Saturday, November 17, 2012





2014 Conference on Rudolfo Anaya:
Tradition, Modernity, and the Literatures of the U.S. Southwest



May 2-3, 2014
California State University, Los Angeles
Golden Eagle Ballroom






Sponsored by Cal State L.A.'s Gigi Gaucher-Morales Memorial Conference Series, the College of Arts and Letters, the College of Natural and Social Sciences, the Department of Chicano Studies, the Department of English, the Barry Munitz Fund, and the Emeriti Association.








Announcing a new film on Rudolfo Anaya
Produced, Directed and Written 
by David Ethan Ellis
http://anayamagicofwords.blogspot.com/


"Rudolfo Anaya
The Magic of Words"



$25 + $4 shipping

Make checks payable to:
NMCF/Anaya film


Send check with order information to:
Ellis Film, LLC.
PO Box 9051
Santa Fe, NM 87504

Questions:
David Ellis
ellisfilm@aol.com







     Rudolfo A. Anaya (New Mexico, 1937) belongs to the first generation of Chicano writers who pioneered and charted one of the most vigorous and theoretically-grounded ethnic literatures in the United States. Anaya led the way since the early 1970s with his novel Bless Me, Ultima (recipient of the 1971 Quinto Sol Award), followed by other novels, short fiction, essays, poetry, drama, and children’s stories. Anaya’s defining impetus in the development of Chicano literature has been threefold. First of all, Anaya's writings--deeply embedded in the cultural history of New Mexico--portray the American Southwest and its historical conflicts as central features in an aggressive and often violent national expansionism that spread westwards under the sign of modernity. This founding chapter in the history of the United States is represented in Anaya's novels through vivid landscape descriptions and traces of autobiography subtly fictionalized and patterned after a literary heritage that includes Mexican/Chicano cultural history and the myths and literary traditions of the U.S. Southwest. Secondly, Anaya’s reconfiguration and reinvention of the American frontier and the wilderness--symbolic spaces that stand in U.S. history as a break with the past, the reinvention of the self, and the colonization of the alien--achieve in Anaya's pages their literary representation in a style and narrative vision that have appealed in an equally compelling manner to both nonspecialist and scholarly readers. And third, Anaya’s work has been translated to many world languages, revealing implicit connections to world civilizations through the language of myth, legend, and national histories, and often turning into a critical arena for international scholarly debates on the analysis and interpretation of Chicano literature and, on a national and global levels, of U.S. and world literatures. Anaya's work  is thus an  illustration of how ethnic literatures can avoid a narrow or naïve realism caught in the personal or local with no reference points to national and global implications. Anaya has received many awards, including the American Book Award, the National Medal of Arts, New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, and the prestigious Kellogg Foundation Fellowship Award.

Conference Meals
Speakers and panelists will have the convenience of two luncheons and two dinners as part of Cal State L.A.'s hospitality. The cost of luncheons will be a reduced price of $15; cost of dinners, $20.  The conference meals are also open to members of the audience.  Participants in the meal program can pay individually at the entrance of the dining area.  










Conference Program
May 2-3, 2014
Golden Eagle Ballroom
California State University, Los Angeles




Friday, May 2
Registration & Hospitality Coffee and Pastry
Courtesy of the College of Natural and Social Sciences
8:30-9:00 a.m.
Golden Eagle Ballroom
California State University, Los Angeles




Left to Right: Sara González, Sylvia de Sanctis, Mauricio Montoya, and Cristóbal Palma


Teresa Metcalf-Yzaguirre and Ivan Kasimoff

Michael Cervantes, Photographer
 and Cal State L.A. alumnus


Mauricio Montoya, Cal State L.A. alumnus

Rosario Soto, Cal State L.A. graduate student

Ivan Kasimoff

Cristóbal Palma, Mauricio Montoya, and Teresa Metcalf-Yzaguirre




Cristóbal Palma, Cal State L.A. alumnus

Welcoming our guests to the conference



Juan Carlos Parrilla, Cal State L.A. alumnus

Juan Carlos Parrilla and Steven Trujillo,
Cal State L. A. alumni


Welcome and Introduction
Friday, May 2, 9:00-9:10 a.m.
Golden Eagle Ballroom





Reyna Grande, Roberto Cantú, and Corina Chaudhry






Morning of May 2, 2014

Roberto Cantú, Reyna Grande, Louis R. Negrete,
and María Teresa Márquez


Words of welcome















Left to Right: Mario Acevedo (near pastry), Ramón Gutiérrez,
Francisco Lomelí, and Beatrice Pita.




World Premiere of Film

"Rudolfo Anaya: The Magic of Words"
(A Work-in-Progress)


Produced and Directed by

David Ethan Ellis
Ellis Productions, Inc.


Moderator:

María Teresa Márquez
University of New Mexico


Friday, May 2, 9:10-9:30 a.m.
Golden Eagle Ballroom



María Teresa Márquez,
University of New Mexico
Introduces film titled "Rudolfo Anaya:  The Magic of Words"
by David Ellis
Ellis Productions, Inc.










With Carlos Vásquez, Director of the
National Hispanic Cultural Center and former
Chicano Studies colleague.


Donald Dewey and Lou Negrete,
members of Cal State L.A.'s Emeriti Association



Featured Speaker #1

Dr. Enrique R. Lamadrid
University of New Mexico

Title of Lecture:

“Cultural Authority, Authenticity, 
and Performance in Rudolfo Anaya”


Moderator:

Louis R. Negrete
California State University, Los Angeles


Friday, May 2, 9:30-10:30 a.m.
Golden Eagle Ballroom



Welcoming Enrique Lamadrid to Cal State L.A.


Enrique Lamadrid and Lou Negrete















Featured Speaker #2
Dr. Horst Tonn
University of Tübingen, Germany

Title of Lecture:

"A Citizen of the World:
Transnational Imaginaries in the Work of Rudolfo Anaya"


Moderator:

Theodore Crovello
California State University, Los Angeles

Friday, May 2, 10:40-11:50 a.m.
Golden Eagle Ballroom



Horst Tonn and Theodore Crovello, before the featured lecture


Theodore Crovello introduces featured speaker Horst Tonn































Featured Speaker #3

Ana Castillo
Independent Writer

Title of Lecture:

“On Writing About New Mexico”


Moderator:

Linda Greenberg
California State University, Los Angeles


Friday, May 2, 12:00-1:15 p.m.
Golden Eagle Ballroom
Linda Greenberg introduces Ana Castillo



Ana Castillo reads from her novel Give It To Me (2014)







Domnita Dumitrescu (Cal State L.A.) asks Ana Castillo a question











Dean Scott Robert Bowman (NSS) listens to Ana Castillo






Ana Castillo tells me more about her new novel Give It To Me


Posing next to Ana Castillo and her son Marcelo Castillo (while Ana holds small canine pet)


Book-signing with Reyna Grande buying most of the copies....





