Pedro García-Caro | University of Oregon (original) (raw)

Books by Pedro García-Caro

Transatlantic Studies: Latin America, Iberia, and Africa, Nov 27, 2019

This volume seeks to advance the conceptualization and definition of the field of Iberian and Lat... more This volume seeks to advance the conceptualization and definition of
the field of Iberian and Latin American Transatlantic Studies with three
goals in mind: to discuss its function within our pedagogical practices, to lay out its research methodologies, and to explain its theoretical underpinnings. One central aim of Transatlantic Studies: Latin America, Iberia, and Africa is to make the case for an understanding of transatlantic cultural history over the last two centuries that transcends national and linguistic boundaries, as well as traditional academic configurations, focusing instead on the continuities and fractures between Latin America, the Iberian Peninsula, and Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Africa.

Transatlantic Studies: Latin America, Iberia, and Africa emerges from, and performs, an ongoing debate concerning the role of transatlantic approaches in the fields of Iberian, Latin American, African, and Luso-Brazilian studies. The innovative research and discussions contained in this volume’s 35 essays by leading scholars in the field reframe the intertwined cultural histories of the diverse transnational spaces encompassed by the former Spanish and Portuguese empires. An emerging field, Transatlantic Studies seeks to provoke a discussion and a reconfiguration of the traditional academic notions of area studies, while critically engaging the concepts of national cultures and postcolonial relations among Spain, Portugal and their former colonies. Crucially, Transatlantic Studies transgresses national boundaries without dehistoricizing or decontextualizing the texts it seeks to incorporate within this new framework.

After the Nation proposes a series of groundbreaking new approaches to novels, essays, and short ... more After the Nation proposes a series of groundbreaking new approaches to novels, essays, and short stories by Carlos Fuentes and Thomas Pynchon within the framework of a hemispheric American studies. García-Caro offers a pioneering comparativist approach to the contemporary American and Mexican literary canons and their underlying nationalist encodement through the study of a wide range of texts by Pynchon and Fuentes which question and historicize in different ways the processes of national definition and myth-making deployed in the drawing of literary borders. After the Nation looks at these literary narratives as postnational satires that aim to unravel and denounce the combined hegemonic processes of modernity and nationalism while they start to contemplate the ensuing postnational constellations. These are texts that playfully challenge the temporal and spatial designs of national themes while they point to and debase “holy” borders, international borders as well as the internal lines where narratives of nation are embodied and consecrated.

From the book-cover:

“After the Nation is an extraordinarily rich book that encompasses more than literary criticism—the cultural history of divergent nations that cannot or should not be ignorant of each other’s culture nor of its dissident voices.”—Jean Franco, from the foreword

“Exemplary in its inter-American scope, well-conceived and clearly written, this book offers an innovative framework to investigate a wide array of interrelated American topics—border crossing, modernity, enlightenment, postcolonalism, exceptionalism—that have shaped the works of Carlos Fuentes and Thomas Pynchon and, by extension, of many contemporary U.S. and Latin American writers.”—Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Michigan and author of The Censorship Files: Latin American Writers and Franco’s Spain

"En cierto modo es comprensible que esta obra de teatro manuscrita no haya recibido casi ninguna ... more "En cierto modo es comprensible que esta obra de teatro manuscrita no haya recibido casi ninguna atención hasta ahora: firmada en 1789 por un español emigrado a México, se trata de una obra satírica de teatro secular que nunca llegó a ser impresa, que fue representada sólo en la minúscula colonia secular californiana, conservada allí entre archivos privados, y posteriormente rescatada para ser archivada de nuevo entre los papeles de la debacle del proyecto colonizador hispano-mexicano en Alta California tras la anexión a los Estados Unidos (1846-1848). Una de las razones obvias para la falta de consideración hacia esta pieza es la gran narrativa sobre la colonización hispana de California, dominada por el estudio del tejido misionero franciscano: en ese contexto, una obra de teatro secular es una indiscutible rareza muy difícil de explicar y entender.

This important book project will further our understanding of the Hispanic cultural heritage on the Pacific rim of the US, and will also contribute to the growing corpus of recovered literary texts from the Hispanic and Mexican period that preceded the annexation of many territories to the US. In 1796 a diverse group of families made up of veteran Catalan soldiers and Mexican prisoners was offered the chance to settle near the San Lorenzo River across the Franciscan Mission of Santa Cruz in what is today Eastern Santa Cruz. They were intent on creating Branciforte, a villa of the Enlightenment: a small agricultural township that entered into immediate competition with the alternate model of colonization represented by the neighboring feudal Misión Santa Cruz across the river. Both settlements constituted the basis for modern-day Santa Cruz in California. As the settlers naturally brought with them the artifacts and practices of daily life –including entertainment in the form of musical instruments, gambling games, and books– this play was one of the cultural products brought along and, according to archival evidence, also performed. And yet, the now obvious connection between this long-forgotten early Hispanic manuscript comedy and this community has not been traced before. The play has never appeared in print before nor has it been performed in the last two hundred years. "

"This play was first published in 1991 after Shawn traveled in war-torn Central America. Co-trans... more "This play was first published in 1991 after Shawn traveled in war-torn Central America. Co-translated into Spanish by Pedro García-Caro and Argentinenan playwright and actor Rafael Spregelburd, this critical edition offers the original play in a new bilingual edition.

