From the Director

CMAS Activities: Past, Current, & Forthcoming

May 4, 2004
Malaquias Montoya Lecture: We Reap What We Sow

The Center for Mexican American Studies presented a lecture by Malaquias Montoya entitled "We Reap What We Sow" based on his art exhibit called Premeditated: Meditations on Capital Punishment on Tuesday, May 4, 2004 at Bass Lecture Hall.

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World-renowned artist Malaquias Montoya is Cooperating Faculty in the Department of Art and Professor in the Chicana/o Studies Program at the University of California, Davis. Professor Montoya has been invited to exhibit his art here, in Europe, and in Latin America. He has received many honors, the latest being the 1997 Adaline Kent Award from the San Francisco Art Institute in San Francisco, California and the Art as a Hammer Honoree from the Center for the Study of Political Graphics in Los Angeles, California, May 1997.

A man of great political and artistic principles, Montoya believes that art should be directed to the broadest possible audiences. He has chosen not to devote his artistic creations to the commercial gallery world, and elects to make the world his art gallery. In so doing, he is following a long tradition of cultural theoreticians who have deconstructed the negative social and cultural dimensions of artistic theories opposed to popular diffusion of the arts. There is no ambiguity in Montoya’s works, as the art form is used to convey the artist’s political message as well as his human concerns. The combination of powerful graphic images and human figures that highlight issues of concern for humanity is perhaps his greatest artistic contribution.

Excerpt from artist’s statement on Premeditated: Meditations on Capital Punishment

This project was conceived during the presidential election of 2000, when the media focused on the state of Texas because our selected president was governor there. A great deal of attention was also placed on the immense number of people being executed in that state’s death chambers. I also started giving the death penalty a lot of consideration when I did the poster design for the Mumia 911 day. The possibility of this brilliant man being murdered, and the uncertainty behind his conviction, was hard to digest.

Th[e] insensitivity to human life takes place not only on an international level, it is also displayed in our own country. Our communities - those of the poor and people of color - are recipients of daily violence. Dilapidated schools, crumbling buildings, and almost nonexistent service programs due to cutbacks, are a type of violence committed on the human psyche. Pain and violence are pervasive throughout poor communities, as drugs flourish on street corners, and police, ignorant and fearful, perpetuate further terror. Mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters are all in a state of shock waiting for the next violent act. These poor communities are the victims of self-inflicted violence, and, to compound the situation, they feel that they are to blame, not the greater structural mechanism. Our country’s solution to all of this is to build more prisons and to increase the numbers on death row. This act of concentrating the country’s poor into a cycle of economic and physical violence seems to be a purposeful act by the State. When billions and billions of dollars are spent on war, when we refuse to educate our youth, house our homeless, provide medical care to our elderly and ill, and feed our hungry, one can only wonder what the State’s real intentions are. We create the situations that lead our children to commit monstrous acts, and then we kill them.

WE REAP WHAT WE SOW.

-Malaquias Montoya

May 21, 2004
Prevenir es Vivir: an HIV/AIDS Workshop and Art Exhibit

The Center for Mexican American Studies at The University of Texas at Austin, in collaboration with the Inter-University Program for Latino Research (IUPLR) at the University of Notre Dame, hosted Prevenir es Vivir, an HIV/AIDS Workshop to be held at ALLGO located at 701 Tillery in Austin, Texas.

The event included a keynote address by Jennifer Herrera, Director of Prevention Programs at AIDS Services of Austin. Following will be a panel discussion by Gilberto Cárdenas, Director, Institute for Latino Studies, University of Notre Dame; Brookes Ebetsch, Project Coordinator for the Prevenir Es Vivir Campaign; Alex Avila, Senior Producer, Latino USA; Sam Coronado, Founder, The Serie Project and Associate Professor Visual Communication Design, Austin Community College; Yolanda Padilla, Associate Professor, School of Social Work, The University of Texas at Austin.

The event featured public popular artwork done at Los Angeles based Self-Help Graphics, which helps to promote awareness about HIV/AIDS. For information about Self-Help Graphics or the Inter-University Program for Latino Research (IUPLR) see: http://www.contrasida-aids.org/.


April 7, 14, 21, 2004
La Raza Unida Party Women’s Oral History Project

During the spring semester, Professor Emilio Zamora initiated an oral history project with a series of activities associated with his graduate seminar in the School of Information entitled, "Memory, History and Oral Narratives: Mexican American Politics in Texas History". Aside from providing the enrolled students an opportunity to conduct interviews with participants in the historic third-party politics of the 1970s and 1980s, the course hosted three round table discussions.