Books going, going, gone!


Luncheon
May 2, 1:15-2:30 p.m.
Golden Eagle Ballroom

Music by Joel Rodz, 
Singer and Musician

Menu
Sesame Beef Stir-fry
Steamed Rice, Stir-Fry Vegetables,
Asian Green Salad, Desserts,
Water, and Iced-Tea



The Golden Eagle Ballroom Staff




Joel Rodríguez sings boleros...


 The Mixquiahula Letters in our minds as I lean and almost fall
on Ana's shoulder...









The boleros sung by Joel Rodríguez and their magic:
people begin to dance.
















Featured Speaker #4

Dr. Francisco Lomelí
University of California, Santa Barbara

Title of Lecture:

"The Chicana and Chicano Literary Imagination"



Moderator:

Louis R. Negrete
California State University, Los Angeles


Friday, May 2, 2:30-3:30 p.m.
Golden Eagle Ballroom





Francisco Lomelí opens his lecture












Featured Speaker #5 

Reyna Grande
Novelist

Title of Lecture:

"The Immigrant Experience 
Through the Eyes of a Child:
From Across a Hundred Mountains to The Distance Between Us"


Moderator:

Corina Martínez Chaudhry
Founder of The Latino Author


Friday, May 2, 3:40-4:50 p.m.
Golden Eagle Ballroom



Corina Chaudhry introduces Reyna Grande








Q & A with the audience






Beatrice Pita and Rosaura Sánchez in the audience


José Limón contributes to the Q & A,
with Enrique Lamadrid and Ramón Gutiérrez (partial view) next to him.






Session #1
Cultural Identity and Orientalism 
in Chicano Literature
Friday, May 2, 5:00-6:00 p.m.
Golden Eagle Ballroom

Moderator: Domnita Dumitrescu, California State University, Los Angeles


Panelists:

1.    César L. Soto, University of Notre Dame
Chicano Literary Nationalism and the Question of Religion: Critical Blasphemy in Rivera’s Tierra and Religio-Deconstructive Hermeneutics in Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima

2.    Joo Ok Kim, University of California, Irvine
“My Oriental Eyes Look Out”: Revisioning Orientalisms in Rudolfo Anaya’s A Chicano in China and Mario Acevedo’s Killing the Cobra: Chinatown Trollop

3.    Marcelo Castillo, Independent Literary Critic
“Going Home: A Tale about Love, Identity, and What it Means to be a Nuevo Mexicano in The Southwest”




Domnita Dumitrescu introduces speakers:  L to R, Marcelo Castillo,
Joo Ok Kim, and César L. Soto.














Joo Ok Kim and Rosaura Sánchez





With  my colleague Domnita Dumitrescu congratulating her for an outstanding session





Featured Speaker #6

Dr. Rosaura Sánchez
University of California, San Diego

Title of Lecture:

"Anaya’s Historical Memory”



Moderator:

Reyna Grande
Novelist


Friday, May 2, 6:10-7:15 p.m.
Golden Eagle Ballroom



Reyna Grande introduces Rosaura Sánchez





Rosaura Sánchez opens her featured lecture











Monika Kaup contributes to the Q & A with a commentary


Rosaura Sánchez and María Teresa Márquez






Dinner
May 2, 7:30-9:00 p.m.
Golden Eagle Ballroom

Music by Cal State L.A.'s 
"Mariachi Aguila de Oro"

Menu
Chicken Fajitas, Mexican Rice and Beans,
Tortillas, Salsa, Full Salad Bar,
Desserts, Water, and Iced-Tea















Saturday, May 3


Group photo, 3 May 2014



Registration & Hospitality Coffee and Pastry


Courtesy of the College of Natural and Social Sciences
8:30-9:00 a.m.
Golden Eagle Ballroom
California State University, Los Angeles




Second day of the conference (May 3), L to R: Corina Chaudhry,
Michael Sedano (La Bloga), Roberto Cantú, and Reyna Grande.




Featured Speaker #7

Mario Acevedo
Novelist, Freelance Writer


Title of Lecture:

“How the Gothic Put Its Whammy on Me”

Moderator:


Corina Martínez Chaudhry
Founder of The Latino Author


Saturday, May 3, 9:00-10:00 a.m.
Golden Eagle Ballroom



Corina Chaudhry introduces Mario Acevedo


Mario Acevedo opens his featured lecture












Session #2
Mesoamerica and the U.S. Southwest

May 3, 10:15-11:45 a.m.
Golden Eagle Ballroom

Moderator: Roberto Cantú, California State University, Los Angeles


Panelists:


1.  Xochitl Flores-Marcial, University of California, Los Angeles
“Mexican Indigenous Traditions in the United States Southwest”

2.  Ricardo García, University of California, Los Angeles
“Yang and Yin: The Mayordomo and the Tenantzin in Indigenous Communities of Western Mexico”

3. Daniela S. Gutiérrez V., California State University, Los Angeles
     “Casta”

4. Michael Mathiowetz, California State University, Long Beach
“Reconsidering El Santo Niño de Atocha del Santuario de Chimayó, New Mexico: The Prehispanic West Mexican Roots of a Chicano Cultural Tradition”

5.  Kristina Nielson, University of California, Los Angeles
     “The Converging Histories of Danza Azteca”




Session on Mesoamerica and the U.S. Southwest



Xóchitl Flores-Marcial and Kristina Nielsen pose for the camera


Welcoming our audience


Introducing panelists, L to R:  Xóchitl Flores-Marcial, Kristina Nielsen,
Ricardo García, Daniela S. Gutiérrez, and Michael Mathiowetz (partial view). 


Daniela S. Gutiérrez begins her presentation










Xóchitl Flores-Marcial delivers her lecture on the Guelaguetza



Kristina Nielsen at the podium



Ricardo García opens his presentation


Michael Mathiowetz (right) about to begin his presentation





Natividad Vázquez,
representing Santa Monica College.
 Get ready for next year's conference, Natividad!


