CSRC Newsletter - March 2020
VOLUME 18, NUMBER 6
Director’s Message
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Director and Professor
News
Daniel G. Solórzano, UCLA professor of education and Chicana/o studies and CSRC faculty advisory committee member, has been elected to the National Academy of Education (NAEd). A renowned scholar of critical race theory and pedagogy and a heralded mentor to graduate students, Solórzano is one of fifteen scholars this year to receive this honor. Honorees will be recognized at the NAEd annual meeting, to take place in Washington, D.C., in November 2020.
Jennifer Josten, associate professor of history of art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh and this year’s IAC visiting research scholar at the CSRC, has won the 2020 ALAA-Arvey Foundation Book Award from the Association for Latin American Art for her publication Mathias Goeritz: Modernist Art and Architecture in Cold War Mexico (Yale University Press, 2018). The CSRC also congratulates Josten on her receipt of the inaugural Dietrich School Award for Excellence in Graduate Mentoring from the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences at her home institution. The award celebrates and honor exemplary graduate mentorship at the Dietrich School.
Last month Charlene Villaseñor Black, CSRC associate director and UCLA professor of art history and Chicana/o studies, concluded her final year as chair of the Annual Conference Committee of the College Art Association (CAA). The 2020 annual conference was held in February in Chicago. A number of UCLA graduate students presented or organized panels. Kaelyn Rodriguez, doctoral candidate in Chicana/o studies co-chaired the panel “Black and Latinx Arts: Radical Solidarity and Racial Intersections.” Among the panelists was Julia Fernandez, who received her undergraduate degree from UCLA and was the first student curator of a CSRC library exhibition; she presented the paper, “Radical Solidarities in Popular Presses in the 1960s-70s.” On separate panels, JoAnna Reyes Walton, doctoral candidate in art history and former Aztlán book review editor, presented the paper “Cicero in the Land of Coatlicue: Renaissance Humanism in Colonial Mexico,” and Carlos Rivas, doctoral candidate in art history and current CSRC IUPLR Mellon dissertation fellow, presented the paper “Decolonizing Aeriality in Colonial El Salvador: Indigenous Geospatial Knowledge in the Descripción geográfico-moral de la diócesis de Goathemala, 1768–1770.”
The artwork All About Family by L.A.-based artist Ramiro Gomez, whose work was featured in the CSRC-organized exhibition Home—So Different, So Appealing, has been acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Created in 2014, All About Family is one of a series of large-scale works in which Gomez inserts Latinx workers into scenes of luxury. For All About Family, Gomez used acrylic paint to add the figure of a Latinx nanny tending two blond children to a photograph, presented as a magazine cover, that shows the exterior of a high-end home. The CSRC holds the Ramiro Gomez Digital Image Collection.
Amada Armenta, UCLA assistant professor of urban planning, CSRC faculty associate, and CSRC faculty advisory committee member, will be one of seventeen fellows in residency at the Russell Sage Foundation’s New York City headquarters in the 2020-21 academic year. Armenta’s research currently focuses on the legal attitudes of immigrants: how they understand and make decisions about migration, driving, working, calling the police, securing identification, and paying taxes. For 2019-20, Armenta received an IAC grant from the CSRC to support her study of the experiences of undocumented Mexican immigrants in Philadelphia.
- Talk: Gronk and Peter Sellars in Conversation at the LA Art Show 2020 (February 8, 2020) (video) Two legendary L.A.-based artists, Gronk and Peter Sellars, met at the 2020 LA Art Show to discuss their theatrical and operatic collaborations over the last three decades. They also shared their experiences and thoughts on the role of art in a time of profound social upheaval and inequity. The conversation took place on the stage of Gronk’s installation Pyramids, a full-size re-creation of a theatrical set that the artist painted on site during the five-day show. The installation was curated by Chon A. Noriega, CSRC director, and was presented by the CSRC and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
CSRC In the News
Gustavo Arellano’s Weekly, February 23, 2020 (URL) (PDF)
Los Angeles Times, February 19, 2020 (URL) (PDF)
All “In the News” articles are available in PDF format on the CSRC website.
