INSIDE THIS ISSUE 3 10 25 28 32 34 Spring 2010 LETTER FROM
Transcripción
INSIDE THIS ISSUE 3 10 25 28 32 34 Spring 2010 LETTER FROM
PROGRAM IN LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES NEWSLETTER LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR Dear friends of PLAS: I hope you are having a relaxing and productive summer. As we prepare for the new academic year, I would like to tell you about some of the planned events and activities for 2010-11. First and foremost, during the fall semester the Program will be hosting Mario Vargas Llosa, the 2010 PLAS Distinguished Visitor, who will teach one undergraduate seminar for PLAS and a second one for the Lewis Center. Vargas Llosa will also deliver a public lecture and hold an afternoon seminar for graduate students. Please consult our website for the exact dates and times. I am also pleased to announce a new initiative that will be launched this fall: the Graduate Student Work-In-Progress lunch seminars. Every week, a graduate student will present his or her work, and will be followed by a faculty discussant. These informal presentations will increase the interaction between students and faculty, and will also serve as preparation for job talks. The calendar is now set for the fall. Graduate students should e-mail the Program ([email protected]) if they would like to participate in the next edition of the lunch seminars. In the past years we had a very active lecture program featuring scholars, artists, and writers from Latin America. This year the focus will be on Princeton: every other week we will have a formal lecture by a Princeton faculty member – an excellent opportunity to catch up on our colleague’s current research projects. Please check our website for schedule and topics. Finally, I would like to thank my colleague Miguel Centeno for serving as acting director for 2009-10. His dedication to the Program’s faculty and students went well beyond the call of duty. I look forward to seeing you in the fall. Sincerely, Rubén Gallo Director, PLAS Spring 2010 I NSIDE THIS ISSUE 3 HIGHLIGHTS 10 FA C U LT Y 25 F E L L OW S 28 STUDENTS 32 ALUMNI 34 SP OT L I G H T SAVE THE DATE: EVENTS, 2010-11 Please check www.princeton.edu/plas for event updates. September 14, 2010 noon–1 p.m. | 216 Burr Hall Latin American Studies Freshman Open House September 27, 2010 7:30 p.m. | Location TBA Film Screening The Storm that Swept Mexico A discussion with Raymond Telles (film director, co-writer and co-producer) will follow. Presentation of Rubén Gallo’s “Freud’s Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis” Presenters: Rubén Gallo (Spanish & Portuguese; Director, PLAS) and Michael Wood (English) [email protected] WWW.PRINCETON.EDU/PLAS TEL: (609) 258-4148 FAX: (609) 258-0113 Comments and news or information from our readers on recent activities are welcome, as are inquiries regarding the program. Please write to [email protected] or contact our staff members directly. RUBÉN GALLO October 11, 2010 7:30 p.m. | Location TBA Lecture will be given in Spanish Lecture by Mario Vargas Llosa October 20, 2010 4:30 p.m. | 219 Burr Hall Lecture In Search of Hope: Albert O. Hirschman in the 1970s Jeremy Adelman (History) November 8, 2010 4:30 p.m. | 216 Burr Hall Lecture The ‘Pre-Colombian Era’ of Drug Trafficking in the Americas: Cocaine, 1945-1973 Paul Gootenberg (Stony Brook University) November 18, 2010 4:30 p.m. | 219 Burr Hall Lecture The Political Economy of Undocumented Migration Douglas Massey (Sociology and Woodrow Wilson School) DIRECTOR 314 Burr Hall [email protected] December 4, 2010 Time TBA | McCosh 28 Freud and the 20th Century Culture A Conference Sponsored by the Program in Latin American Studies and the Council for Humanities December 14, 2010 4:30 p.m. | 219 Burr Hall Lecture Dreams of Distraction Michael Wood (English) February 15, 2011 4:30 p.m. | 219 Burr Hall Lecture will be given in Spanish Lecture Técnicas de conversación con los difuntos Álvaro Enrigue (Mexican novelist and Whitney J. Oates Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Program in Latin American Studies) With generous support from the Council of the Humanities March 1, 2011 4:30 p.m. | 219 Burr Hall Lecture Native History for Natives: The colonial-era evolution of Mexican indigenous annals Camilla Townsend (Rutgers University) ROSALIA RIVERA PROGRAM MANAGER 311 Burr Hall [email protected] JILLIAN LENIHAN COMMUNICATIONS AND PROGRAMMING ASSISTANT 316 Burr Hall [email protected] KAI LAIDLAW TECHNICAL SUPPORT SPECIALIST 310 Burr Hall [email protected] NONDISCRIMINATION STATEMENT In compliance with Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and other federal, state, and local laws, Princeton University does not discriminate on the basis of age, race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, national or ethnic origin, disability, or status as a disabled or Vietnam-era veteran in any phase of its employment process, in any phase of its admission or financial aid programs, or other aspects of its educational programs or activities. The vice provost for institutional equity and diversity is the individual designated by the University to coordinate its efforts to comply with Title IX, Section 504 and other equal opportunity and affirmative action regulations and laws. Questions or concerns regarding Title IX, Section 504 or other aspects of Princeton’s equal opportunity or affirmative action programs should be directed to the Office of the Vice Provost for Institutional Equity and Diversity, Princeton University, 205 Nassau Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544 or (609) 258-6110. Produced by the Program in Latin American Studies Copyright © 2010 by The Trustees of Princeton University In the Nation’s Service and in the Service of All Nations PROGRAM IN LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES NEWSLETTER 2 Cover photo of Rubén Gallo courtesy of the Sigmund Freud Foundation October 6, 2010 Time TBA | Labyrinth Books PROGRAM IN LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES HIGHLIGHTS REVEALING THE BENEFITS OF COLOMBIAN DRUG LEGALIZATION The senior thesis often involves a moment of surprise for Princeton students -- a late-night revelation, an insightful conversation with an adviser or an eye-opening encounter abroad. For Gustavo Silva Cano, it came when he realized his research supported drug legalization in Colombia, a conclusion opposing his personal beliefs. "I was sort of mugged by reality, because I realized that prohibition has really high human costs," Silva Cano said. "That's one of the great things about the thesis -- it's a great intellectual experience." Silva Cano, who was born and raised in Bogota, Colombia, is majoring in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and pursuing a certificate in Latin American studies. His thesis is a cost-benefit analysis of drug prohibition and legalization in his home country. During a summer internship with Colombia's high counselor for reintegration, Silva Cano was assigned to evaluate Colombia's drug crop eradication policy. The project, done after his sophomore year at Princeton, launched his interest in the topic, and he approached Professor Miguel Centeno last spring to serve as his thesis adviser. "The idea sounded like an excellent one," said Centeno, a professor of sociology and international affairs. "It lent itself to the kind of analysis we're trying to teach here, to put a policy dilemma in context and play out the costs and benefits of the alternatives. Gustavo has a perfect case study of alternatives." Silva Cano and Centeno came up with a dozen precise variables to consider, such as government defense expenditures, economic growth and homicide rates. Then Silva Cano worked to identify the current figures under prohibition and what the figures might be if all drugs were legalized in Colombia. His primary focus was on coca crops and cocaine -- the target of Colombia's "war on drugs." In addition to documents he had from his internship, he utilized numerous sources to perform his own statistical analysis, including Colombian government databases and reports online, United Nations documents, U.S. government surveys, U.S. think tank reports, news reports, and scholarly books and journals. Silva Cano found that Colombia spends approximately $7 billion a year on its drug war, equal to what it spends on education or health care. Meanwhile, the war on drugs has resulted in many deaths, displacement, environmental damage, hostile occupations of the countryside by drug cartels and insurgencies, and pressure on cities. If drugs were legalized, those funds could be used for infrastructure, health care, education and balancing the federal budget, Silva Cano noted. The government also would be able to collect tax revenue on the sale of cocaine. About 5,000 fewer homicides would occur, and 100,000 fewer people would be internally displaced, according to his analysis. The potential costs of legalization included diplomatic isolation from the United States, and possibly economic sanctions and loss of American investment. Silva Cano also considered the health risks due to increased drug consumption in the country, but he said the benefits outweighed all of these costs. “Before starting to write my thesis I was a staunch believer of prohibition. I thought the Colombian government had done a great job, and they actually have. It might be the only nation in the world recently that has had great success against drugs,” Silva Cano said. But, he added, “there’s no end in sight.” Silva Cano’s thesis purposefully avoids ethical and moral issues while examining the political and economic factors that he feels should be part of policymaking decisions. “Some people just believe that using drugs is morally wrong. I’m trying to make a utilitarian calculus and am saying, this is how much this policy costs,” he said. “I don’t think any government would want to leave that utilitarian calculus out of the question.” Centeno and Silva Cano have had weekly meetings to discuss research, analysis and drafts. Along the way, Centeno has recommended sources, given writing advice and -- as a skeptic of any state’s ability to effectively prohibit drugs -- played devil’s advocate to Silva Cano’s arguments. “I like Professor Centeno’s hands-on approach,” Silva Cano said. “He is so well regarded but also so approachable and so fun to work with.” Centeno said he had not studied drug legalization in depth, but his work on statesociety interaction helped guide Silva Cano’s work on what makes a state and its laws most effective. The rest was of his student’s making. “No one has written about the Colombian situation with such precision, detachment and so many variables,” Centeno said. The final chapter synthesizing all of Silva Cano’s findings is “masterful,” Centeno said. Looking at Colombian politics, Silva Cano acknowledges in his thesis that his recommendations are unlikely to happen anytime soon, as they are contrary to popular opinion in Colombia and abroad, and to politicians’ stances at the executive and legislative levels. After graduating from Princeton, Silva Cano intends to attend the University of Pennsylvania Law School and work in the United States for a few years before returning to Colombia to work in public policy or politics. Reprinted from the Princeton University Bulletin 99(12), April 19, 2010. WWW.PRINCETON.EDU/PLAS 3 Photo of Gustavo Silva Cano ‘10 (left) and Miguel Centeno (right) by Denise Applewhite BY USHMA PATEL TO REMEMBER/RECORDANDO A JOSÉ LEZAMA LIMA BY RACHEL PRICE James Irby guided the audience through a careful reading of one of Lezama’s “Sonetos criollos,” lingering on every word in the mysterious ode to a mid-century Cuban shopping list to better understand its importance—why a deluded, fallen chickpea? Whence came the “iodized algae”? What is the dark grotto through which parade the tomatoes? At the end of his reading, Irby had himself opened up the poem like an onion, allowing audience members to peek inside its translucent—both clear and opaque—layers to see what “criollo” might have meant for Lezama: its beauty and earthiness but also a lurking ominousness and violence. Or is what appears ominous that which saves lo criollo from chauvinism? The poem only states ambiguously, “Something is missing on the list.” In a talk entitled “On Substitution in Paradiso,” Rachel Price presented from ongoing research into the history of Cuban amusement parks, dwelling principally on those scenes from Lezama’s novel Paradiso set in such parks. She first traced the history of Cuban parks from the beginning of the twentieth century and singled out the surprising and colorful history of Havana’s Coney Island Park. Reading several key scenes from the beginning and end of Paradiso, she then suggested how amusement parks’ culture of repetition and novelty; sexuality and innocence; consumption and waste; pleasure and terror; and nature and artifice provide a (neobaroque) mirror for the novel’s ongoing engagement with these same themes, bundled by Lezama under the novel’s investigation of a series of “substitutions”: linguistic, architectural, sexual, culinary, genealogical, historical. Gustavo Guerrero closed the panel with a history of Lezama’s reception by subsequent Cuban authors. He focused in particular on a lively critical