Paco and Deborah Conway de Prieto
speak with a member of the audience


Preparing for next talk, L to R:  Marc Haefele, myself, and John Pohl



Featured Speaker #8

Dr. John Pohl
University of California, Los Angeles

Title of Lecture:


“Transnational Tales:
A Millenium of Cultural Interchange Between
the United States and Mexico”


Moderator:

Roberto Cantú
California State University, Los Angeles


Saturday, May 3, 12:00-1:00 p.m.
Golden Eagle Ballroom




L to R:  Reyna Grande, John Pohl, and Roberto Cantú





John Pohl delivers his featured lecture on Transnational Tales















Luncheon
May 3, 1:15-2:30 p.m.
Golden Eagle Ballroom

Menu
Basil Pesto Pasta & Grilled Chicken,
Garlic Bread, Full Salad Bar,
Dessert, Water, and Iced-Tea

Enjoying a meal with friends





The finest waiters in the entire Southwest





Marc Haefele and Horst Tonn 




Featured Speaker  #9

Dr. José E. Limón
Julián Samora Endowed Professorship in Latino Studies and
Director of the Institute for Latino Studies
University of Notre Dame

Title of Lecture:

“Sweet Birds of Youth:
Coming of Age From Rudolfo Anaya to the Dreamers”


Moderator:

Linda Greenberg
California State University, Los Angeles

Saturday, May 3, 2:30-3:30 p.m.
Golden Eagle Ballroom

José Limón minutes before his talk



José Limón begins his featured lecture





Ramón Gutiérrez and María Teresa Márquez,
two Novomexicanos in L.A.

With Michael Sedano, wondering if we should go back for more pastry




Richard Soto (with sombrero), from Libros-Corridos,
Stockton, California




Featured Speaker #10

Dr. Monika Kaup
University of Washington, Seattle

Title of Lecture:


"Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me Ultima:
A Nuevomexicano Contribution
to the Hemispheric Genealogy of the New World Baroque"

 
Moderator:

Marc Haefele
California State University, Los Angeles



Saturday, May 3, 3:40-4:50 p.m.
Golden Eagle Ballroom


Enrique Lamadrid introduces a videorecording
of an interview with Rudolfo Anaya


Monika Kaup begins her featured lecture









Monika Kaup and Marc Haefele, welcoming questions from the audience










Participating in the Q & A







Featured Speaker #11

Dr. María Herrera-Sobek
University of California, Santa Barbara

Title of Lecture:

"The Nature of Jalamanta:
Spiritual and Environmental Interconnection
in Rudolfo Anaya’s Ecological Novel"


Moderator:

Reyna Grande
Novelist


Saturday, May 3, 5:00-6:00 p.m.
Golden Eagle Ballroom


  


Keynote Speaker

Dr. Ramón A. Gutiérrez
Preston & Sterling Morton Distinguished Service Professor
in United States History
The University of Chicago
  
Title of Lecture:

“The Spell of New Mexico:
The Lies of the Land”



Moderator:

Roberto Cantú
California State University, Los Angeles


Saturday, May 3, 6:00-7:15 p.m.
Golden Eagle Ballroom


Ramón Gutiérrez delivers the keynote lecture







John Pohl during the Q & A















Conference Banquet
May 3, 7:30-9:00 p.m.
Golden Eagle Ballroom

Menu
Grilled Salmon, Roasted Red Potatoes,
Bread, Fresh Vegetables, Dessert,
Water and Iced-Tea


The conference's banquet begins!






Alfredo Morales examines his conference notes,
already looking forward to next year's conference on Mariano Azuela
and the Novel of the Mexican Revolution.








Keynote and Featured Speakers: 
Lecture  Abstracts and Biographies




Dr. Enrique R. Lamadrid
University of New Mexico


Title of Lecture:

“Cultural Authority, Authenticity, and Performance
in Rudolfo Anaya”


In my talk I will discuss issues of cultural authority, authenticity, and performance in the works of Rudolfo Anaya. In a sustained and multi-faceted literary career, Rudolfo Anaya has achieved a deep cultural resonance that has elated and challenged readers and audiences.  Replete with the arquetypal minimalism of Juan Rulfo, his latest novel Randy López Goes Home (2011) is acclaimed as a Chicano Pedro Páramo.  In his latest play, Rosa Linda (2013), Anaya has emerged as the García Lorca of the upper Pecos Valley in a bloody requiem for patriarchy, with its whispered allusions to the Delgadina legend.
            In the roles of storyteller, mythmaker, and pícaro, Rudolfo Anaya presides over the birth of Chicano literature with the foundational Bless me Ultima (1972), even as he satirizes it in the mock epic poem Adventures of Juan Chicaspatas (1985).   He recasts the search for Chicano identity in the Indo-Hispano philosophical essays of Jalamanta: A Message from the Desert (1996), as well in the escapades of Alburquerque (1992) and sequel tetralogy of detective novels  with hero Sonny Baca, nephew of the notorious sheriff hero of Socorro County Elfego Baca, scourge of renegade Texans.
            Anaya negotiates his cultural authority through resolana dialogues on the virtual plazas of the literary commons, and enacted there as cultural performances which now include film as well as the more regional venues of community theater and the niche market of bilingual children’s books.
            All of Anaya's literary projects are sites of symbolic social action, where identities and relations are continually being reconfigured.   The cultural authenticity he realizes is based not on romantic notions of cultural recovery, but as as James Clifford notes, a "hybrid, creative activity in a local present-becoming-future... local structures produce[ing] histories rather than simply yielding to History."


Enrique R. Lamadrid teaches folklore, literature, and cultural history in the University of New Mexico’s Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese.  His research interests include ethnopoetics, folklore and music, Chicano literature, contemporary Mexican poetry, and literary translation.  His field work centers in NM, but ranges as well into Mexico, Spain, the Andes and the Caribbean. His research on the Indo-Hispano traditions of New Mexico charts the influence of indigenous cultures on the Spanish language and imagination.  His literary writings explore the borderlands between cultures, their natural environments, and between popular traditions and literary expression. Lamadrid was awarded the Chicago folklore prize for his 2003 ethnography "Hermanitos Comanchitos: Indo-Hispano Rituals of Captivity and Redemption" and the Américo Paredes Prize in 2005 for his cultural activism and museum curatorial projects.






Dr. Horst Tonn
University of Tübingen, Germany

Title of Lecture:

"A Citizen of the World:
Transnational Imaginaries in the Work of Rudolfo Anaya"


This lecture will explore the transnational dimensions in the work of Rudolfo Anaya. While Anaya’s work is deeply embedded in the conflictual, yet dialogically responsive cultural traditions of his native New Mexico it is equally clear that the author persistently reflects on how the regional relates to larger formations of the transnational and the global. Based on this observation a number of intriguing questions emerge: How does Anaya imagine the Americas, north and south? And how are the Americas related to global formations and forces in his perception? How does Anaya negotiate a profound "cosmopolitanism“ (Appiah) with a persistent commitment to the local and the regional?  Anaya’s essays are a rich source for the author’s reflections on transculturation and on the resonances between regional culture and global/transnational contexts. The essays on his travels to Latin America, Asia and Europe offer sustained interrogations of these issues. In other essays, his cosmopolitan outlook provides nuanced insights into the potential and limitations of cultural nationalism as well as on the relevance of local knowledge and cultural memory. Also, Anaya’s extensive readings in world literature open up vital connections between the local and the global. In his fiction, finally, Anaya offers wide-ranging explorations of Greater Mexico, the Americas and beyond. His concern with alternatives to American modernity and local resonances with larger imaginary and geopolitical formations will be traced in this paper. 
      
