Wednesday, January 30
5:30-7:30 pm
Gould 110

Tracy Fuentes, PhD student in the Interdisciplinary Urban Design and Planning Program, will present a case study of an urban brownfield site in the El Paso-Ciudad Juarez international metropolitan region. Following remediation, the most recent chapter in the history of La Esmelda (Smeltertown) includes plans to redevelop the site using New Urbanism design principles. But as the City of El Paso and the site trustee attempt to “recast the smelter” do the design and planning processes appropriately address the site history and affected communities? Can good design repair the wounded urban fabric and improve the quality of life and urban function?

Come learn more about this site’s history and join the conversation on the role of design in environmental justice and brownfield redevelopment. Food and drinks provided.

http://criticaldesignuw.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/upcoming-event-tracy-fuentes-january-30th/

Thursday, February 7
4 pm
Comm 120

American Studies, University of Texas, Austin

The Latino/a child citizen subject has become the focal point for all sorts of discourses about citizenship, be they the figure of the Anchor Baby, Dora the Explorer as a potential illegal immigrant, the Dream Activists of Freedom University, or a newly emerging unprotected group, unaccompanied migrant children facing deportation proceedings. In this talk, I demonstrate the ways in which race, immigration status, social mobility, skin color, social class and gender determine whether or not a child is in fact deemed worthy of citizenship, worthy of being saved, and worthy of being incorporated into the nation. Larger media trends have made such Latinas/o child-citizen subjects increasingly visible in the last fifteen years as the U.S.-Mexico border is more militarized than ever.

Nicole Guidotti- Hernández is Associate Professor of American Studies and Associate Director of the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas. Her book Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries was published by Duke University Press in 2011. She is currently working on two new books: ¡Santa Lucia! Contemporary Chicana and Latina Cultural Reinterpretations of Saint Iconographies and Red Devils and Railroads: Race, Gender and Capitalism in the Transnational Nineteenth Century Mexico Borderlands.

Presented as part of B/ordering Violence: Boundaries, Gender, Indigeneity in the Americas, a John E. Sawyer Seminar in Comparative Cultures generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and co-sponsored by the Latin American & Caribbean Studies program, the Jackson School of International Studies, the Simpson Center for the Humanities, and the Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, & Sexuality (WISER). For more on the B/ordering Violence Seminar Series, visit www.borderingviolence.com

Friday, February 1
4 pm
Thomson 317

Mike Wilson (Tohono O’odham) is a policy director of the Border Action Network. His work centers around providing humanitarian aid to undocumented peoples who cross through the deserts of southern Arizona. As a member of a sovereign Native nation and a member of the Border Action Network, Mike Wilson’s perspective provides insight into the context and impact of U.S. Border Patrol actions on the U.S.-Mexico border and within indigenous homelands.

Thursday, January 31
3:30 pm
Allen Auditorium

“Under Arpaio” shows the grassroots resistance to Maricopa County, Arizona’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who prides himself on being the “toughest sheriff in America.” Arpaio prides himself on immigration raids on migrant and Latino neighborhoods, human rights violations in his jails, and wasting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. “Under Airpaio” features the grassroots activists from low-income migrant communities, the attorneys, reporters, elected officials, and indigenous people who speak truth to power.

Thursday, January 17, 2013
COMM 120
4:00-6:00 pm

Indigenous women who migrate to the United States suffer human rights violations at every step: in their homes, where violence and impunity compel them to migrate; as they cross the wide expanse of Mexico; and once they enter the United States, where they face new vulnerability to partners or strangers if they are undocumented and incarceration if they ask for asylum.

This is not what was supposed to happen. The multicultural reforms of the 1990s in various Latin American countries generated hope and unprecedented social mobilization for indigenous women seeking full access to their human rights. However, the promises of neoliberal multiculturalism never materialized. Indigenous people suffered all the damage of ruthless neoliberal economics, without the democratic politics, rights regimes, and rule of law it was supposed to bring with it. In their stead, there are illegal economies on a massive scale and increasingly authoritarian states militarizing to combat illegality, while corruptly participating in it to reap some profits. This talk takes indigenous women migrants’ oral histories as a point of departure for analyzing the larger structures of power that mark them for
violence and render their human rights all but non-existent in the violent era Speed calls “neoliberal multicriminalism.”

Shannon Speed is Associate Professor of Anthropology and the Director of Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research and teaching interests include indigenous politics, human rights, neoliberalism, gender, feminist theory, and activist research. She has published five books and edited volumes, including Dissident Women: Gender and Cultural Politics in Chiapas (2006), Rights in Rebellion: Human Rights and Indigenous Struggle in Chiapas (2007), and Human Rights in the Maya Region: Global Politics,Moral Engagements, and Cultural Contentions (2008).