The three venues (April 7, 14, 21) allowed nine former Raza Unida Party members from throughout the state to offer testimonials on their lives and political histories as community activists. The women included Evey Chapa, María Elena Martínez, Luz Bazán Gutiérrez, María Jiménez, Linda del Toro, Alma Canales, Angelita Mendoza Waterhouse, Elvia Rios, and Martha Cotera. The transcribed interviews, as well as the videotaped testimonials and documentary materials that the former Raza Unida Party women donated will be deposited in the Mexican American Library Program (MALP), the official repository for Mexican American archives at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection.

Typically, oral histories efforts produce records that remain with the interviewer or in archives, too often without transcribed copies and beyond the reach of other researchers. Professor Zamora, however, joined curricular, research, and archival functions to produce a comprehensive experience for our university community. At the same time, he is planning a monograph of the excerpted interviews and related documents in collaboration with David Leal, Assistant Professor with the Department of Government and Martha Cotera, one of the interviewees and librarian in archival acquisitions at the MALP. The project will continue during the summer with additional interviews and transcribing work to be conducted by Zamora, Leal, and Cotera.

The graduate students who made the class, interviews, and testimonial functions successful included Amelia Abreau, Rachel Carreon, Elizabeth Harrison, Linda Ho, Hortensia Palomares, Sara Schueneman-Ayala, Brenda Sendejo, Rebecca Snow, Teresa Taylor, and Cassandra Treviño. We extend special recognition to Cotera for proposing the idea of an oral history project on Raza Unida Party women, assisting in a number of class activities, serving as a model of public service and political activism in our community, and we honor her for her intellectual work.

April 15, 2004
18th Annual Américo Paredes Distinguished Lecture

Professor Aida Hurtado, Social Psychologist from the University of California, Santa Cruz, presented a lecture entitled, ''A Social Psychologist in Dialogue with a Folklorist: Performative and Visual Art in the Construction of Social Identities.'' The lecture was an intriguing interdisciplinary discussion that provided a model for understanding how identities are formulated and reformulated in the present. The lecture was followed by a reception in the Santa Rita Suite in the Texas Union. Professor Hurtado was presented with a commemorative print by Malaquias Montoya commissioned by the Center, which features the likeness of Don Américo Paredes, in honor of her selection as speaker for this annual event.

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Professor Richard Flores

Professor of Anthropology Richard Flores has accepted the position of Associate Dean for the College of Liberal Arts in charge Special Programs to include Uteach, Rapoport-King Scholars, Career Services, and Distinguished Scholars, starting in the fall 2004 semester. Professor Flores ably served as Associate Director of the Center for the past year and we look forward to his anticipated accomplishments in this new capacity.

Professor Rolando Hinojosa-Smith served as a Pulitzer Prize juror for this year's fiction award. Two of his Spanish-language short stories have appeared on Prótesis's (Madrid) web page. In addition, the journal Prótesis will publish his "El puñal de Borges" this month.


Professor Yolanda Padilla

Announcement of newly published book:

Gay and Lesbian Rights Organizing
Community-Based Strategies
Edited by Yolanda C. Padilla, PhD, LMSW-AP
Associate Professor, School of Social Work, University of Texas at Austin

Examine successful strategies designed to end discrimination and achieve social justice for sexual minorities! Gay and Lesbian Rights Organizing: Community-Based Strategies is the first compilation of case studies of local-level gay rights organizing efforts. It is an inspiring testimonial to grassroots work going on across the country, from a community located in the heart of the anti-gay operation in the US, the home of Focus on the Family, in Colorado, to a moving vision of a different world told first-hand by four transgender youth in the Northeast, to a successful campaign in a community in Kentucky where a decade earlier television crews agreed to film only the feet of gay rights marchers in order to protect them in view of fierce opposition and even death threats against them. As Urvashi Vaid states in the foreword, ''local and state activism remains the vibrant center of the movement.''

Professor Domino Perez

I would like to announce the publication of a special issue of the journal, Studies in American Indian Literatures. The title of the special issue is "Indigenous Intersections: Chicana/o and American Indian Literatures." I co-edited the issue with Ines Hernandez-Avila (Nez Perce) and in it, we include interviews with Simon Ortiz and Gloria Anzaldua.

Thanks!

