“Decolonial Environmentalisms: Race, Genre, and Latinx Culture,” Latinx Studies Seed Grant

EMU 119

Speaker: David J. Vázquez, UO Associate Professor and Head of Department of English

The environmental humanities explore relationships between literature, culture, and the environment with the goal of creating an earth-centered scholarly vision. Although this body of scholarship centers environmental concerns, some forms of U.S. environmentalism put ideologies of American exceptionalism to work for the movement’s political goals of, as Rob Nixon puts it, “wilderness preservation, on wielding the Endangered Species Act against developers, and on saving old-growth forests.” Although the social justice turn of the environmental humanities has integrated Environmental Justice (or EJ, the study of the uneven distribution of environmental harms and benefits to people of color and the poor) approaches, some pockets of environmental thought continue to emphasize first-world, privileged perspectives over those of people of color, indigenous people, the economically disempowered, the colonized, and the formerly colonized.

“Decolonial Environmentalisms: Race, Genre and Latinx Culture,” intervenes in these trends by identifying parallel and countervailing environmental representations in contemporary Latinx literature and culture that intertwine decolonial and anti-racist forms of thought with environmental imaginaries. Building on the work of environmental humanities scholars who point to privileged perspectives in environmental thought, this project identifies Latinx literary and cultural texts that express neglected environmental perspectives, often through innovative aesthetic forms. These literary texts and cultural productions question stylized pastoral visions of agriculture and speak powerfully to EJ frameworks. The presentation will conclude with a close reading of Alex Rivera’s 2009 film Sleep Dealer as a case study for how decolonial environmentalisms operate in Latinx culture.

David J. Vázquez is Associate Professor and Head of English and a contributing faculty member in the Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies Department and the Program in Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Triangulations: Narrative Strategies for Navigating Latino Identity (Minnesota 2011) and co-editor of Latinx Environmentalisms: Place, Justice, and the Decolonial (forthcoming Temple). His articles appear in such journals as Arizona Quarterly, Symbolism, Contemporary Literature, CENTRO and Latino Studies. He has also contributed to the Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature and Erasing Public Memory: Race, Aesthetics, and Cultural Amnesia in the Americas.

Tags: CLLAS, David Vazquez, UO

Grant-Writing Workshop for NEH Funding

Jane Grant Conference Room, Hendricks 330

CLLAS Professional Development Series

Tags: CLLAS, UO

CLLAS Research Grant Writing Workshop for Graduate Students

Jane Grant Room
330 Hendricks Hall

CLLAS Professional Development Series

Grant-Writing Workshop for Graduate Students

The Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies will hold its annual Grant Writing Workshop targeted toward graduate students on January 16, 2020.

CLLAS staff members Eli Meyer, director of operations, and Feather Crawford, event planner & project manager, will share tips and strategies for writing successful research grant proposals. This will be an opportunity to learn more about CLLAS’s summer 2020 grants for graduate students. For more information, please contact cllas@uoregon.edu.

Tags: CLLAS, CLLAS Graduate Grant funding, Graduate Student Research, UO

Ana Lara receives a 2019 Oregon Literary Fellowship in fiction

Recipients of the 2019 Oregon Literary Fellowship include UO assistant professor Ana-Maurine Lara, a CLLAS affiliated faculty member, in the category of fiction. Oregon Literary Arts said their out-of-state judges spent several months evaluating the 400+ applications they received, and selected thirteen writers and two publishers to receive grants of $3,500 each.

Bio
Ana-Maurine Lara, Ph.D., is a national award-winning poet and fiction writer. She is author of the fictional works Erzulie’s Skirt (RedBone Press, 2006), When the Sun Once Again Sang to the People (KRK Ediciones, 2011), and Watermarks and Tree Rings (Tanama Press) and the poetry book Kohnjehr Woman (RedBone Press, 2017). The first of her decade-long projects, Cantos, was released as a limited edition letterpress collection in Fall 2015. Lara is an assistant professor at the University of Oregon.

Tags: Ana-Maurine Lara, Oregon Literary Fellowship, UO

Latinx album covers invite people to look at art in a new way

https://around.uoregon.edu/content/latinx-album-covers-invite-people-look-art-new-way

From Around the O / March 4, 2019—Music and art have long-shared a history of collaboration, from turn-of-the-century sheet music illustrations to the vibrant psychedelic album cover designs of the trippy ’60s and beyond.