Dr. Horst Tonn is Professor of American Studies at the University of Tuebingen/Germany.
Educated at the Free University Berlin and the University of Texas/Austin he has previously taught at the Universities of Mainz/Germersheim, Erlangen and Duisburg. As a visiting scholar he taught at California State University, Fullerton and at Poone University in India. His major research areas are Chicano literature and U.S.-Mexican border culture, documentary (writing and film), the representation of war in the media, cultural globalization and participatory culture. His two book publications are on the contemporary Chicano novel (Frankfurt/M., 1988) and on the history of documentary writing in the United States (Essen, 1996). Besides numerous articles, he has co-edited books on the role of war correspondents in media society (Wiesbaden, 2007), and on cultural globalization (Trier, 2007).





Ana Castillo
Independent Writer


Title of Lecture:

“On Writing About New Mexico”


Ana Castillo (June 15, 1953) is a celebrated poet, novelist, short story writer, and essayist.  Castillo was born and raised in Chicago.  Her works include The Guardians, Peel My Love Like an Onion, So Far From God, The Mixquiahuala Letters, and Sapogonia.  She has written a story collection, Loverboys; the critical study Massacre of the Dreamers; the poetry collection My Father Was a Toltec and Selected Poems, and  I Ask the Impossible; and the children’s book My Daughter, My Son, The Eagle, The Dove.  She is the editor of the anthology Goddess of the Americas:  Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe, also available from Vintage Español as La diosa de las Américas.  She has also contributed to numerous national magazines and periodicals.

The 20th anniversary edition of her classic book of Xicana essays, Massacre of the Dreamers will be released Fall 2014.  In addition, her novel Give It To Me, will be published by the Feminist Press (New York) in May 2014.





Dr. Francisco Lomelí
University of California, Santa Barbara

Title of Lecture:

"The Chicana and Chicano Literary Imagination"

The objective of this presentation will be to provide a summary of the various topics contained in my recent book The Chican@ Literary Imagination: A Collection of Critical Studies, edited by Julio Cañero and Juan E. Elices (Biblioteca Benjamín Franklin, 2012), as it pertains to border studies, literary studies, literary history, gender studies, and philosophical inquiries. 

Dr. Francisco A. Lomelí is a professor in the Spanish and Portuguese and Chicana/o Studies Departments at UCSB. He has been chair of three departments: Chicana/o Studies, Black Studies, and Spanish and Portuguese.  He has also served as Director of Education Abroad Programs for the University of California system in Costa Rica (1994, 1995), and Chile and Argentina (2011-2013).  His publications cover a wide gamut of topics in Chicano Studies and Latin American literature.  Some of his works include Dictionary of Literary Biography (1989, 1993, 1999), Handbook of Hispanic Cultures of the United States: Literature and Art (1993), Chicano Literature: A Reference Guide (1984), The Writings of Eusebio Chacón 2012), Life and Writings of Miguel de Quintana (2004), and Barrio on the Edge (trans. 1998).  He has also delivered numerous papers in many universities in the U.S., Mexico, Ireland, Italy, Chile, Spain, Russia, France and Germany, among others.





Reyna Grande
Novelist

Title of Lecture:

"The Immigrant Experience Through the Eyes of a Child: 
From Across a Hundred Mountains to The Distance Between Us"


Reyna Grande is an award-winning novelist and memoirist. She has received an American Book Award, the El Premio Aztlán Literary Award, and the Latino Book Award. In 2012, she was a finalist for the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Awards. Her works have been published internationally in countries such as Norway and South Korea. Her novels, Across a Hundred Mountains, (Atria, 2006) and Dancing with Butterflies (Washington Square Press, 2009) were published to critical acclaim and have been read widely in schools across the country. Her latest book, The Distance Between Us, was published in August 2012, by Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. In this memoir, Reyna writes about her life before and after illegally immigrating from Mexico to the United States. A National Book Circle Critics Award finalist, The Distance Between Us is an inspirational coming-of-age story about the pursuit of a better life. The Los Angeles Times hailed it as ‘the Angela’s Ashes of the modern Mexican immigrant experience.” Born in Mexico, Reyna was two years old when her father left for the U.S. to find work. Her mother followed her father north two years later, leaving Reyna and her siblings behind in Mexico. In 1985, when Reyna was going on ten, she entered the U.S. as an undocumented immigrant. She later went on to become the first person in her family to graduate from college. After attending Pasadena City College for two years, Reyna obtained a B.A. in creative writing and film & video from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She later received her M.F.A. in creative writing from Antioch University. Now, in addition to being a published author, she is also an active promoter of Latino literature and is a sought-after speaker at high schools, colleges, and universities across the nation. Currently Reyna teaches creative writing at UCLA Extension and is at work on her next novel.







Dr. Rosaura Sánchez
University of California, San Diego

Title of Lecture:

"Anaya’s Historical Memory”


Taken together, Rudolfo Anaya’s fiction and essays offer a particularly situated historical perspective on the past, present and future of the U.S. Southwest, especially with regard to New Mexico, as well as on the role that literature and art play in humanity’s search for direction.  His intertextual and hybrid narratives also offer an opportunity to examine changing perspectives on Chicano/a history and especially on the history of New Mexico, a state marked by its rich indigenous past and present, its colonial past, its inter-regional (North/South) conflicts, its traditional outlook on society, despite its housing high-tech military and nuclear laboratories and sites, and its slow growing population, unlike neighboring states of Arizona, Texas and California that have undergone major demographic spikes and attracted large immigrant populations.    My talk will examine how Anaya’s historical perspective enables or inhibits a critical assessment of U.S. Southwest history and what his work offers in terms of a historical perspective on the past and its relation to the present, this 21st century world ruled by global capital.

Dr. Rosaura Sánchez is a leading scholar in the field of literary criticism, linguistics, and theory, and the former Chair of the Department of Literature (1995-1998), and Coordinator of the Third World Studies Program at UCSD (1980-1982).  She is the author of numerous scholarly articles and reviews, especially of lengthy and detailed introductions to the novels and letters of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton.  Rosaura has published seminal books such as Chicano Discourse. A Socio-Historic Perspective, second edition (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1994), and Telling Identities. The Californio Testimonios  (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). Rosaura co-edited with Beatrice Pita the ground-breaking book Conflicts of Interests: The Letters of Amparo Ruiz de Burton (Arte Público Press, 2001). She is also the author of the short story collection He Walked in And Sat Down/Entó y se sentó (University of New Mexico Press, 2000), and, with Beatrice Pita, co-author of a science fiction novel titled Lunar Braceros 2125-2148  (Calaca Press, 2009). Rosaura’s books are required readings in Chicano Studies courses at Cal State L.A.  









