Poniente
(2002) by Chus Gutiérrez: Family Melodrama, (In)Migratory Experiences
and Interracial
Masculinities
Isolina Ballesteros
A great number of films dealing with race and foreignness in the context
of immigration made in the late 1990s and early 2000s focus on the position
of black male immigrants who are represented as (in)visible racialized
bodies, perceived in terms of their exotic/erotic appearance, voicelessness
due to lack of mastery of the Spanish language, sexual interactions with
the national white female, or reduced to battered or drowned bodies made
into anonymous and victimized spectacles by the media.
Many of these same films reintroduce the family as an emblematic microcosm
to epitomize the Nation’s both aggressive and passive resistance
to Otherness, as is the case in Chus Gutiérrez’s Poniente/Sunset
(2002). Melodrama has traditionally used the family to reflect on larger
social issues and sentimentality to draw cathartic reactions from the
audience. Chus Gutiérrez chooses melodrama, like Uribe and Saura
had done before in Bwana and Taxi, as the most appropriate medium to denounce
extreme racism in Spain, but complicates the previous films’ binary
resolutions.
Poniente is the only Spanish immigration film made by a woman that deals
in an innovative way with the representation of interracial male solidarity.
Gutiérrez is interested in emphasizing the link between Spain’s
own past migratory experiences and the current situations and attitudes
resulting from present immigration. These parallel border-crossings and
migrations and the fraternal bonds established between their subjects
prevail and provide in the fiction a logical solution to the cultural
and racial incommunication between natives and immigrants: the emphasis
relies on the shared cultural links, rather than differences, as the only
possible means toward eventual integration and acceptance.
Revising Resistance: African
and Amerindian Marronage in the Americas
Charles Beatty Medina
While Africans' escape from enslavement, or marronage, is widely studied
in the Atlantic context, far less is known of the Amerindian dimensions
of this form of resistance. This paper examines the ways in which Amerindian
and African marronage have followed intersecting pathways in the Atlantic
World and how their utilization of similar tools and strategies worked
to impede and hamper exploitation and slavery.
Mi casa no es su casa:
Transnational Capitalism and Immigration in Spanish Pop Music of the 1990s
Silvia Bermúdez
As contemporary realities of our times, "immigration" and transnational
capitalism have the Atlantic as one of its most real and symbolic locus,
requiring us to understand it as a complex space of analysis. It is within
this space, and more specifically, within theHispanic Atlantic, that I
invite you to consider what appears to be an obsessive musical topic in
Spanish Pop Music: immigration, border crossing and the presence of so-called
?others." This presentation focuses on several songs of the 1990s--by
"cantautores" Joan Manuel Serrat, Joaquin Sabina, Carlos Cano
and the group SKA-P-- to evaluate their participation in the "imagination
of race" in present-day Spain.
Jonathan Gayles
This paper examines the historical origins of the Black Christ of Portobelo and the meaning of his apparent “Blackness” to Panamanian participants in the annual festival that honors him. Through interviews, historical documents and preexisting research, “El Cristo Negro” is placed in national historical context of Panama. This paper is also autoethnographic. The researcher’s nationalized understandings of race are examined as these understandings are, ultimately, placed in contradistinction to Panamanian understandings of race – particularly in relation to the “Blackness” of a figure regarded by many as divine.
Trafficking
in (the Spirit of) the Race: From Bambú to Mambí
Susan Martin-Márquez
Mariselle Meléndez:
Naming
Diasporas: Indian Vassals, African Slaves, and Legal Categories in Colonial
Peru
Rachel O´Toole
Historians have presented colonial casta terms as racial markers or short
hand terms for descent. Mulato meant a man of Spanish and African descent
or a zamba was a woman of mixture with indigenous and Spanish heritage.
Yet, this paper defines casta terminologies as Spanish legal terms in
order to explore seventeenth-century manifestations of race and racism.
If taken as legal categories colonial casta terms provide an entry to
how colonized and enslaved people engaged in official apparatuses of the
colonial state while also constructing collectivities, identities, and
strategies that are more subaltern than official. More, the comparison
allows historians to question how imperial laws intersected with transatlantic
commerce, mixing the terms of slavery with those of the slave trade. By
seizing on what could be offered by the category of *Indian,* coastal
Andeans pushed too far to be exiled from the Crown protections. By calling
themselves by Diasporic names, enslaved Africans multiplied the categories
to create public identities that colonial jurists could only struggle
to contain with proliferating, but inadequate, casta categories - yet
functioning colonialism.
Juan Manuel Santana Pérez
A partir de la llegada a América de forma masiva por parte de los Estados europeos con vocación ultramarina comienzan a llevarse a cabo diferentes intercambios entre ese continente, Europa y África. Con esto se abre una multitud de interrelaciones, no sólo poblacionales, que en muchos casos han sido de ida y vuelta, sino también de productos a través de un lucrativo comercio de mercancías y culturales que se refleja en las distintas manifestaciones artísticas e intelectuales pero no sólo en el continente americano, sino que en muchos casos el trabase de América a África también ha estado presente.
Se abrió un nuevo espacio marítimo a los portugueses, primero, y después a otros europeos, que venían a buscar sobre todo oro en un primer momento hasta que, desde el siglo XVII, la demanda creciente de mano de obra en las plantaciones americanas convirtió a los esclavos en la más importante de las exportaciones africanas. A cambio se recibían tejidos, productos metálicos, armas y bebidas alcohólicas que, sin embargo, nunca alcanzaron un volumen que pudiese afectar al desarrollo económico africano. La originalidad de este trazado no consiste sólo en que se establecen relaciones comerciales entre varias bandas atlánticas, que ya es todo un hito, sino que el mecanismo que articula este tráfico es claramente favorable a los europeos.
Además pasaron a América manifestaciones religiosas, culturales e intelectuales y en el largo plazo vemos que muchas de ellas han regresado a América, en ocasiones incluso como ideologías político-económicas formadas en América.
The
First Wave: Exile and Emigration From Colonial Equatorial Guinea
Miguel Ugarte
Postcolonial migration begins with slavery. The tiny nation-state of Equatorial
Guinea is no exception in its historical migratory patterns. It has been
known throughout its history as a land into which and out of which people
flow due to many factors, not the least of which is slavery. We academics
(along with entrepreneurs) are becoming more familiar with these movements
to and out of Equatorial Guinea as the twenty-first century presses on,
due largely to the country's recent status as an oil-producing nation,
a development which leads to even further movement in and out, despite
the present government's strict control of its borders. The consideration
of the historical circumstances of these movements, migrations, and exiles
are paramount. In this paper I plan to trace the movements of Equatorial
Guineans to Spain by exploring some of the texts that manifest those movements.
I hope that this exploration will provide insights to how Spain reads
itself in terms of its African other as well as how Equatorial Guinean
see themselves in terms of their European dominators.
