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A Bulletin of the Latin American and Latino Studies Program No. 5
Fall 2017
Director's Corner As the year draws to a close I can honestly say that 2017 has been an exciting but also challenging year for LALS. We have deepened our transborder connections in new ways: bringing visitors engaged in scholarly work as well as NGOs and community organizations in Latin America, and launching our Study Abroad program in Chiapas, Mexico. Our faculty have taught or conducted field/archival research in Colombia, Mexico, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Brazil. Our Master’s program continues to thrive, and alumni have found career opportunities in higher and k-12 education, NGOs, community organizations, policy centers, and prestigious PhD programs. We are beginning to overcome the effects of a budget deficit that have affected all Illinois institutions of higher education. However we have also faced new challenges, as changes in immigration policy have affected several of our students and Hurricane Maria has impacted others. In response to growing immigration
concerns and the termination of DACA, LALS faculty and staff have been actively engaged in supporting students, but also shaping policies to offer more institutional support for our students. Additionally, in the spring semester we will cosponsor a couple of events designed to raise awareness of the challenges facing Puerto Rico. Several of our students and faculty have also participated in different programs in the city designed to support affected Puerto Ricans. We will continue to work though these challenges while educating, advising and supporting our students in 2018. As Director of LALS since 2013 I have learned immensely from our students and my colleagues and am deeply appreciative of all our alumni and community members who have worked with us in many programs and continue to support us.
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LALS NEWSLETTER FALL 2017
Master Students Present their Papers On April 10, 2017 LALS gathered for the annual M.A. Student Symposium to hear presentations from the four students who were preparing their Master's paper for graduation. After the students presented their work, a lively discussion ensued with questions from members of the audience and a productive conversation to help the students as they made their final revisions. Following is a summary of the presentations that day. Enrique Alvear Masked Punishment, Racial Selectivity/Disparity, and Detentionalization: Rethinking the Expansion of Immigration Detention in the U.S. The detention of irregular immigrants, undocumented workers, and non citizen immigration "offenders" has been on the rise. In 1973, the INS (now ICE) confined a daily average of 2,370 persons. In 1995 the number reached 7,475, and 33,330 in 2011. Through archival and historical research, I seek to explore the factors that currently shape the significant advance of immigration detention by dissecting its most pressing implications. Considering the reorganization of the immigration enforcement system after 9/11, I analyse three main findings regarding immigration detention. First, I seek to demystify securitized narratives which justify immigration detention and emphasize the patterns of its current expansion, racial selectivity and disparity, and symbolic differentiation. Second, I discuss how the definition of immigration detention as a "bureaucratic procedure" obscures its punitive character, legitimizing and reinforcing its long-term evolution. Finally, I examine how an amplified intersection between detention and incarceration also makes possible the extension of the detention regime. By exploring the reverse of " crimmigration," I look at how the enlargement of immigration detention also reframes and "detentionalizes" carceral regimes by importing "civil" and supposedly "non-punitive" detention procedures into the criminal justice system.
Tertulias with Luis Alberto Urrea By Marta Ayala This fall semester we had the rare opportunity to connect with Luis Alberto Urrea, UIC Professor of English and popular award-winning author in a Tertulia series titled Entre Nos. An adaptation for the theatre by Karen Zacharias of Urrea's book Into the Beautiful North had recently been staged in several cities throughout the United States, making it a powerful counter-balance to the anti-immigrant rhetoric we hear too often on the news. The goal was to have a series of intimate conversations with students about writing, arts, culture and everyday politics. In the 1st Tertulia, Laura Crotte, who acted in Into the Beautiful North in Chicago, was invited to participate. She added to the sharing done by students and energized the entire Latino Cultural Center by performing a song. In the 2nd Tertulia several students from other departments joined the conversation. Another leading actor from Into the Beautiful North, EstĂŠban Cruz, kept all of us in a constant laughter sharing his stories about finding his space as a gay actor, dancer and educator. In the 3rd gathering, participants came prepared with responses to a prompt, writing about where have their
hands been and what stories the hands might tell, or about some one else’s hands. This time it was our turn to share our stories and we found ourselves connecting to our family, our identity as Latinos, as immigrants and as constant luchadores for Latinx cultura in this country. We hope to repeat experiences like this in the future.
