: Anne Riley

This summer, I traveled to Peru to work on an archaeological excavation of a pre-Inca site from the Late Middle Horizon. I had never been to South America and was traveling alone to work with people I had never met. I felt nervous as I waited in airports during layovers that were entirely too long. When I finally landed in Lima late at night, I forgot my sweatshirt on the plane and had to wait two hours until a staff member could retrieve the sweatshirt and take it to the lost and found for me to pick up, during which time, I unintentionally fell asleep on the airport floor. After receiving my sweatshirt, I took a taxi to a backpack-ers’ hostel. The Lima traffic reminded me of videos I had seen in Drivers Ed of the terrifying driving practices that take place in India. When I arrived at the hostel, I was both too tired and too scared to do anything but stay in my room and go to bed immediately. Although I was off to a rocky start with Peru, after meeting up with the rest of our crew and taking a long bus ride to the community neighbor-ing our dig site, I felt excited to explore. It was a small yet noisy town with a bustling market and many shops and restaurants. Clothes were hanging on lines to dry on the rooftops of almost every building. On the outskirts of the town was the community cemetery. Be-hind the cemetery was the community dump. And just beyond the dump was our archaeological site. The site consisted of the remains of a small population from approximately 800-900 AD. The walls of past houses, located in a small valley,

had long since been buried beneath the sand of the northern Peruvian desert. On our first workday at the site, we explored the immediate area. On the top of one of the surrounding mountains, we found a past temple; the foundation and portions of some of the walls were still clearly visible, standing above ground. Scattered around the temple, sitting out on the surface, were the preserved remains of offerings that had been left hundreds of years ago, including pot-tery, textiles, food items, skeletal remains of past burials, and copious amounts of modern-day trash that had accumulated from the site’s proximity to the local dump. I remarked that it was sad that the community thought so little of its history that it would dump and burn garbage on an archaeological site, allowing historical artifacts and even human remains to sit alongside broken bottles, plastic, and old shoes. Despite the less-than-glamorous work environment, the level of preserva-tion was far beyond anything that I had ever seen. The dry desert had provided ideal conditions for preservation, and as we continued to excavate, the amounts of our findings were incredible. In the Late Middle Horizon, it was typical practice for a family to dispose of accumulated trash by burying it in the floors of their homes. As we un-covered the walls of the houses and dug into the floors, we were able to follow the natural stratigraphy and see each layer of trash that had been deposited. We found broken pottery pieces, shells, textile pieces, scraps of rope, botanical remains including fruits, seeds, and maize, faunal skeletal remains, and stone tools, all pre-

served in incredible conditions given the age of the site. It was also typical practice for the residents to bury their dead in the floors of their homes. We excavated with the knowledge of the possibility of encountering a fully articulated human skeleton; although, we found no such burial. We finished the excavation in three weeks and spent the last week of the project taking inventory and

conducting material analysis of the ar-tifacts collected. The collected artifacts, as well as the larger structures that we had left behind in the field, were very telling of the behaviors, common cultural practices, and interactions had of the culture to which the objects had belonged. This experience was my second archaeological excavation, although my first international excava-tion, and as such, I was already well aware that being an archaeologist is far less glamorous than one might imagine, but all the more fascinating, stimulating, and fulfilling. (continued on pg. 8)

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A Month in the DominicanI was bitten with wanderlust when I was young, and have traveled to other states and countries since I can remember. But until May 11, 2014, I had never been to a third world country, and had no reference for how poverty-stricken parts of the Dominican Republic are until I was there. Normally, when you think of the Dominican Republic, you think of the crystal blue seas of the Carib-bean and thatched huts on gorgeous white beaches. Unfortunately, many travelers miss out on the true Do-minican culture by staying in resorts that idealize vacations. Instead, we were immersed in the Dominican culture by stay-ing with host families in Santiago, the second largest city in the DR. The closest beach is over an hour away; although we went on weekend excursions, staying in an urban area allowed us to focus on the culture and the language of the people with-out being distracted by the pristine, sparkling waters. Our host families formed what the Dominican consid-ers a middle class—most citizens are either very poor or very rich—and yet, I still experienced the wake-up call of culture shock; having five min-utes of hot water in the shower was a luxury, toilet paper was thrown in a zafacón (trash can), and we could only drink bottled water. But as I as-similated to these changes in routine, it became secondhand nature and I forgot I was surrounded by poverty. We would walk twenty minutes through the city to get to our class on the campus of the Pon-

