Activities & Initiatives

Geography Colloquium with Professors Hadiya Sewer and Crystal Fortwangler
November 10, 2023, 4 p.m., RLP 0.128

Co-sponsored by the Caribbean Studies Initiative and the Department of Geography and the Environment, this event featured a screening of the short film Our Islands, Our Home (2019) as well as preview segments of the forthcoming documentary Reclaiming Our Island plus a Q & A. The films document how the insights of Senator Theovald Moorehead (U.S. Virgin Islands) inspired his daughter, Theodora Moorehead and other local activists in demanding a more just use of the Virgin Island's resources.

Workshop: Dr. Nadia Mosquera in Conversation with Dr. Deborah Thomas
October 6, 2023, 10 a.m., BUR 554

Deborah Thomas, PhD, Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, and Nadia Mosquera Muriel, PhD (Early Career Provost Fellow, UT Austin)

Dr. Mosquera presented a paper examining the entanglement of Blackness, ideas of skin color and racial identity, and the questioning of religious and Afro-Catholic cultural expressions among Afro-Latin American populations. Based on 13 months of ethnographic research in Venezuela's central coast, Mosquera's work examines Afro-Venezuelan festivals organized around the figures of patron saints such as San Juan Bautista, San Benito de Palermo, and San Juan Congo as sites that reveal how Afro-Venezuelan cultural and political activists question the ideological fiction of racial democracy in Venezuela. She argues that practices of refusal and interrogation of colonial legacies attributed to religious iconography in Venezuela channel fresh cultural contestations against white supremacy embedded in the narrative of racial mixture, or mestizaje, in Latin America. Against ideas of “syncretism,” Mosquera proposes a paradigm of “parallelism” to understand Afro-Venezuelan religious politics in Venezuela.

Lecture: Surrender: The Death of the West, Caribbean World-Building, and the Future of Us All
October 6, 2023, 2:30 p.m., RLP 1.302B

The LLILAS Caribbean Studies Initiative presents a public lecture by Deborah Thomas, PhD, Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania.

How can one imagine sovereignty in a context in which the specter of Black death on the plantation remains an ordinary parameter for organizing social and economic value? How can one enact self-determination when new forms of dispossession are continuously rewritten over earlier removals and displacements? These questions suffuse our engagements with notions of freedom, liberation, and justice, and seem to negate the possibility of sovereignty in Black life, insofar as sovereignty remains tethered to the state, or to the parameters of its institutions.

In this talk, Thomas argues that reaching toward a sovereignty “otherwise” requires that we plumb other terms that might afford a clearer articulation of the histories and futures of (in this case) Caribbean freedom. She posits “possession” as a kind of companion term to sovereignty, one that both aligns with and disrupts imperialist and nationalist aspirations, and one that will ultimately lead us to another term, “surrender,” which can attune us to relations of repetition, recovery, return, and repair.

Mariana Escalona’s work explores the intersection of gender, labor, race, social class, state power, violence, and oppression in the construction of the imaginaries of citizenship. Her research addresses key questions on the reconstruction of the narrative about the life of enslaved African women in the Antillean Caribbean during the colonial period. She is interested in focusing on the enslaver–enslaved relationship record in archives and the legal framework in which they coexisted as the central axis for interpreting everyday life.

Katherine A. Pérez-Quiñones is a doctoral student in the Community and Regional Planning Program in UT Austin. Born and raised on the west coast of Puerto Rico, she is passionate about health and environmental justice and believes in people’s right to stay and achieve well-being on their land. Before coming to Austin in 2020, she spent four years in Connecticut, obtaining her master’s degree in Latinx, Latin American, and Caribbean Studies. There, she worked with a local youth program centered around food justice. She is currently part of the Health Policy Research Scholars program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and hopes to continue working through an interdisciplinary lens around questions of agency, democratic planning, and environmental justice. At UT Austin, she works with a Planet Texas 2050 team that researches and fosters youth involvement in environmental planning and health policy issues through participatory methods.

Francis Russell (they/he) is a current doctoral student in the Department of Geography and the Environment at UT Austin. Their research focuses on the vulnerability and resilience of coffee farmers in Puerto Rico to economic and environmental shocks. They employ both quantitative geospatial analysis to assess physical hurricane damage to coffee farms and qualitative ethnographic methodologies to understand the needs, opinions, and values of farmers.   

Nicole Smythe-Johnson is a writer and independent curator from Kingston, Jamaica. She is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art and Art History at UT Austin. Most recently, she was on the curatorial team for the 2022 Kingston Biennial, and she worked on John Dunkley: Neither Day nor Night at the Perez Art Museum in Miami and the Folk Art Museum in New York, which formed the basis of her doctoral research. She was also editor of Caribbean Quarterly, the University of the West Indies’ flagship journal of culture. Her work has been published in a number of magazines and journals, including Terremoto, Flash Art, and the Small Axe project’s sx visualities.  

nicolesmythejohnson.com  

Pedro Valdez-Castro is a Fulbright Faculty Development grantee and second-year MA student at the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies. He holds a BA in Sociology from the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo and a specialization in Afro-Latin American and Caribbean Studies from the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO)-Brazil and the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO)-Argentina. He has complemented his academic training with studyin Taiwan, Colorado, and Pennsylvania focusing on migrations, education, race studies, interculturality, and decoloniality. He has engaged in teaching, research, policymaking, and community development as well as studied topics like human trafficking, border management, intercultural education, and migrant integration. Before coming to UT Austin, Pedro worked as a Migration Studies and Research Analyst at the National Institute of Migration of the Dominican Republic. He is currently conducting a research project on the cultural, symbolic, and emotional dimensions of Afro-Caribbean migration to the U.S.–Mexico border. Pedro volunteers at Casa Marianella, a migrant shelter in Austin, and enjoys hiking, reading, cooking, and traveling.  

Piero Visconte is a PhD candidate in Ibero and Latino-American Linguistics at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese of UT Austin. He also serves as an Assistant Instructor of both Spanish and Portuguese, as well as an active member of Professor Sandro Sessarego’s Humboldt Fellowship Project, which is building the first open-access Afro-Hispanic Language Atlas. Visconte’s research explores creole studies from an interdisciplinary perspective by offering a cohesive approach to new theoretical insights into language contact, language acquisition, and language change. His dissertation, ”Aspects of Afro-Puerto Rican Spanish: The Interplay of Social and Linguistic Factors,” combines linguistic, sociohistorical, legal, and anthropological insights to cast light on the nature and origins of Afro–Puerto Rican Spanish, a vernacular that developed in colonial Puerto Rico from the contact of African languages and Spanish. His proposal is based on data he has personally collected through sociolinguistic interviews and grammaticality judgments in the Afro-Hispanic community of Loíza, Puerto Rico.