rivalry between Paris-based Cuban author Severo Sarduy’s readings of Lezama and those by Havana-based poet and critic Cintio Vitier. Guerrero highlighted the competing representations of Lezama celebrated both within Cuba and beyond. Which Lezama is being recuperated today in centennials around the world, he asked: a Catholic Lezama or an ecumenical one? The bold author of pioneering gay literature or a closeted one? A neobaroque postmodernist or author of Cuba’s most canonical bildungsroman? Guerrero then focused on Lezama’s influence on contemporary “neobarroso” authors, indicating the Cuban author’s deep reservoir of stylistic and thematic innovation that continues to be mined by contemporary authors throughout Latin America. As the brief panel itself suggested, Lezama is irreducible to any one reading. PROGRAM IN LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES NEWSLETTER 4 Photo of José Lezama Lima courtesy of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures On May 4, 2010, Arcadio Díaz Quiñones (Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures) moderated a roundtable in celebration of the 100 year anniversary of the birth of José Lezama Lima, one of Cuba’s most important twentieth-century authors. James Irby (emeritus, Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures), Rachel Price (Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures) and Gustavo Guerrero (Program in Latin American Studies) presented works in progress about the Cuban author. The event was sponsored by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures and the Program in Latin American Studies, with generous co-sponsorship from the Program in Women and Gender Studies and Poetry@Princeton. José Lezama Lima (1910–1976) is considered one of the greatest twentieth-century Latin American writers. He was born on December 19, 1910 in a military camp near Havana, Cuba. Self-described as the «immobile traveler,» Lezama Lima only left Cuba on two brief occasions: for Mexico in 1949 and Jamaica in 1950. His first poetic composition, Muerte de Narciso (Death of Narcisssus), was published in 1937 and he was primarily known as a poet until his novel Paradiso was published in 1966. After his first novel, Lezama Lima went on to publish numerous collections of poetry, books of essays, and founded and edited several important literary journals including Orígenes (1944–1956), considered to have been one of the most significant literary magazines of the twentieth centry. Oda a Julián del Casal de José Lezama Lima Ode to Julián del Casal by José Lezama Lima Déjenlo, verdeante, que se vuelva; permitidle que salga de la fiesta a la terraza donde están dormidos. A los dormidos los cuidará quejoso, fijándose cómo se agrupa la mañana helada. La errante chispa de su verde errante, trazará círculos frente a los dormidos de la terraza, la seda de su solapa escurre el agua repasada del tritón y otro tritón sobre su espalda en polvo. Dejadlo que se vuelva, mitad ciruelo y mitad piña laqueada por la frente. Allow him, greening, to return; permit him to leave the party and come out to the terrace where they sleep. The sleepers he will watch over and complain, noticing how the chill morning gathers. The errant spark of his errant green will trace circles in front of the sleepers on the terrace, the silk of his lapel sheds the water gone over by the triton and another triton on his back in dust. Let him return, half plum tree and half pineapple lacquered in front. Déjenlo que acompañe sin hablar, permitidle, blandamente, que se vuelva hacia el frutero donde están los osos con el plato de nieve, o el reno de la escribanía, con su manilla de ámbar por la espalda. Su tos alegre espolvorea la máscara de combatientes japoneses. Dentro de un dragón de hilos de oro, camina ligero con los pedidos de la lluvia, hasta la Concha de oro del Teatro Tacón, donde rígida la corista colocará sus flores en el pico del cisne, como la mulata de los tres gritos en el vodevil y los neoclásicos senos martillados par la pedantería de Clesinger. Todo pasó cuando ya fue pasado, pero también pasó la aurora can su punta de nieve. Allow him to accompany without speaking, permit him, softly, to turn toward the fruit bowl where the bears are with the plate of snow, or the reindeer on the writing stand, with the amber backscratcher in back. His happy cough sprinkles the Japanese warrior mask. Inside a dragon of golden threads, he walks quickly with the rain's requests all the way to the Golden Shell at the Teatro Tacón, where rigidly the chorus girl will place his flowers on the swan's beak, like the mulata of the three shouts in the vaudeville and the neo-classical breasts hammered out by Clésinger's pedantry. It all passed when it had already passed, but the dawn also passed at its exact snow point. Si lo tocan, chirrían sus arenas; si lo mueven, el arco iris rompe sus cenizas. Inmóvil en la brisa, sujetado por el brillo de las arañas verdes. Es un vaho que se dobla en las ventanas. Trae la carta funeral del ópalo. Trae el pañuelo del opopónax y agua quejumbrosa a la visita sin sentarse apenas, con muchos quédese, quédese, que se acercan para llorar en su sonido como los sillones de mimbre de las ruinas del ingenio, en cuyas ruinas se quedó para siempre el ancla de su infantil chaqueta marinera. If they touch him, his sands squeak; if they move him, the rainbow breaks his ashes. Motionless in the breeze, held fast by the gleam of the green chandeliers. He's a mist that thickens on the windows. He brings the funeral card with the opal. He brings the handkerchief with the opoponax and complaining water to the visit without hardly sitting down, with many please stay, please stay, that come closer to weep in his sound like the wicker armchairs from the ruins of the plantation, in whose ruins remained forever the anchor from the sailor jacket of his childhood. Pregunta y no espera la respuesta, lo tiran de la manga con trifolias de ceniza. Están frías las ornadas florecillas. Frías están sus manas que no acaban, aprieta las manos con sus manos frías. Sus manos no están frías, frío es el sudor He asks and doesn't wait for a reply, they pull his sleeve with trefoils of ashes. Cold are the ornate little flowers. Cold are his hands that never end, he squeezes hands with his cold hands. His hands are not cold, cold is the sweat (CONTINUED ON PAGE 36) WWW.PRINCETON.EDU/PLAS 5 PLAS MUSIC OF LATIN AMERICA SERIES MÚSICA FICTA: DOS ESTRELLAS LE SIGUEN Founded in Bogotá, Colombia in 1988, Música Ficta has earned an international reputation for its passionate performances and fine recordings of an often unknown and colorfully diverse repertory of Renaissance and Baroque music from Latin America and Spain. Though relatively little known today, music in the Spanish tradition was heard throughout the Spanish New World, and survives in archives of the Cathedral of Bogotá, records of the ViceRoyalty of Peru, and various archives in Bolivia, Guatemala, and Mexico. Widely respected for their careful musicological research and innovative programming, the four musicians of Música Ficta perform on a variety of instruments, including harpsichord, Baroque guitar, vihuela de mano, theorbo, recorders, shawm, dulcian, pipe-and-tabor, as well as percussion and tenor voice. Música Ficta’s performance offers a close exploration of three typical dance forms— xácaras, folías and chaconas—born during the 16th century and particularly popular during the 17th century in Spain and Latin America. All three forms use the common denominator of a ground bass, an ostinato or harmonic progression continuously repeated by the accompanying bass instruments, upon which improvisations are created in the upper melodic lines. The basic structure of these 16th-century genres all functioned in this way. By the 17th century, these forms evolved, and while the basic harmonic structure remained the foundation for the composition, the pattern was frequently altered or broken to allow for melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic exploration. The scope of the texts of these sung dances also underwent changes. Xácaras were second only to pasacalles in number and importance during the 17th century in Spain. Their infectious harmonic and rhythmic elements were used for different kinds of music genres, including villancicos, tonos humanos, and divinos, providing a very lively, festive feel. Early sung xácaras were associated with the life of ruffians and low-life individuals in search of entertainment. By the mid–17th century, this association had faded, and sung xácaras, despite their complex syncopated rhythm, could be religious in nature (as so many villancicos attest), or even tormented love songs. But the distinctive rhythmic interest is always evident: hemiolas and shifting accentuations in triple and duple meters provide infinite possibilities within the overall structure. The performed examples show a wide spectrum of the form, from the lively Christmas villancico, A la xácara xacarilla, composed in Puebla, Mexico, by Gutierrez de Padilla, to the rhythmically challenging Greek mythological theme of No hay que decirle al primor, or the dark and moody love song (tono humano), Sepan todos que muero, by Spanish composer José Marín. On the instrumental side, some anonymous examples were simple in their melodic composition and harmonic accompaniment (usually performed by baroque guitars), but the elaborate, virtuosic instrumental xácara by Valencian organist Juan Cabanilles demonstrates the form stretched beyond its limits. Another popular Hispanic dance from the 17th century is the folía. Folías are mentioned from the early 16th century in various Portuguese and Spanish sources and from the first examples, they convey the word’s primary meaning, madness. Indeed, their nature was wild, a “noisy rambunctious bayle [baile] accompanied by tambourines and guitars.” Folías would eventually enjoy enormous international success, soon adopted by Italian composers whose settings gave them amazing rhetorical expression during the first decades of the 1600’s. During the course of the century, French and English composers also adopted folías as part of instrumental suites, or as solo instrumental pieces. The examples performed included the unusually introspective early folía, Dos estrellas le siguen by Portuguese composer Manuel Machado, as well as a folía by French born composer Michel Farinel. Of all the dance forms from Spanish America during the Renaissance and Baroque periods, chaconas alone originated in Central America. While no known early instrumental or sung pieces from the Americas corroborate this theory, numerous writers mention that Indians and enslaved blacks danced chaconas in colonial Mexico. Their harmonic structure was simple—a ground bass repeated by accompanying instruments—and because of their popular danceable origin, musicians probably did not need to notate the music of the early chaconas. It is interesting to note that the first notated chaconas actually come from Italy. As with folías and xácaras, chaconas were considered a bayle [baile], not a dance, signifying an unrefined popular genre. Their overt, wild, suggestive nature worried the Church, which forbade chacona performances in any kind of religious ceremony. Curiously, as a means of conversion, other dance forms such as xácaras had been accepted by the Church, but there are, to the best of our knowledge, no religious chaconas. As with folías and xácaras, chaconas also became more refined as the 17th century proceeded. As their popularity waned in Spain and its colonies, France adopted a much more polite and elegant form of chaconne, which remained very popular well into the 18th century. Exaltation and celebration of life and its earthly delights seem best to define what early chaconas were all about. Both sung examples of chaconas on the program certainly attest to that. As Arañés’s Sarao de la chacona commands, “¡A la vida vidita bona, vida vámonos a chacona!” Let’s live the good life; let’s go dance the Chacona! PLAS produced Música Ficta in performance at Richardson Auditorium in Alexander Hall on Saturday, September 26, 2009, co-sponsored by the Princeton University Concerts Committee and the Davis International Center. PROGRAM IN LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES NEWSLETTER 6 Photos courtesy of Música Ficta NOTES BY JAIRO SERRANO EDMAR CASTANEDA: COLOMBIAN JAZZ HARPIST, COMPOSER, BANDLEADER From a musical family in Bogotá, Edmar Castaneda took up the arpa llanera at age 13, under the tutelage of his father Pávelid Castaneda. The harp does not generally come to mind when one thinks jazz, but since moving to New York in 1994, Edmar Castaneda (who also plays trumpet) has performed and recorded (to rave critical reviews) with major figures including Paquito D’Rivera, Lila Downs, Giovanni Hidalgo, the Chico O’Farrill Afro-Cuban Jazz Big Band, Wynton Marsalis (trumpeter and Lincoln Center jazz director), David Oquendo, John Patitucci, Dave Samuels, and John Scofield. Castaneda plays the harp as a lead instrument, in a fashion owing something to both flamenco guitar and piano, bending notes, conjuring up astounding melodic and bass lines and jazz harmonies with an intensely rhythmic, percussive attack, on a mostly original repertoire that also reflects his grounding