From the Introduction: Feverish Transits (by Pedro García-Caro)

The Fever seeks to subvert the complacent conscience of the globalized traveling Westerner/American sitting in the audience through a long-established process of empathy and identification, which is, however, devoid of either classical catharsis or a consensus-building, feel-good resolution. Instead, The Fever is an essay-monologue which seeks to contaminate the reader-spectator with that exotic ethical fever the traveler has picked up in a foreign country. As such, it is an infectious text, reader beware.

Para el personaje de La fiebre los contrastes entre el norte global —los placeres individuales de la clase media intelectual y de una vida agradable dedicada al conocimiento— no hacen sino remachar la existencia empobrecida y abandonada de las masas humanas que el viajero encuentra a lo largo y ancho del sur global. El sentimiento de culpa del viajero privilegiado concentra el discurso agónico de este estadounidense que se ha aventurado hacia el sur. En este encuentro entre norte y sur globales, la seguridad y las certidumbres de fronteras y abundancias se derrumban; el estado dedicado a proteger a los pocos privilegiados del planeta —el 1% que machaca y exprime al otro 99%, tanto en casa como fuera de ella— parece haberse esfumado. Mientras se hunde en el suelo de un baño de hotel tercermundista, en "un país pobre donde no hablan mi idioma", el viajero experimenta un tránsito febril: el viaje desde un punto de la red de conexiones aéreas transnacionales y de franquicias hoteleras se ha descarrilado con la irrupción de esta fiebre ética.

La fiebre busca trastornar las conciencias complacientes de los espectadores americanos (y europeos) a través de un proceso bien conocido de empatía e identificación, que sin embargo carece de momento catártico, no busca el consenso o la sensación de bienestar entre su público. Al contrario, este monólogo-ensayo pretende contaminar al espectador-lector con la misma fiebre exótica que ya ha infectado al viajero en algún país extranjero. Así pues, pongan atención, lectores: se trata de un texto infeccioso.""

Book Chapters by Pedro García-Caro

A Companion to Spanish Environmental Cultural Studies, 2023

This chapter deals with two early ecofeminist texts from before the Spanish Civil War period: El ... more This chapter deals with two early ecofeminist texts from before the Spanish Civil War period: El metal de Los muertos (1920) by Concha Espina, and Los mineros (1932-37, 2018) by Carmen Conde and María Cegarra. A well-known social novel and a recently recovered play, respectively, these two texts pioneered environmental and social outlooks on the predatory extractivistic activities unleashed by the liberal regimes of the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth in the southern peripheries of Huelva and Cartagena. Concha Espina’s filo-Marxist social novel expounded an anti-colonial reading of the extractive concession arrangements of informal British colonialism in Western Andalucía. Her novel incorporates and mobilizes proletarian, romantic, and feminist agendas to denounce both pollution and human exploitation in what amounts to a prescient early ecofeminist reading of extractive industries. Capitalism and masculine abuses are equated in their predatory abuses of the human body and the earth while a horizontal, egalitarian movement of resistance is conceived and led by a female character and her growing network of activism. In the recently recovered Los mineros (written in 1932 and completed in 1937, published in 2018), Carmen Conde and María Cegarra developed a lyrical drama in which the rift between the intellectual class and both the capitalist elite and the working class takes center stage. The role of the local female intellectual, writer and chemist, María Cegarra as a spokesperson for the rights of miners in the context of the withdrawal of capital investments is poetically deployed in the play as a site for envisioning the new role of letrada women in the embattled Second Republic. As capitalists withhold their investments as a ploy to boycott the new democratic government and republic, the space of the mourning, lettered household emerges as a repository of humanistic values capable of confronting the capitalist regime with their antisocial plans while acting as a site for proletarian resistance. These two texts emerged at a time in which the liberal regimes had waged an open war on resources and developed mining sites intensively while literary culture had also achieved a highly sophisticated status from which it was well positioned to incept groundbreaking social and environmental visions. Spanish proto-ecofeminism, I argue, preceded by six decades Anglo-French theorizations of the identification between capitalism and patriarchy, and posited female oppression, and female liberation as tied to the liberation of workers and the earth.

Teaching Late Twentieth-Century Mexicana and Chicana Writers, 2021

Providing background on the history and nature of chronicle and testimonio writing, this chapter ... more Providing background on the history and nature of chronicle and testimonio writing, this chapter explores an important facet of Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska’s oeuvre: her chronicle or non-fiction narratives. Discusses critical theory on chronicle writing, Mexican federal and state laws on abortion, and journalistic accounts of the late 20th century era, to explicate Poniatowska’s account on the rape of a young girl, who endures additional abuse from the legal system. The paper places Poniatowska’s book _Las mil y una... La herida de Paulina_ in the context of post-Nafta social and political changes and within the presidential campaign of 2000. The debates around the violation of Paulina’s rights preceded and foreshadowed the large-scale collapse of the rule of law and juridical guarantees in the first two decades of the twenty-first century.

