Center for Latin American Studies Hosts Mexican Culture Conference
The Center for Latin American Studies, an affiliated regional center of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, hosted an October 26-27, 2018 conference on “Mexican Literature, Culture, and Film across Borders: Translation, Migration, and Frontiers.” The conference was organized by the Center of Latin American Studies and co-sponsored by BU Center of the Humanities, BU Arts initiative, Voces Hispanicas, The Dean of the Humanities, and the Department of Romance Studies.
The conference was envisioned as a means to strengthen dialogue among scholars of Mexican Studies coming from different parts of the world. The conference was the fifth in a series that began in 2012 at CUNY-Graduate. The participants in this conference provided models for a new kind of Mexican cultural history, by foregrounding the experiences of borderland subjects. They discussed ways in which an emphasis on borders, translation and migration as historical conditions and categories of analysis, could help us elucidate cultural and sociopolitical phenomena related to Mexico, often neglected by national histories.
The two-day conference brought together prominent scholars to explore cultural and sociopolitical phenomena related to Mexico often neglected by national histories, and to engage with theories on translation and migration in the field of literary and film studies.More than 20 scholars and artists from across North America and Mexico presented their work at the conference including renowned poet Natalia Toledo who read her poetry in Zapotec, Spanish, and English.
Toledo is a Zapotec poet and writer, from Juchitán, Oaxaca. She has published more than ten books and her poetry has been translated to many languages, including Mazatec, Náhuatl, Maya, Mixtec, Slovene, Italian, German, Punjabi, and English. In 2004, Toledo received the Nezhualcóyotl Prize, Mexico’s highest honor for indigenous-language literature, for her bilingual poetry collection Guie’ yaase’ / Olivo negro, written in Isthmus Zapotec and self-translated into Spanish.
Award-winning Mexican-American filmmaker Rodrigo Reyes also attended the conference, and screened his recent film Lupe under the Sun.
Reyes is an award-winning, Mexican-American filmmaker whose work has garnered rave reviews in the New York Times, Variety and other media outlets, as well as multiple awards, including a Special Jury Award at the LA Film Festival. Named one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film by Filmmaker Magazine, he is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow at MacDowell Colony and a recipient of the National Mediamaker Fellowship from the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC). Lupe Under the Sun “is a story that transcends boundaries and also marks boundaries between cultural systems. It is a simple story about Lupe, an aging undocumented Mexican that wants to return home.”
The Center for Latin American Studies provides Boston University students with a versatile and powerful vehicle to develop an in-depth and interdisciplinary understanding of the Latin American region. Boston University is fortunate to have a first-rate Latin American Studies faculty covering each of the disciplines necessary for a full range of course offerings, including archaeology, literature, art history, economics, history, international relations, political science, and sociology.