in Colombian folk traditions. With his left hand he creates a bass line while sustaining a melody or improvising with his right. Superbly backed in various spare combinations of bandoneon, trumpet, flugelhorn, trombone, electric bass, drums, congas, percussion, and palmas, Castaneda essays a mostly original jazz-inspired repertoire tinged with Afrojoropo, bulería, and rumba, sturdily improvisational whatever the genre. Castaneda has appeared at the Tanglewood Jazz Festival, and has been featured on NPR’s JazzSet. He has won critical praise from the New York Times, WNYC Soundcheck, New York Post, Bloomberg News, Boston Herald, Time Out, Global Rhythm, Jazz Times, Jazzitalia, Panama News, Philadelphia Weekly, and Semana (Colombia). Castaneda is highly regarded among NY jazz and world music musicians, and among the Cuban rumba old guard of Union City, New Jersey—some very serious artists. PLAS produced the Edmar Castaneda Quartet in performance at Richardson Auditorium in Alexander Hall on Saturday, April 10, 2010. Co-sponsors included the Princeton University Concerts Committee, the Kathryn W. & Shelby Cullom Davis ’30 International Center, and WWFM-JazzOn2/Mercer County Community College. LIFE’S WISDOM IN UNLIKELY PLACES: DOCUMENTARY FEATURES UNIVERSITY JANITOR’S EFFORTS TO HELP OTHERS From 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. each weekday, Josue Lajeunesse is one of Princeton University’s 220 Building Services janitors. But off campus, Lajeunesse is a taxi driver, a father, a philanthropist, a community organizer and now the subject of a documentary film. A native of Haiti who has worked at Princeton for 15 years, Lajeunesse is featured in the documentary “The Philosopher Kings,” which tells the stories of eight janitors at universities across the country. In search of wisdom in unlikely places, the film highlights the everyday triumphs and tragedies of staff whose hard work is often done when no one is looking. The cameras follow Lajeunesse’s work as a lead janitor in Whitman College and other dormitories, and his travels to Haiti as he helps bring clean drinking water to his family’s village. The screening and talk events at Princeton in December 2009 were part of a nationwide tour of the documentary on college campuses and at film festivals. “Some people close their eyes to what’s going on in front of them,” Lajeunesse said of the poverty in his homeland. “But if God gave me the knowledge and the view to see these things, then I need to go back and help those people who cannot help themselves.” Lajeunesse was born in Haiti as the youngest of four children. His mother passed away when he was a young boy and he grew up close to his father, a farmer. Lajeunesse served in the military in Haiti and moved to the United States in 1989, ultimately settling in the Princeton area because a friend from Haiti was living here. Through the documentary, Lajeunesse puts a face to the work ethic, passion and perseverance shared by many of the University’s janitorial staff, said Building Services director Jon Baer. Baer noted janitors such as Natasha Bowman, who has worked at the University for 21 years and has been a surrogate parent to some of the students living in the dorms she cleans, or Mohamed Flites, an amateur photographer and historian who immigrated to the United States to escape civil war in Algeria. “Having managed janitorial and service staff for the past 25 years, I find so many of their life stories compelling. There’s a depth to Josue, as there is to so many of our janitors, that transcends what they do as an occupation,” Baer said. “Josue is an excellent ambassador (CONTINUED ON PAGE 39) WWW.PRINCETON.EDU/PLAS 7 Photos: (top) courtesy of Edmar Castaneda; (bottom) by Denise Applewhite BY EMILY ARONSON PRINCETON DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL 2009 The Princeton Documentary Festival was created to bring attention to the creative explosion of documentary filmmaking in Latin America and Spain. Through public screenings, commentary and discussions, the festival provides its audience with exceptional, cutting-edge films that would not be otherwise available. The aim is to contribute to a more comprehensive vision of the cultures from which this work springs, while encouraging a more informed debate on the specific topic addressed in each series and on the current state of documentary production. Sponsors: The Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures, The Program in Latin American Studies, The University Center for Human Values, The Council of the Humanities, and The Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies. The 2009 festival was funded in part by a gift to the University Center for Human Values in honor of James A. Moffett ’29. FILMS SCREENED AT THE FESTIVAL Juízo (Maria Augusta Ramos, Brazil, 2007) Juízo follows the process of minors who have fallen into the hands of the Brazilian legal system. Boys and girls from underprivileged backgrounds are faced with crime, ruling, and sentences handed down for theft, drug trafficking, and even murder. The film shows the process of judging and how easily we are swayed over questions involving minors breaking the law. Who really knows what to do? Intimidades de Shakespeare y Victor Hugo (Yulene Olaizola, Mexico, 2008) Within Rosa Elena Carbajal’s boarding house lies a passionate and potentially explosive story. Rosa’s intelligent, artistic, humorous tenant Jorge Riosse was a deeply troubled man—possibly schizophrenic—carrying dark secrets that emerged only after his sudden death. Best documentary prize winner at festivals in Mexico City and Buenos Aires, this is a story of creativity, intimacy, homosexuality, friendship and maybe even murder. Aquele querido mês de agosto (Miguel Gomes, Portugal, 2008) A strange relationship exists between a father, daughter and nephew in a traveling pop band in the midst of the August music festivals that permeate the heart of rural Portugal. Fiction and documentary dance a sensual tango in this celebration of everyday life and love in August. The camera drifts endlessly through picturesque vistas, capturing unrestrained merriment, rural ritual, colorful anecdotes and vivacious characters. PROGRAM IN LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES NEWSLETTER Photos courtesy of directors The Short Films of Susana Barriga (Susana Barriga, Cuba, 2006–2008) Barriga’s short films exhibit a striking confidence in the authority of stark images. The primitive work performed by the road workers in Patria, while depicted in all its physicality, inevitably takes on the allure of a metaphor on the exhaustion—and persistence against all odds—of the Cuban Revolution. The quiet desperation glimpsed in the faces of the people in the little fishing village of Cómo construir un barco also speaks volumes about the quandary of staying or leaving the island. And the failed encounter of The Illusion, between Barriga and her father, an exile in London, turns the dilemma uncomfortably personal. 8 FILMMAKERS Maria Augusta Ramos was born in Brasília (1964) but has lived in Holland for 20 years, becoming an odd-woman-out in Brazilian cinema since she belongs to none of the regional groups that make up the Latin American giant’s identity. Though a musician by training, her films have never had a music sound track, unless her use of direct sound recorded on location counts as music. Her previous films are Brasilia, um dia em fevreiro and the awardwinning Justiça. Miguel Gomes (Lisbon, 1972) broke new ground with his second feature, Aquele querido mês de agosto, straddling documentary and fiction on a route parallel to that of his countryman Pedro Costa. The film had considerable impact at Cannes and won the best film award in Buenos Aires. Despite its modest output (no more than a dozen films produced per year), Portugal has come of late to the forefront of world cinema. Yulene Olaizola (b. 1983) was still a student at Mexico’s Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica when she made her remarkably assured debut feature, Intimidades de Shakespeare y Víctor Hugo, winner of best film awards at the Lima and Buenos Aires film festivals. Olaizola was awarded the National Fund for Culture & Arts scholarship in 2005 and is currently writing a new feature film called Paraísos artificiales. Susana Barriga (Santiago de Cuba, 1981) made several shorts while a student at the International Film School at San Antonio de los Baños, revealing a remarkably original cinematic personality. Her graduation thesis, The Illusion, garnered the DAAD Prize for Best Short Film at the 2008 Berlin Film Festival, leading Barriga to be hailed as the brightest new talent to emerge from the island in many years. She is currently working on a new project in Berlin, on a grant from the festival. Maria Agusta Ramos Yulene Olaizola Vivi Tellas (Buenos Aires, 1955) was a figure of the Buenos Aires underground scene of the 1980s. Subsequently, she has broken with many conventions of the stage. As a director, she has explored the limits of theater in her series of plays labeled Teatro Malo and, lately, in the documentary theater of Proyecto Archivos. Her recent plays include Mi mamá y mi tía, Cozarinsky y su médico, Escuela de conducción, Mujeres guía, and Disc Jockey. She also has played a significant role as curator, creating the documentary theater series Biodrama at the Teatro Sarmiento in Buenos Aires. At the festival, Tellas offered an illustrated presentation, Biodrama: Documentary Theater, followed by discussion on the issue of performance and representation in the documentary genre. Miguel Gomes THE OTHER, THE SAME: THE SUBJECT OF DOCUMENTARY The Other has by tradition been the assumed subject of documentary. From Robert Flaherty’s seminal Nanook of the North to current TV fare, documentary filmmakers have brought home to our screens the spectacle of the Other: the Other defined as someone fundamentally different from ourselves, as a representative of a given category—be it the Indian, the Worker, the Madman—observed from outside. It is only quite recently that filmmakers have begun to see themselves portrayed in their relationship to the Other. The alien may turn out to be uncannily familiar. And just as pretending that I know the Other can be a variety of arrogance, to take for granted who I am may be self-delusion. Predicated on the complexity of the self—that of their subjects or of themselves—the work of the filmmakers featured in this year’s program inevitably challenges cultural assumptions and political imperatives both at home and abroad. The Other has different ways of rearing its head. Susana Barriga’s depiction of Cuban road workers in Patria, hauling rocks hopelessly, like Sisyphus, echoes her own failed attempts to reach out to her estranged father, a Cuban exile in London, in The Illusion. In Aquele querido mês de agosto, Miguel Gomes set out to find real people in the Arganil region of Portugal to cast as actors in a feature film. When the financing fell through, he decided to film a documentary instead, featuring those same people’s real lives. But fiction—the Other of documentary?—came back in through the rear door. In Intimidades de Shakespeare y Víctor Hugo, Yulene Olaizola undertook a portrait of her eccentric grandmother, who operates a rundown hostel on the corner of Shakespeare and Victor Hugo streets in Mexico. But the project took an unexpected turn. In Juizo, Maria Augusta Ramos describes the workings of a juvenile court in Rio, but the legal impossibility of filming minors led her to replace the young offenders with other kids from similar backgrounds. Vivi Tellas is not a filmmaker but a theater director. In a sense, theater may be seen as “the other” of documentary, which makes her “documentary theater” somewhat of a paradoxical proposition. El otro, el mismo. The title is borrowed from a collection of poems by Jorge Luis Borges, whose meditation on the metaphysics of identity will hopefully illuminate the proceedings. WWW.PRINCETON.EDU/PLAS 9 Photos courtesy of named individuals BY ANDRÉS DI TELLA FACULTY NEWS FROM CASH FLOW TO RHYME FLOW: MUSICAL SCHOLAR MANABE TAKES UNCONVENTIONAL PATH TO PRINCETON BY EMILY ARONSON time ethnomusicologist, studying the social and cultural aspects of music-making. Her research ranges from Japanese hip-hop and children’s songs to the influence of Italian opera on Latin boleros. “While my work involves a spectrum of musical styles and artists, the primary themes that interest me are using music to understand issues of globalization, as well as examining the interaction of music with language,” said Manabe, who is an assistant professor. In addition to teaching three courses this year, Manabe has organized two series of colloquia, on popular music and non-Western music, for faculty and students from various departments to share research and develop an appreciation for different methodologies used to study music. She also has brought in guest musicians for hands-on workshops long held aspiration of mine — something I had considered since college,” Manabe said. After a successful career in business, she felt that the time was finally right to pursue music studies full time. She earned her Ph.D. last year with a double concentration in ethnomusicology and music theory, then joined the Princeton music