Spring 2023

Latin American Film Series: Jueves de Cine

 Organized by José Carlos Díaz Zanelli (josecarlos.diaz@trincoll.edu) and Camila Torres-Castro (camila.torres@trincoll.edu)

The Hispanic Division of the Department of Language and Culture Studies offers the Latin American film series Jueves de Cine with the interest of promoting the Spanish language and Latin American culture among Trinity College students and providing them with a varied space for intellectual and cultural formation inherent. The films selected and programmed below offer a diverse, intercultural, and critical perspective of the current Latin American reality. Furthermore, these films are a great opportunity to provide linguistic and cultural exposure to Latin American social diversity.

February 2, 2023; 4:30pm; Seabury S-201
“Los tiburones,” directed by Lucía Garibaldi (Uruguay- Argentina, 2019)
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf3KuDWe3VA

March 2, 2023; 4:30pm; Seabury S-201
“Nudo Mixteco,”
directed by Ángeles Cruz (Mexico, 2021).
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1Aq8v51L0c&t=14s

April 6, 2023; 4:30pm; Seabury S-201
“Ixcanul,”
directed by Jayro Bustamante (Guatemala, 2015)
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOJSDxdrvdE

May 4, 2023; 4:30pm; Seabury S-201
“Pacarrete,”
directed by Allan Deberton (Brazil, 2019).
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J414mkEnDf0

Narratives in Migration by Yuri Herrera

March 7, 2023
4:30 PM-6:00 PM
Rittenberg Lounge, Mather Hall

Join us for a conversation with Mexican novelist Yuri Herrera. Participating in the round table are professors Priscilla Meléndez, Diana Aldrete, Sara Kippur, and Gabriel Salgado.

PAST EVENTS

Fall 2022

“A Proposito de la Duda”  by Patrica Zangaro. Performed by the students of HISP-319

Thursday, December 8, 2022 @5 pm
Library Level 1 – Engelhard Reading Room

This play is about the search for truth in Argentina after a turbulent period of political repression, that is, the euphemistically called Process of National Reconstruction, or more clearly, the Dirty War from 1976 until 1983. It is estimated that approximately 30,000 people died or disappeared during those years particularly young activists that were willing to die for their country, and many did. In the process, numerous young women who were pregnant at the time, were kidnapped and their children were born in captivity. Under the auspices of the military government these children were secretly given to families who supported the regime and they grew up not knowing their real identity. The well-known Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo –who still gather every Thursday to demand justice for their disappeared children– initiated a campaign to locate and identify their grandchildren through DNA tests. A propósito de la duda portrays this search for justice and truth as Grandmothers confront the false parents, the accomplices who argued that they were just following orders, and the children/now adults who are trying to understand who they are.

Play will be performed in Spanish

THE ANNUAL ANN PLATO LECTURE
“Scoring Failure: Reflections on Technobanda and Death” by Camila Torres-Castro

Wednesday, November 9, 2022 @ 4:30 PM
Dangremond Family Commons

This presentation examines how the rise of technobanda in Mexico, a once-experimental genre that draws from techno music and banda music, unknowingly scored a watershed moment in Mexican history: presidential hopeful Luis Donaldo Colosio’s murder (1994). This tragedy, considered by many a pivotal event in Mexico’s politics, is now immortalized in a YouTube video that has become a cult audiovisual product, an omen of the eventual fate of the country. This study analyzes how the merging of music and image creates an audiovisual rhetoric of failure that has embedded itself into Mexican media consciousness. Drawing from Alexander Weheliye’s conceptualization of “phonographies” (2005)—where he ties sound, technology, and Black culture together—as methodology, Colosio’s video is placed within the analytical category of “sound event” to argue that its existence and continued referencing proposes an acousmatic experience of nationalism, failure, and neoliberalism.

“Representations of Protest and Dissent in Colombia: Reflections on the state of siege in Daniel Ferreira’s Rebelión de los oficios inútiles”  by Carlos Gardeazábal Bravo

Thursday, November 3, 2022 @Common Hour
Rittenberg Lounge

This presentation will explore the portrayal of protest and the state of exception in contemporary Colombian literature. Carlos will focus on Daniel Ferreira’s novel Rebelión de los oficios inútiles [Rebellion of the Useless Trades] (2014), showing how it breaks with the established reading pacts of human rights narratives and their sentimental grammars through a historical plot centered on land tenure, the state of exception, and its connections with the right to protest and freedom of expression. This exploration underscores how Rebelión defies certain tropes in the history of violence behind fundamental human rights struggles in Colombia’s past and present, including a dialogue of Ferreira’s work with Colombia’s Truth Commission. The novel points at the Frente Nacional and the Guerra de los Mil Días as sources for vestiges of the current debates about historical memory in Colombia. Carlos will explain how Ferreira’s novel resists the sentimental commercialization of violence and memory in the Colombian (and Latin American) cultural market while representing dissensual subjects outside the customary figures of the victim and the hero.

(Co-Sponsored by Human Rights, Hispanic Studies, Dept of Language and Culture Studies & International Studies)