tificada Universidad Católica de Madre y Maestra (PUCMM), and our path took us through Zurza II, our color-ful, groomed, and safe neighborhood, until the road became dirt, chickens roamed freely, and we walked in single file on a cement and iron bridge over a creek lined with trash and sewage. Suddenly in the city proper, we had to cross four lanes of busy taxis and conchos that tend to ignore traffic laws and pass watchiman, hired guards, to get to PUCMM’s campus. Watchiman would be in banks or money exchange stores, on street corners, some in uni-form, others wearing street clothes, all blatantly carrying rifles. But the overpopulated noise of the city was nothing compared to the poverty of an outlying region of Santiago, Cienfuegos (meaning “a hundred fires”), which houses the city’s garbage dump. This little suburb has dirt roads, houses made of any materi-al they could find, and a smell with no visible source permeating everything. My class spent a few hours helping at a school there, Niños con una Esperanza (Children with Hope). The school was

not extravagant by any means, with cement walls, floors, and a simple metal roof. They have expanded over the last ten years from a one-room schoolhouse to a multiple-floored building with a covered playground and cafeteria. We helped with their project of building an agricultural center to be able to grow fresh vegetables. After working a while, I poured my bucket of gravel on the ground, turned and looked out over Cienfuegos where I saw the ugliest mountain I have ever seen; there were no trees or bushes, no grass or hint of green. It was a mountain created out of trash from Santiago. And when I looked closer, I saw trucks and people, climbing in the mountain of trash to find a few pesos’ worth of plastic or metal. The exchange rate is about 40 Dominican pesos to one American dollar; these people had no other option than to spend their days looking through trash and collect what we consider a worthless few cents. (continued on pg. 10)

UNDERGRADUATE ESSAY CONTEST2nd Prize Winner: Becca Reeder

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LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH FORUMVicky Unruh

This lecture by Vicky Unruh, Pro-fessor Emerita of Latin American Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Kansas, was part of the Latin American Research Forum Series. Dr. Unruh dis-cussed the multifarious character of a physical space, specifically the Necrópolis Cristobal Colón in Havana, Cuba. The Necrópo-lis Cristobal Colón is one of the largest cemeteries in the West-

ern Hemisphere and is a popular tourist stop for visitors to contemporary Cuba. The site of Fidel Castro’s first memorable public appearance in 1951, the Colón entrance also witnessed Fidel’s first use of the word “socialism” in 1961 to describe the Cuban Revolution. Decades of official oratory have reinforced the cemetery as a renewable site of ostensibly immutable state authority but have also rendered it the rich target of cultural inquiry, satire, or critique. This talk explored Post-Soviet Cuban fiction and film representations of the cemetery as a cultural “vortex of behavior,” to use Joseph Roach’s concept, or a “prac-ticed place,” in Michel de Certeau’s terms, for unpacking, cri-tiquing, or recasting residual, if threadbare revolutionary ideals. Dr. Unruh’s talk also examined the cemetery as a ground zero of Cuban filmic and literary imaginings of confrontation with a seemingly eternal revolutionary state and the fertile terrain these imaginings offer for disassembling the all-encompassing national communities that modern cemeteries ostensibly embody and for generating smaller-scale, tentative, and mortal models for community and affiliation. Vicky Unruh is Professor Emerita of Latin American Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Kansas. Her scholarship focuses on 20th and 21st Century Latin American literary and intellectual culture as manifested primarily in nar-rative, theatre, film, and artistic movements. She is the author of Latin American Vanguards: The Art of Contentious Encoun-ters; Performing Women and Modern Literary Culture in Latin America; and numerous articles in journal and books. She is the co-editor of Telling Ruins in Latin America and the coordinator a special issue of PMLA on Work (October 2012). She is cur-rently completing a book on post-Soviet Cuba.