faculty in the fall. In her first year at the University, she quickly has generated interest across campus in her work on popular music in the West, Japan and Latin America. Manabe is the music department’s first full and public performances, and was among the co-organizers of the conference, “Intellectual Property and the Making and Marketing of Music in the Digital Age,” co-hosted by the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies, the Department of Music and the Center for Information Technology Policy. “Noriko has managed, in a very short time, to build synergy between music and other departments such as English, the Center for African American Studies and East Asian studies,” said Steven Mackey, professor and chair of the Department of Music. “She is a catalyst, spark- ing a campuswide awareness of the work that has already been going on in the department but may not have been fully acknowledged.” Her efforts also are introducing students to ideas about music from parts of the world not traditionally on the department’s musical map, Mackey said. “Japanese hip-hop, taiko drumming and Cuban music are a few of the areas that Noriko is taking us to that we’ve never been before,” he said. Musical research around the world Through her research, Manabe said she has kept up relationships with the contacts she made while she was working as an equity analyst covering technology and media companies. “Now I am going back to some of these companies in the music, Internet and media industries to study musical trends in Japan and the impact of corporate policies and infrastructure on music,” Manabe said. Her research also has led her on extensive travels throughout Latin America, where she has focused on examining connections between language and music. One of Manabe’s major projects in the region traced Cuban singer Silvio Rodriguez’s evolution as a protest songwriter to an artist who was embraced by the Castros’ government as a Cuban cultural ambassador. Although his lyrics have changed during the stages of his musical career, Manabe found it revealing that Rodriguez has continued to use the same musical patterns to convey certain sentiments such as resignation or postures such as didacticism. And while she continues to travel the world examining musical styles, Manabe said she is finding new insights and influences within the walls of her classroom. “Two of the classes I’ve taught here are not geared toward students who have studied music before. It is very interesting to see how students draw on their diverse backgrounds to interpret musical styles that they may not have heard before,” Manabe said. “You can also learn about new kinds of music from students — which I love, as a scholar of popular music.” Adapted from the Princeton University Bulletin 99(13), May 3, 2010. PROGRAM IN LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES NEWSLETTER 10 Photo by Denise Applewhite Noriko Manabe’s path to teaching music at Princeton is as unconventional and eclectic as the musical cultures and styles she studies. Manabe came to academia from the investment and consulting fields, where she was a leading analyst of the technology and media industries in Japan and often was cited in the press as an authority on major companies such as Sony and Nintendo. As she traveled around the world for business, she continued to feed her own love for music, growing increasingly fascinated by the cultural and social contexts of global music. Even as she excelled in the financial arena, Manabe held onto a lifelong desire to pursue the study of music more fully. In 2003, she decided to reinvent her career and enrolled in the City University of New York’s graduate program in music. “Going to graduate school in music was a Sociologist Portes wins Du Bois career award NEW FACULTY Nick Nesbitt, a Francophone literature scholar, has been named a professor of French and Italian. His appointment, effective Sept. 1, 2010, recently was approved by the Board of Trustees. Nesbitt’s research focuses on the intellectual history of the black Atlantic world. He wrote “Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature” and “Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment.” He also edited “Toussaint Louverture: The Haitian Revolution” and co-edited “Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Music.” Nesbitt will come to Princeton from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, where he has been a senior lecturer since 2007. He previously served for nine years as a faculty member at Miami University. A graduate of Colorado College, Nesbitt holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University. In Fall 2010 he will teach FRE 528 Francophone Literature and Culture Outside of France - Haiti and the Modes of Political Subjectivation. Portes is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also served as the president of the American Sociological Association in 1998-99. Born in Cuba, Portes studied at the University of Havana and Catholic University of Argentina in Buenos Aires before receiving his B.A. summa cum laude from Creighton University. He received an M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In addition to numerous visiting professorships, Portes has served on the faculty at the University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign, the University of Texas-Austin, Duke University and Johns Hopkins University. Reprinted with permission from http:// www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/ S26/59/42K10/index.xml?section=topstories Selected Recent Publications Economic Sociology: A Systematic Inquiry. (Princeton University Press, 2010). Las instituciones en el desarrollo latinoamericano: un estudio comparado. (Siglo XXI, 2009). “Migration & Social Change: Some Conceptual Reflections.” Journal of Ethnic & Migration Studies, 2010. [Spanish-language version: Revista Española de Sociologia (12, 2009). “Foreword.” International Migration in Cuba: Accumulation, Imperial Designs, & Transnational Social Fields by Margarita Cervantes-Rodríguez (Penn State, 2009). “Foreword: Policies & Preaching That Backfire: The American Experience.” In Getting Immigration Right: What Every American Needs to Know. C. Coates & P. Siavelis, eds. (Potomac Books, 2009). “Migration & Development: Reconciling Opposite Views.” Ethnic & Racial Studies 32, 2009. Alejandro Portes, Cristina Escobar, & Renelinda Arana. “Divided or Convergent Loyalties: The Political Incorporation Process of Latin American Immigrants in the United States.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology (50(2),2009). [Spanish-language translations in Dialogos Migrantes (3, 2009) and Nuevos retos del transnacionalismo en el estudio de las migraciones. C. Solé, S. Parella, & L. Cavalcanti, eds. (Madrid, 2009). Alejandro Portes, Patricia Fernández-Kelly, & William Haller. “The Adaptation of the Immigrant Second Generation in America: Theoretical Overview & Recent Evidence.” Journal of Ethnic & Migration Studies (35, 2009). [Portuguese language translation in Tempo Social 20, 2008; Spanishlanguage translation in Las migraciónes en el mundo: desafíos y esperanzas. F. Checa Olmos, J. C. Checa, & A. Arjona, eds. (Barcelona: 2009). WWW.PRINCETON.EDU/PLAS 11 Photo courtesy of Alejandro Portes Alejandro Portes, Princeton’s Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Sociology, is the 2010 recipient of the W.E.B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award from the American Sociological Association. A major honor in the field, the Du Bois award recognizes “outstanding commitment to the profession of sociology” and cumulative work that has “contributed in important ways to the advancement of the discipline.” Portes, an immigration scholar who joined the University in 1997, will accept the award at the association’s annual meeting this August in Atlanta. The Du Bois award committee cited Portes’ work, which has expanded to include children of immigrants, for its pioneering and wide-ranging nature. The committee also commended Portes for working collaboratively with senior and junior researchers in the international settings he studied. “Alejandro Portes is a world-renowned scholar of international migration, who, in the process of advancing the sociology of immigration, has forged numerous conceptual and methodological innovations,” said the award statement from committee chair Robin WagnerPacifici, the Gil and Frank Mustin Professor of Sociology at Swarthmore College. “Further, Portes’ scholarship has ranged across several major domains of sociology, from economic and political sociology to national development, urbanization, the informal economy, Latin American politics and class structures, and U.S.-Cuba relations.” Portes’ current research projects include studies on Latin American institutions and development; immigration and the U.S. health care system; and assimilation models in Spain. From 1999 to 2007, he served as the director of Princeton’s Center for Migration and Development, and he chaired the sociology department from 2003 to 2006. Portes is a prolific researcher, with more than 250 articles and book chapters to his name. Of his many books, “Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation” (2001) received the Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award and the William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki Distinguished Scholarship Award from the American Sociological Association; and “City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami” (1993) won the Anthony Leeds Award for best book on urban anthropology from the American Anthropological Association and the Robert E. Park Award for best book in urban sociology from the American Sociological Association. A Moment with... Marta Tienda Marta Tienda, the Maurice P. During Professor in Demographic Studies and director of the Program in Latino Studies, was born in rural Texas but grew up outside Detroit after her father, who emigrated from Mexico without documents, took a job in a steel mill. When her father was laid off, Tienda spent two summers picking crops as a farm laborer in northern Michigan. She came to Princeton in 1997 and served for four years as director of the Office of Population Research before becoming the founding director of the Program in Latino Studies in 2009. In addition to writing and editing several books of her own, she is the subject of a biography aimed at young readers, “People Person: The Story of Sociologist Marta Tienda,” published as part of the Women’s Adventures in Science series, underwritten by the National Academy of Sciences. The following is an interview conducted by Mark F. Bernstein ’83. MFB: Hispanics in the United States come from such a wide range of countries. Is there such a thing as a Hispanic community? MT: There is a Hispanic community the same way there is a black community. But the nomenclature of “the Hispanic community” presumes that there is one voice, and there isn’t. Broadly speaking, Hispanics are young, they share a common language, they tend to have low levels of education, and many are undocumented. Together, this represents a profile that differs from other pan-ethnic groups. MFB: How successful have Hispanics been at assimilating into American society? MT: The jury is still out. Many people judge the ability of Hispanics to assimilate based on the cross-section they see today, which includes a large share of immigrants. Upward mobility is occurring between the first and second generations, but there is mobility for most other groups, too, so the gaps between Hispanics and whites are widening, particularly in education. This is very problematic at a time when the returns to education are much higher than was the case in the 1960s or early 1970s. A high school education doesn’t get jobs that pay family wages today. MFB: Is there still such a thing as an American melting pot? MT: I think the melting pot is changing. Over the last few decades, the Hispanic population has experienced an unprecedented geographic scattering. It is unclear whether moving to new areas is going to facilitate integration or whether the problems we have experienced before will follow. We have seen a bit of both. In some places, Hispanic laborers have been welcomed, but when they bring their families along and try to enter the school system there is resistance. Some people — mainly workers who feel that they are being displaced — feel very threatened by Hispanic migration and immigration. Those with more education and greater economic security tend to see the Hispanic dispersal as an opportunity for cultural enrichment. MFB: How does Hispanic economic mobility compare to that of African-Americans? MT: Hispanics have always been intermediate between whites and African-Americans in social and economic status, but I see that as vulnerability. African-Americans surpassed Hispanics in college completion in the 1990 census. It’s partly because of the ways that Hispanics are experiencing education in this country. One of my big concerns is that bilingual education programs hold them back. We need to ensure that everyone acquires proficiency in English. I’m all for multiple languages, but what we are now producing are quasi-linguals who are not proficient either in Spanish or English. If you don’t master