Migration, Culture and Memory

Symposium Program

Tuesday, March 24 

4:00pm, Sequoia Hall 104
Walterio Iraheta, artist lecture 

5:30pm, West Gallery, Art Department
Opening reception for the exhibition “Found/Encontrados” by Walterio Iraheta

Walterio Iraheta
Found / Encontrados 

West Gallery, Art Department
March 24 – April 2, 2015

Found /Encontrados, a multimedia installation, explores the experiences of war and immigration through found objects that speak of the absence of a body and that capture the diversity of identities, personalities, and gaits of those who once inhabited and animated them. The installation includes photographs taken by the artist during exhumations in the town of Rabinal, Baja Verapaz, Guatemala, and of Bishop Oscar Romero’s tunic in San Salvador. Walterio Iraheta has shown his work internationally at biennials in Europe and in the Americas. He lives and works in El Salvador.
 

Wednesday, March 25

9:30am, Whitsett Room, Sierra Hall

Conference inauguration and welcoming remarks

Dr. Elizabeth Say, Dean, College of Humanities, California State University, Northridge

Dr. Harold Hellenbrand, Provost, California State University, Northridge

Dr. Douglas Carranza Mena, Director, Central American Studies, California State University, Northridge

Dr. Jeannene Przyblyski, Provost, California Institute of the Arts

Keynote address:

Pablo Alvarado, Executive Director, National Day Laborer Organizing Network 

11:00am – 12:30pm, Whitsett Room, Sierra Hall

Porosity and Simultaneity in the Diaspora
Moderator: James Wiltgen (CalArts)

“A Body in Pain: Dispositions of Memory in the Experience of Migrant Domestic Workers”
Nancy Perez, Arizona State University

“People in Motion versus Control Societies: or, Vectors of Intensive Thresholds.”
James Wiltgen, California Institute of the Arts

“Body and Nation: On Death and Becoming.”
Beatriz Cortez, California State University, Northridge 

Lunch 12:30 – 1:45pm

2:00 – 3:30pm, Whitsett Room, Sierra Hall

Visual Constructions of the Diaspora: Artist Lectures and Discussion
Moderator: Beatriz Cortez (CSUN)

Njideka Akunyili Crosby

Walterio Iraheta 

Thursday, March 26

9:30am – 10:50am, JH 1131 

Youth Migration and the Border “Crisis”
Moderator: Joseph Wiltberger (CSUN)

“The Deportation and Social Reintegration of Youth.”
Lauren Heidbrink, National Louis University 

“Childhood and Adolescence in El Salvador Today.”
Elizabeth Kennedy, San Diego State University / University of California, Santa Barbara 

“Crisis in the Making: Repeated Exclusions of Central American Asylum Seekers from the 1980s to more Recent Child Migrants.”
Susan Bibler Coutin, University of California, Irvine

“Children in Court: The Joys and Challenges of Representing Unaccompanied Minors in Deportation Proceedings and Beyond.”
Sara Acharya, Central American Resource Center (CARECEN), Los Angeles 

11:00am – 12:30pm, JH 1131

Safe Spaces: Migrant Shelters and Food Kitchens in Mexico
Moderator: Linda Alvarez (CSUN)

Friar Tomás González, “La 72” Migrant Shelter, Tenosique, Tabasco, Mexico

Friar Pat Murphy, c.s., Casa del Migrante, Tijuana, Mexico

Rafael Alonso Hernández López, FM4, Paso Libre, Guadalajara, Mexico

Lunch 12:30 – 1:45pm 

2:00 – 3:30pm, JH 1131

Roundtable on Central American Migration
Moderator: Freya Rojo (CSUN)

Elizabeth Kennedy, San Diego State University

Friar Pat Murphy, Casa del Migrante, Tijuana, Mexico

Friar Tomás González, La 72 Migrant Shelter, Tabasco, Mexico

Lauren Heidbrink, National Louis University

Rafael Alonso Hernández López, FM4 Paso Libre

Vanessa Gutiérrez, CARECEN-Los Angeles 

Friday, March 27

9:30am – 10:50am, Oviatt Library Presentation Room

Migration, Culture, and Exclusion
Moderator: Douglas Carranza (CSUN)

“Hosts” and “Guests” in Santa Catalina, Panama: A Town in the Midst of Change.”
Laura Desfor Edles, California State University, Northridge

