Latin America Chicago 2013–2014

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2013–2014 LATIN AMERICA CHICAGO

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Annual newsletter of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Chicago

Transcript of Latin America Chicago 2013–2014

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2013

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UCHICAGO

C LCENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

A S

lATin AmeRicA cHicAgo

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table oF contents Letter from the Director A Tale of Two Rios: Urbanization and Displacement in Brazil Reimagining Afro-Latin American History and Art Music, Empowerment, and Social Justice Mexico after a Decade of Drug War Tinker Visiting Professors Faculty Publications Learning Mesoamerican Languages to Explore ArtWorking with Deaf Children in Nebaj, GuatemalaDispossesion, Cows, and Mango Trees in ColombiaMartín Baró Prize LectureshipCLAS Supports Interdisciplinary Studies at UChicago2013–2014 GraduatesTeaching Is Indeed Learning 2013–2014 Grant Recipients All’s Fair at the FeriaAlumni Database: Showcasing 90 Years of Latin America at UChicago CLAS Shines at LASAAlumni Profi le: Antonio SotomayorXIV Reunión Internacional de Historiadores de México

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<<COVER PHOTOTHe sAcRed spAces of music mAKing in BRAZilGenevieve Dempsey PhD Candidate, Department of Music, University of Chicago

With a knowing glance, Gabriel da Silva Baeta Nedes looks toward the camera as he drums and sings in an event commemorating 126 years of the abolition of slavery in Brazil. He is one of the youngest members of a group called the Banda de Congado de Nossa Senhora do Rosário (Our Lady of the Rosary) from Lafa-iete, Minas Gerais, Brazil. Congado is an umbrella term that refers to faith-based music and dance ensembles that are devoted to the worship of Our Lady of the Rosary. On the hills of the Concórdia neighborhood in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, among the sacred space of the terreiro (yard), various congado musicians come together to break the silence of the morning with sound. Through initial prayers and music making, they prepare themselves physically and mentally for an all-day ritual in celebration of their liberation, faith, and devotion.

Established in 1968, the University of Chicago Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) provides an intellectual meeting point for members of our University and extended community to study, debate, and shape the big questions surrounding Latin America.

direCTor

Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo AssoCiATe direCTor

Natalie ArsenaultoffiCe mAnAger & sTudenT AffAirs

CoordinATor Jamie Gentry

posTdoCTorAl leCTurer (2013–2015) Rosario Granados

ouTreACh & CAmpus progrAm CoordinATor

sTeven sChwArTZ

C LA S

CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

5848 S. University Ave.Kelly Hall 117Chicago, IL [email protected]

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Letter from the DirectorMauricio Tenorio-Trillo

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Over the winter and spring of 2014, CLAS was under the interim directorship of Professor Dain Borges, who, having been CLAS director in the past, wisely guided the Center during a rather complicat-ed year. CLAS thanks him for his support. During the 2013–2014 academic year, CLAS was particularly involved in managing the transition to new nation-al guidelines and new University administration and policies, involving grant writing, faculty retention, and faculty hiring. CLAS, however, continued with its com-mitment to serve our faculty initiatives and especially to develop our Mexican and Brazilian foci. As we closed the 2013–14 academic year, CLAS staff worked feverishly to complete our Title VI National Resource Center (NRC) and Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) grant proposals—in consortium with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, we have been designated an NRC since 1976. Our pro-posals reflect our long history of sustaining nationally recognized degree programs, library resources, events, and outreach in Latin American Studies. We were able to report impressive accomplishments from the past four years:

•Robust content course offerings: 2,701 undergrad-uate and graduate enrollments in 130 Latin Ameri-can Studies content courses from 2010–11 through 2012–13•Rich concentration of languages spoken in Lat-in America: Aymara, Haitian Kreyol, K’iche’ Maya, Portuguese, Spanish, and Yucatec Maya•Faculty with diverse interests: 43 Latin Americanist faculty—in the Social Sciences, Humanities, College, Biological Sciences, Booth, and Harris—who devote 25 percent or more of their teaching and research to the region•Increased faculty support: 11 new faculty hires since 2010, including three art historians and three politi-cal scientists

•Thriving doctoral student population: approx-imately 150 PhD students in 2012–13 working on Latin America and, since 2010, 46 students receiv-ing Fulbright, Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren, Inter-American Foundation Grass-roots Development, and National Security Educa-tion Program (NSEP) Boren awards•Solid MA and BA programs: 15 MA graduates in the past three years; currently, 16 BA majors and 14 minors•Successful alumni population: recent MA alumni working in the State Department, Navy, MacArthur Foundation, Brookings Institution, and Chicago Public Schools; PhD alumni teaching at most of the top Latin American Studies programs throughout the nation•Exemplary events and public engagement: 7,305 attendees at 120 events from 2010 to 2013; 10,880 downloads of our Latin American Briefing Series videos

While these statistics speak to the considerable impact CLAS has on our University, they are merely numbers. The stories contained in this newsletter speak to the real impact of our mission: to provide an intellectual meeting point for members of our University and ex-tended community to study, debate, and shape the big questions surrounding Latin America. I invite you to read more about CLAS’s 2013–14 events, Tinker Vis-iting Professors, affiliated faculty publications, student research, and more. I sincerely hope to report in the next newsletter that we have received a new Title VI grant to continue our good work. Our students and faculty depend on CLAS to provide a forum to address interdisciplinary, cross-regional concerns.

Yours truly,Mauricio Tenorio

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A TAle of Two RiosUrbanization and displacement in brazil

Joseph Jay sosa PhD Student, Department of AnthropologyWith back-to-back international sport mega-events

intensifying already massive shifts of wealth and political pow-er in Brazilian society, Rio de Janeiro is receiving a great deal of public and scholarly attention. As the national economy has roared in the past 10 years and social welfare programs have lifted 25 million Brazilians out of poverty, Brazil’s sec-ond-largest city has seen its fair share of rapid change. Add to this the visible alterations of the built and human terrains in the wake of the 2014 World Cup and in advanced of the 2016 Olympics, and the city may look and feel unrecogniz-able to past cohorts. The development of massive building projects, however, has triggered numerous expressions of discontent, especially in light of relocations and police abuse. Beginning in 2010, military police and the army have coor-dinated urban pacifications of Rio’s favelas, clearing out not

only drug crime syndicates (the ostensible targets), but also residents’ informal economies and infrastructures. Ongoing civil unrest that was punctuated by the June 2013 protests also highlighted citizen dissatisfaction with rising costs of living, corruption, and government opacity. But are Rio’s current cri-ses of human security, inequality, and displacement new elab-orations on systemic and long-standing problems? Or do the latest waves of development and social disillusionment signal a new paradigm for South America’s most well-known city? Two talks this year at CLAS explored the conflicts of econ-omy, representation, and violence at work in projects to re-form the Marvelous City. Mariana Cavalcanti (Fundação Getúlio Vargas) presented an ethnographic assessment of a favela rehabilitation public project that unites humanitarian >>>

Events

Cidade Olímpica (2013) Photo: Prefeitura da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro

