CSRC Newsletter - March 2009

Volume 7, Number 6

Director's Message

This month the CSRC is sponsoring several events related to Chicano/Latino film, visual arts, music, and literature. We encourage you to support Latino artists by attending these events. It is said that the arts and entertainment are one of the largest U.S. exports. If so, there are many Latino artists who are “shovel ready”—in today’s parlance—to contribute to this increasingly important part of the economy. Your support and advocacy is a first step.
 
Chon A. Noriega
Director and Professor
 

News

Casa Libre Screened at CineFestival
The CSRC film Casa Libre/Freedom House, a one-hour documentary about a Los Angeles homeless shelter for unaccompanied, undocumented minors, was screened at CineFestival in San Antonio, Texas, on Sunday, February 8. For more information about the festival, visit the website. Casa Libre will be screened at the University of Michigan Law School this month.
 
CSRC Director to Co-Host Turner Film Festival
Chon A. Noriega, CSRC director, will join Turner Classic Movie’s Robert Osborne to host a film festival titled “Race and Hollywood: Latino Images in Film.” The festival, which will air in May, is part of an ongoing TMC series that explores Hollywood’s portrayal of different racial/ethnic groups. The festival will showcase forty films, past and present, that illustrate how the depiction of Latino characters and culture has evolved in American cinema. For scheduled programs and more information, please click here.
 

Events

Artist Talk and Book Signing
The Art + Activism in the 21st Century series, in conjunction with the CSRC, will celebrate the publication of Yolanda M. López, Wednesday, March 4, 3:00­–5:00 p.m., in the CSRC Library (144 Haines). The artist and the author, Karen Mary Davalos, associate professor of Chicana/o studies at Loyola Marymount University, will discuss Ms. López’s life and work and her contributions to Chicana/o and American art. The program will be introduced by Charlene Villaseñor Black, associate professor of art history at UCLA. A signing and reception will follow, and books will be available for purchase. Yolanda M. López is the second volume in the CSRC’s A Ver: Revisioning Art History book series. The Art + Activism series is a joint program of Art | Sci Center, Art | Global Health Center, Center for Performance Studies, Chicano Studies Research Center, Department of Design | Media Arts, Department of World Arts and Cultures, and Theater, Film and Television. Principal funding is provided by the ArtsForum program of the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture. Other sponsors of this event are the UCLA Office of Faculty Diversity and Development, Center for the Study of Women, César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o Studies, and Department of Art History. Parking is available in structure 2 and can be purchased for $9.00 at the kiosk located at Westholme Ave. and Hilgard Ave.
 
Reading by Chicana Author and Poet
Author and poet Lucha Corpi will present a reading on Thursday, March 5, 4:15–5:30 p.m., in the CSRC Library (144 Haines). Ms. Corpi has authored five novels written in English, four of which are mysteries featuring Brown Angel Investigations and Gloria Damasco, the first Chicana detective in American literature. Her novels include Delia's Song (1984), Eulogy for a Brown Angel (1992, 2002), which received the 1992 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and the Multicultural Publisher's Exchange award for best fiction in 1992, Cactus Blood (1995), Black Widow's Wardrobe (1999) and Crimson Moon (2004). Her poetry is collected in Variaciones sobre una tempestad/Variations on a Storm (1990) and Palabras de mediodia/Noon Words (2001), with English translations by Catherine Rodríguez Nieto. She has also authored the children's book Where Fireflies Dance/Ahí, donde bailan las luciérnagas (1997). The Triple Banana Split Boy/El nino goloso, her second children's book, will be published this month by Arte Publico Press. Ms. Corpi lives in Oakland, California, where she was a tenured teacher in the Oakland Public Schools Neighborhood Centers Program for thirty years. Ms. Corpi will sign books after the reading, and books will be available for purchase. This event is co-sponsored by the UCLA César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o Studies, the “Bilingual Creative Writing: Mysteries with a Mission” class, and the CSRC. Parking is available in structure 2 and can be purchased for $9.00 at the kiosk located at Westholme Ave. and Hilgard Ave.
 
