Sometimes It’s Necessary to Break a Few Rules

In October of 2020, the University of Arizona’s College of Social and Behavioral Sciences hosted a lecture series called Womanpower. The final lecture was an interview between Michelle Téllez and Yalitza Aparicio—an Indigenous woman, actress, and activist. This interview transcript (originally conducted in Spanish) discusses Aparicio’s childhood, her experiences with discrimination, her role in the groundbreaking film Roma, and her activism on behalf of domestic workers and Indigenous peoples. In this interview, Téllez highlights issues of Indigenous rights, recognizing how Aparicio’s platform can bring visibility to the O’odham land defenders fighting for their sacred lands today, but also to Indigenous peoples fighting for their territories in Mexico, as alluded to in Roma. Téllez wanted to recognize the power that is ever-present in the bodies and minds of women workers who create possibilities despite their circumstances, and who maneuver between space and place, languages and cultures as they center homes, both their own and others. She points us to Aparicio’s role as a domestic worker to remind us of the silent but ever-present power of women. Téllez connects the interview with her own research and personal experiences growing up along the U.S./Mexico border in the cities of San Diego/Tijuana – where she was witness to the racial, gendered, and classed dynamics of power and exclusion.

Wednesday, January 6, 2021

A commentary on the recent assault on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, in which the author situates the attack in the longer history of white supremacy, Christian nationalism, patriarchy, and unfettered capitalism.

We Have No Choice but to Win

Lina Abirafeh discusses her work as director of the Arab Institute for Women, an academic/activist institute at Lebanese American University. Abirafeh describes the work of the Institute, the first women’s institute in the region (covering 22 Arab states)—and one of the first globally. She explains how she engages in gender-based violence prevention and response, and how individuals, academic institutions, and governments can participate in creating justice for women globally. Abirafeh offers her vision for creating feminist Arab states.

It’s Not You, Nor Me…It’s All of Us or None of Us

Hernández, as the current chair of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS), reflects on the “Love Letter to Chicanx Studies.” The author affirms observances within the “letter,” including its considerations of the future of the field, and suggests that we enhance intergenerational knowledge sharing. Hernández presents a provocation on the ultimate goal of liberation as it relates to training and privileging scholars trained in Chicana/o/x Studies, and asks us to think more deeply about how we “do” the work and serve our communities. Finally, he asks that we recover our “Third world” subjectivities and reaffirm our commitment to struggles for shared liberation.

On Inheritances

In this presentation for the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Tamara K. Nopper analyzes the emergent discourses of “anti-Asian violence” and “Black-Asian solidarity” within historical and sociological contexts. She begins with a discussion of the importance of the 1980s and 1990s as formative moments in terms of post-Asian American Movement organizational infrastructure. She then discusses interracial violence, the coeval growth of hate crime data and legislation, and the hashtag #StopAAPIHate. Her primary concern in this discussion is to reveal what work these narrative framings do in service of or in opposition to anti-Blackness and carcerality.

A Provocation of The Modes of Black Indigeneity

This essay explores the meaning of the term Black Indigeneity (BI). Afro-Indigenous Studies scholar Kyle T. Mays asks, what is Black Indigeneity? How do scholars talk about it? What are its possibilities? Relying on a survey of recent scholarship, Mays argues that BI is largely understood as a form of Black Americans participating in settler colonial processes meant to erase and displace Indigenous peoples. He argues that we should look at BI as an analytic that African Americans have used to create belonging and continue to express cultures practiced throughout the African diaspora, adapted and transformed into a modern iteration of cultural expression. In this way, we should rethink how we view blackness and indigeneity as two separate entities, and explore how people of African descent create belonging on dispossessed Indigenous land.

Thinking About Blackness in the Pacific

Anthony Jerry discusses the history and challenges for recognitions of Black Mexico and the broader Pacific region of Latin America. Jerry describes his research on a Black Mexican community of Costa Chica and its complex racial identity development. Responding to Jerry’s presentation, Alex Borucki describes the potential value of conducting comparative research that connects the movements of, as well as the locations where, Black communities developed in the Pacific regions of Latin America. Sabrina Smith suggests more attention to the transpacific slave trade, as well as the emergence of significant social and racial contestations by Afro-Mexicans in both historical and contemporary contexts.