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>>>housing advocates, real estate developers, and wary residents. Celso Castro (Fundação Getúlio Vargas) examined the historic construction of Rio as a tourist mecca and the images of plea-sure and violence created for tourist consumption in the twen-tieth and twenty-first centuries. Considered together, Caval-canti and Castro addressed two powerful and interconnected development forces that continue to shape the city of Rio de Janeiro: the politics of statecraft and the social imagination. More important, both talks emphasized not only the material and political consequences of these social imaginaries, but also the cultural, symbolic, and imaginative ways the city is recon-stituted. Cavalcanti’s and Castro’s talks encouraged attendees to rethink urban planning as not simply a top-down enter-prise, but one caught up in the interplay of competing group interests and mobilized by political and consumer fantasies. Cavalcanti’s talk on her ethnographic collaboration with Morar Carioca, a municipal initiative that assembled teams of architects, social work professionals, and researchers in the revitalization of communities, made clear the complex nego-tiations between knowledge workers, local residents, and the state in transforming some of Rio’s most precarious living en-vironments. Proposed by the state as a legacy contribution of the 2016 Olympic Games to the city of Rio, Morar Carioca has been envisioned as a strategy for eliminating housing insecu-rity and reorganizing Rio’s 1,020 registered favela areas. This utopia-lite project both fell in line with a historic concern with Rio’s informal urban settlements and introduced new strategies for governing these areas while using traditional uplift rhetoric. As Cavalcanti emphasized, current proactive housing pol-icy and security concerns arose alongside one another, such that, since the 1990s, state attempts to construct commu-nity infrastructure inside favelas have worked hand in hand with programs to contain these communities within the ur-ban environment. Cavalcanti’s work demonstrated how the state’s double-pronged construction-containment strategy intensified in preparation for the sport mega-events in Rio de Janeiro. Morar Carioca, alongside the military pacifica-tions and intense land speculation from which it cannot be analytically or ethically separated, is a lesson about how the city’s dream of stabilization and public safety for favelas has resulted in raised rents and other cost-of-living expenses, pushing many longtime residents out of their neighborhoods. New housing and urban development initiatives cannot be separated from the local elite and tourist building projects for which such space needs to be cleared. In his talk, Castro criti-cally interrogated the “natural” aptitude for tourism attributed to Rio de Janeiro and the role this imaginary played in refigur-ing the city both materially and symbolically. Rio’s tourism, ar-gued Castro, should be seen as a historically guided project to maintain national cultural centrality as the city ceded political power to Brasília and economic dominance to São Paulo over the twentieth century. But tourism did more than simply bring influxes of foreign and internal people and income. Tourism

retrained Cariocas and visitors alike in how to see, inhabit, and traverse the city. Castro focused on the history of represen-tation of Rio in North American film, but his most insight-ful example came from his discussion in the changing tourist maps over the twentieth century. The maps, first published by the government and private companies in the 1920s and 1930s, initially focused on the downtown areas and central squares before shifting over time to the beaches and the South Zone. What landmarks will orient the maps of Rio after 2016? Will the favela and the tourist circuit converge? In significant ways they already have. Pleasure and violence are often understood to be the Janus-faced identity of Rio tourism—the first se-ducing and the second repelling. But as Castro’s analysis sug-gested, eroticism and danger share a much more complicated relationship in the Rio tourist imaginary. While the image of a crime-laden city might have only dispelled visitors during the 1990s, the restoration (or pacification?) of a violent imagery currently proves that danger also sells. The recent craze of fave-la tours, touched on by Castro, demonstrates the logic of exot-ic danger taken to its extreme. Precarious and dangerous living conditions in informal communities have become objects of tourism themselves. But not before they are conquered, read-ministered, and commodified. Thus, Cavalcanti’s and Castro’s talks pointed out a common denominator, endemic to many contemporary urban settings: Rio de Janeiro takes many forms, yet regardless of their radical contrast, all of them are for sale.

Navy Stamp. c.1930

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ReimAgining AfRo-lATin AmeRicAn HisToRy And ART

Karma FriersonPhD Student, Department of Anthropology

This past year CLAS organized and cosponsored a variety of events, including book presentations, workshop discussions, and lectures that featured cutting-edge work on Afro-Latin American studies. Visiting scholars presented on work that was innovative both theoretically and methodologically, depicting how portraiture and the historical archive can be approached for reconstructing the histories of Afrocommunities, and to realize how visual and performative art open unexplored ave-nues for thinking of racial inequality, political activism, and re-ligious practice in Latin America. Similarly, the analyses of po-litical and artistic movements in Brazil highlighted the political and sociological consequences of such movements through time across the region. With these new insights, CLAS has encouraged the University of Chicago community to contin-ue the robust conversations on Afro-Latin American studies. The first event of the year was the formal presentation of the book Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press, 2013), coedited by Agnes Lugo-Ortiz (Ro-mance Languages and Literatures) and the late Angela Rosenthal (Dartmouth College). During this event, the ed-itors highlighted the volume’s theoretical contribution of expanding the genre of portraiture to include depictions of enslaved persons, an inclusion that initially seems oxy-moronic. Portraiture as a form of representation focuses on individuality, the very thing slavery worked to strip from the enslaved. However, Lugo-Ortiz and Rosenthal’s focus on depictions of Afro-descended persons such as the page, musician, or maid—found in works of colonial and postco-lonial art—is an open invitation for scholars to reconsider the period’s art canons and to reflect on how these aesthet-ic expressions pose new ways of thinking about colonialism.

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Rubem Valentim, Pintura XIV, 1965. Oil on canvas.

“Valentim created a series of works that consolidated Afro- Brazilian themes as an artistic tradition, making it one of the hallmarks of Salvador`s art scene, which helped cement the idea of Bahia as the place of Africanness in Brazil. Valentim is also responsible for one important shift in the visual arts. In his work, he changed the way Afro-Brazilian religions were being represented. Instead of more or less exotic figuration of deities, faithful people, and rituals, as was practiced since the late nine-teenth century, he dealt with its symbolism and its material cul-ture, connecting them to Constructivists’ principles and forms.”

—Roberto ConduruMay 2014

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“The recurrence of works linked to Afro-Brazilian religions is sig-nificant for the social incorpo-ration of these religions. More than a reflection on the sacred, bringing symbols, indexes, and rituals from these religions to the forefront is a way to participate in the fight for their full and un-fettered public condition, which is one of the sociopolitical issues confronted by contemporary ar-tistic production that associates Africa and Brazil.”