English in the early grades, you will fall further and further behind. Hispanics already have the highest dropout rates of any group in the United States, and if they go to college, they are much more likely to go to two-year rather than four-year institutions. MFB: Is bilingual education harmful? MT: If instruction is truly bilingual, where both languages are taught at the same level simultaneously so that proficiency is acquired from a very early age, I would support it. But that is not what we are getting. Total proficiency in English as early as possible is nonnegotiable, because without it you accumulate disadvantages. You fall further behind. In trying to be accommodating to Hispanic kids, we have been creating divisions and reifying inequality. It’s all well-meaning, but there are also perverse incentives to keep kids in bilingual programs because school districts get extra state and federal money for bilingual education. Yet, we either blame the kids and say that they can’t learn English, or blame the parents and say they are isolating their kids by speaking Spanish at home. MFB: Do you have concerns about the census this year? MT: The census has become increasingly political, particularly for Hispanics. What I find very troublesome is that a group of evangelical Hispanic churches is trying to orchestrate a boycott of the census by Hispanics unless an amnesty for the undocumented is approved. Using the census as a weapon is self-defeating. Congressional districts are going to be drawn around representation of all persons. If Hispanics boycott the census, this diminishes our ability to influence the political process. The effects of not being counted will reverberate for 10 years. MFB: Do Hispanics have political influence equal to their numbers? MT: It’s probably not commensurate with their numbers, but that is partly because Hispanics are younger on average. Younger people either can’t yet vote or don’t vote. Immigration was the largest component of Hispanic growth through the 1990s, but in the current decade demographic growth has been driven by increased fertility among people who are already in this country. Even if immigration stopped altogether, the foundations of Hispanic population growth already are seeded. Most people who think about immigration as a driver of Hispanic population growth are looking in the rearview mirror. The future impacts will be in the schools. We have an obligation to invest in that future generation because, as I like to say, the American population as a whole is aging. What language would you want that person who pushes your wheelchair to speak to you? Do you want to take another language so you can speak to that health-care worker? MFB: The Hispanic vote has been increasingly important. What are some characteristics of Hispanic voters? MT: Hispanic political ideology is different from other groups’ in a couple of different ways. One is that, on average, Hispanics are more likely to support higher taxes if they can get better services and schools. But they are very conservative on family issues. The Bush administration won some Hispanic votes by emphasizing family values. Gay marriage, for example, is not something that gets a lot of support within the Hispanic community. But many Hispanics have been turned away from the Republican Party because of the party’s stance on immigration. MFB: What is the Princeton experience like for Hispanic students? MT: I worked with a team to start a Latino studies program at Princeton, but worried about being perceived as participating in identity politics. I did not want to be one of “them” doing work about “them.” If I had my way, I’d like to see the Program in American Studies broadened to include Asian-American studies, African-American studies, and Latino studies, so that programmatic content can evolve as our society changes. I will consider it a success when the Latino Studies program attracts a diverse group of students. We have a lot to do yet. We have three Hispanic student organizations on campus (Acción Latina, the Chicano Caucus, and LUNA), and there has (CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE) PROGRAM IN LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES NEWSLETTER 12 (CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE) been inadequate coordination. I’m going to see if I can’t get them to come together and Lessons from Financial Crises INTERVIEW BY EMILY ARONSON José Scheinkman, the Theodore A. Wells ‘29 Professor of Economics, taught a course on “Financial Crises” for the first time in spring semester 2010. He said there are similarities among the current U.S. recession and other economic crises in modern history, including bad and lax regulation of the financial industry. EA: How does the current global financial crisis fit into the curriculum? JS: The unfortunate opportunity, so to speak, presented by the financial crisis that began in August 2007 led us to design this course. It brings together elements of previous offering by the Department of Economics, but with a different focus and more depth. My colleagues and I have taught courses that examined past financial crises, but this is the first time we have one so focused on contemporary crisis. In the class, we are using economic theory and models to study the causes of financial crises, and discussing the effectiveness of policy responses. We start with an overview of the major economic crises in the U.S. and internationally during the past century, and then move to the present day. Studying past crises can inform our understanding of what is happening in financial markets today, although this course is primarily focused on models developed by economists to understand different kinds of financial crises. The challenging times we’re currently experiencing tend to attract the intellectually curious to economics, and my goal is for students to use economics as an engine of inquiry to better understand what is happening more broadly in the world today. EA: Are there similarities among the current U.S. recession and other economic crises in modern history? JS: Yes, many of today’s aspects remind us of things policymakers should have learned from previous experiences. That is something that I emphasize to my students: When you look at the historical evidence, you find many recent risks in the U.S. economy that were repetitions of things that happened in the past. Bad and lax regulation of the financial industry played a big role in this and previous crises. Regulation tends to ebb and flow. During the past 10 to 15 years there was a form a coalition. I’d like to build bridges to the Hispanic graduate students, as well. Reprinted with permission from the Princeton Alumni Weekly, January 13, 2010. loosening of government regulation of banks and investment firms, which allowed financial institutions to take more risks. There also are common elements of moral hazard, when people took actions expecting that they would not suffer the consequences in the case of a disaster, but would benefit from the upside. There also is a recurring element of financial bubbles, when prices for certain assets rapidly increase because their value is overestimated, followed by a bursting of the bubble and a sharp decline in prices. EA: You and other Princeton faculty have focused research on financial market bubbles. Why is understanding bubbles so important? JS: Financial bubbles often predate periods of economic crisis, although the severity of the crises has varied in degree. The current economic crisis was preceded by the credit market and real estate bubbles, and in the early 2000s we had the “dot-com” bubble when Internet-related stocks boomed and then crashed. Financial bubbles historically are linked to new technology, such as railroads, electricity, or automobiles. The recent credit market bubble occurred at a time when new methods of financial engineering improved risk management. The introductions of these new technologies often coincide with speculative periods that drive up prices of associated assets. Financial experts working in areas related to these new technologies have an incentive to exaggerate values, and investors often do not understand how much an innovation is really worth because it’s new. The work being done in our department is focused on understanding the logic behind financial bubbles. It is not necessarily about predicting when bubbles may occur or implode, but knowing the kinds of symptoms financial bubbles generate. Policymakers could watch these symptoms and take preventive measures to limit possible market fallout. Even if you can’t detect a financial bubble for sure and even if there are costs to intervening in the situation, it doesn’t mean you should not do it. It is for the same reason you do not cross a busy street even if you are not certain that you will be a hit by a car. EA: How do you see the United States pulling out of the recession based on the lessons from past crises? JS: Every crisis is a little different, so it’s difficult to say certain things need to happen before we get better. Still, we do know that the size of economic crises varies a lot, and a big variable is how deeply a crisis affects a country’s banking system. Starting from the premise that a modern economy needs a financial system that works well, which the economic data show, the question for the future is: What are the conditions that would make the U.S. banking system more immune to the kind of disasters it has had recently? We also can examine why some countries’ economies fared better than the United States’ during this latest crisis. We talk about lax regulation as one of the causes, and we see that countries that had more rigorous banking regulations, such as Canada, experienced a milder crisis. While part of the story is still being told, the evidence seems to call for a system in which financial institutions are better regulated and are restricted in the kinds of risks they take. This time, taxpayer money covered the losses that major financial institutions incurred by taking large risks, and that is the worst of all worlds. Reprinted with permission from www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S26/86/62A45/ index.xml WWW.PRINCETON.EDU/PLAS 13 Photo by Brian Wilson TIENDA BIEHL AWARDED WELLCOME MEDAL FOR MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY João Biehl, professor of anthropology and co-director of the Program on Global Health and Health Policy, was awarded the Wellcome Medal for Anthropology as Applied to Medical Problems for his book Will to Live: AIDS Therapies & the Politics of Survival. Sponsored by the Wellcome Trust, this award is given biennially by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland “for a recent body of published work which makes, as a whole, a significant contribution to research in anthropology as applied to medical problems.” The Wellcome Medal is one of the highest awards in anthropology, and the winning book is entered into the anthropology collection at the British Museum. Biehl shared the Wellcome Medal with Ron Barrett, author of Aghor Medicine: Pollution, Death and Healing in Northern India. In Will to Live, Biehl describes how Brazil became the first developing country to universalize access to life-saving AIDS therapies and why this policy is so difficult to implement among poor Brazilians with HIV-AIDS. Biehl collaborated with photographer Torben Eskerod on the book, which was published by Princeton University Press in 2007. In the official award letter, the judges commented that “Biehl’s study of AIDS and HIV patients in Brazil is a beautiful and methodologically bold work. The study spans a 10–year period and develops a life history approach which moves seamlessly between the personal and the institutional and global practices shaping the destinies of AIDS and HIV patients. By using theory to understand rather than dominate his materials Biehl enhances our understanding both of the lives lived and the global forces that shape them.” Biehl joined the Princeton faculty in 2001, and his research has been supported by Princeton’s Grand Challenges Program as well as grants from the Guggenheim, MacArthur, Wenner-Gren and Ford foundations. His previous book, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment, focused on mental illness and received numerous awards. His current book project is a history of a religious war among German immigrants in 19th-century Brazil. He also is editing a book on evidence, theory, and advocacy in global health. João Biehl was also named the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Anthropology (effective July 1, 2010). Adapted from http://www.princeton.edu/ main/news/archive/S26/65/34K91/index.xml Scholars from Latin America, the U.S., and Europe gathered in Princeton, September 18–19, to participate in the PIIRS Advanced Seminar “Paper Leviathans: State Building in Latin America and Spain, 1810–1930.” The workshop, the first of two, was led by Miguel Centeno, Princeton University professor of sociology and international affairs, and Agustín Ferraro, an associate professor of Latin American studies at the University of Salamanca, Spain. According to Centeno, the aim of the seminar is to better understand the role played by classic liberal doctrine in political and economic development