Tertulia with Luis Alberto Urrea
Iliana, Amalia, Tannya, Kris & Enrique at the Symposium
Tannya Islas Corporeal Landscapes: Affect, Memory, and Embodiment in Mexico's Changing Climate This paper investigates the relationships between ejidatarios and agrarian landscapes in Coamiles, Nayarit, Mexico. I situate farmers and their land with the scholarly discourses circulating Anthropogenic climate change, and more particularly, the human/nature binary. Throughout this essay, I engage with traditional approaches to human/nature relations, such as the understanding that the two are in opposition to one another, or that they have separate histories and processes. I attempt to complicate such frameworks by exploring the intricacies of how they come together in an experience of climate change. I argue in addition to Nature, the farmer is also a locus of climate change, and that by exploring human bodies and experiences, a more nuanced conception of "subjects" of the Anthropocene may emerge.
Enrique, Kris, Iliana and Deanna at LALS Graduation
Kris Tori La Havana Madrid: Recreating Community through Theatre The human impulse to create art is universal. Works of art help us understand how others have lived and what they have valued. This project focuses on constructing the past through works of art, focusing on the play La Havana Madrid, by Chicago actress Sandra Delgado, based on the true story of the 1960s nightclub which was located at Belmont and Sheffield in Chicago. The venue was frequented by many Latinos from the Caribbean. This creative piece touches on elements such as memory and place by recreating a community and explores how memory is being used to understand the community. In this case, the different memories of the nightclub incarnate the experiences and aspirations of a people.
Iliana, Xochitl, Kris & Tannya at UIC Graduation
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Guatemalans in Chicago: Experiencing Community in a Global City This project explores how Guatemalans in Chicago construct community by focusing on the ways in which they describe, claim, and experience their community. While some scholarship has drawn attention to Guatemalans living in other "popular migrant destinations" for Central Americans, such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., the presence and experience of this group of Latinos in the Midwest warrants further examination. I draw on participant observation and interviews to gain insight into processes of integration for Guatemalans in Chicago The unique narratives of this Latino group suggest that their community formation is shaped by the existence of establishments that specifically cater to them, such as bakeries and restaurants which serve to attract them and provide a service connecting them to their homeland--such as access to comfort in having food from their home country. Another facet of their community building is also connected to their cultural events, such as the annual Independence Day Parade, religious festivities like the Misa de Esquipilas each January, and social events like the Picnic Chapin every summer, which bring members of the community together. I argue that these not only play a role in generating their visibility in Chicago, but also in how they claim their space and form their community in the city.
LALS NEWSLETTER ¡ FALL 2017
Iliana Avila
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LALS NEWSLETTER FALL 2017
Faculty News and Notes Adam Goodman had a chapter "Mexican Migrants, Family Separation, and US Immigration Policy Since 1942," published in the book Forced Out and Fenced In: Immigration Tales from the Field. HIs article "The Long History of Self-Deportation," was published in NACLA: Report on the Americas, Vol. 49, No. 2. He was the cocreator of #ImmigrationSyllabus Project which was a public history collaboration that provided historical context to contemporary questions about immigration and citizenship. His article "The Human Costs of Outsorcing Deportation" was accepted for publication in the Winter 2017 issue of Humanity (Vol. 8 No 3). Amalia Pallares published “Uncivil Acts and Foundational Moments: the Case of Ecuador,” a chapter in the book Interrogating Civil Society in Latin America. Among many presentations, at the Hull House she gave a lecture on "Who is the Common? Mexican Immigrants Chicago: 1920s to 1940s" for the NEH Seminar on the Common Good. She was also invited to participate in the workshop on Securing the Common Good, at Hull House, where participants read and discussed shared readings on the common good in the progressive era, and developed a two week course model on this topic. Andreas E. Feldmann participates as an external researcher for "Para el Estudio de la Estatalidad y la Democracia en América Latina," with the Chilean Economics Ministry. He published “Greater State Capacity, Lesser Stateness: Lessons from the Peruvian Commodity Boom” in Politics and Society 45 (1): 3-34 (with Eduardo Dargent and Juan Pablo Luna). He is an active member of the Rising Democracy Network, funded by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The purpose of the initiative is to promote dialogue and diplomatic exchange on ways to foment democracy at the global level. As part of the network he regularly writes reports about the situation in specific countries in the Western Hemisphere and participates in inter-regional dialogues. Christopher Boyer's book Political Landscapes: Forests, Communities and Conservation in Mexico received the Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Book Award for superior scholarship in forest and conservation. He published a book chapter titled "Crisis Utilization in Mexican Forests" in Simo Laakkonen, Richard Tucker, and Timo Vourisalo, (eds.), The Long Shadows: A Global Environmental History of the Second World War.