Intimations of Mortality: The Cemetery in Post-Soviet Cuban Film and Fiction September 9, 2015

However, after spending a month abroad studying what was essentially ancient garbage, my perspec-tive had changed regarding history’s value in Peru. While material remains from past cultures capti-vated me, the sight of modern trash, cultural mate-rial in every sense, initially saddened me. It is not the case that Peruvians care little of history or historical artifacts. While we encoun-tered many in the community who were inter-ested in our research, as well as a few local history advocates, it became clearer to me that the way we distinguish value between past material remains and present material remains is something largely distinct to our culture. While many, if not most, of the Peruvians understood that there was an archaeological site next to their dump, they viewed ancient garbage and modern garbage as garbage all the same. In fact, many thought it was strange to see foreigners so interested in what was going on in their community dump. The word “palimpsest” derives from the Greek word palimpsestos, or “scraped again,” and is used to describe a document that has been partly written over, with older imageries visible under-neath more recent imageries. Any location can be a palimpsest, exposing events both current and dis-tant in time. All evidence present is evidence none-theless of thriving cultures. The way we under-stand and view the evidence we see varies largely in accordance with our background and environ-ment. My experience in Peru taught me that as an international scientist, it is incredibly important to realize the differences between the viewpoints held by one’s self and by the people living in the region being studied in order to avoid misinterpreting the views of a culture, whether ancient or modern. Only then can we truly understand a culture.

Understanding Modern Culture (continued from pg. 6)

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LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH FORUMCarlos Sandroni

initiated by a country’s government, such widespread programs take on a “top-down” organization with policies initiated by government authorities and trickling down to local communi-ties where those programs are imple-mented. This approach to program implementation benefits from having a homogenous structure regardless of geographic area, however, also tends to disregard the concerns of local individ-uals involved in that specific program-ming. For example, including musical and cultural performances that can differ substantially from neighborhood to neighborhood, let alone across a large geographic area, raises compli-

cated questions. For those engaged in the work of digitizing and preserving cultural practices, using a “top-down” approach has not been a viable option for the Brazilian govern-ment. In this case it has been extremely important for Brazilian authorities to invest significant resources

to establishing strong communication channels with local groups to deter-mine the best course of action for this program’s implementation. Dr. Sandroni discussed the possibility of groups choosing to not participate in the UNESCO ICH pres-ervation program for various reasons. Because ICH is such a broad term, it can include any number of cultural practices deemed “intangible culture”; however, should a group not identify with the project or have qualms with the Brazilian government or UNESCO,

or any other possible reasons, they may choose not to participate. This creates a curious challenge for the project as the primary objective is to preserve and showcase the very es-sence of intangible Brazilian culture. If a group chooses not to participate yet still belongs to the corpus of Bra-zilian cultural production, how could this be accounted for in the final products? Dr. Sandroni argued that it is extremely important to respect the wishes of groups and individuals who do not wish to participate in the pro-gram while continuing to maintain strong communication channels with these groups in order to facilitate possible collaboration in the future. Although refusals to participate in the preservation program cannot be avoided, it is still advantageous for the Brazilian government to maintain friendly relationships with commu-nity actors who are creating Brazilian culture.