Leadership, Mobilization, and Change: Cultural Persistence of the Ngobe People of Panama.”
Osvaldo Jordan, Alianza para la Conservación y el Desarrollo (ACD), Panama

 “Water and Space: The Politics behind the Water Delivery Problem in Colon, Panama.”
Gisela Lanzas, California State University, Northridge 

“Confronting Exclusion: El sueño panameño / El sueño americano and the Panama-U.S. Connection.”
Kaysha Corinealdi, Columbia University, New York 

11:00am – 12:30pm, Oviatt Library Presentation Room

Indigenous Communities: Border Crossing and Identity
Moderator: Axel Montepeque (CSUN) 

“The Mezcala Club of the Assumption in South Los Angeles: Politics and Ethnicity.”
Elizabeth Pérez Márquez, Universidad de Guadalajara 

“Border Impact and Public Policy. Every Day Life among the Cucapá of Baja California.”
Alejandra Navarro, Cátedras CONACYT at CIESAS Occidente

“Mixtec Migrants Youth: Identity, Language, and Gender”
Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, University of California, Los Angeles 

“Transnational Spirituality: Mesoamerican Ritual Performance in Los Angeles.”
Douglas Carranza Mena, California State University, Northridge 

Lunch 12:30 – 1:45pm

2:00 – 3:30pm, Oviatt Library Presentation Room

Roundtable on the Dream: Politics of Migration and Its Future
Moderator: Nancy Pérez (Arizona State University)

Yilian Maribeth David Herrera, Organizacion Fraternal Negra Hondurena (OFRANEH)

Pablo Alvarado, Executive Director, National Day Laborer Organizing Network

María Eugenia de la O, Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores de Antropología Social, Guadalajara, Mexico

Martha Arévalo, Executive Director, Central American Resource Center (CARECEN) - Los Angeles

Sarah England, Soka University, Aliso Viejo, California

Gladis Molina, The Florence Project, Phoenix, Arizona

3:30pm: Lidereibugu Garifuna Ensemble, Oviatt Library Presentation Room by the Garifuna American Heritage Foundation United (GAHFU)

Biographies

Sara Acharya is the managing attorney of the Unaccompanied Children’s Representation Team at the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN) in Los Angeles, where she oversees the legal representation and case management needs of nearly 200 unaccompanied children and adolescents in deportation proceedings. She is an active clinician, researcher, and advocate for children with complex trauma exposure and immigration needs. She is involved with the Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE-LA) and the Los Angeles Unified School District’s AYUDA project. She holds an MA in Counseling Psychology from The Wright Institute in Berkeley and a JD from Harvard Law School.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby is a Nigerian contemporary artist. She holds an MFA from Yale University School of Art, a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and a BA from Swarthmore College. She is the 2014 recipient of the James Dicke Contemporary Artist Prize awarded by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, for her work’s representation of “the increasingly transnational nature of the contemporary art world.” She has exhibited her work at the Tiwani Contemporary in London, the Sensei Exchange in New York, Franklin Art Works in Minneapolis, Gallery Zidoun in Luxembourg, Art Basel, Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, Lancommandery of Alden-Biesen in Belgium, the Brand New Gallery in Milan, among others. Her work will be part of the forthcoming Triennial at the New Museum in New York in 2015. She lives and works in Los Angeles and New York.

https://www.njidekaakunyilicrosby.com/

Pablo Alvarado is the Executive Director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON). This coalition was founded in July 2001 in Northridge, California at the first national gathering of day laborer organizations. Today, NDLON represents the alliance of nearly 50 day laborer organizations nationwide, and fights to protect the civil, labor, and human rights of workers. Pablo Alvarado is an immigrant himself. He was born in the small village of El Níspero in El Salvador. He migrated to the United States in 1990. He holds a degree in sociology from the University of El Salvador. However, as an undocumented immigrant, he also gained important experience as a gardener, a painter, and other day labor jobs before becoming an organizer.

Linda Alvarez was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley. She holds a doctorate in Political Science from Claremont Graduate University, and a Masters in Latin American Studies from California State University, Los Angeles. She joined the Central American Studies Program in the Fall of 2010. Her scholarly interests include comparative politics, Latin American politics, comparative political behavior, political psychology, social movements, and the politics of food. Her current research focuses on political knowledge and transnational political engagement among underrepresented groups in Central America and the United States.