Domino Perez
Assistant Professor
English Department and Center for Mexican American Studies

Professor Richard Valencia

Richard R. Valencia, Professor of Educational Psychology and Faculty Associate of CMAS, chaired and presented papers in two symposia at the April 2004 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (San Diego, California). His first symposium was ''Texas’ Legislative Efforts to Halt Social Promotion: Negative Consequences for Latino and African American Students.'' Dr. Valencia’s paper (co-researched with UT doctoral candidate Bruno Villarreal) was titled, ''Texas’ First Year of Mandated Testing for Grade Promotion: Third-Grade Students Failing the TAKS Reading Test in the 10 Largest School Districts.'' In the second symposium, ''Mexican American Desegregation Litigative Struggles: Foreshadowing Brown, Benefiting from Brown,'' Dr. Valencia presented a paper titled, ''The California Mendez v. Westminster (1946) Case: Helping Pave the Way for Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954).''


Faculty Associate Presentations and Projects

Professor Barbara J. Robles

*Presentations Fall 2003/Spring 2004:
1) Santa Fe, New Mexico, Center for Credit Union Research and the Filene Institute, Audience: Credit Union, CEOs, Topic: Challenges and Opportunities Providing Financial Services Access to Latino Families, Oct. 10-11, 2003.
2) Hispanic Economic Summit 2003, Organization of American States, Washington, DC, Oct. 16, 2003, Topic: Latino Consumer Purchasing Power, Panel Member: Board of Economists, HispanicBusiness, Inc. magazine.
3) Federal Reserve Bank, Chicago, April 14-15, 2004, Invited Conference Participant: Immigrant Access to Financial Services: Learning> From Diverse Perspectives, Topic: Entrepreneurship in the Borderlands: Family Well Being and the Role of Community Organizations, Chicago, IL
4) Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s National Housing Initiative Conference, May 20, 2004, Invited Keynote Speaker, Topic: Latinos, Affordable Housing and Community Based Organizations, Washington, DC.
5) Ford Foundation, Wealth and Asset Building in Communities of Color Conference, Invited Participant, May 14-16, 2004, Tuskegee Institute.

Projects:
1) Latino Financial Issues Program Internships linked to Southwest Border Family and Community Asset Building Research Project funded by: Annie E. Casey Foundation, Arizona Foundation, New Mexico Foundation, El Paso Foundation, and the Center for Credit Union Research. The Southwest Border Families located in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California and partnering with community based organizations that are engaged in financial literacy outreach. The project focuses on designing programs that connect EITC refunds with family and community asset building strategies that include: increasing affordable home ownership, microbusiness, ownership, and participation in Individual Development Accounts and savings/checking accounts. In 2001, Starr County received $21.6 million in EITC refunds while Hidalgo County received $210 million in EITC refunds. Clearly, Border Counties engaged in increasing the participation of Latino families in claiming EITC refunds benefit from the economic impact of increased economic activity.

2) Latino Financial Issues Program is also linked to the National Association of Latino Community Asset Builders, a national coalition of community development housing organizations that serve the Latino community in the US. The 2nd National NALCAB Conference will be held September 2-4, 2004 in San Antonio, Texas and LFIP Students will host a session devoted to Latino Students Leadership and Policy Research that links university service learning with community capacity building.

Angela Valenzuela, Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction

Angela Valenzuela made three presentations at the annual meeting of the
American Educational Association meetings in San Diego, California, April
12-16. These were entitled, "Endarkened Epistemology and Angles of Vision
in Education Policy," "The Struggle for Fair Assessment in Texas," and
"Sidestepping the Rhetorical Conundrum of Accountability."

1) On April 24, she delivered a keynote lecture as part of a Forum on High-Stakes Testing at Southwestern University in Georgetown titled, "Leaving Children Behind: High-Stakes Testing, Accountability and Privatization in Texas."

2) On April 29, she also delivered the Helen DeVitt Jones Lecture at Texas Tech University in Lubbock titled, "Accountability and Privatization: Ethics, Policies, and Politics in Texas."

3) On May 4, as Education Chair for Texas LULAC, Angela Valenzuela, in concert with other LULAC leaders, the NAACP, and also the Texas Association for Bilingual Education held a press conference on school finance on the steps of the capitol. These groups urged the state to put a school funding plan in place that is fair, reliable, and does not incur social costs, including the regressive taxation of the poor.


Students

Maneja Beto

Graduating CMAS major Alex Chavez, who has also been accepted into the graduate program in Anthropology here at UT in the fall, and his band Maneja Beto have just released their first cd entitled Para Que Las Paredes No Se Aburran this month. MAS graduate Bobby Garza is also a member of the band. All of us associated with the Center highly recommend not only the cd, but taking in a live show!