Music and Intangible Heritage in Brazil, October 14, 2015

2016 Graduate Student Conference

On October 14, visiting scholar and Fulbright Chair in Music at the Jacobs School of Music and CLACS, Dr. Carlos Sandroni presented “Music and Intangible Heritage in Brazil” as part of the Latin American Research Forum. The definition of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) is incredibly broad and can include dance, music, literary performance, as well as any number of practices that are a part of Brazilian culture but cannot necessarily be housed as physical items in a museum. The vastness of this definition means that digital preservation of these artifacts requires special care in correctly

identifying specific subjects as well as in maintaining appropriate com-munication channels with the local groups and individuals engaged in these practices. ICH presents a number of challenges for the Brazilian govern-ment and UNESCO, the principal of which is the question of how to work effectively with local actors to digi-tally preserve Brazilian ICH without overstepping into the autonomy of local groups who are engaged in these cultural practices. When

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Rebecca Dirksen, Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at IU, gave a lecture titled “Zafè Fatra (The Affair of Trash): Haiti’s Trash-Talking Musi-cians and Their Pursuit of a Cleaner Port-au-Prince” on the response of young musicians in Port-au-Prince, Haiti to the pervasive problem of gar-bage accumulation. So that new scholars could benefit from her experi-ences, Dr. Dirksen’s talk was purposefully both critical and reflexive of her involvement as an ‘outsider’ to the country. Two projects were discussed, Wucamp, a group of volunteer youths that cleaned up trash in their neigh-borhoods and performed music about environmental degradation, and Zafè Fatra, an ongoing collaborative documentary project about the trash problem. Attendees had the privilege of viewing a rough cut of the film that featured scenes of Haitian streets and young musicians talking about the garbage and performing songs. Dirksen ended the lecture by empha-sizing the benefits of collaborative projects between researchers and local communities. Following the talk, the conversation continued over coffee

and cookies as attendees and Dirksen compared world regions and theoretical perspectives.

LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH FORUMRebecca Dirksen

Zafè Fatra (The Affair of Trash): Haiti’s Trash-Talking Musicians and Their Pursuit of a Cleaner Port-au-Prince, November 11, 2015

That school is the children’s hope. Without the chance to have an education and climb their way out of Cienfuegos, they would be scrounging through garbage with their parents every day for the rest of their lives. After finishing our work in the agricultural center, we returned to spend more time with the kids before we had to leave. Seeing the children laugh and play and be so carefree, forgetting about where their parents work and just be in the moment with their friends was so amazing. It was heartbreaking to leave them all there and go back to my privi-leged life; I hope someday I can go back to help more. We had multiple weekend excursions during our four week stay, traveling to almost every

A Month in the Dominican (continued from pg. 7)

corner of the country. Each trip helped me realize how inundated the island is with history. Although history is not my favorite subject, stories came alive when we studied colonization or past dictators and were physically able to go some-where to see how it is still relevant to the Dominican people. For instance, La Hispanola—the island’s colonial name—was the first island Columbus created a Spanish settle-ment on, and they landed in Puerto Plata, one of the first beaches we visited. Santo Domingo, the capital, is the oldest city in the Americas with continuous Spanish colonial rule, and the Parque de los Haitises illuminated the influence of the indigenous people, the tainos. The Dominican Republic is a beautiful country that is half of

an island in the Caribbean, but is also much more than that. A country immersed in history, tainted by tyranny, and stricken with poverty, the Dominican is much too complex to under-stand after living and studying there for a month. However, the thirty days I spent there helped me to see the blessings in my life, taught me to find the silver lining in even the most hopeless of situations, and find beauty in cultural differences. For now, though, I’ve reached an impasse with myself: my wanderlust wants to keep exploring all the corners of the earth, but I want to go back to the Caribbean as soon as I can, because I left a part of my heart there after a month in the Dominican.

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Stephen SelkaLATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH FORUM