Cristián Roa was awarded the Mid-Career Award by the UIC Scholarhsip/Research LAS college. He was funded for his project "The Florentine Codex: Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún and the Invention of Nahua Theology.” He published a review of David Mauricio Adriano Solodkow's Etnógrafos coloniales. Alteridad y escritura en la conquista de América (siglo XVI) in Colonial Latin American Review (Vol. 25 No. 2). Elena Gutierrez was funded for "Collaborative Collection of Chicago’s Community Histories," “Humanities Without Walls: The Global Midwest.” Elena has been elected a faculty advisor for Feminists United, and the Task Force Chair for Latino Health Minor. She is also an Archival Consultant for the National Health Law Center. Joel W. Palka received funding for "Science and Humanities in Research: Investigating the Provenience and Iconography of Twin Maya Ceramic Urns.” This summer he led the first-ever LALS Sumer Study Abroad Program in Chiapas, Mexico, which will be repeated in 2018. Lorena Garcia co-edited a virtual special issue on " Sex Education in the United States" for the journal Sex Education and published, with Jessica Fields, "Renewed Commitments in A Time of Vigilance: Sexuality Education in the USA. Sex Education." Maria de Los Angeles Torres is Director of the InterUniversity Program on Latino Research (IUPLR) currently housed at UIC. This past year they organized the IUPLR Siglo XXI conference in San Antonio, TX where she moderated the plenary session. She was able to renew the Mellon Fellowship program for doctoral students in the humanities writing dissertations in Latina/o studies. She has been serving as a Committee Member helping create new courses for the Masters program. She is currently working on a book project titled The Elusive Present: Democracy's Time in Cuban Thought. Patrisia Macias-Rojas received a Faculty Fellowship from the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy. She published her book From Deportation to Prison: The Politics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America. Patrisia Contributed to an Amicus Brief in the Supreme Court case: Jesus V. Hernandez et al. v. Jesus Mesa Jr. et al. in which 15Continues on page 7
By Kris Tori (MA 2017)
Getting started During a meeting with Amalia Pallares, Director of LALS, I expressed my interest in theatre and Nena, the executive director of IUPLR, mentioned this new project called La Havana Madrid. I contacted Sandra Delgado and expressed my interest in being part of this production by helping conduct research. During the summer I attended some
workshops and table reads the playwright organized. It was exciting to listen to these characters and hear the words in the script spoken for the first time. It is also exciting to experience how a piece of literature can flourish through performance. I also attended events and visited research libraries such as the Newberry Library and Sulzer Library. For three months I constantly communicated with the playwright back and forth and sent her information such as books, articles, old magazines and photographs from the 1960s. During this stage I was able to ask questions and truly pick at the playwright’s brain. I wanted to understand why this piece was, and still is, so important to her and what it means today. I worked with Sandra Delgado for almost a year and it was fascinating to be a part of creating La Havana Madrid. I truly cherished every moment.
Final thoughts I believe that education is important and that theatre is a powerful form of learning. Theatre examines the human condition and teaches us how to express ourselves more effectively in various ways. We can learn about people, history, ideas and distant places. It broadens our imagination and helps us to develop our creativity. Seeing a piece of literature or a beautiful poetic text unfold in front of our very own eyes is magical. I encourage people to go to the theatre, whether it is to see the beautiful work of La Havana Madrid or any other play – you will always learn something new. I would like to thank Sandra Delgado, my mentors Maria de los Angeles (Nena) Torres, Javier Villa-Flores, Amalia Pallares, Marta Ayala, professors, faculty members and students from the Latin American and Latino Studies program and Theatre Department at UIC, and family and friends for their unconditional support throughout this journey.
