The Newberry Seminar in
Borderlands and Latino Studies
Co-sponsored by Northwestern University’s Program in Latina and Latino Studies, the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame, the Center for Latino Research at DePaul University, and the Katz Center for Mexican Studies at the University of Chicago
Seminar sessions are held on Thursdays from 5:00 PM–7:00 PM
at the Newberry Library, 60 West Walton Street, Chicago, Illinois.
2009-2010
October 8, 2009
Japanese American Internment and the Mexican Bracero Project at the Crossroads of WWII
Jinah Kim, Northwestern University
This article in process explores the links between two WW-II era projects - internment of over 120,000 Japanese Americans and exploitative contract labor Mexican ‘bracero’ program - through the framing lens of ‘the third border’ or the policing of citizenship and belonging within national borders. In (re)constituting the links between these events I propose that a revision of American history - or a temporal map of American modernity – simultaneously demands a spatial re-mapping of the Americas. A map of third borders’ reveals how proximate the center of the nation – both physical center like the mid-west but also metaphorical center like the family – is to international borders, and how unsuccessful the border is in maintaining the strict line between white and other, citizen and immigrant. By imagining that the border constituted by the Pacific coast and line between the U.S. and Mexican territories can meet in Arizona and Chicago also fundamentally challenges Asian America and Latina/o studies east and west coast biases. Mapping and excavating third borders throughout U.S. history necessitates bringing together ethnic nationalist and post-colonialist theories destabilizing the nation as the agent of history and highlighting the constitutive role that immigrants and migration play in constructing modernity. "La Maquila-Golondrina": Feminine Details, Habitat Fragments, and the Documentary Performative
Amy Sara Carroll, University of Michigan
This paper opens and closes with references to contributions to the October 2008 show Proyecto Cívico Project at the Centro Cultural Tijuana (CECUT). Ingrid Hernández’s arresting image of an abandoned factory in Tijuana, La maquila-golondrina, sets the watch of the scene. “La maquila-golondrina,” a deceptively poetic phrase in Spanish, translates literally into the“factory-swallow” (as in swallow, the species of bird that migrates). Part of a larger book project (specifically, the third section of my manuscript, entitled “BORDER”), this paper concentrates on the intervention that Sergio De La Torre and Vicky Funari’s documentary Maquilapolis (2006) makes “toward a history of the vanishing present.” Somewhere in Maquilapolis’ thickening description, a young Mexican woman reflects on her struggles with unemployment, earmarking the beginning of an end—the years 2000-2001, the approximate eleventh hour when outsourcing to Tijuana began to be outsourced to Indonesia and elsewhere. Intelligible within a tradition of border art, which, as of late, has had to contend with the U.S.-Mexico border’s growing prominence and dissemination in Mexican, U.S., and global imaginaries, De La Torre and Vicky Funari’s film both chronicles claustrophobic elements of border culture, tagging environmental –isms like the performative sexualization and racialization of working Woman, and suggests possible escape valves of “cultural collaboration.” This paper learns from Maquilapolis even as it offers open-ended observations on neoliberalisms’ habitat-fragmenting habits, their aesthetic representations and the borders and circuits of periodization, to arrive at a closing analysis of Nuevo Dragon City (also included in the CECUT show), De La Torre’s most recent cinematic performance of the feminine details of abandon and racialized “temporary autonomous zones.”
November 12, 2009
Commentator: Ramón Gutierrez, University of Chicago
"Ours in Blood and Sympathy": The Great Basin and Pacific Expansionism
Eve Mayer, Harvard University
My paper examines Mormon expansionism into Hawaii in the context of a competitive nineteenth-century religious marketplace. I argue that mid-nineteenth-century Hawaii became a “borderland of empires” in which states and religions fit Pacific Islanders into their respective conceptions of racial hierarchy and political alliance. The LDS Church developed its particular form of “Manifest Destiny,” expanding fundamental conceptions of indigenous kinship. Unable to escape their reputation as lawless polygamists, Mormon missionaries in the Pacific faced resistance based on demographic fears that linked Mormons to Native American insurgency in the U.S. West.
