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.
Ana-Maurine Lara
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.
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.
CLLAS offers both Faculty Collaborative Research Grants and the Faculty Latinx Studies Seed Grant. Application deadline for faculty grants is: 12:00 p.m. (noon), Friday, April 5, 2019.
CLLAS Professional Development: NEH Grant Writing and more
The Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies (CLLAS) invites junior faculty and graduate students to join us on Thursday, February 7.
Dr. Stephanie Wood (Center for Equity Promotion) will share tips and strategies for writing successful research grant proposals, applicable not only to NEH but also to other external funding for grants for humanities and social sciences.
The Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies will hold its annual Grant Writing Workshop targeted toward graduate students on January 22, 2019.
Erin Beck, associate professor of political science, will share tips and strategies for writing successful research grant proposals. This will be an opportunity to learn more about CLLAS’s summer 2019 grants for graduate students. Professor Beck will also answer questions about applying for Tinker Field Research Grants. For more information, please contact cllas@uoregon.edu.
Around the O / December 12, 2018 — To date, more than 7,000 languages are spoken around the world. As Gabriela Pérez Báez explains, languages hold critical knowledge about the history of survival of the communities of speakers, their ecological perspectives and their well-being.
Gabriela Pérez Báez
Pérez Báez is an assistant professor in the University of Oregon’s linguistics department and serves as the director of its new Language Revitalization Lab. She also serves as co-director for the National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages and works with the UO’s Northwest Indian Language Institute, known as NILI.
Of the more than 300 languages spoken at the time of contact with Europeans in what is now the United States, more than half stopped being spoken as a result of colonization and state-building policies. These languages are considered to be dormant or sleeping. Many more are highly endangered today.
“The language communities recognize how critical the languages are and as a result have engaged in the arduous work of researching the languages in historical archives in order to reconstruct them and bring them back to use,” Pérez Báez said.
The Northwest Indian Language Institute provides training to Native American teachers working to revitalize many of these languages. Institute staff also partner with tribes to carry out on-site trainings and develop curriculum to teach highly endangered or sleeping languages in the classroom.
The institute’s efforts are being recognized with the announcement earlier in the fall that the National Breath of Life, of which the institute is a partner, has received support through a $311,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The grant was awarded to Daryl Baldwin, director of the Myaamia Center at Miami University, and Pérez Báez.
Since 2011, the National Breath of Life has provided training on the use of archival documentation for the revitalization of highly endangered and dormant languages to 117 community researchers from 55 language communities. With this growth comes the need for software to support the advancement of the research.
In response, the upcoming NEH-funded National Breath of Life 2.0 workshops are designed to provide participants with training in the use of the new indigenous languages digital archive. The archival system is the only available software that allows for the organization, storage and retrieval of digital copies of linguistic archival materials.
It directly links independent data derived from linguistic analysis to original manuscript pages. Pérez Báez said its powerful search function allows for the in-depth linguistic analysis required for the reconstruction of highly endangered or dormant languages.
The indigenous languages digital archive is modeled after the Miami-Illinois digital archive, also funded by a prior NEH grant and designed by the Myaamia Center to advance research for the revitalization of the heritage language of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma.
Pérez Báez said the grant will support the refinement of indigenous languages digital archive. It will also provide funding to hold two training workshops for community researchers engaged in language revitalization to learn how to use the archival system. The community researchers will then have access to the software free of charge.
The grant “has had significant positive impact on our ability to utilize archival materials for our revitalization effort,” Baldwin said. “It is an important step in the development of National Breath of Life to be able to share this technology with other tribal communities.”
A National Breath of Life 2.0 workshop will be held at Miami University in July 2019. Applications to the 2019 workshop are being accepted at www.nationalbreathoflife.org. The deadline is Saturday, Dec. 15.
The UO institute will hold a second workshop in Eugene in 2020.
“NILI is excited to be partnering with the National Breath of Life in this important national workshop, and we look forward to hosting community language leaders from across the nation,” said Janne Underriner, director of the institute.
Access the above link for giving to the Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies Gift Fund. Online gifts may be made using the form available at this link; all gifts are processed by the University of Oregon Foundation, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization responsible for receiving and administering private donations to the University of Oregon.
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