— Roberto Conduru May 2014

Ayrson Heracltito Bori, Oxossi Performance, 2009

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>>> This charge to rethink and revisit old sources continued in the African Series Distinguished Lecture given by James H. Sweet (University of Wisconsin–Madison). In his lecture titled “Reimagining the African-Atlantic Archive: Method, Concept, Ontology,” Sweet argued that Atlantic World his-toriography favors European worldviews even when focused on “the slave,” partly due to the power relations embedded in the creation and organization of the archive itself, but also because of the questions historians bring to the source mate-rial. To this point, Sweet made the methodological argument that colonial archives offer insights to the African past only if one asked the right question and reimagined the archive itself, i.e., reading the archive through the lenses of African ontologies. This method includes considering details that may have been neglected but provide insight on the African past. The broad concern with the Atlantic World explored in the Autumn Quarter events gave way to a focus on Afro-Brazilian studies in the Winter and Spring Quar-ters. Two visiting scholars from Brazil presented their work to interdisciplinary audiences and sparked conver-sations on the changing relationship between black iden-tities and citizenship, and the role of art in the incorpora-tion of Afro-Brazilian religions in broader Brazilian society. In the winter, Antonio Sérgio A. Guimarães (Universidade de São Paulo) offered work to a joint meeting of the Lat-in American History Workshop and the Workshop on Latin America and the Caribbean. At this event, a group of pro-fessors and graduate students asked questions and offered feedback on his working paper “Black Identities in Brazil: Ideologies and Rhetoric.” In this session, participants worked through the argumentation and implications of Guim-arães’s provocation that it is worthwhile to ask if the shift-

ing terms used in various moments of racialization in Brazil signal different identities or indicate different political projects. The final event concerned with Afro-Latin American stud-ies was the Brazilian Studies Speaker Series lecture given by Roberto Conduru (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janei-ro). In his talk, “Symbols, Indexes, and Rites: Afro-Brazilian Religions and Contemporary Arts,” Conduru argued that Afro-Brazilian culture, particularly Afro-Brazilian religions, has been a constant topic in Brazilian art since the nineteenth century. Furthermore, he suggested that the use of Afro-Bra-zilian religious symbols, tropes, and practices in the modern era of Brazilian art has significantly aided the social incorporation of Afro-Brazilian religions in the broader Brazilian society. The conversations sparked by CLAS-sponsored events con-tinued beyond the events themselves. Many of the questions and comments posed around the Workshop on Latin Amer-ica and the Caribbean as well as the Latin America History Workshop echoed themes introduced throughout the year. For instance, questions on methodology, the archive, rhet-oric, and ideology were points of conversation as Larissa Brewer-García, who has joined the faculty of Romance Lan-guages and Literatures, presented a chapter of her manuscript on sacred blackness in Peru. More important, the interdis-ciplinary approach and the range of themes have advanced broader conversation throughout campus, even among those who do not have a focus in Afro-Latin American studies.

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music, empoweRmenT, And sociAl JusTice

Daniel GouGh PhD Student, Department of MusicOne of Brazil’s foremost ethnomusicologists, Samu-

el Mello Araújo (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro) is widely known internationally for pioneering work in applied ethnomusicology that combines music and sound research with experimental methodologies and public advocacy. Since 2003 Araújo has spearheaded a collaborative music research group known as the Grupo Musicultura in the Maré neigh-borhood in Rio de Janeiro’s North Zone. Participants include university students of all levels, high school students, and community members. With an approach to academic research influenced by the work of Brazilian pedagogue and philos-opher Paulo Freire and Colombian anthropologist Orlando Fals Borda, the group formulates its research projects collec-tively, aiming to produce knowledge about musical practices non-hierarchically through deep engagement with the com-munity. In particular, the Grupo Musicultura deploys music research as a means of confronting locally salient issues such as violence—physical, symbolic, and spatial—committed in the Maré district by drug gangs, mass media, the police, city

planners, and others. The Grupo Musicultura has also chal-lenged academic conventions in the humanities and social sciences by publishing articles with collective authorship and giving group presentations at academic conferences. This innovative work has attracted the attention of a number of important Brazilian funding sources, including the Nation-al Council of Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), the State of Rio de Janeiro’s Foundation for Research Support (FAPERJ), and the research and development arm of Brazil’s state-controlled oil company (CENPES-Petrobrás). As Tinker Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago during the Spring Quarter of 2014, Araújo taught a course called Music and Social Justice: Emerging Approaches in Ap-plied Music Research. The class’s primary objective was to serve as a pilot project for a Chicago-based music research and advocacy group similar to the one Araújo leads in Rio de Ja-neiro. Undergraduate and graduate students across majors and departments took the class, which included the participation of musicians and educators from outside the University. >>>

Tinker Visiting Professors

Festive parade ending of the Carnival group Se Benze que Dá (Bless It So It Passes), founded in 2005 by local activists in Maré. Photo; Samuel Araújo

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>>> The class combined readings in ethnomusicology and an-thropology with an extended conversation about the for-mation and execution of the pilot research project. Read-ings dealt with topics such as theories of social justice, the interrelatedness of sonic life and power relations, and re-search methodologies such as collaborative ethnography that link academic production with community outcomes. Case studies from Brazil, South Africa, and Slovenia demon-strated the efficacy of such approaches in several contexts. From the first class session, Araújo encouraged students to consider how some kind of collaborative music research proj-ect might promote social justice in Chicago. Students connect-ed case studies to the specific context of Chicago, with themes such as music in public spaces, educational institutions, gentri-fication, and musical participation emerging as recurring con-cerns. These diverse ideas coalesced throughout the quarter as specific research objectives, with students settling on a blog as an effective way to present their geographically and themat-ically diverse topics. By the middle of the quarter, students were conducting fieldwork throughout the city, refining their research questions and publishing their findings on the blog. A concern with public soundscapes and social justice mo-tivated undergraduates Shirley Zhang (cello) and Salina Wu (violin) to perform in several locations in the tourist areas of the Loop and the Gold Coast, raising money for a small New York–based organization called Chamber Music Un-derground that provides music lessons for students who might otherwise not be able to afford them. While in the vi-cinity of Water Tower Place, Zhang confronted one of the brokers of sonic power in the city: she was cited by a police officer for performing on the street without a license. Simi-larly, Chelsea Burns, a PhD candidate in Music History and Theory, investigated the multistep process for obtaining a

street performer’s license in Chicago. An applicant must pay $100 and appear at an office during business hours, making it dif-ficult for musicians with little disposable income and/or a full-time job to obtain. Undergraduate Cathryn Jijon worked on a sound map of Chicago, traveling to the West Loop, Pilsen, Little Village, and Wicker Park to record the sounds of commercial corridors and asking how processes of gentrification altered the sounds, musics, and languages heard in these neighborhoods. Music education was another important theme of this pre-liminary research. Michael Allemana, a first-year PhD stu-dent in Ethnomusicology, investigated how youth music initiatives might reproduce the already existing economic, racial, and educational disparities in Chicago. Undergraduate Caressa Franklin began a project that mapped after-school music education programs in Chicago, following up her ini-tial survey with targeted interviews about the ways in which specific programs engage the concept of social justice. Students also identified environmental justice as a significant issue that interfaces with sound in the city. Burns discussed the area around Montrose Beach in Chicago’s Uptown neigh-borhood as home to both a recently established bird sanctuary and an outdoor bar with daily live music in the summer. Nadia Chana, a second-year PhD student in Ethnomusicology, and undergraduate Ingrid Watts separately reflected on the sound-scapes of Lincoln Park Zoo, each utilizing an analysis of the area’s soundscapes to think about the ethics of animal captivity. On June 3, 2014, students presented the results of the pilot project in a public forum at Fulton Recital Hall. Many of the students pointed toward the potential contributions of applied music research for social justice in the city. Araújo praised the di-verse contributions of the students and discussed the possibil-ity of future collaborations between the University of Chicago and the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro on these topics.

“The ethnography of sound practices in today’s world may require repositioning seemingly ageless theo-retical, methodological, and conceptual guideposts (perhaps the easiest part) while simultaneously (the toughest part) finding sense in symbolic agency under the apparently irresistible hegemony of the commodi-ty form.”