Sandra Delgado was a guest speaker in LALS 102 " Introduction to Latino Studies"
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I had the privilege of working very closely with the Chicago theatre actress and playwright Sandra Delgado. La Havana Madrid is the title of her play and this was Sandra Delgado’s debut as a playwright. Embarking on this journey with her was a delight! This play is a powerful story about culture, community, music, memory and Chicago. La Havana Madrid was the name of the longgone Caribbean night club that drew throngs of newly arrived Latinos to the north side of Chicago in the 1960s where it became a cultural hub for these new Chicagoans. The piece was inspired by real life stories of those who frequented this venue to celebrate, dance and remember. My MA paper for the Latin American and Latino Studies program was based on the play. I focused on the recreation of the community through theatre, place and memory and on what happens to memory when a place no longer exists. The playwright wants to bring these memories to life through the play which she is reconstructing from a profound and intimate place. The characters become flashbacks to the context as spirits of the past, and the building itself has a personality. In my interview with Delgado she said: “people love sharing memories – you’re like the hero of your own story, you’re in control of that memory so there is something very empowering about that. Memory is very empowering.” The play begins and ends with the words “no dejes que te quiten tu historia” -- “don’t let them take away your history.”
LALS NEWSLETTER · FALL 2017
The Graduate Perspective: My Research Experience
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LALS NEWSLETTER FALL 2017
Immigrant Family’s Rights and the Transborder Youth Project
In April 2017 LALS invited Frida Espinosa, Director of the Transnational Families Project of the Instituto para las Mujeres en Migración (IMUMI) in Mexico City to give a talk and a workshop at UIC. She led discussions on the rights of Mexican women who have been deported or returned to Mexico as well as Central American women who are in transit or now residing in Mexico. She introduced students to some of the legal, social and economic challenges facing the women that IMUMI is assisting. The most pressing problems are legal difficulties in reuniting families who have been separated by deportation, as these cases often involve working with legal systems from different countries: the US, Mexico and El Salvador, Guatemala or Honduras. An additional difficulty has been obtaining sufficient documentation for children to enter the school system and receive social services. While recent legal changes now allow these children to attend
Mexican schools, IMUMI continues to work on disseminating this information widely so that all schools comply, assisting children and families in the adaptation process. UIC students were able to gain firsthand knowledge of what are the challenges facing returning as well as Central American communities in Mexico. Frida Espinosa’s visit was the result of two years of transborder youth networking established by LALS faculty interested in helping youth immigration activists from the US, Mexico and Central America build bridges in order to grow and enhance their respective mobilizing work. Professors Bada and Pallares met Frida Espinosa in a transborder youth conference they helped create. In 2015, thanks to a seed money working group grant offered by the UIC-based Inter-University Program for Latino Research, the Immigrant youth working group created by Profs. Bada and Pallares was able to launch the first Transborder Youth Network Conference “De Aquí y de Allá” which connected for the first time ever undocumented youth from the U.S with returned/deported youth in Mexico and Central America. We partnered with several faculty including, in Mexico, Jill Anderson (currently a visiting professor at Duke), Leticia Calderón (Instituto Mora), and Nutty Cardenas (CIDE); and in the United States, including Leisy Abrego (UCLA) and Ricardo Ramírez (Notre Dame).We were able to gain the logistical support of Iniciativa Ciudadana, who helped secure additional funding in order to house and feed all the participants. The IUPLR grant was used
exclusively to finance the advance parole and travel of the US applicants. We had an extensive application and selection process that ensured that all of the applicants selected had a trajectory of advocacy for immigrant rights and had demonstrated ample leadership capacity and strong commitment and engagement. We felt that the establishment of a long-term transborder advocacy network would be much easier if the participants were proven leaders in this field. We were also able to get popular education consultants from La Tapizca group in Florida to donate their time and lead the sessions. In three days in July 2015 a group of 30 diverse Guatemalan, Costa Rican, Nicaraguan, Mexican mestizo, indigenous, queer, dacamented, current and former migrant youth met in Mexico City at the Instituto José María Luis Mora in July to exchange organizing strategies to improve human rights access for these communities. The group had a mix of seasoned transborder activists including those working for the Freedom University in Georgia, the cross-country walks for the undocumented youth, the Organized Communities against Deportation, the California Farmworkers Union, and MECHA groups from California, among others. Multiple similar encounters had taken place since the approval of DACA, but they had been organized or sponsored by the Mexican government or had been exclusively academic events. This was the first encounter to purposively bring together youth activists from the US, Mexico and Central America.