Phantom Sightings in San Antonio
On Thursday, March 12, Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement opens at the Museo Alameda in San Antonio for a three-month run. The exhibition then travels to Phoenix, Guadalajara, and New York. Phantom Sightings was co-curated by Chon A. Noriega, CSRC director. For more information, visit the Museo Alameda’s website. The exhibition catalog is available from the University of California Press.
 
Launch of the Frontera Collection Online Archive
The CSRC, in collaboration with the University Library, Los Tigres del Norte Foundation, and the Arhoolie Foundation, will host the public launch of the Frontera Collection Online Archive on Thursday, March 26, 10:00 a.m., in the Morgan Center Press Room at UCLA. More than 41,000 Mexican and Mexican-American recordings are available in the online archive. Compiled by Chris Strachwitz of the Arhoolie Foundation, the Frontera Collection is the largest and most complete repository of Mexican and Mexican-American vernacular music in existence; many of the recordings are one of a kind. The CSRC began digitizing the collection in 2001. The project is funded in part by a generous grant from Los Tigres del Norte Foundation. The collection provides access to an essential component of the Spanish-language musical heritage of the United States. For media inquiries, contact Letisia Marquez at 310 206 3986 or lmarquez@support.ucla.edu; for general information, call 310 206 9185.
 

CSRC Library and Archive

Southwest Oral History Association Conference
The CSRC and the UCLA Center for Oral History will be represented at the 2009 Southwest Oral History Association Conference, which will take place at the University of Southern California on March 26–29. Lizette Guerra, CSRC acting librarian, will present CSRC publications and materials. The conference offers the CSRC and the Center for Oral History the opportunity to display their unique and rich collections and to demonstrate the intersection between archives and oral histories. For additional information, visit the conference website.
 

CSRC Press

New Issue of Aztlán
The Spring 2009 issue of Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies is on its way to subscribers. In the editor’s commentary, Chon A. Noriega assesses how the silent Western film—and two subgenres he identifies as “greaser” and “grandee” films—relates to the discourse on Mexican American citizenship.
 
The opening essays look at Chicana/o identity and representation in regard to nationality, sexuality, and ethnicity. Christina L. Sisk writes on the concept of community in Ramón “Tianguis” Pérez’s Diario de un mojado; Jessica E. Jones explores the queer urban Aztlán depicted in Jaime Hernandez’s comic Locas; and Jennifer Domino Rudolph discusses the controversy that followed the release of American Girl doll Marisol Luna. The concluding essays draw on empirical research to evaluate the Chicana/o experience. Pat Rubio Goldsmith, Mary Romero, Raquel Rubio-Goldsmith, Manuel Escobedo, and Laura Khoury examine the problem of ethno-racial profiling and state violence in South Tucson; and David Sandell employs an experiential approach to explore poetics and politics among Latino Catholics.
 
This issue of Aztlán features two dossier sections. In the first, “The Archive,” Kelly Lytle Hernández, Pablo Yankelevich, and Marta María Saade Granados offer initial assessments of early-twentieth-century archival material that has recently been made available at the Archivo Histórico del Instituto Nacional de Migración (AHINM). These essays look at African American migration to Mexico and the Mexican government’s attempts to prevent Mexican nationals from emigrating to the United States and to define U.S. citizens along the U.S.-Mexico border as undesirable immigrants. The second dossier, “Memory and Response,” brings together pieces by Peter Nabokov, José P. Garza, and Alejandro Anreus that reflect upon the rich intellectual landscape of Chicano and Latino cultural and political expression. On the cover and in the artist’s communiqué, Los Angeles artist José Lozano presents his distinctive depiction of social interaction in the Chicano community.
 
Subscribe Today!
A year’s subscription to Aztlán includes not only two issues filled with research, writing, and reviews from Chicana/o and Latina/o scholars but also online access to every article published since the journal began in 1970. Subscribe online or by mail. Information is available on the Aztlán webpage.
 

Contacts

UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center • 193 Haines Hall • Box 951544 • Los Angeles, CA 90095-1544 Campus Mail Code: 154403 • Tel: (310) 825-2363 • Fax: (310) 206-1784
 

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