"Meat in the Middle": The Borderlands Histories of Illinois Beef, 1835-1900
Kristin Hoganson, Univeristy of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
When I proposed this paper, my working subtitle was “Overlapping Borderlands of Beef, 1835-1900.” This captured my initial argument, which was that borderlands geographies are indeterminate, and even places that do not share land borders with other nations can be seen as having borderlands attributes. However, on further reflection, I realized that my point was not to evacuate the term “borderland” of much of its meaning, but to illuminate some of the nineteenth-century transborder connections that bound the rural Midwest to Canada, Mexico, and Indian Territory. As a result, I’ve changed both the subtitle and the argument. Combining a commodity chain approach with an outward looking local history approach, my paper finds that their location in the middle of a major land mass led Midwestern farmers to position themselves along a north/south axis as well as an east/west one. More specifically, my case study finds that the beef producers of Champaign, Illinois looked to Ontario for pedigreed cattle for breeding purposes and to the U.S./Mexico borderlands and Indian country for range animals to fatten. But recognizing rural Midwesterners’ embeddedness in multidirectional commodity webs does not imply that their northern and southern transborder relations were commensurate. Whereas farmers in Champaign recognized their many ties with Canada – extending beyond breeding circuits to labor migrations, railway routes, and farmers’ alliances -- they tended to overlook their ties to Indian Territory and Mexico, centered as they were on commodities rather than interpersonal relationships. In contrast to accounts that domesticated Canada, depicting it as more familial than foreign, farmers’ descriptions of Mexico and Indian Territory drew very different, racially-inflected, conclusions, thought to apply both to people and animals. By both revealing and contrasting such transborder relations, this paper sheds light on the ways that northern and southern borders were defined in relation to each other.
January 21, 2010
Commentator: Bill Johnson González, DePaul University
El tren de la muerte: Youth Border Crossing Narratives
Gabriela Nuñez, University of Louisville
This paper examines contemporary narratives about children and adolescents who travel unaccompanied from Central America to the U.S.-Mexico border in search of long-lost parents and better life opportunities. Contemporary feminist scholarship has succeeded in complicating early research on migration and immigration that focuses on the lives and experiences of adult men. Although the study across academic disciplines centered on youth border crossers is still in its nascent stages, there is a proliferation of narratives in journalism, and feature and documentary film representing the “war without a name” – a phrase used to describe the harrowing phenomena of youth who travel on the top of freight trains to reach the U.S. These contemporary texts challenge audiences to question their assumptions about undocumented immigrants and to consider the unique struggles for young migrants. I assert that reading these texts in tandem demonstrates a problematic focus on the moral arguments regarding parenting that elide the socio-economic connections between the U.S. and Central America that motivate northward mass migration.
Elvira Arellano and Migrant Melodrama
Ana Elena Puga, Northwestern University
This paper delineates how melodrama, as a mode of imagination, played a crucial role in the construction of the public performances and spectatorship of the undocumented migrant activist Elvira Arellano during and after her year in sanctuary in a Chicago church, where she remained for a year together with her son Saul. It asks to what extent and in what ways our melodramatic imagination simultaneously propels and circumscribes migrant claims to human rights. How can advocates for migrant rights best negotiate expectations, even demands, for moral clarity and spectacles of suffering as the price of inclusion in the national imagined community?
February 18, 2010
¿soy emo, y qué? sad kids, punkera dykes and the Latino public sphere
Marissa López, University of California, Los Angeles
In March and April of 2008, the world witnessed the violent, physical attacks on emo youth in Mexico and Latin America. Commentators wondered what emo was, why it appeared in Mexico and Latin America, and why people responded so violently to it. This paper approaches a similar set of questions. Tracing a route from Morrissey?s passionate Latino fans, to Mexico?s emo youth, to Myriam Gurba?s queer, punk short fiction, I ask how emo travels, and how these public performances of affect speak to the intersections of race and gender in 21st century Latino and Latin American youth culture.
“I heard that Puerto Ricans are Latino and Mexicans are Hispanic”: EthnoRacial Contortions in a Chicago High School
Jonathon Rosa, University of Chicago
This paper analyzes the ways in which “at risk” Mexican and Puerto Rican students in a hyper-segregated Chicago public high school become and un-become Latina/o. That is, what are the ways in which students learn and unlearn Puerto Rican, Mexican, and Latina/o difference? These experiences of socialization and differentiation take place in relation to a school-based governmental project of subject-making, a community-based history of social networks, and the circulation of popular cultural images among school actors. Whereas previous research emphasizes Puerto Rican-Mexican difference by positioning it as a straightforward object of contention by which some actors draw on citizenship status to exercise privilege and power over others, this paper moves beyond these approaches by analyzing the creation of shared Latina/o identities through institutional, ideological, and interactional mechanisms that redefine Puerto Rican and Mexican difference.