Transatlantic Studies: Latin America, Iberia, and Africa, edited by CECILIA ENJUTO-RANGEL et al., , 2019

The Cambridge history of Latina/o American literature, 2018

Throughout this chapter, I trace a number of performative acts in the long history of the coloniz... more Throughout this chapter, I trace a number of performative acts in the long
history of the colonization of the North American continent by evoking a
fragmented narrative of cultural encounters. In this narrative, Hispanic
colonizers and a diversity of indigenous peoples engaged in the tense
production of mutual knowledge through corporal performance art ranging
from military spectacle to religious acts to pantomime and drama. This
framing of Hispanic/Latina/o culture in the colonial period and beyond as
performed to a captive audience, for a public incarcerated within the matrix
of colonial power, seated within the confines of the Western episteme and
defined as a passive spectator in need of cultural and religious conversion,
allows me to critically reflect on the ethos of performance and the archives of the public stage to further disclose this literature’s foundational epistemic violence. While the scattered archival records of over 300 years of settlement and contact highlight the wide use of music, dance, and drama, as tools for the theatricalization of the colonial regime, the records also confirm these arts’ relevance as a precious space for cultural survival and resistance for the colonized.

En breve: La novela corta en México, Nov 2014

En este ensayo propongo leer "Aura" como una especie de manifiesto literario que contiene y desar... more En este ensayo propongo leer "Aura" como una especie de manifiesto literario que contiene y desarrolla varias de las formulaciones, conceptos y prácticas narrativas que pasarían a ser centrales más adelante en la obra de Carlos Fuentes tales como la relación entre autenticidad e historiografía, los juegos con distintas voces narrativas, la temporalidad mítica, circular o paralizada, las nuevas subjetividades urbanas del México posrevolucionario, y la renovación del género gótico con imprevistas dimensiones socio-políticas. La explicación abierta y directa de la influencia intelectual o tradición narrativa en que el propio autor inserta este relato, sitúan a la novella en un lugar privilegiado de su experimentación temprana con formas y temas concebidos en un espacio cultural transnacional muy amplio que supera el campo literario nacional mexicano y el regional latinoamericano.

L'exil espagnol dans les Amériques, Jun 2011

This article presents ongoing research around the trial of the fascist leader and founder of Fala... more This article presents ongoing research around the trial of the fascist leader and founder of Falange, José Antonio Primo de Rivera at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. The unpublished memoirs of the investigative judge, Federico Enjuto Ferrán, cited here for the first time, will cast new light into the plans of the second Spanish republic to exercise the rule of law in a context of a complex Civil War. A central objective here was to offer Primo de Rivera and other instigators of the coup, judicial guarantees and safewards in the face of political assassinations and summary executions. This momentum and the legacy of a reformed, popular justice system was however obscured by Francoist propaganda which denied the legitimacy of all republican institutions.

Articles by Pedro García-Caro

Journal of Academic Freedom, Oct 29, 2024

“Truth” and “propaganda,” the two key concepts at the center of this volume, contour a key debate... more “Truth” and “propaganda,” the two key concepts at the center of this volume, contour a key debate about higher education and the increasingly endangered right of scholars to academic freedom. Accusations of biased classrooms, the depiction of “liberal arts” programs and colleges as sites for “liberal activism” where “the promotion of equity” somehow overrides “the pursuit of truth” (Abrams 2022) have become customary in many quarters. At a time when building blocks of public consensus such as “equity” and “inclusion” have become suspect of radicalism (Gorka and González 2022), and affirmative actions to foster “equal opportunities” have been outlawed and abandoned, such ideological censures show the fractures in the common language of a multiethnic democracy. As meaning and a shared language is debased, so is the possibility of arriving at a consensus on what is true, or what constitutes “truth” itself, and what is simply a partisan agenda, a manipulation of facts, an abuse of power, or even a blatant falsehood, a big lie.

Journal of Academic Freedom, 2023

The landscape of higher education in the United States is now radically changed: academic freedom... more The landscape of higher education in the United States is now radically changed: academic freedom is no longer guaranteed across the entire country. Professors self-censor their lectures and publications; students cannot engage with key explanations and discussions about the history of their very institution, state, and country; and books have been banned from local libraries. In multiple US states, concepts such as "structural racism," "environmental racism," "intersectionality" and the open study of the "relationship among race, racism, and power" (Delgado, Stefancic, and Harris 2017, 3) have been terminated after being characterized as "divisive" and "controversial" by a cascade of gag laws and executive orders. The impact of these political encroachments into the autonomy of institutions of higher education to produce knowledge and to freely understand the workings of settler colonialism, of the lasting impacts of slavery and of racial segregation, will haunt the United States for decades to come. These overt forms of censorship will have long-lasting effects on the ability of US citizens to understand the racial legacies of this postplantation, postcolonial society. A key notion underlying these moves is that any critical review or discussion of US history or racial divides in US society is unpatriotic or inherently "anti-American." Proponents of these deep forms of thought-control implicitly define all stages of education as fundamentally destined to shape consensus, to advance and solidify national pride and develop what some define as modernity's secular religion: nationalism (Anderson 1991). In other words, for modern-day inquisitors, education cannot critically review key power relations in society. The racial and gendered roots of social, political, and economic power and the long history and contemporary reality of racial apartheid in the United States cannot be named or studied; posing such questions is considered too disruptive and unpatriotic. The opposition between proponents of gag laws and the defenders of critical race theory (CRT) is yet another battle in the long-lasting antagonism between faith-based scholarship and critical thinking, between untouchable dogmas and the unfettered search for truth. In this case, the faith being protected from critical inquiry is the belief in the greatness and exceptionality of the US nation. These gag laws are, then, the biggest success of the right-wing authoritarian Make America Great Again movement, even though most of them have been implemented over the last three years, after the failed reelection of the seditious forty-fifth president, a defendant currently being tried for his instigation of the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. This well-defined pattern of disassembling democratic institutions and practices from within, of curtailing basic

Conversaciones sobre historia, 2023

Primo de Rivera fue ejecutado por su clara participación intelectual y política en la rebelión co... more Primo de Rivera fue ejecutado por su clara participación intelectual y política en la rebelión contra la república tras un juicio en que él mismo se defendió y que le brindó las garantías del estado democrático republicano, con un proceso que incluyó un juez instructor, un tribunal de derecho con tres magistrados, y un jurado popular de catorce miembros. Decenas de miles de ejecutados y “paseados” en uno u otro lado de la guerra no contaron con las exquisitas provisiones jurídicas que se le brindaron a uno de los más públicos enemigos de la república.