Our Lady of Many Causes: Religion and the Politics of Heritage in Bahia, Brazil December 9, 2015On December 9th, Stephen Selka, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies at IU, closed the Fall 2015 series of El Foro lectures with his presentation, “Our Lady of Many Causes: Religion and the Politics of Heritage in Bahia, Brazil.” Based on work from his upcoming book project, the talk focused on the religious festival “Our Lady of Good Death,” a yearly celebration that takes place in Cachoeira, Bahia. In his talk, Dr. Selka argued that “Africana religion”—the category in which the Our Lady of Good Death festival is placed—is important for many actors outside of scholarly con-texts, and exists in many different political, cultural and economic spheres. The festival itself works between two spheres of religious influence. On the one hand, it is about Mary and her assumption to heaven. On the other, the festival is grounded heavily in Candomblé, an Africana religion practiced in Brazil. Selka’s talk looked at this festival between the 1989 to 1999, look-ing into markers of identity and answering questions of what this religious festival might have meant (and continue to mean) for “being Brazilian”, and in particular, on “being Bahian.” Selka paid note to the dovetailing of the representation of the Our Lady of Good Death festival as both a representa-tion of the resilience of Africana religions and as cultural appropriation, as different actors moved to take advantage of the festival. Links between the United States and the festival—and to the Sisterhood of Our Lady of the Good Death—were one of the root causes for the increased commercialization and politicization of the event, and as Selka described, created a major controversy for the church itself, lifting it from a Bahian problem to a cause of national consciousness. Stephen Selka’s research is broadly concerned with religion in relation to other religions and in relation to projects that are not specifically religious, such as social activism, tourism development and heritage preservation. He is the author of several noteworthy publications, including the book Religion and the Politics of Heritage in Bahia, Brazil, and recently, the article “Morality in the Religious Marketplace: Evangelical Christianity, Candomblé and the Struggle for Moral Distinction in Brazil.”

Alex Elvis Badillo, Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology, CLACS Ph.D. minor• Received the National Science Foundation (NSF) Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (DDRIG),

Summer 2015, for regional archaeological settlement survey investigating land-use change in the rural mountainous region of Quiechapa during the Postclassic period (A.D. 800 - 1521). 

Amanda Ferstead, MA/MPH student in CLACS and the School of Public Health• Presented poster (reflecting the work of Dr. Lucia Guerra-Reyes), “On the Threshold: Understanding Access to

Sexual and Reproductive Health Services for Latinas in Emerging Communities,” at the American Public Health As-sociation Annual Meeting, November 2015.

Ricardo Higelin Ponce de Leon, Ph.D. student in Anthropology, CLACS Ph.D. minor• Recipient, Mellon Innovating International Research, Teaching and Collaboration Dissertation Fellowship for dis-

sertation research in Oaxaca, Mexico during 2016-2017.• Published “Ritualidad y Simbolismo del Postclásico Temprano en la Tumba 1 de San Pedro Ixtlahuaca”: in Tumbas

de Oaxaca. Arqueología Mexicana. Vol. 132: 56-59. (continued on pg. 12)

STUDENT ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Enfoque pg.

CARLOS ALZUGARAY TRETO

Cuban educator, diplomat, and former Ambassador to Belgium and Luxembourg, Carlos Alzugaray Treto, gave a presentation at CLACS on November 19th in the auditorium of the School of Global and International Studies. His presentation focused on the history of Cuba since the Revolution in 1959, and on what Cuba’s future might look like now that relations with the US are becoming friendlier. Dr. Treto gave a critical review of the accomplishments and failures of the Cuban Revolution, noting that some of the more idealistic ways of thinking that had dominated in the Revolutionary government, such as the belief that the market and money could be eliminated, had caused significant difficulties. Further, he remarked on some plans for development currently underway in Cuba, including

offshore drilling for oil and the construction of a major con-tainer shipping port. IU Professor in the School of Education Dr. Gerardo Gonzalez provided some opening remarks to Dr. Treto’s presentation. Dr. Treto holds a Ph.D. in History from the Univer-sity of Havana. He has served in the Cuban Foreign Service since 1961 and was posted as Ambassador to Belgium and Luxembourg between 1994-1996. He is also on the faculty of the Instituto Superior de Relaciones Internacionales (ISRI) and an adjunct professor at the University of Havana. He teaches classes on foreign policy and international affairs as well as on Latin American and Caribbean political integra-tion.