Events
UCLA: Our Stories, Our Impact is currently on display at the Robert F. Kennedy Complex Library. The multimedia exhibition showcases the role of UCLA and its alumni in advancing equity and equality in America. The exhibition features the stories of present and former Bruins who have advanced and shaped social justice movements. The project is led by the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, the Labor Center, and the Chancellor’s Advisory Council on Immigration Policy, in partnership with the Institute of American Cultures, the American Indian Studies Center, the Asian American Studies Center, the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, and the CSRC.
Join us for Inés Durán Matute’s presentation of Indigenous Peoples and the Geographies of Power: Mezcala’s Narratives of Neoliberal Governance (Routledge, 2018). Durán Matute demonstrates how global political economic processes have shaped the lives, spaces, projects, and identities of the indigenous community of Mezcala, Mexico. The author employs the narratives and experiences of the Mezcalenses, collected through interviews and observations during fieldwork in 2008–2014, to illuminate the link between neoliberal governance and the continuation of colonial structures. Durán Matute argues that while the processes of neoliberal governance can enmesh lives even in the most isolated settings, communities can mobilize and create autonomous projects that challenge these forms of governance. This event is organized by the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment and co-sponsored by the CSRC.
The UCLA Center for the Study of Women present the thirtieth annual “Thinking Gender” research conference for graduate students. This year’s theme, “Sexual Violence as Structural Violence: Feminist Visions of Transformative Justice,” will focus on sexual violence as a function of state and capitalist violence, emphasizing feminist, queer, trans, abolitionist, and intersectional interventions. This event is co-sponsored by the CSRC. Free registration is available at csw.ucla.edu/TG20.
Join us at the Image Movers film festival, which will celebrate the UCLA Asian American Studies Center's fiftieth anniversary! The three-weekend event will present screenings of short and feature films followed by talks with filmmakers, actors, scholars, artists, and community leaders. Each program will focus on issues facing Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. This event is presented by UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center, Center for EthnoCommunications, Film and Television Archive, Melnitz Movies, and CSRC, in collaboration with Visual Communications, Film Quarterly, and the UCLA Asian American Studies Department.
All CSRC events are free and do not require an RSVP unless otherwise noted. Programs are subject to change. For the most current information, visit the Events page on the CSRC website.
CSRC Library
Currently on view at the CSRC Library are three mini exhibitions and an installation. They celebrate fifty years of Chicanx and Latinx activism through art, literature, and scholarship and mark the CSRC’s fiftieth anniversary. Profiles of Activism gathers together prints, photographs, and books from the collections of the CSRC Library. In Give Us Our Flowers: Latinx Artivist Portraits, artist and UCLA doctoral candidate Angélica Becerra presents watercolor portraits of four emerging or established artivists—artist-activists who are responsible for visual culture in contemporary social movements. Salomón Huerta’s Portrait Series of Chicana/o-Latina/o and Mexican–Latin American Icons honors the leaders—both women and men—who have played a key role in making positive differences in the United States and Mexico. The exhibitions will remain on view through the winter quarter in the library and vitrine and are viewable during regular library hours: Monday through Friday, 10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.
The La Gente de Aztlán Records have been processed. La Gente de Aztlán newsmagazine was founded in 1971 to address the political, social, and cultural issues that were of interest to Chicanx youth during the Chicano movement. La Gente’s influence extended well beyond the UCLA campus because it was distributed to select high schools and prisons across California. Today, nearly fifty years later, the publication’s mission is to represent the broader Latinx community in and around UCLA. The CSRC’s collection largely consists of office records, which include original submissions, administrative files, research material, and artwork. It also contains a notable number of photographs, most of which document protests at UCLA and across greater Los Angeles, and a near-complete run of the publication from 1971 to 2011. The finding aid for the La Gente de Aztlán Records can be found on the Online Archive of California.