Martha Arévalo is Executive Director of the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN) in Los Angeles. In this role, she is responsible for operations, fundraising, program development and strategic communications. Originally from El Salvador, she has extensive experience in the areas of social marketing, public education, immigration, civic participation, public policy, and community organizing. She has worked as a partner in a small public relations and marketing firm, Arévalo Sánchez, Inc., and as communications manager for Univisión 34 and TeleFutura 46 TV in Los Angeles. She graduated from the School of Public Policy at the University of California at Los Angeles with a Master of Arts in urban planning. CARECEN was founded in 1983 to promote human and civil rights of Central Americans and other immigrant communities through legal and educational services, and by advocating and organizing to transform immigration and education policies.

Douglas Carranza Mena holds a doctorate in Socio-Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research agenda is to explore from an interdisciplinary perspective the concepts of space, citizenship, civil society, sovereignty and modes of governing in order to address Indigenous movements and transnational communities in Central America and the United States. He is co-editor of Introduction to Central American Studies (Kendall Hunt), and author of several academic articles on indigenous identity, hometown associations, civil society, and immigration. He is the director of the Central American Studies Program at California State University, Northridge.

Kaysha Corinealdi received her Ph.D. in History from Yale University. She specializes on twentieth century Latin America and the United States with a focus on race and ethnicity formation, nationalism, gender and sexuality, and migration. She is currently working on a book project titled “The Afterlives of the Canal: Black Diasporic Activism in Cold War Panama and the United States,” which focuses on the hemispheric nature of African diaspora activism in the Americas from the 1930s to the 1980s. Her work places Panama at the center of twentieth century debates regarding empire, the rights and movements of people of color, and alternative systems of political governance. She is a lecturer in the History Department at Columbia University and a member of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change.

Beatriz Cortez is a visual artist and a cultural critic. She was born in El Salvador and migrated to the United States in 1989. She holds a Ph.D. in Latin American literature from Arizona State University where she wrote her dissertation on post-war Central American fiction. She has written on the aesthetics of cynicism in Central America, racism and culture, indigenous rights, violence, and memory. She teaches literature, art, and film courses in Central American Studies at California State University, Northridge. Her current research interests include nomadism, simultaneity, and multiple temporalities in the dislocated experiences of populations in movement. Her artwork explores simultaneity, as well as the existence in different temporalities and different versions of modernity, particularly in relation to memory and loss in the aftermath of war, the experience of immigration, and the imaginaries of the future. She lives and works in Los Angeles. 

Susan Bibler Coutin holds a Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology and is professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Society and the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, where she also serves as Associate Dean of the Graduate Division. Her research examines social, political, and legal activism surrounding immigration issues, particularly immigration from El Salvador to the United States, the 1.5 generation migrants born in El Salvador but raised in the United States, the archival practices in immigrant and indigenous advocacy, and working in a new collaborative project titled “Navigating Liminal Legalities along Pathways to Citizenship: Immigrant Vulnerability and the Role of Mediating Institutions.” She is the author of The Culture of Protest: Religious Activism and the U.S. Sanctuary Movement (Westview Press 1993), Legalizing Moves: Salvadoran Immigrants’ Struggle for U.S. Residency (University of Michigan Press, 2000), and Nations of Emigrants: Shifting Boundaries of Citizenship in El Salvador and the United States (Cornell University Press, 2007).

Laura Desfor Edles holds a doctorate in sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles. She specializes in cultural sociology and sociological theory, and her research interests include culture, religion, race/ethnicity, and the resurgence of the religious “left” in the United States today. She is the author of Symbol and Ritual in New Spain (Cambridge University Press), Cultural Sociology in Practice (Blackwell), and co-author of A Contemporary Introduction to Sociology: A Cultural Approach (Paradigm Publishers), Sociological Theory in the Contemporary Era (Sage/Pine Forge Press), Classical and Contemporary Sociological Theory (Sage/Pine Forge Press), and Sociological Theory in the Classical Era (Sage/Pine Forge Press). She teaches in the Sociology Department at California State University, Northridge.

Sarah England holds a doctorate in Anthropology from the University of California, Davis. Her research interests include racial ideologies and race mixture in Trinidad, transnational migration of Hondurans to the United States, and Afro-Honduran social movements. She is the author of Afro-Hondurans in New York City: Garifuna Tales of Transnational Movements in Racialized Space (University Press of Florida). She is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Soka University, where she also serves as Director of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and as Associate Dean of Students.