Journal of Academic Freedom, 2022

This new volume of the Journal of Academic Freedom engages with recent political challenges to ac... more This new volume of the Journal of Academic Freedom engages with recent political challenges to academic freedom, which have mobilized the antidemocratic notion that academic knowledge-whether in the United States or elsewhere-can be scripted by outside agencies such as a legislative body, a board of trustees, a ministry, or a governmental commission. In our call for papers, we contextualized the ongoing frenzy in many state legislatures to ban or censor references to centuries of racialized oppression and expropriation as part of "the recent upsurge in white ethnonationalism in the United States," predicated on nostalgia for "white-settler narratives of the nation's founding." The resulting laws openly vilify "histories that call attention to the historical realities of genocide, slavery, oppression, and dispossession," and their advocates have deployed "many disinformation tactics, including the production and dissemination of a counterfeit version of critical race theory (CRT)." 1 We explicitly sought to investigate the impact that this exaggerated form of prescriptive historiography is having on K-12 schools and college and university campuses. The contributors to this volume have offered a chilling panorama of the ongoing struggle between legitimate scholarship and nostalgic propaganda-between informed discourse seeking to enlighten and expand knowledge about past and present and dogmatic

Abstract: This article traces the provenance of a recently recovered literary manuscript from the... more Abstract: This article traces the provenance of a recently recovered literary manuscript from the Bancroft Library in California: Astucias por heredar un sobrino a un tío. This original text written in Spanish by Fermín de Reygadas is considered to be the earliest secular play performed in a European language in California. Authored in 1789 by a Spanish colonist in Mexico, and banned from the stage by the censor’s office in the spring of 1790, this satirical family drama was never printed, and was only performed (circa 1797) in the newly settled secular town of Branciforte (East Santa Cruz). It was preserved there in private archives, and then briefly rescued by Guadalupe Vallejo and Hubert H. Bancroft to be stored away again, having thus received almost no critical or scholarly attention until now. I consider here some aspects of the textual origins as well as some recent performances of the play.
Keywords: Neoclassical drama, colonial Spanish California, border theater, Fer- mín de Reygadas, recovered literature, censorship.

Resumen: Este ensayo traza las tensiones ideológicas que subyacen al relato " Luvina " de Juan Ru... more Resumen: Este ensayo traza las tensiones ideológicas que subyacen al relato " Luvina " de Juan Rulfo y que muestran el legado secularizante de la Revolución mexicana enfrentado a las ruinas del proyecto colonial hispano: la iglesia católica. Proveniente del ambiente cristero de Jalisco, Rulfo marcó distancias con el legado de destrucción de la cristiada y " Luvina " esboza su capacidad para escenificar el cinismo postrevolucionario de ambos bandos del conflicto: el maestro derrotado y los (des)creyentes abandonados. Abstract: This essay traces the ideological tensions underlying the short story " Luvina " by Juan Rulfo, which portrays the secularizing legacy of the Mexican Revolution at loggerheads with the ruined landscape of the Hispanic colonial project symbolized by the Catholic church. Originally from a Cristero family in Jalisco, Rulfo dennounced the legacy of destruction of the Cristero rebellion and the story " Luvina " demonstrates his ability to stage the resulting political

Transatlantic Studies: Latin America, Iberia, and Africa, Nov 27, 2019

From the book-cover:

From the Introduction: Feverish Transits (by Pedro García-Caro)

A Companion to Spanish Environmental Cultural Studies, 2023

Teaching Late Twentieth-Century Mexicana and Chicana Writers, 2021

Transatlantic Studies: Latin America, Iberia, and Africa, edited by CECILIA ENJUTO-RANGEL et al., , 2019

The Cambridge history of Latina/o American literature, 2018

En breve: La novela corta en México, Nov 2014

L'exil espagnol dans les Amériques, Jun 2011

Journal of Academic Freedom, Oct 29, 2024

Journal of Academic Freedom, 2023

Conversaciones sobre historia, 2023

Journal of Academic Freedom, 2022

"This article explores different interpretations of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917) in Vicente... more "This article explores different interpretations of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917) in Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s El militarismo mejicano (1920) and Ramón María del Valle Inclán’s Tirano Banderas (1926). Spain’s colonial legacies and neocolonial practices in the Americas were mobilized by Spanish writers to discuss not only the revolutionary processes experienced in Mexico, but also to argue about Spanish internal politics and to define the meaning and import of the emerging concept of Hispanidad. This mode of writing can be best understood through the concept of postcolonial stereography: descriptions and discussions of the former colonial possessions by metropolitan writers are not only postcolonial ethnographies; they also contain a wealth of commentaries on social and political customs and events in the former metropolis. It is consequently a writing in two directions that uses the postcolonial country, in this case Mexico, as a site to discuss side by side two societies that share many political trends and social habits but are also distinctly separate. Blasco Ibáñez’s description of the protofascist military dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (1923–1929) as a “mejicanización” of Spanish politics, exemplifies this mode of writing as he spuriously detects unwarranted influences of the former colony on the metropolis. Blasco Ibáñez’s earlier series of newspaper articles on the Mexican Revolution evidence an ethnocentric, occidentalist rejection of the social emancipatory promises of the Revolution. In contrast, Valle-Inclán’s fictional approach to the Revolution reveals an orientalized representation of the corrupt Hispanic elite as the source of postcolonial social unrest.
"

