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.
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
Desperate Acts: Melodrama in the Performance of Twenty-first century Migration
Ana Elena Puga, Northwestern University
February 18, 2010
¿soy emo, y qué? sad kids, punkera dykes and the Latino public sphere
Marissa López, University of California, Los Angeles
“I heard that Puerto Ricans are Latino and Mexicans are Hispanic”: EthnoRacial Contortions in a Chicago High School
Jonathon Rosa, University of Chicago
March 25, 2010
Commentator: John Nieto-Phillips, Indiana University
A Community in Transition: Competing Identities
Nelly Blacker-Hanson, Valparaiso University
Border Wars: Dangerous boundaries and the internationalization of internal security in the U.S. and Mexico, 1940-1945
Andy Eisen, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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
The Registers of Ethnolinguistic Belonging: A Latino Diaspora of Discourse in Israel
Alejandro Paz, The University of Toronto
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.