Mario Acevedo
Novelist, Freelance Writer

Title of Lecture:

“How the Gothic Put Its Whammy on Me”

I wrote my novels solely to entertain, mostly through the use of satire and by drawing when necessary from Gothic tropes--the mysterious and the fantastic, and my attraction to blood spatter and the double cross. While I sought to create stories with universal appeal, I found that the more I culled from my experience--mostly bad choices--the tighter and more compelling the resulting tale.
This pulled me deeper into the Gothic realm as I dissected our cultural myths to find the connection between la Llorona and the Roswell UFO. I admire Rudolfo Anaya’s ability to tap into our Mexican-American heritage and present stories that underline the schizomania of being a Chicano in this society. Like Anaya, I grew up in New Mexico and I appreciate his ability to present a complex Gothic landscape layered with centuries of conquest, relentless cultural rip-off, and abandoned low-riders.
In my lecture I will discuss how the Gothic drove me to the archetype of the private detective because I find kinship with desperate characters wrestling with high stakes, hidden agendas, and moral compromises. The private detective in noir fiction is the outsider but cannot be just an observer. He or she has a mystery to solve and so must be the engine of the story, to act as judge and jury, and sometimes executioner. As do Anaya’s Sonny Baca and Rose Medina characters, my Felix Gomez finds himself as an unwanted interloper--even on his home turf--as he searches for his pants and the truth on his journey through the Gothic.

Mario Acevedo is the author of the national bestselling Félix Gómez detective-vampire series from HarperCollins. His debut novel, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats, was chosen by Barnes & Noble as one of the best Paranormal Fantasy Novels of the Decade. His short fiction is included in the anthologies, You Don’t Have A Clue: Latino Mystery Stories for Teens and Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery from Arte Público Press, and in Modern Drunkard Magazine. He also teaches creative writing at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop and is a past chapter-president in the Mystery Writers of America. Mario grew up in southern New Mexico and lives and writes in Denver, Colorado.







Dr. John Pohl
University of California, Los Angeles

Title of Lecture:

“Transnational Tales:
A Millenium of Cultural Interchange Between
the United States and Mexico”



Rudolfo Anaya’s novels are rooted in very personal experiences with the profound cultural complexity that characterizes the American Southwest. The social, economic, and political relationships between Native Americans, Spaniards, and Anglo-Americans who constitute this world will be examined in light of a millennium of cultural interaction between Mexico and the United States from the rise of ancient trading societies, the first expeditions to settle the north under viceroyalty, Hidalgo’s Mexican independence movement and the transnational culture that is transforming both nations today. The role of indigenous agency will be emphasized and the colonial origins of the modern state together with inherent questions of what constitutes national identity among otherwise highly diverse peoples will be considered in light of changing perspectives in archaeology, history, literature and visual culture.  

Dr. John Pohl is Adjunct Professor of Art History at UCLA and teaches in the Departments of Anthropology, Chicano Studies, and Fine Arts at California State University, Los Angeles.  He is an authority on American Indian civilizations and has directed numerous archaeological projects in Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Central America as well as Europe.  A specialist in the ancient arts and writing systems of the Americas, Dr. Pohl served as the Peter Jay Sharp Curator and Lecturer in the Art of the Ancient Americas at Princeton University and has designed, written and produced exhibitions as well as documentary and feature films on American Indian history for many other institutions around the country as well as Europe.  Most recently, John Pohl curated the exhibitions “The Aztec Pantheon and the Art of Empire” for the Getty Villa Museum in 2010 and the “Children of the Plumed Serpent: The Legacy of Quetzalcoatl in Ancient Mexico” for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Dallas Museum of Art in 2012.  








Dr. José E. Limón
Julián Samora Endowed Professorship in Latino Studies
Director of the Institute for Latino Studies
University of Notre Dame


Title of Lecture:


“Sweet Birds of Youth:
Coming of Age From Rudolfo Anaya to the Dreamers”

  
In this lecture I depart from Tennessee William’s 1959 play, Sweet Bird of Youth but also Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless me Ultima and his young Antonio as figurative points of reference. I then offer a sustained exploration of the vicissitudes in coming of age for Latino male youth at the present time as represented in contemporary Latino fiction. With yet other reference points such as Tómas Rivera, Rolando Hinojosa and Richard Rodríguez, I turn principally to Oscar Casares in Texas, Manuel Muñoz in California, Manuel Luis Martinez (in Texas and California) and Fred Arroyo in the Midwest. They all seem to suggest that in the contemporary and contestative dialogue between “tradition” and a now post-modernity, the latter has prevailed with rather dismal results for such youth. However, against such a dismal outlook, the real-world actions of the young “dreamers” and immigration rights offer the “audacity of hope” for the Latino future.


    Dr. José E. Limón is Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame where he also holds the Julián Samora Endowed Professorship in Latino Studies and is Director of the Institute for Latino Studies. Dr. Limón has published in major scholarly journals and authored four books: Mexican Ballads and Chicano Poems: History and Influence in Mexican-American Social Poetry (University of California Press, 1992); Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas (University of Wisconsin Press, 1994); American Encounters: Greater Mexico, the United States, and the Erotics of Culture (Beacon Press, 1998); and, Américo Paredes: Culture and Critique (University of Texas Press, 2012). A new book, Neither Friends, Nor Strangers: Mexicans and Anglos in the Literary Making of Texas, is in progress. In his former position as Professor of English and Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, he directed thirty PhDs to completion with twenty-eight of these currently in tenure-track positions across the country from Brown University to UC-Santa Cruz.








Dr. Monika Kaup
University of Washington, Seattle

Title of Lecture:
"Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me Ultima:
A Nuevomexicano Contribution
to the Hemispheric Genealogy of the New World Baroque"