RESUMEN La poesía y el periodismo fueron los medios principales en que se batió la querella dialé... more RESUMEN
La poesía y el periodismo fueron los medios principales en que se batió la querella dialéctica por la autonomía e independencia cultural y política de Latinoamérica a comienzos del siglo XIX. Este artículo delinea la centralidad del debate intelectual en torno a la naturaleza americana y en particular a las riquezas minerales y la denuncia criolla de la dependencia española de la plata y el oro americanos en algunas muestras destacadas del extenso corpus literario independentista. En los poemas analizados de Andrés Bello, José Joaquín Olmedo, y Bartolomé Hidalgo, el texto literario se convierte en un espacio ideal para dilucidar por un lado las mecánicas relaciones coloniales de explotación y expropiación mineral y por otro para imaginar el futuro postcolonial y el papel (o su ausencia) de la industria minera en ese nuevo escenario.
Palabras clave: minería, plata, oro, colonialismo, poesía de la independencia, periodismo, orientalismo, Leyenda Negra española, Andrés Bello, José Joaquín Olmedo, Bartolomé Hidalgo, Simón Bolívar.

Poetry and journalism were two closely related forms of expression adopted by writers fighting over the cultural autonomy and political independence of Latin America at the start of the 19th Century. This article maps out the central role of the debate over natural and mineral resources as well as the Spanish dependency on American silver and gold in some of the
relevant works from the Latin American poetry of independence. The poems by Andrés Bello,
José Joaquín Olmedo, and Bartolomé Hidalgo analyzed here, show how literary texts became a suitable space to explore the mechanical colonial relations of mineral exploitation and
expropriation, and also to imagine the postcolonial future and the role (if any) assigned to mining industries in that new scene.

Keywords: mining, silver, gold, colonialism, poetry of independence, journalism, orientalism, Spanish
Black Legend, Andrés Bello, José Joaquín Olmedo, Bartolomé Hidalgo, Simón Bolívar.

At home everywhere and yet nowhere entirely settled, Fuentes’s restless searching spirit should b... more At home everywhere and yet nowhere entirely settled, Fuentes’s restless searching spirit should be remembered for his independent style, his humanistic promotion of critical thought, his unrestricted rebelliousness against conventions, stifling fashions, bureaucratization, and dogmatism.

espanolEste ensayo traza las tensiones ideologicas que subyacen al relato «Luvina» de Juan Rulfo ... more espanolEste ensayo traza las tensiones ideologicas que subyacen al relato «Luvina» de Juan Rulfo y que muestran el legado secularizante de la Revolucion mexicana enfrentado a las ruinas del proyecto colonial hispano: la iglesia catolica. Proveniente del ambiente cristero de Jalisco, Rulfo marco distancias con el legado de destruccion de la cristiada y «Luvina» esboza su capacidad para escenicar el cinismo postrevolucionario de ambos bandos del convicto: el maestro derrotado y los (des)creyentes abandonados. EnglishThis essay traces the ideological tensions underlying the short story «Luvina» by Juan Rulfo, which portrays the secularizing legacy of the Mexican Revolution at loggerheads with the ruined landscape of the Hispanic colonial project symbolized by the Catholic church. Originally from a Cristero family in Jalisco, Rulfo dennounced the legacy of destruction of the Cristero rebellion and the story «Luvina» demonstrates his ability to stage the resulting political cynicism on b...

Vanderbilt e-Journal of Luso-Hispanic Studies, 2009

Hispanic settlers throughout the Americas deployed religious performances and dramatic acts to si... more Hispanic settlers throughout the Americas deployed religious performances and dramatic acts to signify and to impose a sense of spiritual and cultural bond(age) to a new audience: the people they were seeking to conquer and subjugate. This enforced western aesthetics staged novel cultural performances of newfangled hierarchies of power. Colonial performances displaced, replaced, repressed and criminalized the cultural practices of the colonized native inhabitants after casting them first as pagan, and then increasingly as demonic.1 In many areas now incorporated into the U.S., from Puerto Rico to California, the cultural patterns of an emerging latinidad were fraught with the original sin of this bondage, a captivity presented as the cultural bond of a new community where colonial hierarchies of race, class, and gender determined the legitimacy of aesthetic knowledge(s) and practices. Throughout this chapter, I trace a number of performative acts in the long history of the colonization of the North American continent by evoking a fragmented narrative of cultural encounters. In this narrative, Hispanic colonizers and a diversity of indigenous peoples engaged in the tense production of mutual knowledge through corporal performance art ranging from military spectacle to religious acts to pantomime and drama. This framing of Hispanic/Latino culture in the colonial period and beyond as performed to a captive audience, for a public incarcerated within the matrix of colonial power, seated within the confines of the Western episteme and defined as a passive spectator in need of cultural, religious conversion, allows me to critically reflect on the ethos of performance and the archives of the public stage to further disclose their foundational epistemic violence. While the scattered archival records of over three hundred years of settlement and contact highlight the wide use of music, dance, as well as drama, as a tool for the theatricalization of the colonial regime, they also confirm their relevance as a