12

Ricardo Higelin Ponce de Leon, Ph.D. student in Anthropology, CLACS Ph.D. minor • Published “Colectividad Funeraria de una Tumba de San Miguel Albarradas”: in Tumbas de Oaxaca. Arque-

ología Mexicana. Vol. 132: 60-63. • Collaborated in three archaeological projects in Oaxaca, Mexico during Summer 2015 led by the Field Museum

of Chicago, SUNY-ALBANY, and the American Museum of Natural History, NY.• Participated in the Learning NAGPRA Collegium hosted by Indiana University. • Awarded David Skomp Travel Grant to present two papers of the Bioarchaeology of Oaxaca at the XVIII Colo-

quio Internacional Juan Comas, Durango Mexico. Nov 2015. Denisa Jashari, Ph.D. student in History, CLACS Ph.D. minor• With funding from the College Arts and Humanities Institute Travel Award, presented “Social Abjection and

Political Subjectivity in Santiago’s Urban ‘Belts of Misery’” at the LASA Congress in San Juan, Puerto Rico. • Attended the Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas in Tepoztlán, Mexico, for which

she received the College of Arts and Sciences Travel Award.• With funding from the History Department, spent 6 weeks in Santiago Chile conducting research. Emma McDonell, Ph.D. student in Anthropology, CLACS Ph.D. minor• Received the Mellon Innovating International Research and Teaching Dissertation Fellowship.• Published an article “Miracle Foods: Hunger Politics and Curative Metaphors” in Gastronomica.• Published book reviews in the Graduate Journal of Food Studies and Gastronomica.• Conducted a feasibility study for dissertation research in Lima and Puno, Peru during the summer with funds

from the CLACS Field Research Grant, an Ostrom Workshop Research Grant, and a Skomp Research Grant.

Student Accomplishments (continued from pg. 11)

Enfoque pg. 13

FACULTY ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Jeff Gould, Rudy Professor of History, IUB• “Ignacio Ellacuría and the Salvadoran Revolution,” Journal of Latin American Studies 47:2, May 2015.• “Entre el Bosque y los Arboles: Utopías Menores y Desencuentros en la Historia Moderna Centroamericana.”

Guerra y Pos Guerra en Centroamerica: Nuevas Preguntas y Debates Recientes, Instituto Mora, Mexico City, 2015.• “The Cost of Solidarity: The Salvadoran Labor Movement in Puerto el Triunfo and Greater San Salvador, 1979-

1980.” Global Labour and the Crisis of High Capitalism, Humboldt University, Berlin, 2015.• Film showing of La Palabra en el Bosque. Instituto Mora, UC Berkeley.Stephanie Kane, Professor of International Studies, IUB• 2015. Bird Names and Folklore from the Emberá (Chocó) in Darién, Panamá. Ethnobiological Letters 6(1): 32-62.   • (with E. Medina and D.M. Michler) Infrastructural Drift in Seismic Cities: Chile, Pacific Rim, 27 February,

2010.  Social Text 33(1) (#122): 71-92. doi: 10.1215/01642472-2831880. Stepanka Korytova, Adjunct Professor of International Studies, IUB• 2015: Meeting the Needs of Victims of Sex Trafficking: DV Victim Services as Appropriate Providers? in Domestic

Violence Report. Law, Prevention, Protection, Enforcement, Treatment, Health, Vol.21, No.1, October/November, 3-4, 11-12. Co-written with T. Strout.

Michael Martin, Professor of Communication and Culture, IUB• Martin, M. T. & Wall, D.C. (Eds.). (2015). The Politics and Poetics of Black Film: Nothing But a Man (Studies in the

Cinema of the Black Diaspora). Bloomington, IN: IU Press. • Martin, M.T. (2015). Struggles for the Sign in the Black Atlantic: The L.A. Collective. In A. N. Field, J. Horak & J. N.