    This paper intends to demonstrate that Rudolfo Anaya’s acclaimed first novel, Bless Me Ultima (1972) rightfully belongs into a cultural and artistic context where it hasn’t been widely noted—the hemispheric continuities of the New World Baroque. The New World Baroque—the baroque that grew up in Spain’s and Portugal’s colonies in the Americas—is the offspring of the European Baroque. Indeed, the Baroque’s original arrival overseas owes to European colonialism. However, the widespread evidence of idiosyncratic mestizo and local adaptations of the Iberian Baroque across the visual and verbal arts in the 17th and 18th centuries, but especially in rural religious architecture and painting, suggested that new, rebellious articulations had emerged that exceeded the Baroque’s original function as a repressive tool of colonialism and the Counter-Reformation. A post-WW II generation of Latin American intellectuals, foremost among them Cuban writers Alejo Carpentier and José Lezama Lima, popularized the notion of an “anticolonial,” transculturated New World Baroque. Building on the pioneering studies of Argentine art historian Angel Guido, Carpentier and Lezama Lima argued that the official European Baroque was adapted and transformed at the hands of indigenous and mestizo artisans, whose labor created most of the monuments of Baroque art in the Americas. These artists inserted pre-Columbian symbols into the iconography of the Catholic Baroque, undoing the colonial negation of their world and at the same time deforming and re-creating the European expression that had been imposed upon them. Carpentier and Lezama Lima claimed that New World artists had stolen the colonizer’s art and turned it into an expression of their own: somehow, the colonizer was in turn colonized. In Lezama Lima words, the American baroque was an instrument not of the Counter-Reformation, but of contraconquista (counterconquest). In Bless Me, Ultima, Antonio traces the cosmic patterns of his nuevomexicano mestizo culture and spirituality. The nuevomexicano mestizo cosmovision that is revealed to Antonio during his spiritual maturation under the tutelage of his mentor, the curandera Ultima, is the literary analogue of the flamboyant mestizo iconography of New World folk baroque altarpieces, such the Church of Santa María Tonantzintla, near Cholula, Mexico, or façade of the Church of San Lorenzo, Potosí, Bolivia, where Catholic angels and saints mix with indigenous figures, flora and fauna. Anaya’s portrait of nuevomexicano spirituality decenters the sacred in the baroque mode of “proliferating nuclei,” as Carpentier explains in his 1975 essay “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real,” by generating “decorative elements that completely fill the space of the construction” (93) so that no empty space is left unfilled, thus exemplifying the baroque logic of horror vacui. Antonio’s mestizo cosmovision effects the de-throning of the single center (the Christian God) to include the pantheon of indigenous deities and spirits of that populate the mestizo folk spirituality of his part-Hispanic, part-indigenous New Mexican culture. The pattern remains illogical, confusing, chaotic, disorderly—in short, baroque, never clarifying into symmetrical order. Beyond my analysis of Anaya’s novel, my larger goal is to urge a wider recognition of the presence of the New World Baroque (and its contemporary Neobaroque recuperation as in Bless Me, Ultima) north of the U.S.-Mexico border. The New World Baroque is sedimented within the texture of U.S. Latino culture, including Chicano culture, and it continues to inspire contemporary U.S. Latino artists and writers.

     Dr. Monika Kaup is associate professor in the department of English and adjunct associate professor in the department of Comparative Literature at the University of Washington, Seattle, where her teaching and research areas include U.S. Latino/a literature, U.S. –Mexico border literature and culture, hemispheric American studies, Baroque/New World Baroque/Neobaroque studies, and 20th-century U.S. fiction.  She has completed two related projects on the New World Baroque and the Neobaroque. The first, Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest (co-edited with Lois Parkinson Zamora, Duke UP, 2010) is a collection that traces the changing nature of Baroque representation in Europe and the Americas across four centuries. Neobaroque in the Americas: Alternative Modernities in Literature, Visual Art, and Film (U of Virginia P, 2012) is a comparative, hemispheric study of the Neobaroque—the 20th and 21st-century recovery of the Baroque—in modern and postmodern North American, U.S. Latino,  and Latin American literature, film, visual arts, and theory. Her other publications include Rewriting North American Borders in Chicano and Chicana Narrative (Peter Lang 2001, Mixing Race, Mixing Culture: Inter-American Literary Dialogues (co-edited with Debra Rosenthal, U of Texas P, 2002). She is currently at work on a new book project entitled “Post-Poststructuralism: New Realisms in Contemporary Theory and Post-Apocalyptic Narrative,” which investigates the rise of new realisms in the contemporary theory after poststructuralism and will explore its arguments via close readings of contemporary post-apocalyptic narrative.







Dr. María Herrera-Sobek
Associate Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity, and Academic Policy
University of California, Santa Barbara

Title of Lecture:

"The Nature of Jalamanta:
Spiritual and Environmental Interconnection
in Rudolfo Anaya’s Ecological Novel"


Rudolfo Anaya’s early novel Jalamanta (1996) follows the initial trajectory evident in Bless Me, Ultima (1972) regarding the spiritual nature of a living, breathing universe. Jalamanta’s central focus is on philosophical and epistemological excursions on the nature of being as it relates to humanity’s connections and interconnections to a sentient universe. My study explores and highlights the novel’s ecological and spiritual journey as exemplified by the main protagonist and posits this as one of the first Chicano novels to explore spiritual issues related to the environment in a systematic manner.

Dr. María Herrera-Sobek is Associate Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity, and Academic Policy and a Professor in the Chicana and Chicano Studies Department at UC, Santa Barbara. She holds the Luis Leal Endowed Chair in Chicano Studies. She taught at UC, Irvine for several years and has been a Visiting Professor at Stanford and Harvard Universities. She is the author of numerous books including The Bracero Experience: Elitelore versus Folklore (1979); The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis (1990); and Northward Bound: The Mexican Immigrant Experience in Ballad and Song (1993); Chicano Renaissance: Contemporary Trends in Chicano Culture (with Maciel and Ortiz, 2000); and Santa Barraza: The Life and work of a Mexica/Tejana Artist (2001). Santa Barraza: Artist of the Borderlands (2001) and Chicano Folklore: A Handbook (2006). She has edited or co-edited several books including: Violence and Transgression in World Minority Literatures (with Ahrens Rüdiger, Karin Ikas, and Francisco A. Lomelí, Germany, 2005) and Perpectivas Transatlánticas en la Literatura Chicana: Ensayos y Creatividad (with Francisco Lomelí and Juan Antonio Perles Rochel, Spain 2005). 





Keynote Speaker

Dr. Ramón A. Gutiérrez
Preston & Sterling Morton Distinguished Service Professor
in United States History
The University of Chicago
  

Title of Lecture:

“The Spell of New Mexico:
The Lies of the Land”


"The Spell of the Land" is a talk that explores the Spanish fantasy heritage so present in the tourist and civic booster literature of New Mexico and the entire Southwest.  What the rhetoric of New Mexico as a land of enchantment, as a land of mañana, as a land of harmonious ethnic relations hides are the brutalities that have long been part of New Mexico's history.  These are the lies of the land. 

