Center for Mexican American Studies-- Spring Conference "Illustrating Anarchy and Revolution: Mexican Legacies of Global Change" UT Austin February 5-7, 2014

CMAS Spring Conference

Illustrating Anarchy and Revolution: Mexican Legacies of Global Change

UT Austin February 5-7, 2014

Keynote Address: Dr. Claudio Lomnitz, Columbia University Author of The Return of Ricardo Flores Magón: Ideology and Absence in the Mexican Revolution (Zone Books).

This conference traces various efforts to imagine a better, more inclusive political future, especially efforts rooted in the anarchist legacy of the Mexican Revolution. In 1903, the Flores-Magón brothersCen declared, “La Constitucion ha muerto” on a banner which they hung outside the offices of the anti-Porfirista newspaper El Hijo del Ahuizote in Mexico City. The routes of exile they traveled following this watershed proclamation created opportunities for insurgent Mexicans and their sympathizers – first, on the Texas-Mexico border and then across the globe – to form radical communities through a variety of media. Of particular interest is how these “sueños de libertad” galvanized communities at the turn of the century in cities ranging from San Antonio, Laredo, Chicago, Los Angeles, and St. Louis to Alcoy, Barcelona, and Moscow. With a mixed media exhibition at Mexic-Arte, a Fine Arts Museum housing works by Mexican and Mexican American artists in downtown Austin, and an academic conference at UT Austin co-sponsored by the Center for Mexican American Studies (CMAS) and the Hijo de Ahuizote Museum-Archive in Mexico City, we wish to revisit these early 20th century articulations of transnational collaboration as we discuss their anarchist spirit and global legacies.

We seek papers that examine these early 20th century utopian, revolutionary networks both in the U.S./Mexico Borderlands and beyond in visual, textual, historical, archival, performative, digital, activist, literary and other media. We are especially interested in papers that foreground and analyze the materiality of these media. What can these historical, visual, and literary tensions tell us about alternative histories of revolutions, gender, race, sexuality, and social class? How can the recovery and/or reintroduction of such texts via digital media or contemporary art articulate queer, feminist, or gender perspectives that might be lacking in traditional accounts of the transformative historical moment that was the early 20th century? How do anarchist archives create collective memories and imagined communities, past and present?

*For more information on the event and proposal submissions, please visit: http://illustratinganarchyandrevolution.eventbrite.com