March 25, 2010
Commentator: John Nieto-Phillips, Indiana University
A Community in Transition: Competing Identities
Nelly Blacker-Hanson, Valparaiso University
Mexican and Mexican-American workers were a vital component of labor organizing in the 1930s. Particularly significant were efforts to overcome divisions of nationality, language and cultural heritage. They faced competing calls to identify as workers and Mexicans. While it would be inaccurate and simplistic to argue that these identities – ethnic and class – could only be mutually exclusive, the struggle for primacy was waged on the pages of the dailies, in the fields, the labor halls, and at the negotiating table. The medium I use to explore these competing forces is the newspapers: La Opinión, the widely-read Spanish-language paper; The Daily Worker, of the CP-USA; and the notoriously anti-union Los Angeles Times, which found itself in a tenuous alliance with the Mexican consulate.
Entangled Borders: International security and the relocation of Japanese in Mexico during World War II
Andy Eisen, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Following the attacks on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Mexican army, with the aide of U.S. military intelligence agencies, oversaw the removal of Japanese and Japanese-Mexicans residing within 150km of Mexico’s western coastline, northern border, and later, its southern border with Guatemala. This paper, utilizing archival research collected in Mexico City and Washington D.C., examines the cooperative policing efforts that emerged during World War II. It documents how Mexico’s coasts and borders became entangled with the United States’ international security efforts and then reveals how these fears resulted in the subsequent surveillance, harassment, relocation, and in some cases, detention of Japanese in camps established in central Mexico.
April 29, 2010
Commentator: Elaine Peña, George Washington University
The Politicization and Politics of Mexican Migrants: Guerrero Hometown Organizations in Chicago
Judith Boruchoff, University of Chicago
There is now ample literature arguing that
Mexican migrant organizations, that initially formed to fund and carry
out public works in members’ native villages, have become noteworthy
political actors. Yet we have not adequately inquired into the
different types of political power they achieve and through what means.
I contribute to this task, developing my arguments through comparison
of the two Guerrero state-level coalitions of hometown clubs that
resulted when the original Federation of Guerrerenses in Chicago split
in 2003 after making pioneering gains since it was founded in the early
1990s. Through ethnography I explore the divergent ways of doing
politics, both internal to the organizations and beyond, and assess
their implications for varied impacts on political processes in both
Mexico and the United States. This analysis of two groups from the same
Mexican state reminds us of the different ways of being political that
may obtain even in seemingly similar organizations; it invites greater
scrutiny of how political modus operandi may vary yielding different
types of agency and limitations.
The Registers of Ethnolinguistic Belonging: A Latino Diaspora of Discourse in Israel
Alejandro Paz, The University of Toronto
Switching or shifting to the dominant language is often conceived of as either a risky if temporary boundary-crossing, or else an irreparable process of losing culture during assimilation. On the other hand, maintaining a heritage language is often thought to preserve a diasporic tie. This paper challenges such treatments of language as a discrete object, by considering how Latino labor migrants in Israel see the preservation of educación (polite breeding) in discursive interaction—rather than Spanish—as both what sets them apart ethnolinguistically, as well as what ties them to their diasporic origins. Based on extensive ethnographic and linguistic fieldwork, the paper documents a unique group of Latinos as part of a larger phenomenon of labor migration that transformed Israeli society.
We will pre-circulate papers to those planning to attend. If you cannot attend and want to read a paper, please contact the author directly. E-mail scholl[at]newberry.org,or call (312) 255-3524 to receive a copy of the paper. Papers are available for request two weeks prior to the seminar date. Please include your e-mail address in all correspondence.
The seminar format assumes that all participants have read the essays in advance, and that all those requesting the paper will attend the seminar. Please do not request a paper unless you plan to attend. We encourage faculty members to call the seminar to the attention of graduate students.