Friar Tomás González is the director of the shelter for migrants “La 72” in Tenosique, Tabasco, Mexico. He is also the founder and president of the Centro de Derechos Humanos del Usumacinta or Center for Human Rights of the Usumacinta river area. Fray Tomás has been conducting humanitarian work in southern Mexico for over two decades. His advocacy for the migrants’ human rights and dignity have made him target of the government’s persecution and criminal groups harassment. Since 2013, Amnesty International has named Fray Tomás as an “individual at risk” due to the intimidation and threats he has received as a result of his work, mainly with Central American migrants in Mexico.

Vanessa Gutiérrez is an immigration lawyer working for CARECEN-Los Angeles. She has served as Supervising Attorney and is the director of CARECEN’s new immigration center in the San Fernando Valley. She is a graduate of American University’s Washington College of Law. She has been involved in several immigration advocacy initiatives, including American University’s Project on Human Trafficking and Forced Labor, the National Immigration Forum, and Advocates for Human Rights Refugee and Immigrant Program. 

Lauren Heidbrink holds a doctorate in anthropology from Johns Hopkins University and a joint Master of Arts and Sciences in International Public Service Management from DePaul University. Her research and teaching interests include childhood and youth, transnational migration, social movements, performance and identity, law at the margins of the state, and Latin America. Over the last fifteen years, she has worked in the fields of international public health and human rights in Latin America and in lusophone Africa. She is the author of Migrant Youth, Transnational Families, and the State: Care and Contested Interests (University of Pennsylvania Press). She is currently Principal Investigator of a multi-year study funded by the National Science Foundation, which entails a mixed methods analysis of the deportation and social reintegration of youth in Guatemala. She is Assistant Professor in Social and Behavioral Sciences and co-chair of the Public Policy and Administration Program at National Louis University.

Harold Hellenbrand has served as Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at California State University, Northridge since 2004. Prior to that, he served as Dean, and Professor at the College of Liberal Arts at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo from 1998-2004; as Dean, and Professor at the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota, Duluth from 1994-1998; and as Chair and Professor of the English Department at California State University, San Bernardino from 1982-1994. He holds a doctorate in modern thought and literature from Stanford University.

Rafael Alonso Hernández López holds a doctorate in Social Sciences from the Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS-West) in Mexico. He currently was named the General Coordinator of Dignity and Justice in the AC Camino (FM4 Paso Libre), as well as the Coordinator of the Network of Documentation of Organizations for the Defense of Migrants (REDODEM). In addition, he is faculty at the Institute of Inter-congregational Philosophical Education in Mexico (IFFIM). His research is based on issues of international migration, internal migration, labor markets, racism, and ethnicity.

Walterio Iraheta studied Applied Arts and the Centro Nacional de Artes (CENAR) and the University Dr. José Matías Delgado in El Salvador. He also studied Graphic Design at the Chicago Cultural Center and the School of Visual Arts in La Esmeralda, México. He has shown his work internationally at the Photography Biennial in Lima, Perú, the Venice Biennial in Italy, the Pontevedra Biennial in Galicia, Spain, the X Havana Biennial in Cuba, the Valencia-São Paulo Biennial, the Contemporary Art Competition in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, and the Art Biennial Paiz in Guatemala, among others. He lives and works in San Salvador. He will speak about his photography collection titled “Faraway Brother Style,” which depicts remittance culture and vernacular architecture in Central America. The photo series Faraway Brother Style shows some of the ways in which money sent home by emigrant family members is spent on buildings that defy genres and blend disparate styles.

http://walterioinfoynoticias.blogspot.com

http://farawaybrotherstylewalterioiraheta.blogspot.com 

Osvaldo Jordan holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and a Master of Arts in Latin American Studies from the University of Florida. He has worked as a consultant for the government of Panama, national and international non-governmental organizations, and intergovernmental organizations on biodiversity conservation, indigenous rights, public participation, and climate change adaptation. He has taught courses on environmental conservation and Latin American politics at the Universidad Santa Maria La Antigua (USMA), at the School for International Training (SIT), and at the University of Florida, Gainesville. His research focuses on indigenous politics, environmental conflicts, and climate change vulnerability, being active in a number of environmental and human rights organizations. He is a founding member of Alianza para la Conservación y el Desarrollo (ACD), an organization that supports the protection of indigenous territories and environmental justice in Panama.