A slice of that history has makes up the visual artistry of Latinx artists, who are the subject of an interactive exhibition at the UO’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art titled “Visual Clave: The Expression of the Latino/a Experience through Album Cover Art: 1940-90.” The installation features 40-50 original album covers that are, in some cases, paired with the original artwork that was created to produce the album cover.

The inspiration for the exhibit, and the culmination of more than a decade of research and collecting, is the 2005 book “Cocinando: 50 Years of Latin Album Cover Art”by Northampton, Massachusetts-based Cuban-American author, musician and artist Pablo Ygnasio. The result is a pared-down selection culled from a larger East Coast show that distills the essence of the Latinx experience in its many forms.

The co-curator of the exhibit is Phillip Scher, UO professor of anthropology and folklore and public culture and also divisional dean for social sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences. Scher has collaborated with Ygnasio on projects since their college days together and explained that although the work is certainly diverse, much of what was produced for the mass market in the early days was largely controlled by big music industry companies like RCA, Decca and Capitol Records.

“Record producers and record labels understood the popularity of popular music — there had been a big mambo craze — they understood that it sold records, but they were still largely controlling the recording marketing and distribution process,” Scher said. “The artists might have been contracted, who themselves may not have been from the (Latinx) community.”

That began to change, however, in the 1960s and ’70s as Latin American musicians and emergent independent record labels such as Faniabegan to hand over more control to the musicians as well as to the artists who designed the cover art.

That also meant taking control of the messaging.

Latinx artists not only used albums as an outlet to express themselves artistically but also oftentimes as a means of conveying provocative commentary on Hispanic topics of resistance or issues of a political, economic or cultural nature.

“You begin to see covers themselves reflecting more of what the musicians want to say about their music, their community, their relationship to the American experience,” Scher said. “There’s a variety of ways in which taking control of the process of production yields really different artwork.”

Indeed, the exhibition, which is grouped by themes, embraces everything from dance and food, “Spanglish”, lowriders and borders, and life in the barrio to protest, resistance and spirituality, to name a few. A section celebrating female artists provides imagery and context to those strong Latinas who persevered, despite pressure to “stay out of the macho world of salsa and ranchera” and to not speak to women’s issues and perspectives.

Likewise, a 1971 Izzy Sanabria album cover designed for the iconic Willie Colónrecord “La Gran Fuga/The Big Break”, also known as the “Wanted by the FBI,” features a mug shot of Colón and uses satire to break negative stereotypes of the “bad Latino.” That includes humorous quotes such as “armed with a trombone and considered dangerous” and “Occupation: singer, also a very dangerous man with his voice.” Ironically, Colón went on to a career in law enforcement.

Although it’s not featured in this grouping, Scher cited an example of subtle messaging in popular crossover musician Desi Arnaz’ album Babalú. It’s unlikely that the predominently Anglo-American audience tuning in to the 1950s era comedy sitcom “I Love Lucy” suspected that Arnaz’ signature, conga-infused song was a ceremonial drumming ritual designed to invoke the spirit of Babalú-Ayú.

“What he is essentially approximating there is an Afro-Cuban religious ceremony, in which the spirits are invoked by calling them out and drumming in certain patterns to have the spirits arrive, to come to the ritual and participate,” Scher explained. “And sometimes that participation meant essentially spirit possession. People were singing that and had no idea what they were singing about.”

Because the exhibition also embodies multiple disciplines — Latin American, internationaland ethnic studies, history, music, art, folklore, and anthropology— “the teaching potential is tremendous,” Scher said. As they view the artwork and peruse the program, museum visitors listen to piped-in Latin music selections drawn from each of the albums on display and can also take a turn at playing the claves, an important percussion instrument used in African, Brazilian and Cuban music.

Overall, Scher hopes that the takeaway for people is that they will think differently about pop cultural ephemera.

“For many people and for many ways, popular culture is a really viable way of communicating through artistic expression and reaching a lot of people, communicating the most pressing types of issues that confront a particular community,” he said.

Ygnasio and Scher will present a curator’s lecture, part of the CLLAS Spring 2019 Research Presentation Series, on April 11. The exhibition runs through April 21.

—By Sharleen Nelson, University Communications

Tags: CLLAS Faculty Grant, Latinx album cover, Philip Scher, UO, Visual Clave

CLLAS Faculty Research Grants deadline

Tags: CLLAS research grants