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.
Students from Dr. Kristina Jacobsen’s class, “Diné (Navajo) Expressive Culture,” help build a shadehouse (cha’a’oh) as part of a service-learning project and cultural immersion camping trip to the Navajo Nation.
The class focuses on music, language, poetry, film and expressive arts in the context of sovereignty and contemporary politics on the Navajo Nation.
Music from the Americas presents “Scaling the Wall”
“Scaling the Wall” is a project that promotes works for flute by Canadian, American and Mexican ex-patriate composers. It seeks to showcase how contemporary composers connected to those countries have successfully bridged the political, cultural and geographic borders crossing the western 100th meridian. Featured composers’ works vary in style, instrumentation and compositional approach, but also illustrate the universality of music, regardless of nationality.
Music from the Americas presents Iracema de Andrade, cello
Brazilian cellist Iracema de Andrade is strongly committed to the music of our time. Her repertory includes pieces for solo cello, cello and electronics, as well as multimedia and improvisation.