— Samuel Araújo “Conflict and Violence as Theoretical Tools

in Present-Day Ethnomusicology: Notes on a Dialogic Ethnography of Sound Prac-tices in Rio de Janeiro.” Ethnomusicology

50(2): 310. 2006

Musical performance by the local group Los Chivitos at the Maré Museum of a song written by Samuel Araújo on an incident leading to the death of an eight-year-old boy during a police shooting in Maré 08

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meXico AfTeR A decAde of dRug wARIn 2006 the Mexican government launched the con-troversial “war on drugs,” a military plan aimed at dismantling drug cartels, regaining territorial control of the US-Mexico border, and reducing the stagger-ing levels of criminal violence. As this conflict ap-proaches a decade, questions arise: What is the cur-rent state of the war? How is the situation evolving? As part of the Latin American Briefing Series, CLAS organized a panel titled “Mexico after a Decade of Drug War,” in which experts from Mexico and the United States reflected on these and other related questions. The panel was integrated by Benjamin Lessing (Po-litical Science), Guillermo Trejo (University of Notre Dame), Monica Serrano (El Colegio de México), Ale-jandro Hope (Instituto Mexicano para la Competitiv-idad), and Roberto Valladares (Lantia Consultores). While criminal violence is still rampant in Mexico, the government has done little to break away from the previous security agenda. To achieve better results, the panelists agreed, more needs to be done not only at the institutional level, but also on the very terms in which the problem is currently addressed. Institu-tional overhauling means not only strengthening the judicial system and eradicating corruption, but also thinking about how local and international regulatory regimes create contradictory demands, which usually exacerbate social suffering. The institutional revamp-ing, as Trejo argued, also needs to follow a bottom-up approach with a special emphasis on the municipal level of government. “Drug trafficking,” Trejo assert-ed, “is a global chain of local operation,” which now functions not as a hierarchical structure, but as a hori-zontal and fragmented tapestry of local officials, rack-eteers, private armies, gangs, law enforcement agents, and others. And this is where change needs to begin. This decade of drug war has begun to pave the way for new dynamics that are aggravating an already dif-ficult scenario. This is the case, for instance, of the Autodefensas de Michoacán, an armed group that has emerged with the purpose of defending local com-munities from the Knights Templar cartel, and of the relation between cartel turfs and natural resources. As northern Mexico has recently been considered a potential site for shale gas and oil extraction, car-tels have begun exercising pressure over oil compa-nies and are slowly becoming critical actors in the energy economy. With natural resource extraction around the corner, criminal organizations are more than ever interested in securing territorial control. Regardless of the future course of this conflict, CLAS is committed to continuing the conversation about drug trafficking and illicit economies in Mex-ico, and exploring affairs that will shape future so-cial, political, and economic trends in Latin America.

Exploring Poetry and Mexican Literature

Christopher Dominguez Michael

Among the most respected and prolific lit-erary and cultural critics in Mexico, Christo-pher Domínguez Michael has published 11 prize-winning books and more than a thou-sand articles and essays. During his Tinker Visiting Professorship, Domínguez Michael taught two courses on his areas of expertise, Theories and Histories of Mexican Cultures (Autumn 2013) and La historia de las ideas en América Latina, Siglo XX (Spring 2014). He also utilized the holdings of the Regen-stein Library to complete his book Octavio Paz en su siglo (forthcoming) and gave pub-lic lectures about Paz both on campus and in the community at the Printers Row Lit Fest, cosponsored by the Instituto Cervant-es. Before returning to Mexico, Domín-guez Michael donated the notes, marginalia, and papers collected during his years of re-search on Paz to the library, in the hopes that the materials can seed a collection on Paz.

An artist and a professor at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Ricardo Basbaum first came to the University of Chicago in November 2012 with “Would you like to par-ticipate in an artistic experience?,” an 18-year project rooted in participatory and performa-tive engagement. At its essence, the project comprises a sculptural piece that has been sent to different people around the world to do with it as they please, so long as they document their interaction with the object. Basbaum’s work has been featured in more than 40 cities on four continents. Invited as the Department of Visual Arts’s first Tinker Visiting Professor, Basbaum taught The Production of the Artist (Autumn 2013), with a focus on what consti-tutes the image of the contemporary artist

Tinker Visiting Professors

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nts

Artistic Experience and Social Transformation

Ricardo Basbaum

Christopher Dominguez Michael, 2013photo: CLAS

Ricardo Basbaum, 2013photo: CLAS

“Artists should not control meanings, and how people play, project, and imagine things in relation

to their work. These things should remain open. It’s interesting for artists to discover that they

don’t exist prior to their works, but are reinvented each time anew.” —Ricardo Basbaum

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The Elusiveness of ‘Afro-Cuban Religion’

Tinker Visiting Professors

Faculty Publications

One of the most inescapable traits of Latin American cities is the informal geography that cuts across their urban terrains. Today, one out of four Latin Americans lives in the so-called “infor-mal city,” usually enduring conditions of severe poverty, exclusion, and structural violence. Yet, despite its overwhelming presence, the informal city has frequently been depicted in scholarly literature in a rather simplified manner. Slums have been represented as either pathological devia-tions, failed modernization plans, helpless epicenters of crime and violence, or spaces of despair that are disarticulated from formal urbanity. In order to move beyond these misconceptions, Cities from Scratch, coedited by Brodwyn Fischer (History), Bryan McCann (Georgetown University), and Javier Auyero (University of Texas at Austin), offers a deep historical understanding of the local and global dynamics that have shaped the informal cityscape in Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Mana-gua, Caracas, and Buenos Aires. By presenting a series of essays written from different disciplinary angles, the volume reflects on the history of such informal settlements and “their relationships to the larger urban form, their political roles, their transformations over time, and their nature as sites for the reproduction or transcendence of poverty and subcitizenship” (p. 6). Cities from Scratch encourages us to challenge the widely assumed dichotomy between the formal and informal city as two separate entities, and invites us to see how cities are not simply the result of top-down urban planning, but rather of historically contingent forces such as democratization, migration, environmental change, neoliberalism, political activism, and the intensification of urban poverty.

In this book, Stephan Palmié (Anthropology) provides a critique of the presuppositions underly-ing the term “Afro-Cuban religion” as both an object of scholarly inquiry and a religious tradition. After two decades of studying Santeria in the United States and Cuba, Palmié breaks away from past approaches by arguing that “Afro-Cuban religion” does not exist as a self-contained entity, but rather is the product of a series of “operative fictions” (p. 6)—or “slices of life”—that have been discursively drawn together by santeros, anthropologists, aficionados, and bibliographers over the course of several decades. What arises from this “ethnographic interface” is not a “win-dow onto another world” (e.g., a religion), but rather a “heteroglossic hybrid” formation that combines different discursive entanglements, historical trajectories, and contrasting purposes in which santeros and scholars are equally accomplices. The Cooking of History promises not only to change the way anthropologists study Santeria in Latin America, but also to unsettle the epistemo-logical premises by which anthropological knowledge is produced. The question that remains is, of course, what comes next? Should students and scholars continue studying Santeria and other religious traditions as such? If so, how can these practices be examined without being diverted by the traps about which Palmié is cautioning us? It is too early to answer these questions, yet what is certain is that The Cooking of History has sparked the beginning of an exciting conversation.