Challenging the epic nationalist academic framework built around tropes of national origins, colo... more Challenging the epic nationalist academic framework built around tropes of national origins, colonial emancipation, and independence, this study looks at the early articulation of alternate definitions of Hispanicity and of Spain’s wrestling role within its cultural and economic colonial network. At stake here is the instability between Spain as a signifier and its plural signifieds: through the many issues of “el Español,” José Blanco White sought to resignify “lo español” ie Spanishness as a plural Transatlantic network of cultural connections through the image of a decentralized confederation, a full enfranchisement of criollos, and a questioning of colonial logics which included a refutation of slavery and of peninsular preeminence. Poet and propagandist Juan Bautista Arriaza, by contrast, mobilized a series of tropes (metaphors, allegories, hyperboles) which signified Spain as uniquely peninsular, and redefined Creole agency as subaltern and peripheral, thus reinstating a Euroc...

How Far is America From Here?, 2005

Early American Literature, 2018

World Literature Today

ABSTRACT

Eighteenth-Century Contexts, Postmodern Observations

Cartaphilus: Revista de Investigación y Crítica …, 2010

A Contracorriente: Revista de Historia Social y …, 2010

Anales de Literatura Hispanoamericana, 2011

Revista Hispánica Moderna, 2012

Peripherica: Journal of Social, Cultural, and Literary History, 2019

Esta entrevista acerca de las políticas migratorias de EEUU y México y las estrategias de resiste... more Esta entrevista acerca de las políticas migratorias de EEUU y México y las estrategias de resistencia que se han creado en los últimos años para huir de la represión a los migrantes, se llevó a cabo en el contexto de la visita del Padre Solalinde a la Universidad de Oregón en mayo de 2018. Importante para el contexto es también la campaña presidencial de Andrés Manuel López Obrador que resultaría victorioso en julio y cuyo sexenio dio comienzo en diciembre de ese mismo año.

Peripherica: Journal of Social, Cultural, and Literary History, 2019

This interview was carried out in the context of the visit of Father Solalinde to the University ... more This interview was carried out in the context of the visit of Father Solalinde to the University of Oregon in May 2018. It deals with immigration policies in the US and Mexico, and the resistance strategies that have been developed in recent years to escape from the repression and corruption around migrants and their travel North. Important for the context is also the presidential campaign of Andrés Manuel López Obrador that would win the elections in July and whose six-year term started in December of 2018.

Editor-writer, chronicler-writer, Elena is a novelist who looks carefully at each of her characte... more Editor-writer, chronicler-writer, Elena is a novelist who looks carefully at each of her characters and who knows and inhabits each of them the way the old realist Russian authors did. She knows their tastes and their memories; she allows them to live and to fill the room with their very real presence and voice. It is not easy to interview such a genuinely humble thinker; she is more interested in listening and learning about other peoples’ lives and problems than in propagating her opinions and analyses. Her word and her memory are both natural and distinguished—they are a repository of wisdom, the result of a long socially committed life.

Escritora-editora, escritora-cronista, novelista que mira con detenimiento a sus personajes y que... more Escritora-editora, escritora-cronista, novelista que mira con detenimiento a sus personajes y que los conoce y los habita como los viejos narradores del realismo ruso hacían: sabiendo sus gustos y sus recuer- dos, permitiéndoles vivir, dejando que ocupen la escena con voz propia. Elena mira a sus interlocutores y los escucha con sabiduría paciente, atenta a las anécdotas vitales, pendiente de las pequeñas historias cotidianas de toda la gente que conoce. No es fácil entrevistar a una pensadora tan genuinamente humilde, más interesada en escuchar y hacerse eco de los problemas de otros que en prodigarse con sus opiniones o análisis. Su memoria y su palabra son distinguidas, y como todo en ella, naturales, un repositorio de las vivencias de una larga vida comprometida.

Periphērica: Journal of Social, Cultural, and Literary History, 2023

Editor's Foreword

Periphērica, 2022

In this third issue of Periphērica (2.1) we offer a wide range of critical approaches to cultural... more In this third issue of Periphērica (2.1) we offer a wide range of critical approaches to cultural production from Latinoamérica and Iberia. As in our past issues, most of the works analyzed here are not defined by one cultural center, a single nation-state, but instead they inhabit the intervals of migration, exile, travel, adaptation, and cultural circulation in different spaces: Argentina and Paris, Cuba and Spain, Murcia and Havana, Mexico and Barcelona, Lisbon and Mexico. The dossier on Transatlantic Encounters: Cuba and Spain, guest edited by Cecilia Enjuto Rangel, critically considers the postcolonial and neocolonial interrelations between the former metropolis and the largest island of the Antilles, relations that are overdetermined by the legacies of imperial violence and authoritarian repression. Foremost among these violent legacies is the epistemic violence exercised by European ideals and projections onto the colonial space dating back to the Renaissance, the legacies of what Walter Mignolo has called the Renaissance's "Darker Side." In closing his treaty on the famed invented island republic of Utopia, Thomas More satirically joked about the ambivalent sound of its name in English which hesitated between the no-place (utopia), and the happy place (eutopia).