from the birth of these states to the collapse of the oligarchic republics in the first third of the 20th century. A secondary goal is to create a network of academics working on the analysis of state building in Ibero-America. Universities from the U.S., Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Spain, Germany, and the U.K. were represented. “These issues are important for the study of contemporary Latin America,” says Centeno. “The region’s current political and economic development eerily parallels the 19th-century experience. Now, as then, we see significant commodity-fueled growth that has not alleviated the inequality or long-standing poverty. Latin American states remain weak or contested. The exceptional path of Spain, and, to a lesser extent, of Chile, cries for explanation.” In Princeton, the scholars presented papers on five themes: developing a state of law, the state as developer, professional bureaucracies, the impact of ideas, and national and political identities. A portion of the seminar was devoted to comparative perspectives and provided participants the opportunity to discuss the experiences of other regions in which state building was more successful than in Latin America. The seminar’s next event will be a public conference in Salamanca in fall 2010 to present the finished papers. A selection of the papers will be published in 2011. PIIRS Advanced Seminar funding will also support construction of a website that will provide public access to statistical sources and bibliographical materials, among other things. PIIRS director Katherine Newman notes that “it is important for scholars to be able to work on important problems like this one face to face, to be able to dig deep into the topic and debate their conclusions. PIIRS support made it possible to surmount the limitations of ‘e-mail collaborations’ and give our colleagues a chance to work together the old-fashioned way. I expect a remarkable volume to result.” The PIIRS Advanced Seminars support faculty research and new collaborations in the humanities, sciences, engineering, and architecture. The Advanced Seminar on state building is the third to receive funding since the program was initiated. The first, held in fall 2008, was led by Alejandro Portes, the Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Sociology, and focused on institutions and development in Latin America. The second, held last spring, was led by Frank von Hippel, a professor of public and international affairs, and examined the transition to a nuclear-free world. Reprinted from PIIRS NEWSLETTER Fall 2009, with permission. PROGRAM IN LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES NEWSLETTER 14 Photo Credits: (top) courtesy of João Biehl; (bottom) by Denise Applewhite STATE BUILDING IS FOCUS OF PIIRS ADVANCED SEMINAR; COLLABORATION IS A GOAL FREUD AND MEXICO, VIA VIENNA BY KARIN DIENST How did a scholar of modern Spanish America become interested in Freud? RG: For the past three years I have been writing a book on Freud and Mexico. Part of it is about the reception of Freud. Who was reading Freud in the 1920s? How were books like Totem and Taboo read by Mexican poets and artists? Part of it is about Freud’s view of Mexico. Freud collected Mexican antiquities, read Mexican books—in Spanish—and corresponded with Mexican disciples. Surprisingly, no one had explored this intriguing relationship. There are books about Freud in Russia, Freud in France, even one about Freud in Argentina called Freud in the Pampas, but there was virtually nothing about Freud in Mexico, so I decided it would make a good book project. Has living in Vienna helped you understand Freud’s relationship to Mexico? Absolutely! Not many people realize that the histories of Austria and Mexico have been intertwined for more than 500 years, and that the two countries have had a complex—and at times traumatic—relationship. It was a Hapsburg King, Charles V, who ruled Spain during the Conquest of Mexico in the 1520s, and many of the Aztec treasures taken by the Spaniards made their way to Vienna, where they can still be seen today. And in the 19th century, during one of the most surreal episodes of history, another Austrian, Maximilian von Hapsburg, the younger brother of Kaiser Franz Josef, became emperor of Mexico. He was shot by a firing squad in 1867—a scene that was painted by Manet—despite pleas to the Mexican government by figures including Victor Hugo and Queen Victoria. And in 1938, Mexico was the only country to present a formal protest at the Society of Nations against the Nazi annexation of Austria, the event that led to Freud’s exile. To commemorate this expression of solidarity, Vienna named one of its squares “Mexikoplatz” after the end of the war. Living in Vienna has helped me to understand the relations between these two cultures, and it inspired me to write a chapter called “Freud’s Mexican Vienna,” where I document all the “Mexican” places Freud would have encountered during his daily walks in the city. What is it like to work in Berggasse 19? It is an extremely moving experience. The first time I entered the doorway and walked up the stairs to Freud’s apartment, I thought to myself: This is the birthplace of so many ideas that transformed the world. So much of 20th-century culture—the talking cure, surrealism, the films of Luis Buñuel, our approach to the study of literature at Princeton, everything down to the humor of New Yorker cartoons—trace their origin to this modest apartment in Berggasse. And what strikes me most is to think that Freud altered the course of history without weapons, money or power; all he had were ideas and words. It was his passionate relation to “the life of the mind,” as Hannah Arendt called it, that changed the world—and it was all done from a desk in this very apartment. batical year. In the evenings I usually attend lectures at the university or at the Sigmund Freud Museum; the last talk I heard was by an economist who did a psychoanalytic study of “Overconfidence and the Financial Markets.” And a few times a week I have dinner at one of Vienna’s famous cafés, like the Landtman, or go to a concert at the Philharmonic. Do you expect to teach about this work when you return to Princeton? Yes! I already have a few ideas for courses. One will be “Freud at Large,” a seminar devoted to the readings of Freud offered by artists and writers in Latin America. The other will focus on the literary and artistic representation of the execution of Maximilian. Mexican novelists have been fascinated by this episode since the 19th century, and there is a vast corpus of novels, plays, poems, paintings—even an opera—that tells us much about the relationship between literature and history. Adapted from the Princeton University Bulletin 99(5), November 9, 2009. Interview conducted by Karen Dienst. What is a typical day like for you in Vienna? I have a quick breakfast in my apartment, where from my window I can see the Stefansdom, Vienna’s cathedral. I then head to the National Library, located in a section of the Hofburg, the Imperial Palace, where I read and write for most of the day—this is the beauty of a sab- WWW.PRINCETON.EDU/PLAS 15 Photos courtesy of the Sigmund Freud Foundation A scholar of modern Spanish America, Rubén Gallo is the author of Freud’s Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis, forthcoming from MIT Press, which explores Freud’s relation to Mexico. His other publications in English include Mexican Modernity: The Avant-Garde & the Technological Revolution, which won the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize in 2005, and New Tendencies in Mexican Art (2004). Gallo is the 2009 Fulbright-Freud Visiting Lecturer in Psychoanalysis and spent fall 2009 in Vienna as a guest of the Sigmund Freud Foundation, located at Berggasse 19. Freud lived there for 47 years before emigrating to London after Austria’s 1938 annexation by Nazi Germany. Gallo had an office in what was once the bedroom of Minna Bernays, Freud’s sister-in-law. In addition to conducting research at the Sigmund Freud Museum, he gave a series of lectures on Freud’s relation to Mexico and taught a seminar at the University of Vienna. NEW GLOBAL COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH FUND PROJECTS SELECTED BY NICK DIULIO Three teams of Princeton scholars have been selected by the University's Council for International Teaching and Research to receive research network grants for new studies of migrant children, the global economic crisis and the international language of photography. Funded through the Princeton Global Collaborative Research Fund, which facilitates international scholarly networks that enable Princeton to engage with centers of learning worldwide, these research networks will begin in fall 2010. The grants total $532,500 over a three-year period. The Princeton Global Collaborative Research Fund allocates grants to sustain collaborative initiatives of significant global scholarship and to promote career development of scholars at all stages with the purpose of enhancing Princeton scholars' participation in global research. The fund is part of a series of international initiatives outlined by President Shirley M. Tilghman and Provost Christopher Eisgruber in fall 2007. Last year the fund's first grants were awarded to six research networks that will continue through 2012. Two of the three teams include members of PLAS’s Associated Faculty: • Migrant Youth and Children of Migrants in a Globalized World (Marta Tienda and Sara McLanahan, sociology and Wilson School; and Alicia Adsera, Wilson School). In response to global economic and political integration, international migration has been rising. Today, between 9 and 10 percent of the population living in developed regions is foreign-born, compared to 1.3 percent in developing regions. Women and children represent a large share of international migrants. This project seeks to study children's involvement in international migration and its consequences for their psychosocial, physical and economic well-being. The group will convene interdisciplinary teams of researchers from research hubs in the United Kingdom, Spain, Australia and at the Wilson School to foster crossnational comparative research about the well-being of children and youth with migration backgrounds. • The Itinerate Languages of Photography: Images, Media and Archives in an International Context (Eduardo Cadava, English; and Gabriela Nouzeilles, Spanish and Portuguese languages and cultures). Photographs communicate across historical periods, national borders and media outlets. This project will study these “itinerate languages” of modern photography and how they operate in international and global networks of collaboration and exchange. Scholars will address questions relating to the unprecedented speed of this language’s spread, as well as examine the consequences of artificial memory and modern forms of archiving. Tracing the movement of photographs within and between different national photographic traditions -- especially within the Latin American and Hispanic context -- the research group hopes to understand not only the shifting contours of this phenomenon, but also the role and place of images within it. Adapted from http://www.princeton.edu/ main/news/archive/S27/60/03K12/index. xml?section=topstories FACULTY MEMBERS RECEIVED PRESIDENT’S AWARDS FOR DISTINGUISHED TEACHING AT COMMENCEMENT CEREMONIES thought.” As a pioneering figure in the field of modern Latin American literary studies, Díaz Quiñones seeks to foster understanding of the diverse cultures of the Spanish-speaking world in his research and teaching. “Arcadio taught me that the best teachers assume the challenge of helping their students avoid hollow or stereotyped views of other cultures and traditions,” wrote one former graduate student. Students noted Díaz Quiñones’ unyielding dedication, citing examples such as returning to campus from a sabbatical to attend a play directed by one of his undergraduates, and providing graduate students with access to his private collection of work by Puerto Rican authors for their research. Students, in turn, are inspired to tackle the intellectual challenges he sets before them. “Growing up, I had read Spanish literature in translation, never having the courage to grab an original, but now with the encouragement of Professor Díaz-Quiñones, I was reading Cesar Vallejo and Xavier Villauruttia,” wrote one current undergraduate. “The lectures he Faculty members recognized with President's Awards for Distinguished Teaching by President Shirley M. Tilghman (right) were (from left): P. Adams Sitney, Jeffrey Stout, Erhan Çinlar and Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones. The awards were established in 1991 through gifts by Princeton alumni Lloyd Cotsen of the class of 1950 and John Sherrerd of the class of 1952 to recognize excellence in undergraduate and graduate teaching by Princeton faculty members. Each winner receives a cash prize of $5,000, and his or her department receives $3,000 for the purchase of new books. A committee of faculty, undergraduate and graduate students and academic administrators selected the winners from nominations by current students, faculty colleagues and alumni. presented about the context and contours of each poem