This book explores the linguistic development of Spanish and Portuguese in Latin Amer-ica from a sociohistorical perspective. By focusing on the politics of Iberian colonialism, the social and economic interactions between settlers and indigenous peoples, as well as the eco-logical distribution of languages, this collection of essays seeks to unfold the trajectories and processes that underpin the linguistic diversity prevalent in the region today. Edited by Sa-likoko S. Mufwene (Linguistics), this book is the result of a 2007 workshop sponsored by CLAS and the Tinker Foundation. In a century in which more than half of the current lan-guages are expected to disappear (according to UNESCO), this timely book depicts the eco-nomic and cultural forces that affect the vitality of languages, as well as the multifaceted consequences of language contact and colonial interaction. This volume challenges any over-simplification regarding language evolution and instead offers a nuanced understanding of the process of adaptation and change undergone by languages in Latin America throughout time.

The Cooking of hisTory: how noT To sTudy Afro-CubAn religion. sTephAn pAlmié

368 pAges, universiTy of ChiCAgo press (June 14, 2013) Rethinking the Informal Cityscape in Latin America

CiTies from sCrATCh: poverTy And informAliTy in urbAn lATin AmeriCA

edyTed by brodwyn fisCher, bryAn mCCAnn, JAvier Auyero

304 pAges, duke universiTy press (februAry 28, 2014)

Exploring Sociolinguistic Diversity in Latin America

iberiAn imperiAlism And lAnguAge evoluTion in lATin AmeriCA ediTed by sAlikoko s. mufwene

368 pAges, universiTy of ChiCAgo press (mAy 14, 2014) 10CLAS

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Working with Deaf Children in Nebaj, Guatemala

Laura Horton, PhD Student, Comparative Human Development

My research focuses on deaf children’s strategies for communi-cation with other family and community members. In the United States, children who are born deaf typically receive early interven-tion and treatment, either in the form of exposure to a formal sign language or a cochlear implant. In countries where these services are not readily available, however, children born with a hearing loss are raised with limited access to the language spoken around them. These children cannot learn the spoken language because of their hearing loss, but they often create their own self-styled gestural communication systems that they use with family and friends (Gol-din-Meadow 2003). In Guatemala, I study the circumstances of these children, sometimes called homesigners, and their families. During the summer of 2013 I spent six weeks in the town of Santa Maria Nebaj in the central highlands of Guatemala. The municipality of Nebaj is quite urban, with crowded paved streets and sidewalks, two gas stations, many churches, schools, and local businesses. I stayed at a small combination hostel, restaurant, and crafts store in the city center, which is the proj-ect of a local community cooperative called Grupo de Mujeres y Hombres por la Paz. The group, which consists of 50 members from various parts of Nebaj, was formed in 1998 to apply for aid from the central government following Guatemala’s civil war. An American researcher in Nebaj, Maria Garcia, intro-duced me to various members of the Grupo who then connected me to families with multiple deaf members. They often accompanied me on visits to the families’ hous-es and talked with me about their lives and experiences.

>>>

Learning Mesoamerican Languages to Explore Art

Kristopher Driggers, PhD Student,Art History

As a graduate student in Art History, I study and interpret objects made in pre-Columbian antiquity. In the past year, for instance, I’ve worked to reconstruct the viewership of mu-ral paintings made in seventh-century Oaxaca, investigated the placement of carved stone sculpture at an Andean site in the second millennium BCE, and examined how readers in the early colonial period glossed a painted almanac containing im-ages of Aztec deities. All of these objects were made at a sig-nificant chronological and cultural distance from the arts of the Western world, but one of the ways in which I work to re-cover elements of the original contexts of these works of art is through the study of contemporary indigenous languages. In Summer 2013, I completed an intensive course in Nahuatl, one of the indigenous languages of central Mexico, with the sup-port of a FLAS grant offered through CLAS. By the end of the rigorous six-week course, I had sufficient language skills to begin translating documents in the relatively large corpus of Nahuatl al-phabetic texts written in the decades just after the conquest. As an art historian, my favorite experiences working with Nahuatl have been translating texts accompanied by painted images, especially when the images and texts seem to tell different stories about sim-ilar subjects, as is so often the case in colonial manuscripts. Some-times the revelations won through reading Nahuatl texts can seem relatively humble—on a painted map, for instance, a short inscrip-tion might name a town to which a depicted road leads—but these small discoveries help to locate an image in a particular milieu. In other cases, though—as with a manuscript in a French

>>>

Student Research

Port-au-PrincePhoto: Lauren Eldridge PhD Student, Music

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Student Research

>>> collection on which I am working—an image and a Na-huatl text might seem at first to have relatively little to do with one another, and their appearance together makes for an interesting puzzle to return to time and again. While I continue to read Nahuatl sources for my research, I’ve also recently been developing proficiency in Yucatec Mayan, a language spoken by more than one million speak-ers today in the Mexican states of Yucatán, Campeche, and Quintana Roo. Through a second FLAS grant, and follow-ing a year of Modern Spoken Yucatec courses offered at the University of Chicago, I spent the summer of 2014 in Yu-catán practicing conversational Mayan in Valladolid and the nearby community of Xocen, where it was fascinating to see how the language is employed in the context of village life. Learning Mayan in Yucatán also allowed me to visit the many archaeological sites and museum collections in the area, bringing me into direct contact with objects and spaces that I study from afar in Chicago. Over the past two years, lan-guage study has enriched my understanding of the ancient Mesoamerican world in any number of ways; now, too, I am cultivating a sense of how one Mesoamerican language has found continued utility into the twenty-first century.

Dispossession, Cows, and Mango Trees in ColombiaMeghan Morris, PhD Student, Anthropology

When I began my research on property, land, and dispossession in Colombia, I hadn’t anticipated that cows and man-go trees would come to be central figures. Displacement and dispossession are problems that run deep in Colombia, where over five million people have been displaced during the country’s ongoing armed conflict. In 2011, a new Victims’ Law was passed as part of the country’s transitional justice process. This law opened the possibility of land restitution for people who lost their land during the conflict. The resulting restitution program aims to return over six million hectares of land—more than 5 percent of the country’s territory—to the displaced population. My research examines how property is configured and mobilized both in processes of dispossession during the conflict and in current efforts at land restitution. So where do cows and mango trees fit in? My ongoing research focuses on following restitution cases based on claims to land in the northwestern region of Urabá, as well as property claims in an urban slum in the city of Medellín, where many of Urabá’s displaced reside. Traditionally a center of banana production, Urabá has seen rapid growth in cattle ranching in recent years. Many of the cows graze on pastures that, following the felling of many of Urabá’s forests in the 1960s, had been small plots held by peasants. The traces of these former smallholder plots remain on the landscape, largely in the form of fruit trees such as mango trees. Displaced peasants often cite mango and other fruit trees as evidence of their labor and life on the land—and their rightful claim to it today. Untangling claims to land and property, however, is in no way simple in Colombia. A number of the owners of Urabá’s cattle ranches are the same people or closely related to those who, years ago, dispossessed the peasants who are filing claims. Some of the cows and the land on which they graze have been used to launder drug money or facilitate drug transport. Armed actors in some areas forcibly displaced peasants, but dispossession also often came alongside efforts at legalization, such as forced sales at low prices, or false titles processed by corrupt notaries. Shifting land occupation over time has also complicated claims, with multiple displaced individuals often claiming a single plot. Mango trees might provide evidence that peasants once worked the land—but which peasants, and when? And plenty of Colombia’s displaced who have spent years and even decades in the city have no desire to return to their rural land at all, despite the difficulties of securing food and work without land. In this research, I talk to everyone from displaced claimants to state officials to armed actors to business executives. In various ways, they have each played a role in mobilizing and configuring property during Colombia’s ongoing conflict, and in deter-mining its future. The opportunity to follow these processes has been overwhelming, humbling, and tremendously rewarding. I am grateful to CLAS for the support it has provided to me and to this work over the years. I only hope that I am able to do some form of justice to the stories I have heard, and to the people, cows, and mango trees I have encountered along the way.

