LALS Master of Arts Research Symposium 2023

MASTER OF ARTS RESEARCH SYMPOSIUM

SCHEDULE OF EVENT

Welcome Address

Dr. Jonathan Inda

Professor and Director of Latin American and Latino Studies

Moderator

Dr. Xóchitl Bada

Professor and Director of Graduate Studies

M.A. Student Presentations

Adriana Soto

Evelyn Martinez-Aguilera

Lynda Lopez

Q&A Session

M . A . S T U D E N T P R E S E N T A T I O N S

Confianza y Coraje: Building a Latina Studies Course for High School Latinas Adriana Soto

This research examines the creation of a curriculum for a high school-level Latina Studies course that seeks to provide a nuanced understanding of the complex racial and ethnic dimensions of being Latina. The primary audience for this course is Latina students, in order to help them explore the intricacies of their Latina identities in everyday life. The secondary audience is the rest of the student population, who, in learning about Latina culture, can assist in creating cultural awareness and cultural peace. The course will build upon Latina epistemologies such as the Mujerista perspective with an interdisciplinary method combining focuses on social constructs such as race, gender, and power. Students will be able to explore various aspects of Latina culture through avenues related to academia, art, literature, media, and political activism. Students will be empowered through knowledge, dialogue, and connection. Knowledge to better understand what's going on. Testimonios to bear witness and share experiences. A connection built within a community of confianzaycoraje.

A New Population to Manage: The Making of Environmental Refugees Through Emergency, Crisis,

and Care

Evelyn Martinez-Aguilera

As climate change continues to escalate, the unfolding environmental degradation has been normalized to the point where narratives of predicted apocalyptic misery and its consequences have become the strategic frames to garner international attention. Such narratives have generated discussions on environmental migration, migration attributed to the effects of anthropogenic climate patterns, to the forefront, with the subjectivity of environmental refugees as the latest people to alleviate or, in the case of nation-states, to manage. Taking after Michel Foucault’s concepts of governmentality, this research situates the environmental refugee subject as the latest population to manage– a subjectivity that has been constructed through the rhetoric of climate emergency, imminent crisis, and humanitarian care. Through archival research of environmental nongovernmental organization reports, I trace how the concept of environmental refugee came to be, paying specific attention to the temporal dimension of its construction and the importance of care. The temporalities of emergency and crisis have served to situate climate change and, in turn, massive climate migration as the truth, simultaneously creating the subject of environmental refugee as real, vulnerable, and in need of saving.

Planting Seeds: Histories and Strategies of the Environmental Justice Movement in Chicago

Lynda Lopez

Environmental justice (EJ) is not a new framework in Chicago, but recently more people have started to pay attention to it. Over the last few years, there have been high-profile examples of the environmental racism Latinx communities experience in Chicago, which were made more acute because of the coronavirus pandemic. The Hilco implosion and the proposed relocation of the General Iron metal shredder to the East Side catapulted the EJ lens to a new level of visibility. Over the past decade, EJ has been utilized as a framework to win key victories for Chicago communities, such as the opening of La Villita Park on a former brownfield site and most recently a community farm at the southern end of the park. This project builds upon current scholarship, including Teresa Irene Gonzales (2021) and Kern and Kovesi (2018), which has advanced the importance of the intersectional application of the EJ framework. Through archival research including newspapers, reports, and community data, this research seeks to advance the discussion of the EJ framework for Latinx communities in Chicago organizing for social change and tackling complex community issues, such as crime, access to healthy food, and air pollution. Through EJ organizing, Latinx residents have designed and cultivated shared spaces, thereby creating more just and equitable communities.