On February 3, CSRC librarian and archivist Xaviera Flores spoke with Vice Provost David Yoo’s Fiat Lux class about the mission of the CSRC and its roots in student activism.
On February 19, more than twenty-five high school students from Homeboy Industries Learning Works Charter School visited the CSRC as part of the People of Color tour offered by the UCLA Center of Community College Partnerships (CCCP).
On February 26, CSRC librarian and archivist Xaviera Flores and CSRC director Chon A. Noriega met with six prospective PhD students admitted to the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies. The two provided information on the services offered by the CSRC, including research support, publications, public programs, and grant opportunities.
The CSRC announces the acquisition of new collections and additions to existing collections. These materials enrich our understanding of the Chicanx and Latinx experience in the United States.
- Mario T. Garcia, professor of history at UC Santa Barbara, donated new materials to the Mario T. Garcia Oral History Collection. These include audiocassette recordings of his interviews with Raul Ruiz for his book Chicano Generation. Also donated were transcripts of his interviews with Rosalio Muñoz, for which the CSRC holds audiocassette recordings.
- The CSRC recently received the Alicia Alarcón Papers, which consists of audio recordings, video, manuscripts, and notes related to the acclaimed journalist’s career in the United States from the 1980s to the present. Alarcón was a columnist for La Opinión in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and she was also a reporter for Univision and CNN for Latin America. She eventually moved to radio and is best known as one of the first women on Spanish-language radio in the United States. She was instrumental in its move from DJ-hosted shows to talk radio. Alarcón is the author of two books: The Border Patrol Ate My Dust (2002, Spanish; 2004, English) and Revancha en Los Angeles (2016). Currently her political and social commentary is distributed to fifty Spanish-speaking communities across the United States. This collection was brought to us by Esther Díaz Martín, assistant professor of Latin American and Latino studies and gender and women's studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
The following off-campus exhibitions opening this month or currently on view include images and artworks from CSRC collections and publications:
- Imaging Change: History, Memory, and Social Justice, Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, California, through April 5, 2020
- Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A., The Gund Gallery at Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, through April 12, 2020*
- The 1968 Walkouts: Selections from UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Collections, Theodore Roosevelt High School Library, Los Angeles, California, through April 1, 2029
- LA Starts Here! Plaza de Cultura y Artes, Los Angeles, California, ongoing, permanent exhibition
*Exhibition catalog available in the CSRC Library
To schedule a tour of the CSRC Library, contact CSRC librarian Xaviera Flores at floresx@ucla.edu or fill out the form on the CSRC Library Services page.
CSRC Press
The Spring 2020 issue of Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies features essays on a range of topics: the Chicano movement at the University of Washington, semiotic analysis of La Llorona, the “baile economy” generated by Mexican sonidos in the Chicago area, and the poetry of Javier Huerta as a site of resistance. The dossier section, curated by Michelle Téllez, presents reflections on fifty years of Chicana feminism from twelve scholars, writers, and artists. LA-based artist Judithe Hernández is the subject of the editor’s commentary by Charlene Villaseñor Black as well as the artist’s communiqué. Subscribers have access to every article in every issue of Aztlán. Click here to subscribe.
Opportunities
The University Center for International Studies at the University of Pittsburgh invites applications for a one-year (with the possibility of renewal), full-time, non-tenure-stream postdoctoral fellowship centered on Latinx studies, beginning August 2020. The successful applicant will be housed in one of four disciplinary departments/programs within the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences: the History Department, the English Department, the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program, or the Urban Studies Program. The university welcomes applicants whose research (and proposed teaching) underscores the recognition of the vital importance of the Latinx experience in the United States (and the gap which remains in the scholarship documenting and analyzing it). Particular interest is in scholars whose work explores intersections with Latinx history, Latinx literatures, gender and sexuality, or urban communities.
Applicants must have satisfactorily completed all requirements for the PhD degree, including any oral defense, by May 1, 2020. Individuals who completed all such requirements before May 1, 2017, are ineligible
Deadline to apply: March 15, 2020.
For further information, please visit the University of Pittsburgh careers website.