Elizabeth Kennedy is currently completing her Ph.D. in the joint program in geography at San Diego State University and the University of California, Santa Barbara. She holds a Master’s from the University of Oxford in refugee and forced migration studies. Her work focuses on the experiences and needs of child, youth, and forced migrants. She just completed a Fulbright Fellowship in El Salvador, where she conducted interviews with child and adult migrants, government officials, and NGOs researchers. She has published a brief on Central American child migrants for the American Immigration Council, and an editorial on the same topic for InSight Crime. She is the author of a report in JAMA Pediatrics about potential unmet mental health needs of detained unaccompanied child migrants, and an article in the Forced Migration Review about rejected Central American asylum claims of those fleeing gang-related violence.

Gisela Lanzas received her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests include the analysis of social, cultural,, and economic implications of development programs and watershed management, particularly in tropical regions of Mexico and Panama. Her research explores the ways in which people’s experiences and strategies serve as tools to negotiate scarcity and institutional constraints, and how those experiences and strategies in turn can potentially transform their circumstances.

Maria Eugenia de la O holds a doctorate from the Colegio de México. She is a professor at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores de Antropología Social in Guadalajara, Mexico, and she is visiting professor at the University of Utah. She has authored two books, edited six books, and published 30 book chapters and 25 scientific articles, as well as collaborated in several scientific research projects in Mexico. Her research interests include international migration, gender and development, sociology of work and occupations, Mexico and borderland studies and violence associated with drug trafficking. Currently she teaches on the effects of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, and the opportunity for immigrant students to request a temporary reprieve from deportation and temporary work authorization, and understand inequalities and obstacles faced by them.

Gladis Molina was born in Morazán, El Salvador, and lived there until she was ten. Her American hometown is Long Beach, California, where she grew up with her parents and three brothers. She obtained her B.A. from California State University and her J.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. Before attending law school, she traveled through Italy and worked at the U.S. Capitol. Her prior work experience includes working with unaccompanied children in custody in the Rio Grande Valley and released unaccompanied children in Los Angeles. She is Director of the Children’s Initiative Program at The Florence Project in Phoenix, Arizona.

Axel Montepeque holds a Ph.D. in Literature and a Masters in Spanish Literature from the University of California, San Diego. His research interests include Central American literature and cultural productions of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, Latino/o and Chicana/o literatures of the U.S., and Latin American literature of the 20^th century. He is also interested in literary theory and the theory of the novel. He teaches in the Central American Studies Program at California State University, Northridge. 

Fr. Pat Murphy, c.s., was born in New York City in 1952. He carried out his seminary studies in New York, Chicago, and Toronto. He graduated from Dominican University, in River Forest, Illinois in 1974 with a Bachelors in Psychology and in 1979 he completed his Masters in Divinity at the University of Toronto. He was ordained as a priest in 1980. He also received a Masters in Pastoral Studies from Loyola University in Chicago in 1985. During the course of his seminary formation, Fr. Pat had the opportunity to live in both Mexico and Puerto Rico, and to learn Spanish. Fr. Pat has been a member of the Missionaries of St. Charles – The Scalabrinians – since 1976. He is the director of the Casa del Migrante in Tijuana, Mexico.

Alejandra Navarro Smith holds a doctorate in Social Anthropology from Manchester University in England. She works as an investigator at the Cátedras CONACYT, CIESAS Occidente. Her investigations look at the intersection of politics and visual images from the perspective of the indigenous migrants’ experience. Her areas of academic interest also include land rights and autonomy, ethnic citizenship, racism, and political consciousness. Her research among the Cucapá indigenous community of Baja California examines the challenges encountered by this community regarding their ideas about economic production in an industrialized society, as well as issues of power and leadership, ethnicity, and racism.

Nancy Pérez is doctoral candidate in the interdisciplinary program in Justice Studies at Arizona State University. She holds a Masters in Chicano Studies from California State University, Northridge. Her research interests include the experience of migration, labor, and theories on the body, pain, and transgenerational memory. She is currently researching and writing her dissertation on Central American and Mexican domestic workers and their children in Los Angeles. She focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to understanding the complexities of domestic work, current legal processes that are reshaping cultures of resistance, and the ways these conditions influence experiences of self, community, and the production of memory across borders and generations. She has taught at the Central American Studies Program at California State University, Northridge, and in Justice Studies at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona.

Elizabeth Pérez Márquez holds a doctorate in Social Anthropology from the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS) in Guadalajara, Mexico. She teaches in the Cultural Organization Program at the Universidad de Guadalajara. Her research interests include Mexico-US transnational migration, gender, ethnicity, identity, religion, politics, and family studies. She has participated as investigator and consultant at the Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios de Occidente and the Gender Studies Center in Mexico on themes pertaining identity, transnational communities, and gendered identities. Currently, she is investigating the effects of double citizenship among families and individuals holding different national citizenships.