motivated me to write my own in Spanish and English.” A colleague in the Program in Latin American Studies, where Díaz Quiñones is an associated faculty member, wrote, “It was tempting to make anything Arcadio taught a prerequisite for my courses. These students have an engagement, an excitement and an appetite that is just remarkable.” Adapted from http://www.princeton. edu/main/news/archive/S27/54/11K66/ index.xml?section=topstories PROGRAM IN LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES NEWSLETTER 16 Photo by Denise Applewhite Díaz Quiñones, who has taught at Princeton since 1983, will retire at the end of this academic year. His introductory classes on Latin American literature and poetry are considered “legendary” by students and colleagues. His undergraduate and graduate courses have included “Literature and Memory in Latin America and the Caribbean,” “Modern Hispanic-Caribbean Poetry,” “19thand 20th-Century Latin American Thought” and “Literature of the Cuban Revolution.” Students and colleagues noted that Díaz-Quiñones’ lectures are a form of poetry in their own right. “There are very few professors who can match Arcadio’s remarkable, mesmeric teaching talents and the profound influence he has had on the hundreds of students he has taught,” wrote one colleague. Also, a former graduate student wrote, “His words follow a deliberate trajectory, a graceful arc that moves with not only direction and determination, but also form and elegance,” and added that, “Complex ideas are rendered succinctly, and his listeners absorb and appreciate them in the moment as part of a performance of Arcadio Díaz Quiñones Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones is one of the finest and most prominent Caribbean public intellectuals of his time, a talented writer and scholar whose essays already have become classics in the Latin American and Latino/a modern literary canon, and an extraordinary teacher who has inspired generations of undergraduate and graduate students at Princeton and elsewhere. Arcadio earned the B.A. and M.A. in Hispanic studies from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, and completed his graduate training at the Universidad Central de Madrid, Spain, with a doctoral dissertation on the uses of the Spanish language in 16th- century colonial archival documents, under the supervision of the legendary Spanish scholar Rafael Lapesa. He joined the Princeton University faculty in 1983, after having taught at the Universidad de Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras. In recognition of the excellence of his scholarship and teaching, he was named the Emory L. Ford Professor of Spanish in 1999. He also served as director of the Program in Latin American Studies at Princeton for six years, when with extraordinary determination and inspirational leadership he vigorously transformed the program into one of the strongest and most visible programs on campus, with a stellar interdisciplinary team of faculty members and a thriving community of undergraduate and graduate students. Arcadio’s accomplishments as a scholar and essayist are many and varied. His main fields of interest have been Latin American cultural and intellectual history and Caribbean poetry. He has devoted many articles to the role of poets and intellectuals in Hispanic-Caribbean society, including Luis Palés Matos, Antonio S. Pedreira, and Pedro Henríquez Ureña. Among his many contributions to Caribbean intellectual and literary history are his polished editions of works by Caribbean writers and public intellectuals such as Luis Rafael Sánchez, Tomás Blanco, Cintio Vitier, and José Luis González. His publications include EI almuerzo en la hierba (1982); an edition of EI prejuicio racial en Puerto Rico, by Tomás Blanco (1985); an edition of works by Luis Lloréns Torres, Verso y prosa (1986); a study on the Cuban poet Cintio Vitier: La memoria integradora (1987); and an edition of Sánchez’s Puerto Rican classic La guaracha del Macho Camacho (2003). But it is perhaps within the long and prestigious tradition of the Latin American essay where Arcadio has left his most indelible mark, with classics such as La memoria rota: ensayos sobre cultura y política (1993) and El arte de bregar: ensayos (2000), both preoccupied with tracing the elusive archive of experiences born from a long and contradictory colonial history. El arte de bregar offers a dazzling exploration of the Puerto Rican local uses of the word bregar as a symptomatological signifier condensing the traumatic traces of a Caribbean political unconscious. In Sobre los principios: los intelectuales caribeños y la tradición, published in 2006, Arcadio directs his erudition and elegant writing to the study of the anxious relationship of Caribbean writers with the notion of tradition, as it was conceived by Latin American leading intellectuals such as Pedro Henríquez Ureña, José Martí, Fernando Ortiz, Ramiro Guerra y Sánchez, Antonio S. Pedreira, and Tomás Blanco, or figures related to the Hispanic transatlantic such as the Spaniard Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, who was interested in the role of the last Spanish colonies in modern Hispanism. In Arcadio’s exquisite analysis, Caribbean intellectuals see themselves confronted with a continuous dilemma between a sense of belonging to a “Hispanic” common tradition and the threat of its dissolution, which forced them to re-visit over and over the question of the origins of a national culture. Besides being a distinguished scholar, Arcadio has been an extraordinary teacher. He has always stressed that teaching is one of the highest and most challenging forms of intellectual engagement. Whether leading a graduate seminar on the question of memory and power, analyzing a poem by Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, or directing a senior thesis or a doctoral thesis, he has brought the excitement of scholarship and the passion of literary writing to all his students. Two of his regular offerings at Princeton, “Introduction to Spanish American Literature” and “Introduction to Latin American Poetry,” became legendary courses within the undergraduate community. For many students, the “Princeton experience” was not complete until they had the opportunity to attend Arcadio’s famous lectures. The powerful, enduring effects of his commitment to teaching have created a vast web of enthusiastic and grateful heirs and disciples, forever touched by his knowledge, his wit, and the love of learning. Adapted from text written by Gabriela Nouzeilles, found in Princeton University Honors Faculty Members Receiving Emeritus Status, May 2010. THE ART OF LA BREGA (Fragments) When and how did the concept of bregar (with its complex meanings as coping, dealing, handling, withstanding, resolving, surviving) become Puerto Rican currency? Bregar, a word both witty and wise, hovers above the many stages of Puerto Rican life, in Cidra and Cabo Rojo on the Island as much as in such outposts of the Diaspora as Hartford and Newark. Men and women use the word incessantly and deploy it with freedom and intelligence. Puerto Ricans are forever in the brega (in the lurch), forever vulnerable and alert. And should an outcome prove disappointing, they disparage those who show themselves incapable or inept at maneuvering the skills of bregar (quienes no bregan o no saben bregar). Mastery of these skills, on the other hand, elicits unstinting praise. Bregar is, one could say, another system of knowledge, a diffuse and subtle method of navigating the day to day, in which all things are extremely precarious, unstable and violent as attested to by the history of twentieth century Puerto Rican migration and as continues to be the case throughout the entire width and length of the Island. More often than not, Puerto Ricans will respond to a polite and ritualistic ¿Como estás? with a laconic or playful rendition of Aquí, en la brega (hanging in there, or, perhaps more literally, here, in the thick of things), an acquired phrase as predictable as a musical refrain (pie forzado). La brega is a way of being and not Photo credits: (top) by Denise Applewhite; (bottom) from Wikipedia BY ARCADIO DÍAZ QUIÑONES (CONTINUED ON PAGE 45) WWW.PRINCETON.EDU/PLAS 17 RECENT FACULTY WRITINGS BY STAN KATZ BRAINSTORM Stan Katz is a lecturer with the rank of professor in public and international affairs and a PLAS faculty associate; he also directs the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School. He is a past president of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society for Legal History. He comments frequently on policy issues relating to higher education, particularly liberal education, and on the humanities and social sciences, philanthropy, scholarly relations with Cuba, and the interplay of civil society, constitutionalism, and democracy. And on his beloved Chicago Cubs. The following entries appeared during fall 2009 and spring 2010 on Katz’s chronicle.com blog. NOVEMBER 29, 2009 QUICK TRIP TO HAVANA I made a quick trip to Havana just before Thanksgiving. I had two objectives. The first was to complete arrangements for the Woodrow Wilson School undergraduate seminar that will be held at the University of Havana this spring. Each of our WWS juniors must take what we call a Policy Task Force each term, in order to learn the techniques of public-policy analysis. We offer several of these PTF’s abroad, with our students enrolling in other host university courses for the remainder of their program. Some, but not all, of these PTF’s are taught in local languages, and the one in Havana will be in Spanish. It will be organized by the Cuban Center for Demography (CEDEM), and will focus on a variety of Cuban human migration problems. We have nine students signed up, and I think they are going to have a very good experience at the University. Several other U.S. universities are running programs at the University of Havana, and I was impressed by their quality when I visited them last spring. My second purpose was to assist the Ford Foundation in expanding its programming in Cuba. I chair the Working Group on Cuba for ACLS-SSRC. This is a group Ken Prewitt and I established when we were the presidents of the two organizations in 1997, hoping to encourage better academic contact between the two countries. The Working Group was initially quite active, but as political relations between the two countries deteriorated in the late 1990s, we have found it more and more difficult to mount programs that comply with the legal requirements of both countries, though in recent years we have emphasized cultural heritage preservation work in Cuban libraries and archives with some success. I keep hoping for improvement in political relations between the U.S. and Cuba, but so far there has been little change under the Obama administration. Still, we are committed to keep trying to do something useful, and I was gratified to find that the new president of the Ford Foundation was interested in expanding its work in Cuba. Mario Bronfman, the Ford rep in Mexico City (himself a distinguished medical sociologist), has responsibility for Ford’s Cuba funding, and wants to increase his Cuban programming. So on this trip, Sarah Doty, the incredibly able SSRC staffer for the Working Group, and I arranged to meet Bronfman in Havana to investigate possible convergences between the Foundation’s interests and those of the Cuban academic community. We had a series of interesting meetings. Sunday night we had dinner with the Cuban representative to the U.N. Population Fund (and a former graduate student of Bronfman’s in Mexico). Monday we spent at a fascinating German arts organization, the Fundación Ludwig, and later had dinner with the Foreign Secretary of the Cuban Academy of Sciences (the formal SSRC partner organization in Cuba). Tuesday we visited the University of Havana both to discuss the WWS program this spring and to explore possible U.S, research collaboration on problems of human migration. Then we visited a new university institute on human sexuality directed by Mariela Castro (Raul Castro’s daughter). At that point I had to leave for the airport, while Sarah and Mario went on to the well-known and highly-regard Pedro Kouri Institute, Cuba’s leading tropical public health research institute. We’ll have to wait to see what develops from these contacts, but they are promising. My trip began last Sunday when my taxi driver overslept and did not turn up at 5:15 a.m. to take me to Newark airport (I jumped into my car and just made the flight). It ended when I discovered at José Marti airport in Havana that I had lost my exit visa. My first thought was that I was going to have a much longer stay in Cuba than I had intended. But my next thought, that the Cubans wouldn’t know what to do with me if they kept me, proved correct. So I arrived back in Princeton at 1 a.m. last Wednesday, ready to help prepare for our eight Thanksgiving guests! FEBRUARY 16, 2010 WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO «INTERNATIONALIZE» HIGHER ED? Apparently one of those large associations of higher education administrators, this one dealing with “international education,” has been meeting in Washington. I use quotations around “international education,” since the term does not have a fixed meaning—and