Dr. Ramón A. Gutiérrez is currently the Preston & Sterling Morton Distinguished Service Professor of American History and the College.  Born in New Mexico, raised in Albuquerque, and educated at the University of New Mexico and the University of Wisconsin, he has held posts at Pomona College, UC San Diego, and now at Chicago.  At UCSD he was the founding chair of the Ethnic Studies Department and its Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.  Over the years his research has focused on the racial and ethnic legacies of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, studying the religious aspects of cultural change.  He is the authoreditor of a number of books, among them When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away:  Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (Stanford University Press, 1991); Feasts and Celebrations in North American Ethnic Communities (University of New Mexico Press, 1995); Mexican Home Altars (University of New Mexico Press, 1997); Contested Eden: California Before the Gold Rush (University California Press, 1998); and Mexicans in California:  Emergent Challenges and Transformations (University of Illinois Press, 2009)




Conference Abstracts


Marcelo Castillo, Independent Literary Critic
“Going Home: A Tale about Love, Identity, and What it Means to be a Nuevo Mexicano in The Southwest”
As a contributing writer to La Tolteca ‘Zine I had the opportunity to read and review Rudolfo Anaya’s most recent novel.  I was long familiar with the writer and his early work, Bless Me, Ultima and I was happy with the assignment. Today I will discuss Rudy magnificent novel Randy Lopez Goes Home. I will discuss the plot of Randy Lopez Goes Home and various themes that Anaya continues to appreciate, such as the songs of nature, his philosophies on life and death, memory, true love, preserving New Mexican traditions, Chicano identity and ultimately, what he feels is causing us to lose these: assimilation.

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Xochitl Flores-Marcial, University of California, Los Angeles
“Mexican Indigenous Traditions in the United States Southwest”
Tradition cannot be contained by geographic borders. Migrants carry traditions across borders and their descendants often reproduce the culture and tradition of their forebears in new social contexts. This presentation will focus on the cultural contributions of the Zapotec of the Central Valley of Oaxaca and their tradition called Gelaguetza, a Mesoamerican system of collaboration and reciprocal gift exchange. Guelaguetza was used by Zapotecs of the colonial period in organizing resources such as agricultural products, labor and money.  This indigenous system existed in pre-Columbian Oaxaca, continued to be practiced during the colonial period and is alive and well in Oaxacan communities of today in Mexico and the United States.  This presentation will contribute to the conversation of tradition, modernity and the U.S. Southwest which is home to the largest population of Oaxacans outside of Mexico by discussing the indigenous adaptation of Guelaguetza in the US context and the ways in which Zapotecs negotiate representations of their culture outside of Mexico.

Ricardo García, University of California, Los Angeles
“Yang and Yin: The Mayordomo and the Tenantzin in Indigenous Communities of Western Mexico”
The role of indigenous agency in the construction of New Spain has received considerable attention in recent years, particularly through cooperative efforts with members of mendicant orders.  Less attention has been paid to the Western and Northern frontiers.  Fray Antonio Tello wrote that, between 1547 and 1548, the Franciscans founded hospitales dedicated to Mary of the Immaculate Conception in Indigenous towns of western Mexico.  By the 1600s, many the towns from this region had a hospital and a cofradía dedicated to this saint. This study will examine two of the cofradía-hospital’s positions—the tenantzin and the mayordomo—to determine this institution’s interaction with its host community.  

Daniela S. Gutiérrez V., California State University, Los Angeles
“Casta”
The Sistema de Castas was a socially-based construction that was used throughout the colonial period in Latin America. This hierarchical system legitimized the discrimination towards the hybrid races found in the New World. While considerable attention has been paid to the role of castas in the composition of hierarchical and political systems in New Spain, far less attention has been paid to the role of Casta on the northern frontier.  I question what function it may have had, if any, in frontier society in general and will explore the role of castas in the founding of Los Angeles in particular.

Joo Ok Kim, University of California, Irvine
“My Oriental eyes look out”: Revisioning Orientalisms in Rudolfo Anaya’s A Chicano in China and Mario Acevedo’s Killing the Cobra: Chinatown Trollop
Rudolfo Anaya declares in his travel journal, dated 1984: “I am the first Chicano from the Southwest to journey to China” (viii). A Chicano in China (published in 1986) is rich with expressions of yearning to trace a common “blood” between Chicanos and Asians; it reframes the Cold War global map of 1984 into one that charts a different trajectory, from Albuquerque to Beijing. The desire for blood resurfaces in a radically different context in Mario Acevedo’s graphic novel Killing the Cobra: Chinatown Trollop, in which the Chicano detective-vampire and U.S. Army veteran Felix Gomez declines human blood from Qian Ning, the former “Chinatown Trollop.” Despite the differences in genre and historical era, I argue that reading these texts together enables a singular perspective on the overlaps of race, sexuality, and empire through the haunting images of Asia in Anaya’s and Acevedo’s works.

This paper analyzes Rudolfo Anaya’s travel narrative, A Chicano in China, and Mario Acevedo’s graphic novel, Killing the Cobra (2010) through the analytic of “alternative orientalisms.” Building on the concept articulated by Ignacio López-Calvo and other scholars, I revisit Anaya’s travel narrative as a critical inquiry into cultural genealogies that bypass European legacies. Instead, these genealogies speculate dreams of a shared past at the thresholds of a common future. Indeed, read alongside Anaya’s A Chicano in China, Acevedo’s graphic novel reframes Anaya’s journey with a gothic twist—the Chicano in China is now a detective-vampire and Iraq War veteran who navigates the noir landscapes of Hong Kong and San Francisco’s Chinatown with Qian Ning, an advocate for former sex workers. In an effort to complicate more prevalent readings of orientalism as uniformly problematic and unidirectional, I instead explore “alternative orientalisms” here as critiques waged against racism, militarism, and hetero-patriarchy in the mythical dreamscapes of A Chicano in China and the graphic representations of Killing the Cobra.

Michael Mathiowetz, California State University, Long Beach
“Reconsidering El Santo Niño de Atocha del Santuario de Chimayó, New Mexico: The Prehispanic West Mexican Roots of a Chicano Cultural Tradition”
Chicano cultural and literary traditions are deeply rooted in an ancestral indigenous and Mexican heritage that extends from the southwestern United States to deep within Mesoamerica. Understanding the complex cultural syncretism that existed in prehispanic northwest Mesoamerica and the US Southwest provides new light by which to analyze the fusion of indigenous, Spanish, and Mexican traditions that subsequently define Chicano culture. While Chicano literature, visual culture, and identity has been strongly influenced by the iconography and art of highland central Mexican cultures such as the Aztec in general, I will demonstrate through an examination of the cults of both Xochipilli and Santo Niño, that the influence of prehispanic indigenous West Mexican cultural traditions on Chicano and Pueblo cultural practices played no less a role in cultural and symbolic developments.
Kristina Nielson, University of California, Los Angeles
“The Converging Histories of Danza Azteca”
Rooted in both ancient, colonial, as well as modernist traditions, contemporary practitioners of Danza Azteca advocate that it is dedicated to preserving and nourishing the ancient knowledge of their ancestors to whom they pledge to uphold a spiritual way of life as well as inform and educate the general public on the values they perceive in celebrating ancient Mexican culture.  In this presentation, I intend to present several potential origins for Danza Azteca that are laden with mythical, historical, or religious meaning. I contend that these histories offer insight into Danza Azteca’s relationship with both the historical and imagined Aztec past.