Stewart (Eds.), L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema (pp. 196-224). Berkeley, CA: UC Press. • Martin, M.T. (2015). ’I just wanted my figures to move’: The filmmaking practice of Mike Henderson. Black Cam-

era, vol. 7(1), pp. 60-90.• Chaired panel “The State of Memory of Slavery,” October 22 at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales

Conference, Paris, France.• Received grants from New Frontiers ($19,000), CAHI ($8,500), Ostrom Program ($3,500) to organize two-day

symposium, “From Cinematic Past to Fast Forward Present: D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation—A Centennial Symposium, November 12-13 (2015).

• Introduced two films at IU Cinema: The Battle of Algiers (November 2) and The Birth of a Nation (November 12).• Moderated panel at IU Cinema, Sembene: Father of African Cinema (October 20). John McDowell, Professor of Folklore, IUB• McDowell, J. (2015). ¡Corrido!: The Living Ballad of Mexico’s Western Coast. Albuquerque, NM: University of New

Mexico Press.• McDowell, J. (2015). “Surfing the Tube” for Latin American Song: The Blessings (and Curses) of YouTube. Journal

of American Folklore 128 (2015): 260-272. • 2015 Indiana University Latino Faculty and Staff Council Faculty of the Year Award.Jason McGraw, Associate Professor of History, IUB• “A Tropical Reconstruction,” Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas 12:4 (December 2015):29-32.• IU Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in Society Faculty Seed Grant, 2015.• 2015 Book Prize, Center for the Study of Citizenship, Wayne State University.• 2015 Michael Jiménez Book Prize, Latin American Studies Association. Luciana Namorato, Associate Professor of Portuguese, IUB• Co-organized (with Professor Estela Vieira) the international symposium “Transatlantic Dialogues: Realism and

Modernity in Eça de Queirós and Machado de Assis”, at the IU campus on October 23 and 24, 2015. (continued on pg. 15)

Enfoque pg. 14

An Assistant Professor in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicol-ogy, Rebecca Dirksen’s primary research concerns music and grassroots development in pre- and post-earthquake Haiti, where she has conducted field research for more than a decade. Concurrent projects revolve around creative responses to crisis and disaster, intangible cultural heritage protection, cultural policy, research ethics, and Haitian classical music. Broader research interests expand across the Caribbean and Latin America and include issues of (mis)representation and musical articulations of poverty and violence. Dirksen’s work has appeared in the Yearbook for Traditional Music, the Ethnomusicology Review, the Bulletin du Bureau d’Ethnologie d’Haïti, and elsewhere. She is a Senior Editor for the Diction-ary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography, forthcoming from Oxford University Press, for which she has curated, solicited, and edited entries on cultural figures from the French Caribbean by scholars around the world. Along with several col-leagues, Dirksen previously recorded an independently distributed CD of Haitian classical music, Belle Ay-iti: Mizik Savant Ayisyen, Z.A.M.A. (Friends Together for Haitian Music) (2007). A new recording project is underway in conjunction with the performance series Les Héritages Oubliés Revisités currently taking place in Port-au-Prince, supported by the Banque de la République d’Haïti; the three-CD box set will be released by Manoumba Records within the year. The Conseil d’Administration of the Banque de la République d’Haïti recently honored her “pour son dévouement à l’avancement de la musique haïtienne” with a plaque presented by Haitian President Michel Martelly.

Rebecca DirksenNEW AFFILIATED FACULTY

Dr. Gonzalez is Dean Emeritus and Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies in the Indiana Uni-versity School of Education Higher Education Administration and Student Affairs Program. From July 1, 2000 until June 30, 2015 he served as University Dean of the School. In that role, he directed administrative and budgetary activities of the School on the Bloomington and Indianapolis campuses and provided academic over-

sight to education programs on six regional campuses of IU. Dr. Gonzalez’ teaching and research interests include higher education leadership and finance, underrepresented student success, campus health promotion, and multicultural communication and collaboration. He has addressed nation-al and international groups and published scholarly works on the Cuban-American experience and Latino educational concerns. In 2012, Hispanic Business named him one of the 50 most influential Hispanics in the United States. Upon his retirement from the deanship, President Michael McRob-bie asked him to serve as a special adviser to the IU Office of International Affairs on IU-Cuba partnerships. In addition to his academic appointment in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, Dr. Gonzalez holds appoint-ments as Adjunct Professor of Counseling and Adjunct Professor of Public Health at Indiana University. Dr. Gonzalez received a bachelor’s degree in Psychology in 1974 and a Ph.D. in Counseling and Higher Education Ad-ministration in 1978 from the University of Florida.

