Becoming Heritage: Recognition, Exclusion, and the Politics of Black Cultural Heritage in Colombia

March 3, 2022
3:30 pm	to	5:00 pm

CLLAS Faculty Research Presentation

180 PLC, University of Oregon

Join CLLAS for our first 2022 faculty research presentation: “Becoming Heritage: Recognition, Exclusion, and the Politics of Black Cultural Heritage in Colombia.” Maria Fernanda Escallón (Department of Anthropology) will share her work on March 3, 2022, 3:30-5pm.

This in-person event will take place in 180 PLC. Masks are required. Attendance will be capped at 100.

Maria Fernanda Escallón is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oregon. She was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia, where she completed a BA and MA in Anthropology and Archaeology at the Universidad de Los Andes. In 2016 she completed her PhD in Anthropology at Stanford University. Before starting her doctorate, she worked in sustainable development and heritage policy-making for non-governmental organizations and Colombian public entities, including the Ministry of Culture and Bogotá’s Secretary of Culture and Tourism.

Maria Fernanda is interested in cultural heritage, race, diversity politics, ethnicity, and inequality in Latin America. Prior to joining the Anthropology Department at the University of Oregon, she was a 2015-2016 Dissertation Fellow in the Department of Black Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara. She has conducted field research in Colombia for over 10 years analyzing how and why certain multicultural policies that are ostensibly inclusive, can end up replicating, rather than dismantling, inequality and segregation across Latin America. Her latest book “Becoming Heritage: Recognition, Exclusion, and the Politics of Black Cultural Heritage in Colombia” is currently under contract with Cambridge University Press.

Her research has received support from a variety of sources, including the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Social Sciences Research Council, the Fulbright Program, the Mellon Foundation, and the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Her most recent work appears in Cultural Anthropology, the International Journal of Cultural Property and the International Journal of Heritage Studies.

Tags: CLLAS Faculty Grant, Colombia, faculty, Maria Fernanda Escallón

Shadow Suburbanism: Mexican Settlement and Immigration Enforcement in the Nuevo South

CLLAS Faculty Event

VIDEO

View the video for this CLLAS Research Series Faculty presentation by John Arroyo (School of Planning, Public Policy, and Management), here.

Over the past 20 years, Mexican communities have bypassed historic, urban ethnic enclaves to settle in and physically transform suburban areas of U.S. South. Nowhere is this spatial “Latinization” phenomenon more acute than in small towns such as those in Gwinnett County (metropolitan Atlanta), one of the foremost frontiers of new immigrant destinations in America. Coinciding with the growth of predominantly undocumented Mexican immigrants in these regions have been popular state and county-level immigration policies —all of which have use explicit language to position states like Georgia to be a national pioneer of hyper immigration surveillance and a regional enforcement model for neighboring metropolitan areas. The culmination of these adverse effects has required Mexican residents to create covert, built environments. Findings from this research analyze the key reactionary anti-immigrant federalism policies that influence how Mexican immigrants reshape culturally-specific land use in suburban Atlanta. 

John Arroyo, PhD, AICP is an Assistant Professor in Engaging Diverse Communities and director of the Pacific Northwest Just Futures Institute for Racial and Climate Justice at the University of Oregon. Previously, he was an The Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Latino Studies at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, NM. As a scholar and practitioner of urban planning and migration studies, Arroyo’s applied research and teaching agendas focus on inclusive urbanism. He is particularly interested in the social, political, and cultural dimensions of immigrant-centered built environments and neighborhood change in underrepresented communities. He received a doctorate in Urban Planning, Policy, and Design as well as a Master’s in City Planning and a Certificate in Urban Design from MIT. He is a governor-appointed member of the Oregon State Advisory Committee on Historic Preservation and serves on the boards of the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities and the Public Humanities Network.

Tags: CLLAS Faculty Grant, event video, John Arroyo, PPPM

Call for 2021 CLLAS Faculty Grant Proposals

April 2, 2021

12:00 pm

The Center for Latino/a & Latin American Studies (CLLAS) 2021 Seed Grant Award for Faculty in the field of Latinx Studies

CLLAS invites applications for research and/or creative projects in the field of Latinx Studies. We plan to award one seed grant of up to $5000;1the funds must be used during the 2021-2022 academic year (July 1, 2021 through June 30, 2022). This grant is specifically intended to support research or creative projects in Latinx Studies that fit within the CLLAS mission.

Projects that include collaboration between UO units, involve the wider Eugene/Springfield, Oregon, or Latinx communities/organizations/institutions in the U.S., or propose other forms of community engagement are welcome, but not required.

See criteria in this linked PDF: Call-for-Faculty-Latinx-Grants-Final.pdf

The Center for Latino/a & Latin American Studies (CLLAS) Announces 2021 Faculty Research Seed Grant

CLLAS invites applications for its annual Faculty Research seed grant for funds to be used during the 2021-2022 academic year (July 1, 2021 through June 30, 2022). CLLAS plans to award one (1) grant of up to $5000.1 This grant is intended to support research that fits within the CLLAS mission, and has the potential to put Latinx and Latin American Studies in conversation.

Projects that include collaboration between faculty from different UO units, involve the wider Eugene/Springfield, Oregon, or Latin American communities/organizations/institutions in the U.S. or Latin America, or propose other forms of community engagement are welcome but not required.

CLLAS will also consider research projects that involve elements of community engagement.

See criteria in this linked PDF: Call-for-Faculty-Grants-Final.pdf

Application Deadline: 12:00 p.m. (noon), Friday, April 2, 2021

Applicants will be notified by May 7, 2021.

Tags: CLLAS Faculty Grant

Grant-Writing Workshop for NEH Funding, Q&A for CLLAS Faculty Grants

February 17, 2021
12:00 pm	to	1:00 pm

VIDEO

CLLAS Professional Development Series

CLLAS held a grant-writing workshop on Wednesday February 17, 12:00-1:00pm.   This was a virtual event. To view the video of the workshop, please FOLLOW THIS LINK

Stephanie Wood (Center for Equity Promotion) will be shared her expertise in writing successful proposals for National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grants.

CLLAS staff were available to answer questions about CLLAS faculty grants. Faculty grant CFPS forthcoming, find 2020 Faculty grant CFPs here.

Tags: CLLAS Faculty Grant, grant writing

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