May 8, 2013
4:00 to 6:00 pm
120 Elmer L. Andersen Library

Keystone Awards
Cindy Herring
Jeff Nelson
Haven Hawley

Career Achievement Award
Prof. Katherine Fennelly

Certificates of Appreciation
Michael Anuta
Katie Evans
Emily Janisch
Kris Kiesling
Halyna Myroniuk
Mia Overly
Lisa Vecoli
Margaret Yzaguirre

This award is the one of highest honors the University gives to a faculty member for service to the community and recognizes the substantial and significant contributions Prof. Gabaccia made to her work at the IHRC building University-community partnerships and programs benefit university students, faculty, staff, community partners and citizens across the state and provide an exemplary model of a publicly engaged professional.

Visit the exhibit by clicking on the photograph below (one of IHRCA's items in the exhibit).

To learn more about the exhibition, the Digital Public Library of America and Europeana, please visit the project description web page.

To read the full press release, please follow this link.

When Gloria Anzaldúa published Borderlands / la frontera in 1987, she sparked a renewed interest among Chicana/o scholars in the U.S.-Mexico border region as a locus of analysis and as a conceptual paradigm. While the borderlands have been central to the field since its inception, Chicana/o scholars mined the region's critical potential with an intensified rigor, extending and developing approaches for its study as place, process, and metaphor. At the same time, scholars in American studies were searching for ways to re-think the place of the nation in the field, especially in light of work that elucidated the relationship between nation and empire in the United States. The global framework that Chicana/o studies scholars were applying to the border was seen as powerfully generative, particularly the connections such scholars made between the study of ethnicity, racialization, and immigration, and empire building, imperialism, and international relations. In the ensuing years, the "borderlands" has become one of American Studies' key tropes, and a central critical coordinate in the field's much-remarked "transnational turn."

In this course, we will critically engage the developments outlined above, doing so in three parts. First, we will track Chicana/o border studies as it evolved in the 1980s and '90s, paying special attention to the approaches the field generated for challenging nation-based understandings of cultural politics, racialization, and subject formation. Second, we will examine the ways in which border studies influenced and shaped the transnational imperatives that are now fundamental to work in American studies, as well as the strong criticisms directed against such work by Latin Americanists. Finally, we will consider two case studies that indicate the continuing importance of the borderlands for generating transnational approaches in Chicana/o and American studies. The first will be a focus on Américo Paredes, a figure of particular importance for our course due to his centrality in the initial emergence of border studies and in more recent debates regarding transnational American studies. Second, we will study the rise of more material-based cultural criticism in Chicana/o border studies, especially work that examines the cultural politics of the border around the economic globalization of the region and the Juárez femicides.

Each part will be grounded in analyses of the border region's rich tradition of cultural production. Possible cultural works we will study include the foundational border writings of Américo Paredes and Gloria Anzaldúa, films by Lourdes Portillo, John Sayles, and María Novaro, performance art by Marisela Norte and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, music by Chela Silva, Tish Hinojosa, and El Vez, and short fiction by Mexican fronteriza/o writers Rosinda Conde and Federico Campbell. Scholarship we will engage includes works by Norma Alarcón, Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Debra Castillo, Claire Fox, Rosa Linda Fregoso, José Limón, Walter Mignolo, Claudia Sadowski-Smith, Ramón Saldívar, and Sonia Saldívar-Hull.

The IHRC hosted the international conference American Association in cooperation with the American Lativan Association and the Latvians Abroad Museum, April 12-14, 2012.
Research Archivist Daniel Necas participated as an archival expert in the panel "Understanding Differences between Libraries, Archives, and Museums & Basic Principles in Collection Development."

Sara Wakefield, Daniel Necas and Haven Hawley gave presentations, led trainings and facilitated discussions for the conference, which was conducted in English and Latvian. the American Latvian Association filmed the conference to provide community access to the training, with the Latvian Abroad Museum also co-sponsoring the event.

Anyone interested to arrange a bequest, pledge or paced electronic fund transfer gift to the IHRC may contact Eva Widder in the College of Liberal Arts External Relations office. Phone: 612-626-5146 or email ewidder@umn.edu.

The materials have been organized thematically in order to initiate student discussion related to Minnesota K-12 Academic Standards and Benchmarks that address the study of migration. By incorporating these archival records into lesson plans, students will be able to think critically about the immigrant experience. Furthermore, working directly with primary sources will enable students to practice and develop research skills that will become increasingly important as they progress in their studies.

Visit the project's web site: http://ihrc.umn.edu/research/projects/12-10/fon1.html