Periphērica: Journal of Social, Cultural, and Literary History, 2020

Welcome to the second issue of Periphērica: Journal of Social, Cultural, and Literary History. A... more Welcome to the second issue of Periphērica: Journal of Social, Cultural, and Literary History. Apologies are due at the outset as we have been severely delayed from our intended publication schedule due to the particularly complex review process involved in such a lengthy issue. We are confident, however, that the wait will be worth your while and that readers will find here a diverse and stimulating array of voices ranging from scholarly work on cinema, to poetic responses to the pandemic.
Starting from the very final section, and in dialogue with our cover image, three distinguished Latin American poets, Luz Stella Mejía, Luis Carlos Mussó, and Jesús Sepúlveda, our Creative Writing editor, address the COVID-19 pandemic and its challenges to social, political, and even metaphysical confidence. This last year the health crisis has tested our societies and our resilience, often eliciting a firmer commitment to humanistic values, and to the belief that culture can satisfy our desire for a shared campfire story or song, our longing for communal experiences amid separation and loss.

Transmodernity, Jun 8, 2015

Book review of Pedro García Caro's monograph "After the Nation: Postnational Satire in the Works ... more Book review of Pedro García Caro's monograph "After the Nation: Postnational Satire in the Works of Carlos Fuentes and Thomas Pynchon." Published in Revista de Literatura Mexicana Contemporánea vol. 22, no. 71, May-Aug. 2017, pp. 211-16.

From Catalonia to California, Cuba, Chile, to all the many areas impacted by the long Iberian exp... more From Catalonia to California, Cuba, Chile, to all the many areas impacted by the long Iberian expansion that started in the 15 th century, the foundational divisions of center and periphery have constituted cultural and social spaces where languages, bodies, ethnicities, and alternate mappings have resisted colonial hegemonic practices and institutions. According to Mexican philosopher Leopoldo Zea (1912-2004) the peripheral mappings within which Spain and Portugal were placed in the early modern period positioned their colonial territories at " the periphery of a periphery. " Decolonial movements and theoretical discussions have critically revisited the concept of periphery and problematized the discussion with new terms such as Gloria Anzaldúa's " nepantilism " (" being between crossroads ") and her post-binary discussion of mestizo/a identities. Following on the fruitful discussions of our inaugural conference at Reed College in the spring of 2016, our Second Conference of LALISA at the University of Oregon aims to investigate the validity and contemporary currency of the center-periphery model as a way to understand Latin American, Latino/a, and Iberian cultural productions and social formations. We expect to receive papers from various disciplines across the humanities and the social sciences that will deal with issues related to the central themes of the conference: Center/periphery; Peripheral knowledges and identities; Colonial and postcolonial cartographies; Spatial identifications; Walls, borders, and the end of globalization; Eurocentrism, white supremacist geographies of exclusion; Environmental humanities; Global/local; Postcoloniality in the post-Hispanic world; Gender formations in the peripheries of modernity; Virtual borders, zones of influence, divisions; Regionalism and nationalism, postnationalism, and neonationalism; Space and the modern/premodern/postmodern debate; Latinidad/hispanidad/indigenismo; Enrique Dussel's concepts " underside of modernity, Abstracts should include a full title, a 300-word description of the paper, and the institutional affiliation of the presenter. Papers will be accepted in Spanish, Portuguese, and English. Please direct your enquiries and abstract submissions to lalisa@uoregon.edu

Journal of Academic Freedom, 2025

The AAUP's Journal of Academic Freedom invites submissions for the 2025 volume of scholarly artic... more The AAUP's Journal of Academic Freedom invites submissions for the 2025 volume of scholarly articles that address the impact of large private donations on academic freedom and the educational mission of colleges and universities. Fiscal constraints resulting from decades of disinvestment in public higher education form the backdrop of an increasing dependence on philanthropy. Administrators deploy the refrain that "the donors won't like it" in relation to a widening array of cultural or academic programs. Resources, we hear, are the reasons we do X and not Y and Z. Educational priorities with programmatic or ethical rationales-channeled appropriately through structures of shared governance-are too often blocked by administrators whose priorities are aligned with donor or trustee demands. Some donors have taken advantage of fiscal precarity in higher education to influence programs, appoint specific faculty and staff, and even determine research outcomes. The entanglement of large private financial donations in higher education has always posed questions about the risk of intrusion of special interests into the academic and civic mission of colleges and universities. Some donors have troubling ties to fossil fuel pollution, human rights violations, and war crimes. While private donations provide necessary funding for infrastructure, research, and scholarships, they may also perpetuate inequitable access to education when institutions prioritize programs or facilities that appeal to wealthy donors, leaving less visible needs unmet. Too often absent from debates about philanthropy in higher education is the tension between the tax-deductibility of large donations and the public interest. How can institutions limit excessive monitoring of gift expenditures, and even unrelated campus activities, by donors? What is the role of the faculty in decision-making related to these donations? Although we will consider any eligible submission relevant to the journal's core focus on academic freedom, we will give priority to those that address any of the following topics.
https://www.aaup.org/reports-publications/journal-academic-freedom/call-papers

Journal of Academic Freedom, 2023

Journal of Academic Freedom Volume 14: Landscapes of Power and Academic Freedom The 2023 issue ... more Journal of Academic Freedom Volume 14: Landscapes of Power and Academic Freedom

The 2023 issue of the Journal of Academic Freedom seeks original articles that investigate the links between landscapes of social power and the historical development and contemporary status of academic freedom. For over a century, the AAUP has defended the profession against attacks on academic freedom and has faced many powerful adversaries in the process, yet it has also found and cultivated allies. Preserving academic freedom for a free society entails understanding those who would dismantle or undermine it as well as those who will coalesce in its defense.