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>>> In addition to working with individual families, I volunteered as a teaching assistant at La Escuela Oficial para Educación Especial de Nebaj, Nebaj’s only official school for special edu-cation. The school has a total enrollment of 55 students, with eight students who are deaf. The students who are deaf come to-gether, either in the classroom or during recreational times, and communicate freely in an improvised gestural or sign system. This “microcommunity” is a unique environment for the emergence of a new sign system. These students have a community of the other deaf students and must negotiate and adapt their individual, potentially idiosyncratic systems to the communicative needs of the group. In the future, I hope to document their system and to observe them com-municating at school and at home to assess their gestural strategies in different contexts and stages of development. My funds from the CLAS/Tinker Field Research Grant al-lowed me to assess the feasibility of future work in this com-munity with a local school and families. I was able to make connections that I can build on for my dissertation work. This is work that is impossible to do without being physically pres-ent and engaging with people, face to face, and I am grate-ful for the opportunity to interact with the people of Nebaj.

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Student Programs

Havana. Photo: Jenna LevingAlum, Romance Languages and Literatures

CLAS Supports Interdisciplinary Studies at UChicagoThe interdisciplinary major program in Latin American and Caribbean Studies is increasingly popular among the undergraduate population at the University of Chicago. Designed to give students a thorough grounding in as-pects of Latin American history, politics, economics, and culture, the program draws students from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds and experiences. The 2014 co-hort of graduating majors boasted students with a broad range of interests who wrote theses on a variety of time-ly topics, ranging from surrealist architecture, to Puerto Rican social movements, to an examination of the US–Latin American international passenger aviation market. When asked about their postgraduation plans, two stu-dents, Patricia Arbona and Alicia French, exemplified the versatile nature of an interdisciplinary degree: Arbo-na plans to put her Spanish-language skills to work in the nonprofit sector for a year or two before applying to law school, while French intends to pursue a degree in archi-tecture. CLAS wishes the newest class of Latin American Studies graduates the best of luck in their career endeavors. To learn more about the current cohorts of Latin Amer-ican Studies majors, please visit the CLAS website: clas.uchicago.edu

Martín Baró Prize Lectureship

The Ignacio Martín Baró Lectureship program was estab-lished in 1991 in honor of Father Ignacio Martín Baró, a Jesuit priest and distinguished member of the University of Chicago community who was slain in the midst of the vio-lence of the Salvadoran Civil War as a result of his efforts to aid the war’s dispossessed. In his memory, the prize lectureship supports the design of a one-quarter undergraduate course that focuses on ma-jor Latin American political issues or questions pertaining to human rights in Latin America. One lectureship prize per year is available to advanced doctoral students from all divisions and disciplines. The 2013–14 Martín Baró Prize Lectureship was award-ed to Gregory “Duff ” Morton, doctoral candidate in An-thropology. Morton’s course, Social Rights and the New Social Democracies in Latin America, addressed the revival and reinvention of classic human rights questions in Lat-in America: Why do rights emerge at certain moments in history? What context makes it possible for new rights to achieve recognition? How is the current debate on rights connected to a long tradition of political practice in Latin America? The Spring Quarter course attracted a full enroll-ment of students from an array of disciplines across the University, including majors from Anthropology; Biological Sciences; Economics; International Studies; Law, Letters, and Society; Physics; Political Science; Public Policy Studies; and Romance Languages and Literatures.

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BA mAJoR in lATin AmeRicAn sTudies

Luis Amaya“Lessons to Learn from the Immigration Reform and Con-trol Act of 1986”

Patricia Arbona“¡Ni una bomba más! Fighting for Justice Then and Now: The Development of the Vieques Anti-Navy Movement and Its Successes”

Alicia FrenchArt History and Latin American Studies“Returning to Not Knowing: Surrealism in the Open City of Ritoque”

Melissa Marquez“A Solution to Overpopulation in Mexico City: Family Plan-ning in the 1970s”

Michelle Musielewicz“Forgetting the American Dream: Downward Assimilation of Mexican Migrants in the United States in the Age of Free Trade and Nativism”

Nicolas SernaPublic Policy Studies and Latin American Studies“The Rise of Global Airline Alliances: Forces for Good or a Beleaguered Industry’s Last Stand?”

BA minoR in lATin AmeRicAn sTudies

William Calvin, Public Policy Studies

Vicente Fernandez, Cinema and Media Studies

Kathleen O’Shea, English Language and Literature

Alejandra Vasquez, Romance Languages and Literatures; Comparative Literature

mA in lATin AmeRicAn & cARiBBeAn sTudies

Robyn Carney“Petitioning to Be White: Political Inclusion and the Jews of Jamaica 1750 to 1831”

Jade Hill“Gender and Militancy: The Role of Men in the Search for Argentina’s Disappeared”

Jacob Kuss“Addressing the Chilean Energy Dilemma and the Effects on the Mining Sector of the Northern Provinces: Reliance on Fossil Fuels and the Advantages and Disadvantages of Short-Term and Long-Term Solutions”

Mónica Rivera Bayón“El Mantengo: Historicizing Federal Transfers and Welfare Benefits in Puerto Rico”

2013–2014 GRADUATES

pHd

CJ AlvarezHistory“The Shape of the Border: Policing the US-Mexico Divide, 1848–2010”

Kevin AnzzolinRomance Languages and Literatures“Guardians of Discourse: Journalism and Literatures in Por-firian Mexico (1887–1912)”

Paola Castaño RodríguezSociology“The Time of the Victims: Understanding of Violence and Institutional Practices in the National Commission of Repa-ration and Reconciliation in Colombia”

Tànit Fernández de la Reguera TayàRomance Languages and Literatures“Cuba y Cataluña en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX: teatro popular e identidades (proto) nacionales”

Molly FlahertyPsychology“The Emergence of Argument Structural Devices in Nicara-guan Sign Language”

Elina HartikainenAnthropology“A Candomblé Politics of Respect: Forming an African Reli-gious Public in Multiculturalist Brazil”

Gilberto Hernandez OsegueraLaw School“Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Judgements be-tween Mexico and the United States of America”

Jenna Leving JacobsonRomance Languages and Literatures“Confessing Exile: Revolution and Redemption in the Narra-tives of the Cuban (Re)encuentro”

Casey LurtzHistory“Exporting from Eden: Coffee, Migration, and the Develop-ment of the Soconusco, Mexico, 1867–1920”

Nicole MottierHistory“Ejidal Credit and Debt in Twentieth-Century Mexico”

