“Border Crossings: Southern Guerrero, Migrations, and Black-Indianness”
(October 29th, 3:30pm at 501 North Park)
In our first working group session of this academic year, the MLCP sponsored a lecture and discussion with visiting scholar Dr. Laura Lewis from James Madison University on October 29, 2009. Her talk, titled “Border Crossings: Southern Guerrero, Migrations, and Black-Indianness,” explored the intersection of spaces and “races” in the African descent community of San Nicolás Tolentino, Guerrero, Mexico and among San Nicoladenses in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Dr. Lewis focused on themes that entail spatial and temporal movements and that confuse centers and peripheries, the local and the non-local, and “blacks” and “Indians.” She also addressed connections between displacements and the ongoing construction of notions of place. The concept of the black-Indian is an intriguing one for the MLCP membership, with our shared interest in Latin America’s indigenous and African-descent populations. And her deconstruction of African heritage in this New World setting gave our members much to think about in terms of our current working-group theme, heritage policies and politics.
Laura A. Lewis is Professor of Anthropology and Coordinator of Latin American Studies at James Madison University. She is the author of the award winning Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft and Caste in Colonial Mexico (Duke University Press 2003). She has held Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian Institution and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. She is currently finishing the ethnography History, Race and Place in the Making of Black Mexico, based on long-term fieldwork in San Nicolás, Guerrero, Mexico and Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