Within the United States and internationally, we have witnessed the deleterious effects that authoritarian governments, unchecked corporate interests, reactionary movements, and partisan politics have on academic freedom. Indeed, there is a wide range of impacts that we could cite, from tenure denial, dismissal, and censorship to imprisonment, political exile, and “brain drain.” What can we learn about academic freedom and its contemporary precarity by exposing the forces of power that mobilize against it?

We invite consideration of how academic freedom serves as a touchstone for democracy and the ways that the death of academic freedom signals the atrophy of more inclusive and democratized landscapes of power. What is the relationship between democratic societies and the flourishing of academia and academic freedom within them? What kind of society would powerful forces working against academia and academic freedom usher forth if they had their way? History and comparative international studies give us some clues about a range of possible futures we can envision for academic freedom. Potential topics and questions that prospective authors might explore for volume 14 include the following:

The relative autonomy of the knowledge sector within which the academy is situated. How do academic labor movements, professional associations, and wider social movements and coalitions support academic freedom and resist economic, partisan, and state intrusions that limit this autonomy? How can we acknowledge and strengthen landscapes of power—both within the profession and in the wider society—that bolster and protect academic freedom?

Comparative histories and current examples of academic censorship. How do past and present attempts at thought control, political and religious interference in curricula, and other threats to academic freedom erode civil society and its democratic processes?

Liberal arts programs and colleges and the utilitarian ethos. Are the liberal arts and the transformative critical thinking paradigms they promote being targeted and challenged by specific political or economic groups? What are the agendas behind such attacks? Is the ongoing transformation of liberal arts colleges and departments across the United States and elsewhere into “career-ready” degrees and institutions the result of market-driven forces or an ideological effort to straightjacket knowledge production? What is the current and potential impact of challenges to the liberal arts on academic freedom and shared governance? And its impact on the larger experiment of democracy?

Resisting structures of discipline and coercion in the academic profession. How can educators counteract the routinized behavior imposed by standardized testing in K–12 and higher education and expectations for education as the recitation of established truths? And how can they harness the revolutionary potential of debate and critical thinking and nurture competing narratives, discoveries, or conceptual frameworks to challenge received forms of knowledge?

External agendas or powerful interests in conflict with academic standards. We encourage investigations and analyses that dissect the often-hidden motives and interests of powerful actors. In many instances, these motives may be economic, ideological and partisan, or morally coercive. The attacks on climate scientists, for example, often trace back to powerful economic interests in the fossil-fuel sector but have strong partisan and ideological allies. Contemporary attacks on research and teaching about racism have complex power structures and interests behind them. Are public universities bound by private donor interests and their private corporate or ideological agendas? How does this increasing tendency toward “philanthropy” as a way to support higher education threaten the status of public universities and their foundational mandate to serve democracy and the common good?

Times Higher Education, 2023

A guide to help faculty manage and respond to threats to their academic freedom, from understandi... more A guide to help faculty manage and respond to threats to their academic freedom, from understanding the source of the challenges to finding allies and resources that can assist

AUUP Oregon Newsletter, 2018

The logic goes as follows: if you, as an academic in a public university, have access to private ... more The logic goes as follows: if you, as an academic in a public university, have access to private funds, you can trump the much-cited paradigm of public interest, student demand, credit hours, or even academic excellence around town – your program will appear as “viable” and even “successful” in this increasingly corporatized culture. “Private money,” regardless of its seemingly glamorous or obscure origins, or the fact that it actually has become “public” as a tax deduction to its donor, calls all the shots around this (college) town. Following the administrator-on-the-road model, academics should now devote their time, and demonstrate their research excellence, around their ability to attract such golden donations. Whether we as a society may need knowledge of environmental or health conditions across the Southern US border, Korean language and cultural skills, proficiency in Arabic, Portuguese, or Russian, including crucial cultural contexts to participate in conversations or negotiations in those languages, it all now relies on the better impulses of our local “captains of industry” and their alliance with our leadership.

AAUP Oregon Newsletter, 2017

The narrative of the liberal arts college, where students were not future clerks or businessmen a... more The narrative of the liberal arts college, where students were not future clerks or businessmen and women “in training”, but young people experiencing a radical intellectual transformation through deep daily exposure to small seminars in philosophy, political science, quantum physics, religion, history, medieval verse, anthropology, a different language and its culture, algebra, or music and dance was rapidly evaporating at the beginning of the decade. The impact of a deep recession, which has supposedly made families become more utilitarian around college education, is one of the arguments constantly used to justify closing down “expensive” and “useless” seminar classes, while opening large remodeled buildings to host five-hundred bodies in search of an Excel sheet or a Prezi show. The incapacity of donors and administrators to see and protect the worth of the liberal arts model, with the arts and humanities at its core, has meant that we are confronting the naked neoliberal model of privatized knowledge production, the celebration of patent offices and pricey stadiums on campus while libraries and humanist programs are culled.

Cambridge History of Latina/o Literature, 2018