Critical Latin@ Indigeneities Symposium—Constructing and Theorizing between Fields Thursday March 26th, 2015 8:30 AM—6:00 PM 2nd Floor Conference Room, Benson Latin American Collection, SRH Unit I University of Texas at Austin

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Critical Latin@ Indigeneities Symposium—Constructing and Theorizing between Fields

Thursday March 26^th, 2015

8:30 AM—6:00 PM

2^nd Floor Conference Room, Benson Latin American Collection, SRH Unit I

University of Texas at Austin

The global political economy has resulted in the mass migration of indigenous people from Latin America and an increasingly large indigenous diaspora continues to shift and complicate the categories of race and ethnicity in the U.S., raising questions about transnational meanings of race, place, and indigeneity. In an effort to better understand how the experiences of indigenous migrants reshape and grapple with U.S. racial and political formations, the Critical Latin@ Indigeneities Symposium will focus on the experiences of the Latin American indigenous diaspora in the U.S., the increasing presence of second generation, U.S.-born youth from indigenous migrant experiences, and will build on how indigenous Latin@ communities mobilize particular forms of activism and scholarship that pushes the boundaries of U.S. Latin@ Studies, Latin American Studies, and Native American Studies. Symposium participants will describe and complicate how indigeneitity is transforming U.S. notions of Latinidad and how Latinidad is transforming historic conceptions of Indianness. Participants will highlight the important forms of activism around language, epistemology, transnationalism and youth cultural practice that are taken on in order to ensure the survival of distinct indigenous peoples who confront displacement and migration with creative forms of cultural cohesion. This symposium seeks to enable conversations that will help unpack how the experiences of indigenous migrants in the U.S. reflect how multiple indigeneities are defined and constructed across multiple countries and how the process of migration to the U.S. and then return migration of later generations to the communities of origin all create a textured notion of what it means to be indigenous in our contemporary moment. Importantly, participants also draw from Critical Native American and Indigenous studies to re/think about how processes of mobility and migration contribute to settler colonial projects of elimination.

The symposium will be guided by the following questions:

·      How will the meanings of indigeneity be negotiated as U.S. state-defined categories of belonging conflict with Latin American state definitions and indigenous community definitions?  

·      How is mobility, traditionally understood as a cause of cultural loss, producing new forms of indigenous consciousness?

·      Will these new forms of consciousness conflict with existing indigenous groups or create new possibilities for solidarity?   

·      How will indigenous migrants fit into racial orders within the Latin@ community and U.S. society at large? 

·      How do more newly arrived indigenous groups relate to indigenous peoples of the lands they now live and work in?

·      How will these new indigenous migrants and later generations grapple with settler colonial structures and the multiple colonialities now at play?

Symposium Presenters, Speakers, and Moderators:

·      Bianet Castellanos, Department of American Studies, University of Minnesota

·      Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University

·      Maylei Blackwell, Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies, University of California—Los Angeles

·      Gloria Chacón, Department of Literature, University of California—San Diego

·      Lourdes Alberto, Department of English, University of Utah

·      Floridalma Boj Lopez, Department of American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California

·      Luis Lopez-Sanchez, Department of History, University of California—San Diego

·      Rico Kleinstein Chenyek, Department of Communication and Media Studies, University of Illinois—Urbana Champaign

·      Brenda Nicolás, Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies, University of California—Los Angeles

·      Luis Cárcamo-Huechante, Department of Spanish & Portuguese, University of Texas at Austin

·      Giovanni Batz, Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin

·      Noé López, Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin

·      Domino Pérez, Department of English & CMAS Director, University of Texas at Austin

·      Shannon Speed, Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin

·      Luis Urrieta, Department of Curriculum & Instruction, Chair, Mexican Center of LLILAS, University of Texas at Austin

This event is being hosted by the Mexican Center of LLILAS and co-sponsored by the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies & the Center for Mexican American Studies, the Native American & Indigenous Studies Program, the Department of Curriculum & Instruction, and the Graduate School. Symposium organizing committee: Maylei Blackwell, Floridalma Boj Lopez & Luis Urrieta