NEW AFFILIATED FACULTYGerardo Gonzalez

Enfoque pg. 15

NEW AFFILIATED FACULTYAlberto Varon

Alberto Varon joined IU’s faculty as an Assistant Professor of English and Latino Studies in 2012, and is affiliated with the Departments of American Studies and Gender Studies. He is currently completing a book that examines the intersection of gender and citizenship in early Latino culture. His is the first book-length study of Latino manhood before the civil rights movement of the 1960s and contends that Latinos in the 19th and 20th centuries envisioned themselves as U.S. national citizens through cultural depictions of manhood. It demonstrates how literary manhood sutured regional communities into a national whole and argues that Latinos were deeply invested in U.S. citizenship, and in making Latino manhood a part of U.S. national manhood. Although focused on the category of manhood, this study is in part an intellectual history of Latino Studies and a critique of its long-standing attachment to the late 20th-century as origin point; his book shows how Latinos used print culture to define their place not against but within multiple national projects. Through an analysis of Latino print culture (including fiction, newspapers and periodicals, government documents, essays, unpublished manuscripts, images, travelogues, and other genres), Textual Citizens moves beyond the resistance para-digm that has dominated Latino Studies and uncovers how Latinos shaped—and were shaped—by American cultural life. Although he specializes in Latina/o culture, Alberto teaches courses in ethnic American literature and culture from the 19th-century to the present and in transnational American studies more broadly. He received his M.A. from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. in English with certification in Mexican American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. His research has been supported by the Texas State History Association, the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Proj-ect, Indiana University’s College Art and Humanities Institute and the New Frontiers in Arts and Sciences, and by the Uni-versities of Texas and Chicago. Most recently, he has a forthcoming article, “Pronouncing Citizenship: Juan Nepomuceno Cortina’s War to Be Read.” His next project is on cultural and media adaptation in contemporary Latina/o fiction.

Anya Royce, Chancellor’s Professor of Anthropology, IUB• Field research in May-June and November of 2015 for new project in Juchitán, Oaxaca with Zapotec poets, painters, and

musicians.• 2015-2016 Awardee of the Medalla Guendabinnizaa [The Spirit of the Zapotec People medal] from the Fundación Histórico

Cultural Juchitán in Juchitán, given for distinguished scholarly contributions to the Isthmus Zapotec.• Prestigio y Afiliación en una Comunidad Urbana: Juchitán, Oaxaca, third reprint edition [1975, 1991, 2015], chosen as one of

the 25 most important books published about Juchitán and the Isthmus Zapotec. In press, December 2015. CONACULTA: Mexico DF.

• “Landscapes of the In-Between: Artists Mediating Cultures,” framing chapter, The ArtistTurned Inside-Out, a volume com-memorating the 20th anniversary of the founding of The Irish World Academy of Music and Dance. Helen Phelan and Graham Welch, eds. In press.

• Frontiers in the Arts and Humanities Exploratory Travel Fellowship, for “Zapotec Artists and Their Arts: Heritage and In-novation.”

Kalim Shah, Assistant Professor of Environmental Policy, IUN• Visiting Research Scholar in May-July 2015 to the Center for Environmental Management and Environmental Studies

(CERMES) of the University of the West Indies, Barbados.• Presented research on the Implementation of Regulatory Impact Assessments for introducing national energy efficiency

and conservation standards in Caribbean countries to the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Council of Ministers for Trade and Development (COTED) Annual Meeting in Guyana, November 11, 2015.

Faculty Accomplishments (continued from pg. 13)

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