César L. Soto, University of Notre Dame
Chicano Literary Nationalism and the Question of Religion: Critical Blasphemy in Rivera’s Tierra and Religio-Deconstructive Hermeneutics in Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima
If we concede that the four books awarded the Premio Quinto Sol (Age of the Fifth Sun Literary Prize) (1971-1975) sought to shape the worldview of an emergent Chicano nation, then these novels demand collective examination strictly in relation to their role in nation-building. For this conference project, I will look at the first two winners of the prize, Tomas Rivera’s …y no se lo trago la tierra (1971) and Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless me, Ultima (1972). Because both novels are intensely preoccupied with the role of religion in the formation of the individual and in the social practices of the community, I contend that Chicano literary nationalism is inextricable from philosophical reflection on religion.

Especially in the case of Rivera’s and Anaya’s first novels, to think though oppression and conflict is to evoke religious doubt and the problem of suffering as pondered by the great thinkers throughout the ages. This engagement with religion is evident in the titles of both texts, which contain allusions to the religious lifeworld. The “and the earth did not devour him” that follow the ellipses in Rivera’s title announce both its religious engagement as well as the novel’s (anti)climax. As opposed to how it would have occurred in an Old Testament scene in which the blasphemer would have been swallowed up by an implacable Jehovah, the earth does not devour the blaspheming young boy. Thus, Rivera’s novel firmly positions itself as a narrative about the aftermath of a blasphemous utterance (especially evident in the foregrounding of ellipses in the title), though in reality the events leading up to the anti-climax are just as critical in the formation of the young boy. In Anaya’s novel, because one of Antonio’s possible destinies is to become a priest, the title also richly resonates with the transgression of a religio-social practice. The fact that the blessing is compelled from a curandera, rather than from a male Catholic priest, suggests that the novel’s climax will also be about a radical departure from what is expected from a young man who has grown up in the Roman Catholic tradition and for whom the priesthood is an expected outcome. Thus, religious concerns fuse with the emergence of the Chicano/a subject as constructed by those waging war on the literary front.

 With this in mind, I will argue that Rivera presents critical blasphemy as a useful method for not only confronting social inequality but also as a means for enjoying bodily immediacy, a state blocked by the fear of eternal damnation. However, Rivera ruthlessly critiques all religiosity and “pre-modern” ways of being, evident in his representations of Catholicism, folk customs, and folk ways of perceiving the world as exploitative and irredeemable. Thus, Rivera would have a rigorous rationalism divorced from religion and culture as the critical tool for combating oppressive conditions. On the other hand, Anaya presents what I am calling a religio-deconstructive hermeneutic that is also a portal to a pleasurable immediacy that the fear of hell obstructs, though Anaya’s deconstructive tendencies, I contend, go beyond Rivera’s solution. Anaya’s novel presents three tenable cosmologies—Roman Catholicism, Curanderismo, and that which is represented by the legend of the Golden Carp—that are shown to overlap in their oppressive demands for a form of penance, which deconstructs any one as the preeminent solution to social problems, thus at times rendering each as oppressive and, at others, as salutary or desirable. Indeed, as the novel closes, Antonio’s future is left open-ended, thus modeling for the reader the possibility of a truly self-determined existence. This self-determination is historically contingent, self-designed, and necessarily syncretic in its continual deconstruction of stable categories that consequently re-assimilate in ways that meaningfully respond to changing circumstances.


















Dr. Jeanine “Gigi” Gaucher-Morales

     The Gigi Gaucher-Morales Memorial Lecture Series has been established by the Morales Family Lecture Series Endowment in memory of the late Dr. Jeanine (Gigi) Gaucher-Morales, who passed away on May 20, 2007. Born in Paris, France, Dr. Gaucher-Morales was a professor emerita of French and Spanish at Cal State L.A. She taught from 1965 till 2005, thus devoting four decades of her academic life to Cal State L.A., where her friends, students, and colleagues knew her as Gigi.
     During her long and productive tenure at this campus, Gigi taught generations of students the literature and culture of France, of the Anglophone world, and of Latin America, including the Caribbean. With her husband, Dr. Alfredo O. Morales, also professor emeritus of Spanish, she co-founded, directed, and served as advisor of Teatro Universitario en Español for almost 25 years, bringing to Cal State L.A. annual theater productions based on plays stemming from different traditions and languages, such as the Maya (Los enemigos), Colonial Mexico (Aguila Real), Spanish (Bodas de sangre), French (The Little Prince), and English (Under the Bridge). In addition, Gigi was the founder at Cal State L.A. of Pi Delta Phi, the national French honor society. She was recognized and honored by the French government for her contributions to the knowledge of French civilization in Latin America and the United States. Gigi was also honored by her peers at Cal State L.A. with the 1991-1992 Outstanding Professor Award.
     On March 7, 1997, Gigi was recognized by the Council of the City of Los Angeles, State of California, with a resolution that in part reads as follows: “be it resolved that by the adoption of this resolution, the Los Angeles City Council does hereby commend Dr. Jeanine ‘Gigi’ Gaucher-Morales valued Professor of Spanish and French at California State University, Los Angeles for her vision and her gift to the people of Los Angeles and for contributing to the richness of multi-cultural arts in Los Angeles.”
     Every spring quarter, the Gigi Gaucher-Morales Memorial Conferences honors Gigi’s academic ideals as a teacher, colleague, and mentor. The lectures represent Gigi’s diverse yet interconnected interests in civilizations of the world such as Mesoamerica and that of the Andes, Latin America, Asia, and Francophone America, from Canada to Haiti. Gigi embodied the highest academic standards and a range of academic fields that were truly global and interdisciplinary. The Memorial Conferences shall serve as a forum for distinguished guest speakers who engage vital topics of our age in a world setting, thus offering students, staff, and faculty at Cal State L.A. an opportunity to be critically exposed to different areas of study and artistic traditions that constitute the highest cultural aspirations of humanity. In the Spring 2015, the Gigi Gaucher-Morales Memorial Conference Series will sponsor a two-day conference titled “Conference on Mariano Azuela and the Novel of the Mexican Revolution."



"Conference on Mariano Azuela 
and the Novel of the Mexican Revolution"

Call for Papers:
http://marianoazuelaatcalstatela.blogspot.com/

California State University, Los Angeles
Golden Eagle Ballroom
May 1-2, 2015









Interview with Rudolfo Anaya:
Westwords










Bless Me, Ultima Park

Santa Rosa, New Mexico



Michelle Otero:  Ultima, Reconciling the Masculine