Jeannene M. Przyblyski was named provost at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 2012. She is a noted artist, art historian, and educator who oversees the academic affairs of CalArts’ six schools—Art, Critical Studies, Dance, Film/Video, Music, and Theater. An accomplished speaker and writer, her publications span topics in the history of art, photography, and urbanism. She holds a Ph.D. in the History of Art with a specialization in 19^th and 20^th Century Photography and an M.A. in the History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley.

Gaspar Rivera-Salgado holds a doctorate in sociology from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has extensive experience as an independent consultant on transnational migration, race and ethnic relations and diversity trainings for large organizations. He is co-author of Indigenous Mexican Migration in the United States (University of California San Diego), and co-editor of Just Neighbors? Research on African American and Latino Relations in the United States (Russell Sage Foundation). He is Project Director at the Center for Labor Research and Education and Director of the Institute for Transnational Social Change at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Freya Rojo is a journalist and a social communicator. She holds a Masters in Latin American Studies from California State University, Los Angeles. Her research interests are immigrant communities and their use of social media, music as an instrument of liberation, and multi-media production for social change. She teaches in the Central American Studies Program and in the Journalism Department at California State University, Northridge. She produces and hosts the Spanish language radio show Nuestra Voz at Pacifica Radio KPFK, where she addresses historic and contemporary issues of the local and global Latino community.

Elizabeth Say is Dean of the College of Humanities at California State University, Northridge. Previous to that she was professor and founding chair of the Department of Women’s Studies, and professor in the Department of Religious Studies. She holds a doctorate in Religious Social Ethics from the University of Southern California. Her research and publications are in the areas of women and religion and gay and lesbian studies. Recently she was elected president of the National Council of Arts and Sciences.

Joseph Wiltberger holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research explores the political, economic, and social practices of transnational communities, the meanings they produce, and their relationship to the cultural politics of development and migrant rights activism. His research focuses on El Salvador, where he first began fieldwork in 1999, and on Central American migrants in the United States and on the migrant trail in Mexico. He has been the recipient of fellowships and grants from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Inter-American Foundation, and the Institute for the Study of the Americas at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His work has been published in the following journals: Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Identidades, and Development.

James Wiltgen holds a Ph.D. in Latin American History from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he wrote his dissertation on the development of television in Brazil. He has written on Latin American film, sado-monetarism, Deleuze, and the inhuman. He currently teaches at both the BFA and MA level in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts where he combines contemporary theory and historical analysis in his courses on modernity and capitalism, megacities, Latin-American film and video, music of the Americas, and border politics. His current projects include an analysis of the scientific and aesthetic paradigms in the work of Félix Guattari, the intersection of the Cold War and the Cold World, the dynamics of the image, and accelerationsim and its discontents. He has also worked extensively on questions of global violence, the forces of war, and the wages of peace.

Organizing Committee

Linda Alvarez, Central American Studies, CSUN

Douglas Carranza, Central American Studies, CSUN

Beatriz Cortez, Central American Studies, CSUN

Gisela Lanzas, Anthropology and Central American Studies, CSUN

Freya Rojo, Journalism and Central American Studies, CSUN

Joseph Wiltberger, Central American Studies, CSUN

James Wiltgen, Critical Studies, CalArts

Special Thanks

At California State University, Northridge 

Provost Harold Hellenbrand

Dean Elizabeth Say

Office of the Provost

College of Humanities Academic Programming Fund

Department of Africana Studies

American Indian Studies

Department of Art

Central American Research and Policy Institute (CARPI)

Department of Anthropology

Department of Geography

Department of Gender and Women’s Studies

Department of Journalism

Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures

Department of Political Science

Queer Studies Program

Department of Religious Studies

Department of Sociology

Tom and Ethel Bradley Center for Arts and Media

Prof. Jenny Donaire

Prof. Celia Simonds

María Castillo

James Sweeters, Art Galleries

Michelle Giacopuzzi, Art Galleries

Central American United Student Association (CAUSA)

At the California Institute of the Arts 

Patricia Gonzalez, Assistant Vice President for Board Relations & Special Projects

Steven Lavine, President

Jeannene Przyblyski, Provost

Latin American / Latino/a Initiative

Equity and Diversity Committee