The Chicanx Enigma: Ancestors, Borderlands, Chronicles, Learning

The David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS) at Harvard, founded in 1994 by then-President Neil L. Rudenstine and alumnus David Rockefeller, is an international, university-wide center focusing on Latin America, the Caribbean, and their diaspora communities. It has offices in Brazil, Chile, and Mexico.Our mission is to foster, expand, and leverage Harvard's research, educational, and convening capabilities within the region. We aim to contribute to a more informed, democratic, sustainable, prosperous, equitable, and inclusive world.

DRCLAS

Join us for a discussion on the Chicanx community in South Texas with John Phillip Santos.

1730 Cambridge St room s250

In this presentation, we’ll explore how the ever-transmuting identity of the Chicanx community of South Texas, is using a Borderlands Humanities practice, expressed in archaeology, new scholarship, visual art, music, and literature to re-connect communities to their unique American ancestral story.We still encourage you to attend even if tickets are sold out!Speaker:John Phillip Santos, Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities and Distinguished Senior Lecturer in Mestizo Cultural Studies, University of Texas - San AntonioSpeaker Bio:John Phillip Santos is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker from San Antonio, Texas. His two memoirs, Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (a National Book Award Finalist) and The Farthest Home is in an Empire of Fire, together tell the ancestral stories of his mother and father’s families, an American origin story of the centuries-long migrations that emerged out of Spain, Mexico, and the lands that became South Texas. His book of poems is Songs Older Than Any Known Singer.As an Emmy-nominated television producer, he has produced more than 40 broadcast documentaries and news programs on cultural themes in sixteen countries for CBS and PBS. His journalism and commentary have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the San Antonio Express-News, the Manchester Guardian, Texas Monthly, and other publications in the U.S., Mexico, and Europe. This work is archived in the Special Collections of the University of Texas San Antonio.During his six years as a program officer at the Ford Foundation, he directed the philanthropic program in media infrastructure and production, making more than $40M in grants to support the development of independent media networks in the US, Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and to fund the production of documentaries around the world.A proud graduate of Texas public schools, Santos was the first Latino to be selected as a Rhodes Scholar and holds degrees in English Literature and Language from Oxford University, and Philosophy and Literature from the University of Notre Dame. Moderator: Davíd Carrasco, Neil L. Rudenstine Professor of the Study of Latin America, with a joint appointment with the Department of Anthropology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard UniversityModerator Bio:Davíd Carrasco (Neil L. Rudenstine Professor of the Study of Latin America) is a Mexican American historian of religions with particular interest in Mesoamerican cities as symbols, and the Mexican-American borderlands. His studies with historians of religions at the University of Chicago inspired him to work on the question, "where is your sacred place," on the challenges of postcolonial ethnography and theory, and on the practices and symbolic nature of ritual violence in comparative perspective. Working with Mexican archaeologists, he has carried out research in the excavations and archives associated with the sites of Teotihuacan and Mexico-Tenochtitlan resulting in Religions of Mesoamerica, City of Sacrifice, and Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire. An award-winning teacher, he has participated in spirited debates at Harvard with Cornel West and Samuel Huntington on the topics of race, culture, and religion in the Americas. He also directs the <a href="https://mmarp.fas.harvard.edu/en" title="https://mmarp.fas.harvard.edu/en" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Moses Mesoamerican Archive and Research Project</a> at Harvard University. This event is presented in collaboration with the Moses Mesoamerican Archive at Harvard University.Cover image description: Mural by an unknown artist or artists on the wall of a small business on South Zazamora Street in southwest San Antonio, TexasImage credit: Photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress

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The Chicanx Enigma: Ancestors, Borderlands, Chronicles, Learning

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The Chicanx Enigma: Ancestors, Borderlands, Chronicles, Learning

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