José Luis RamosHistory“Diplomacy, Social Politics, and United States–Mexico Rela-tions after the Mexican Revolution, 1919–1930”

Dora Sánchez Hidalgo HernándezHistory“Building a Modern Port: Urban Space, Local Government, and Social Change in Veracruz, Mexico, 1872–1914”

Jesica Torres-CoronadoEconomics“Size-Dependent Firm Regulations and the Return to Skill: Evidence from the Mexican Labor Market” 14

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Student Programs

Rio de JaneiroPhoto: Aditi ShirodkarPhD Student, Political Science

Last year, teaching the Proseminar in Latin Ameri-can Studies was among the best activities I had to per-form as the new CLAS postdoctoral lecturer. I was a bit afraid of having only two students and worried about how we would make profitable our weekly dis-cussions on research methods. I was also concerned about who our guest lecturers should be to better help the students find a significant MA thesis topic. I was lucky to have Alex Johnson and Clay Oppenhui-zen as my first students in Chicago. They always came prepared about the readings, and thus their comments were sharp and witty. In the classroom, our discussions always flew easily (which was not always the case in the other courses I taught during the year, even if with a larg-er number of students). When guest professors talked to our class, the two students were always engaged and tried to link the different topics to their own, hence taking the best of what was being offered to them. To me, however, the most revealing aspect of being their teacher was the new topics they forced me to learn. Their interests were so radically different from my area of expertise that I had to follow their lead and get acquainted with both Argen-

tinian comic strips and Brazilian literature and their respective sociopolitical contexts. I cannot imag-ine a better teaching context in which we all learn from each other. Even if I knew that the MA in Lat-in American Studies would imply this challenge, I nev-er expected enjoying it this much. I am really thankful to them for their patience, openness, and hard work. My experience teaching this Proseminar confirmed to me that education, in order to be fully valued, must be meaningful for the learner. And when meaningful, ed-ucation is the best path to discover how to think for oneself and to share one’s opinion with others. I hope both Clay and Alex continue to be as critical and genu-ine to themselves as they were in this course, and I wish them the best in their new endeavors. I am certain they will succeed in any path they choose after their MA at CLAS. At the same time, I look forward to meeting the incoming crew of students. I will do my best so we all can bring to the classroom a new set of interests and living experiences that contribute to a safe and exciting learning environment. I am as eager to learn from them as I am to share all I know about the difficult yet enjoy-able process of researching and crafting an MA thesis.

Teaching Is Indeed Learning Rosario Inés Granados

Postdoctoral Lecturer at CLAS

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All’s Fair at the Feria

Sarah WenzelBibliographer for Literatures of

Europe and the AmericasUniversity of Chicago Library

The hard-to-find, the rare, and “I didn’t know this existed!” are librarians’ coups at any book fair. This year University of Chi-cago bibliographers attended the Salon du Livre de Montréal (Haiti was the coun-try of honor) and the Feria Internacional del Libro in both Guadalajara and Bogotá. At the Haitian stand I bought over $1,000 of books that I knew I might not locate again, in-cluding titles requested three years ago that we had been unable to acquire through our usu-al channels. These included books on litera-ture (Haïti:une traversée littéraire), music (Grandes dames de la musique haitienne), and photography (Edouard Peloux:Photographe du Vingtième Siecle). In Colombia I bought ephemeral materi-als reflecting the popular mood or political opinions that serve as primary sources. In addition, I went to several regional depart-ment stands to look for music (scores, CDs, DVDs) and books on social life in the Carib-bean. These materials are simply unknown and thus unavailable in the United States. Ti-tles from Colombia include Transnistria by Se-bastià Jovani, Violentología: un manual del conflic-to colombiano, and Procesos del arte en Colombia. Book fairs give you the chance to read and hear newer voices and to discover the next gen-eration of scholars and poets. Relatively few catalogues are available, newsletters are nearly unheard-of, and while a publisher may refer you to its website, frequently there is only a blog. Without going to a fair, I would never know about these authors, publishers, or their work. Thanks to CLAS and the University of Chicago Library for partially support-ing our travel and primarily for purchas-ing materials added to the collections.

2013–2014 GRANT RECIPIENTSForeign Language and Area Studies (FLAS)

Chelsea Burns, Music, Portuguese

Kristopher Driggers, Art History, Yucatec Maya

Lauren Eldridge, Music, Haitian Kreyol

Jason Enos, Anthropology, Haitian Kreyol

Keshia Harris, Comparative Human Development, Portuguese

Zachary Herbert, Linguistics, Haitian Kreyol

Alexis Howard, Comparative Human Development, Portuguese

Ana Ilievska, Comparative Human Development, Portuguese

Deirdre Lyons, History, Haitian Kreyol

Margaret McFee, Comparative Human Development, Haitian Kreyol

Jack Mullee, Anthropology, Portuguese

David Recksieck, Art History, Portuguese

Medardo Rosario, Romance Languages and Literatures, Portuguese

Maria Welch, Music, Portuguese

Tinker Field Research Grant

Carly Bertrand, Comparative Human Development“Cultural Integration as a Mode of Intervention for Buenos Aires’s Street Chil-dren: A Case Study”Nicholas Carby-Denning, Anthropology“Struggle over Yasuni: NGOs, the State, and the Exceptionality of Nature in Ecuador’s Rain Forest”Matthew Furlong, Anthropology“A Political Geography of the Discarded: Transformations of Lived Urban Space in Baja California”Christopher Gatto, History“From Cochineal to Coffee: Examining Pre-Revolutionary Social Change in Miahuatlán, Oaxaca, 1780–1880”Keshia Harris, Comparative Human Development“The Face of Success: Perceptions of Racial Features among Afro-Brazilian Adolescents”Vivana Hong, Romance Languages and Literatures“Censorship in Children’s Literature During Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ (1976–1983)”Laura Horton, Comparative Human Development“Homesign and Ixhil Maya: Language Emergence and Acquisition in Nebaj, Guatemala”Alexis Howard, Comparative Human Development“The Vulnerability of Aging in Santiago, Chile”Raymond Hunter, Anthropology“New Perspectives on the Inka: Colonialism in the Pre-Colombian Andes”Ana Ilievska, Comparative Literature“Autodidacticism in Contemporary Lusophone and Hispanic Literature”Jack Mullee, Anthropology“São Paulo in Transit: Expert, Passenger, and Material Perspectives”Catalina Ospina, Art History“The Muisca Colonial Experience”David Recksieck, Art HistoryExploratory Research in Salvador da BahiaAditi Shirodkar, Political Science“Colonizing Consciousness: Missionary Encounters in Imperial Brazil & India”Marco Torres, History“Labor, Popular Front, and the Consolidation of the Mexican Political System 1928–1940”Maria Welch, Music “Sounding the Body, Singing the Soul: the Musical Labor of Childhood” 16

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Alumni

Cusco valley of PeruPhoto: Raymond HunterPhD Student, Anthropology

Alumni Database: Showcasing 90 Years of Latin America at UChicagoFor a number of years, CLAS has been engaged in a proj-ect to identify and locate University of Chicago alumni with a strong interest in Latin America. We worked to find alumni who earned a degree directly from CLAS (BA ma-jor or minor, or MA), as well as doctoral students (1) who were awarded Tinker Field Research Grants and/or For-eign Language & Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships from CLAS; (2) who received external fellowships for yearlong fieldwork in the region; (3) whose thesis or dissertation project indicates a strong interest in the region; or (4) who enrolled in multiple courses sponsored by CLAS. The result is a database that includes more than 3,000 alumni, with details on their degree(s), year of gradua-tion, adviser, field of study, and dissertation/thesis. With our first Latin Americanist students graduating in the 1920s, the directory highlights the longevity, diversity, and popularity of Latin American Studies at the University. The results of our efforts are now available on-line, in a browsable format, on the CLAS website. We hope the directory is useful to alumni, as well as current and prospective students, who are seek-ing information about our history, faculty advising, disciplinary coverage, and intellectual production. Please contact us with additions and corrections at [email protected].

