Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez
Date:
Thursday, September 28th, 2017
Time and Location:
2:00-3:30pm, Waters Room, Zimmerman Library
Lecture Title:
Imagining Something Better: Punk, Tejano, La Bamba, and Other Rolas from My Border Hi-Fi
Description:
With a focus on narrative soundscapes from borderlands communities, this presentation reflects on the ways that music —in particular, Chicana/o punk— can examine complicity, entanglement and compromise in relation to nation, identity, migration and globalization.
Unrepentant border crosser, writer, ex-dj, and academic. Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez is an Associate Professor of US Southwestern Literatures, and Creative Writing in the Department of Spanish, and Portuguese at the University of New Mexico. Has lectured and taught at universities across the United States, Latin America, and Europe. Author of four collections of short stories, Algún día te cuento las cosas que he visto (2012), Luego el silencio (2014), One Day I’ll Tell You the Things I’ve Seen (2015), and En el Lost ‘n Found (2016). His academic work focuses on US Latino cultural expression, and US/Mexico border cultures.
The Cruelty of Jazz: Toward a Hemispheric Politics of Sound
Rooted in concepts of affect and Empire, this paper argues that jazz operated in various 20th century Latin American settings as a vital touchstone bearing the risks and benefits of urban modernization, hemispheric geopolitics, and transnational cultural production, “cruelly” echoing the United States’ cultural, political, and economic dominance in the hemisphere and beyond.
Music from the Americas presents Versus 8
Percussion music in the Americas is one of the most exotic, visually attractive, and antique forms of expression since pre-hispanic times. Preserving, promoting and creating music for the percussion family of instruments is at the core of Versus 8’s mission through international collaboration with composers, performers, students, and cultural centers that contribute with their resources to the cycle of music, namely: creation, performance, and listening..
A Day in the Life of the Bosavi People
A 90 minute, 4K, 7.1 surround sound eco-rockumentary concert of a day in the life of the Bosavi people and their rainforest home in Papua New Guinea, directed and produced by Steven Feld and based on recordings and images from 1976-2018.