Faculty News & News, continued from page 4 year-old Sergio Hernández was standing in Mexico, barely across the border, when he was shot and killed by a U.S. Border Patrol agent standing inside the United States. Ralph Cintrón is currently working on his book Democracy as Fetish. He and co-PIs Molly Doane, Omur Harmansah, and David Wise, were awarded a grant for a project entitled “Political Ecology as Practice: A Regional Approach to the Anthropocene.” for $145,000., as part of the "Humanities without Walls: The Work of the Humanities in a Changing Climate, Mellon Foundation. As part of this project the team that will do fieldwork in different parts of the world in order to understand and compare local interpretations of climate change and landscape. He serves as a board member for LUCHA which is an affordable housing agency as well as a member for the Puero Rican Agenda.
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summer to investigate conditions of Central American immigrants in Mexico City. Further, UIC professor Xochitl Bada relied on some of the scholars and youth she met to organize a Law and Society Panel on the rights of returned and deportees in Summer 2017. We look forward to future collaborations with several of the youth who are now part of this transborder youth network, and help keep LALS informed of the most current and pressing immigrationrelated issues in our times. To learn more about this encounter please see this publication: Abrego, Leisy and Berta Guevara. 2015. “Centroamérica: Origen, tránsito y destino de personas migrantes.” Brújula Ciudadana (Edición Especial:
LALS NEWSLETTER · FALL 2017
Since the encounter several of the youth, who named themselves “jovenes sin fronteras” have engaged in extensive communications and continued networking among themselves and several of the scholars involved. For example one youth based in Mexico invited another youth involved in Organized Communities Against Deportations (Chicago) to a conference on immigrant women in Guadalajara, and the Chicago activist in turn used those connections to organized another trip of undocumented youth with the purposed of deepening those advocacy ties. Youth from OCAD in Chicago have relied on those ties in Mexico and Central America to support deportees once they leave the US. Additionally one of our partners, UCLA professor Leisy Abrego has maintained ties with Otros Dreamers en Accion and visited them last
Encuentro de Jóvenes sin Fronteras). Agosto: 19-21. http://www.iniciativaciudadana.or g.mx/#!centroamrica-origentrnsito/cimj You can also view this video, created by the youth during the conference to share their concerns and issues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LnIL4BpRTE For more information about IMUMI, visit http://www.imumi.com
LALS FACULTY ON THE NEWS! Patricia Macias-Rojas on PBS's The Tavis Smiley Show http://www.pbs.org/wnet/tavissmiley/interviews/professor-author-patrisia-macias-rojas/ Xóchitl Bada on PRI's the World http://www.pri.org/stories/2016-10-05/small-townmexican-photographer-brings-big-time-nostalgiahim-detriot Adam Goodman on Univisión http://www.univision.com/univisionnews/politics/latination-speaks-to-the-importanceof-latinos-in-us-society
Xótchil Bada received a grant for her project "An Oral History Project of Chicago's Mexican Hometown Associations," from the LAS Dean's Award for Faculty Research in the Humanities. Last year she completed the project "Parent Empowerment Academy” where she was the co-principal with Nilda Flores-Gonzalez. She published a chapter in El Impacto Sociocultural del Fenómeno Migratorio en Michoacán. Xochitl was the lead coordinator of a binational and simultaneous Dialogue for the Dignity of Migrants organized by UNAM in Chicago and Mexico City. She was also invited by the consuls of Argentina and Venezuela to offer a workshop on labor rights for Latin American migrants at UIC. She is a co-editor on two current book projects: Oxford Handbook of Latin American Sociology and New Migration Patterns in the Americas: Challenges for the 21st Century, both under contract.
The deadline to apply for the program "Cultures & Histories in San Cristóbal de las Casas" in Chiapas, Mexico is March 16, 2018. Don't delay! For more information, visit the web page of the Study Abroad Office and look for it under "Faculty-led programs." http://studyabroad.uic.edu/
Get your LALS T-Shirt Today Sales suppport the LALS Student Scholarship Fund Consider a monetary donation to support LALS students. Visit the website or stop by the office for more information http://lals.uic.edu Like us on Facebook facebook.com/lalsatuic Latin American and Latino Studies Program (MC 219) College of Liberal Arts and Sciences 1525 University Hall 601 South Morgan Street Chicago, IL. 606077115 3129962445 lals@uic.edu