One description of their music: "Maneja Beto mystify audiences with their neo-pop-en-Español-meets-cumbia/bolero/huasteco strangeness, leading one to believe that classification itself may be the problem, and good, honest music the solution. Para Que Las Paredes No Se Aburran (So the Walls Don't Get Bored) may, simply put, be the most difficult record I have ever been asked to describe."

Their sound has been written about this way; "The range of sounds that reveal themselves throughout Las Paredes is astounding, breath-taking even. From musicas Latinas such as the danceable cumbia, bolero, musica romantica mexicana and son huastecos y huapangos of Northern Mexico to more modern rock stylings ranging from experimental Brit-poppers Elbow to the Cure and the Smiths. Then there are, of course, the pioneers of this neo-Latino sound - Café Tacuba and APD favorites Ozomatli. The band has heard recent descriptions from a fellow musician comparing Beto's sound to NYC hipsters Interpol (no doubt influenced by the band's disco-emo fusion on Y Al Vinuete?), or something like 'the Mexican Radiohead' even.

"The band itself describes its sound as,'Rascuache Naco Pop' (from the band's press release) - 'rascuache' being a term associated with the civil rights consciousness and the idea that one must make the best of what's around in creating one's art; 'naco' is a once-derogatory term for poor Mexicanos now taken with pride by politically aware Chicanos; and 'pop' is, well, self-explanatory". (Daily Texan, April 15, 2004.)

For more information about the band, please see their website: http://www.manejabeto.com/. The CD is available at Resistencia Bookstore and other local stores that carry music.
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April 20, 2004
8th Annual Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality Formation in Borderlands Lecture Series

This year the theme for the lecture was: "Building Community Through Art and Cultural Justice." Graciela I. Sanchez, Executive Director of La Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, San Antonio, Texas was the featured speaker. A workshop and lecture that were free and open to the public was held on Tuesday, April 20, 2004.





April 2, 2004
NACCS panel presentation

A number of our MAS affiliated faculty and students presented together at NACCS. José Limón chaired a panel of Alex Chavez, Xochitl Chavez, and Deborah Paredez on music and dance.

Deborah Paredez presented a paper entitled, "Selena's Rodeo 'Hustle': Crossing Over Tejana Performance". It examined the "Disco Medley" Selena performed at the Houston Astrodome concert in 1995. She examines how "Selena's concert at the Houston Astrodome on February 26, 1995 has been frequently invoked as an emblem of her stage charisma, performative skills, and crossover promise. Selena's Houston concert offers a particularly compelling site for investigating localized Tejana negotiations of both Tejano music's traditional constraints on female sexuality and of (multi)national capitalist articulations of race. This talk offers an analysis of Selena's opening 'Disco Medley'- wherein her 'Hustle' breaks down into Tejano cumbias and Caribbean salsa kicks-revealing how the performance challenges the unidirectional, bipolar cultural model assumed by the 'Latin crossover' narratives that have frequently frame the careers of contemporary Latina/o musicians.'

Alex Chavez presented a paper entitled, "Entre Bravata y Apporeon: Huapango Arribeño and Transnational Performance." His work ''examined the transnational movement of huapango arribeño, a musical expressive form of oral tradition originally from the Mexican states of San Luis Potosi, Guanajuato, and Queretaro. Traditionally, huapango arribeño is best expressed during the topada performance, a dignified encounter between two poets and their respective huapango arribeño ensembles. As a point of departure, I focused on a particular topada that took place this past December in Guanajuato between a native poet of Guanajuato and a transnational poet who resides in central Texas. The discussion touched upon the issues and the transnational dynamics expressed throughout this particular musical encounter. I made a case for huapango arribeño as political space, oral tradition, and transnational performance.''

Xochitl Chavez presented a paper entitled, ''Challenging Gender Boundaries: La Feria de Enero.'' Her work looks at ''The January Festival (La Feria de Enero) [which] is a celebration held in Chiapa de Corzo, a community located in Chiapas, México. La Feria de Enero honors the city’s patron, Saint Sebastián the Martyr, and celebrates the colonial legend of Doña María de Angulo. The January Festival, which officially began in 1599, is held every year January 8th-23rd as the principal festival of Chiapa de Corzo. This festival offers an interesting example of a flexibility of gender roles. In the parading and dancing that accompanies the honoring of a local patron saint and a colonial legend, men dress and participate as Chunta, a role traditionally filled by women. Likewise, women dress and participate as Parachico dancers, a role traditionally preserved for men, while also contesting and reclaiming their role as Chunta, as they negotiate their gender roles in the festival setting. Today, I want to argue that the January Festival is a site for challenging as well as reconstructing gender identity. In addition, this study explores how women’s and homosexual men’s participation in the Festival influences their cultural identity.''