CLAS Shines at LASA

The XXXII International Congress of the Lat-in American Studies Association (LASA) met at the Palmer House Hilton in May 2014, with nearly 4,000 scholars from around the world in attendance. Seven-teen current University of Chicago faculty and stu-dents, as well as dozens of alumni, presented at LASA on topics ranging from race in the Americas to tour-ism in Mexico to musical aesthetics in São Paulo. Taking advantage of the fact that the largest confer-ence dedicated to Latin America was meeting in our backyard, CLAS cosponsored LASA 2014. Our logo was featured in the conference program and on con-ference banners. As a result of our cosponsorship, publishers who participated in the book exhibit do-nated more than $10,000 in materials to our library. CLAS also held a reception for alumni and friends during LASA. We gathered at Tanta, a local Peruvian restaurant, where we sampled cebiches, causitas, and pisco sours while catching up with one another. CLAS invited all alumni for whom we had contact informa-tion—if you have not heard from CLAS lately, please get in touch to make sure we have your contact info.

We want to stay in touch!

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Alumni

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XIV Reunión Internacional de Historiadores de MéxicoNow in its 14th edition, the International Conference of His-torians of Mexico (XIV Reunión Internacional de Historiadores de México, for its official name) is the largest and most import-ant academic gathering of Mexicanist historians anywhere in the world. The conference took place September 18–21, 2014, in Chicago and was hosted by the Katz Center for Mexican Studies. The conference theme was Mexico in the World, the World in Mexico. On the evening of September 18, the inaugura-tion ceremony featured an inaugural plenary that paid hom-age to the work of Friedrich Katz and a ceremony where John Coatsworth, provost of Columbia University, was recog-nized as the honorary president of the Reunión for his out-standing trajectory and contributions to the study of Mexico. All academic sessions took place at the Gleacher Center. Conference participants attended eight academic sessions on Friday, six on Saturday, and two on Sunday, and had the op-portunity to choose from eight different talks each session. The gala dinner and closing plenary session took place on the evening of September 20 at Navy Pier. The closing ple-nary session on Mexicans in Chicago was chaired by Josefina Vázquez with remarks by Alan Knight and Mauricio Tenorio and was followed by a gala dinner. More than 300 participants from more than 10 countries attended the conference.

Alumni Profile: Antonio Sotomayor

Antonio Sotomayor, a 2012 graduate of the doctoral pro-gram in History, exemplifies the multifaceted strengths of the Latin Americanists who graduate from the University of Chicago. Sotomayor recently began an appointment at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as assistant professor, historian, and librarian for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. In addition, he holds an appointment as assistant professor in the Department of Recreation, Sport, and Tourism and is an affiliated faculty member of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. His presence at UIUC will certainly be an asset to the exist-ing consortium relationship between the Centers for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at UIUC and UChicago. Sotomayor’s research focuses on sport as the embodiment of politics and national identity in Puerto Rico during the twen-tieth century with an emphasis on sport leadership and infra-structure. Among his current research endeavors is a project that studies the role the YMCA played in the politics of US expansion throughout Latin America and the Caribbean and a book project on the history of Puerto Rican Olympism. More information about his research and forthcoming projects can be found on his website at asotomay.wix.com/sotomayorphd.

Photo: Antonio Sotomayor, 2013

Katz Center for Mexican Studies

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STAY CONNECTED WITH CLASSubscribe to CLAS email lists (http://clas.uchicago.edu/publications/email_listservs.shtml)Visit our online events calendar (http://clas.uchicago.edu/event/)Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn

GIVE TO THE CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

UPCOMING EVENTS, COURSES, AND VISITING PROFESSORS The Center for Latin American Studies provides an intellectual meeting point for members of our Univer-sity and extended community to study, debate, and shape the big questions surrounding Latin America. As the 2014–15 academic year approached, CLAS worked closely with faculty and students to prepare events, courses, and workshops that will continue our long-standing tradition of encouraging scholarly inquiry and lively debate. Here are some of the highlights for the upcoming year! Please visit our website for more info.New Faculty:

Megan Sullivan joins the Department of Art History. Her scholarship focuses on twentieth-century Lat-in American art, with a particular emphasis on Brazil and Argentina. Her research and teaching interests in-clude the global history of modernism (especially abstraction), the relationship of modernism and modern-ization in peripheral countries, and artistic engagements with landscape, nature, and territory in Latin America.

Larissa Brewer-García joins Romance Languages and Literatures. Her research and teaching interests include colonial Latin American and early-modern Caribbean cultural productions, representations of the Af-rican diaspora in the early-modern Atlantic and Pacifi c, and notions of human differences and hierarchies in early-modern visual and written text. We also had three new faculty members join us in 2013: Brodwyn Fisch-er (History), Laura Gandolfi (Romance Languages and Literatures), and Benjamin Lessing (Political Science). Cutting-Edge Courses for Autumn:

Identities Are Not Born but Made: What Has Race to Do with Sex? Verena Stolcke, Tinker Visiting Professor. This course will examine how ideas of modern Western naturalism allow for the existence of two interrelated doctrines: sexism and racism.

Narrating the Other: The Non-Human in Latin American Literature Laura Gandolfi , Romance Lan-guages and Literatures. This course explores the construction of “otherness” in Latin American literature and culture from the nineteenth to the twenty-fi rst century.

Democracy and the Politics of Wealth Redistribution Michael Albertus, Political Science. This course explores the mechanisms through which individual and group preferences can be translated into pro-poor policies, and the role elites play in infl uencing a government’s capacity or incentives to redistribute wealth.Public Events:

Drug Wars: The Logic and Politics of Cartel-State Confl ict, October 2014. In this conference, scholars and students will discuss Benjamin Lessing’s book manuscript on narco-violence in Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil.

UCHICAGO

C LCENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

A S

Students and faculty affi liated with the Center for Latin American Studies are an extraordinary community. Giving to CLAS is a powerful statement of your commitment to the rigorous scholarship, lively debate, and pub-lic engagement programs that are the hallmark of the Center. Gifts support public events, student fellowships and professionalization, and innovative research; your support helps us train better scholars and increase public understanding of Latin America. There are many ways to get involved with CLAS. While we welcome fi nancial support, we also seek to en-gage alumni and friends through inclusion in our events and career advising. Whether you support the Center by contributing your time and talents, or by making a fi nancial gift, you are helping to advance our mission. If you would like to discuss your giving interests, please contact Associate Director Natalie Arse-nault. However large or small, your gift will have a lasting impact on the quality of our programming and benefi t the larger Latin American Studies community at the University of Chicago and beyond.