I am pretty sure that it means something different to me than it does to the Association of International Education Administrators. Or to Martha Kanter, the Obama under secretary of education, who told the meeting that the administration is committed to internationalizing American education from K through 16. The Chronicle report on the meeting quotes Kanter as announcing that “international education cannot be seen as an add-on…. The skills and knowledge acquired in international education are the same skills graduates need to succeed in the economy.” Speaking today at the same conference, Nancy Zimpher, president of SUNY, urged participants to act to implement international-education programs on their campuses. Zimpher stressed that “universities’ international work had to be done in the context of trade and immigration policy.” According to The Chronicle, Zimpher concluded that “vision trumps everything.” Indeed, but whose vision? What vision? Judging by the excerpts in The Chronicle, the vision of “international education” at the AIEA meeting is crudely utilitarian—education as a strategy for economic growth. I can understand why government officials and public university presidents feel the need to make such arguments, but I hope they also have a broader and deeper sense of the cognitive potential of international education. The skills needed to succeed in the economy are indeed appropriately taught in our universities, but if those skills are too narrowly construed they will not be as useful as their proponents claim. We have been discussing international education for many years, and “internationalization” has been one of the poster children for educational leadership for the past quarter-century, but we are still not agreed on what the markers of such education might be. Study abroad? Foreign-language acquisition? Knowledge of “foreign” cultures? Internationalized faculties and student bodies? Internationalization of curricula? Each of those approaches has its proponents, and one might name other approaches, but there is no consensus as to what these phrases mean. What should we do to “internationalize” the curriculum? How should (CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE) PROGRAM IN LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES NEWSLETTER 18 BRAINSTORM (CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE) we present foreign cultures? And so forth. Further, what programmatic steps must be taken to implement internationalization on our campuses? Do we have adequate faculty resources for teaching about the world outside our borders? Area studies have been dramatically weakened, for instance, and have tended to disappear in many social science fields—would Henry Rosovsky, a specialist on Japan, get tenure in today’s Harvard Economics Department? Is the Fulbright Program as effective in supporting the foreign area training of American graduate students as it once was? What sorts of foreign study programs are educationally most effective—or should we simply be concerned to get American students out of the United States for at least a year? More of our students are studying abroad, and at some level that must be a positive development, but are we doing all that we might to enhance their understanding of the experience? Does it matter where they go to study abroad? Are we truly succeeding in encouraging our students to acquire deep facility in foreign languages, especially the less commonly learned languages? Or, on a completely different level, are American universities playing a truly active (and reactive) role in the international educational arena? I certainly agree with President Zimpher that vision is the key, but her vision of internationalization is not mine. What concerns me is enhancing the cognitive experience of undergraduates, and I would prioritize those programs that address student learning directly. Until students have deeply internationalized cognitive experiences, they will not fully benefit from international education. Au fond, I think we have to think and talk about the problem as educators, not marketers. MARCH 11, 2010 TRAVEL TO CUBA For those of us who are committed to the notion that it is important for the United States to open up intellectual and cultural relations with Cuba, the last year has been quite frustrating. We had hoped that the Obama administration would reject the exceptionally restrictive policies of George W. Bush’s presidency since Obama would not be as self-evidently obligated to the Cuban-American hardliners as Bush had been. Indeed, since a Latin American summit was scheduled to take place only a month after President Obama’s inauguration, we thought there was a good chance that the new admin- istration would signal its commitment to open engagement with the southern hemisphere by announcing that it was abandoning most or all of the Bush restrictions on travel by Americans to Cuba. But of course Senator Menendez lost no time in signaling that he would use his considerable power to oppose any relaxation of the Bush policies, and the new policy announced by Secretary of State Clinton merely removed restrictions on Cuban American family travel and remittances—in other words, the Obama policy was basically a return to the policies of President Clinton, which advocates of openness (like myself) had thought needlessly restrictive. There has been considerable pressure on Congress to lift the travel restrictions and to increase U.S. food sales to Cuba, thanks to an unlikely coalition of advocates of more open cultural and political relations with advocates of increased commercial relations between Cuba and the U.S. There was in fact a hearing in the House on H.R.4645, a bill to open travel to all U.S. citizens and to facilitate food sales. There have been quite a few votes for such bills, but none has passed in both Houses, and the administration has yet to signal its support for a new beginning in Cuba policy. On March 9, Paul Basken covered for the Chronicle a meeting in Washington of the Emergency Coalition to Defend Educational Travel (ECDET), an informal group, largely of university faculty, that was formed in 2004 in response to the announcement of new restrictions on travel by the Bush administration (admission: I have been a supporter of ECDET). The meeting (which I could not attend) was presumably aimed at supporting the pending legislation in the House. Basken reports learning that “only 63 American students from 10 universities” are now studying in Cuba. If so, a high proportion are the nine Princeton students in my department who are currently enrolled at the University of Havana—and who, so far as I can tell, are having a very good academic experience there. The point is that the Bush regulations forbade short visits by student groups, such as the 15 or 20 students Princeton’s Program in Latin American Studies used to send during the spring break, and permitted students only to study in Cuba by registering in a Cuban institution for at least 10 weeks. This policy has been continued by the Obama administration. But American institutions, faculty and students are also hampered by the licensing procedures maintained by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) at Treasury, by the visa procedures maintained by the State Department, and more. All of these have made it difficult for American faculty and students to go to Cuba to do research, study and the like. Basken reports some skepticism that it is worthwhile for American faculty to attempt to do research in Cuba on the grounds that the Cuban government makes it impossible to do “real research.” There is some truth to such concerns, and they will not surprise any of us who have earlier worked in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam or Eastern Europe prior to 1989. Of course there are restrictions, especially in some areas of the social and natural sciences. There are some kinds of research that simply cannot be done in such political environments. Needless to say, there are comparable limitations on research, especially social science research, in many other countries around the world. But there are also important opportunities in such countries, and in Cuba, for significant work in many fields of the sciences, humanities, and even the social sciences. And there are great opportunities for collaboration between Cuban and American scholars. We have a lot to learn about one another, and from one another. So apart from appeasing the Cuban-American hardliners (who are surely no longer a majority of the Cuban-American community), why has the Obama administration been so reluctant to remove most or all of the restrictions? Last year in Istanbul the President asserted that “exchanges can break down walls between us,” echoing the spirit of J. William Fulbright on the need for mutuality in cultural exchange. The newly appointed Assistant Secretary for Latin American Affairs (a serious academic from Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service), recently said in Spain that the administration would open relations with Cuba “to have much more communication from one society to the other society.” I hope he follows through. I am committed to the view that enhanced openness would be good for both societies, whereas the tired policy of embargo has not in all these year achieved its objectives. Let’s give mutual understanding a chance! WWW.PRINCETON.EDU/PLAS 19 A TALE OF THREE BUILDINGS: BRAZIL’S ESTADO NOVO BY BRUNO CARVALHO Greek columns, in Thomas Jefferson’s designs for the University of Virginia, might evoke democracy. In Albert Speer’s designs for Berlin during the Third Reich, similar columns serve to project imperial power. Perhaps more so than other art forms, architecture faces that paradox: outside of their historical contexts, very similar buildings or design elements can signify very different things. In a sense, this paradox is even more present in Latin America, where architecture has stood at the crossroads of ideological battles through much of the 20th century. In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s capital until the inauguration of Brasília in 1960, architectural design keenly reflected both local political pressures and the country’s aspired place on the world stage. One of the most top-down, orchestrated examples was the construction of the Avenida Central (now known as the Ave- Bruno Carvalho (assistant professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures) earned the B.A. in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College and a Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard University. His research interests focus on some of the intersections between urban development and cultural expressions. He has published articles on topics like the relation between Rio de Janeiro’s beaches and modernity, as well as on how Brazil functions as a cultural space in the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges. He has also collaborated (with Kenneth Maxwell) on a forthcoming introduction and critical edition in Portuguese of the earliest versions of the United States constitutions, which circulated in 18th century Brazil and played a role in movements to overthrow the monarchy. Currently, he is working on a book tentatively entitled Porous City: Afro-Jewish Cultural Spaces of Rio de Janiero (1810–1945). Forthcoming is «From Iberia to Recife: Mysticism and Modernity in Manuel Bandeira’s Earlier Poetry» to be publised in the Luso-Brazilian Review. (traditional painted ceramic tile-work) made reference to Portuguese heritage. Although the extent of Le Corbusier’s direct role in the final design has been the object of controversy, his influence remains undeniable. Another two buildings, which have received considerably less attention from architectural historians, are just as crucial to understanding what University of Maryland historian Daryle Williams terms “culture wars” in his book Culture Wars in Brazil. These internal tensions pervaded Brazil’s political and social life from 1937 to 1945—the period of Getúlio Vargas’ authoritarian Estado Novo. The buildings were designed to face the monumental Avenida Presidente Vargas, and were inaugurated in 1944, at the same time as the avenue. The two neighboring skyscrapers, though, share certain architectural elements that immediately set them apart from the MEC, which stood on the In the 1930s, a new generation of Brazilian architects were at the forefront of architectural modernity, exuding confidence and determined not to lag behind the newest trends. nida Rio Branco), from 1904-1906. Inspired by Haussmann’s 19th century reforms in Paris, Rio’s own urban intervention was in some ways born outdated. Its façades, variations on the French Eclecticism of the École des Beaux-Arts, would be considered old-fashioned within a little over a decade of their construction. In the 1930s, a new generation of Brazilian architects were at the forefront of architectural modernity, exuding confidence and determined not to lag behind the newest trends. The design team for the fourteen-story building that was to host the Ministry of Health and Education (later, the Ministry of Education and Culture, or MEC), an organ created during the Getúlio Vargas regime, included Lúcio Costa, Affonso Eduardo Reidy, and Oscar Niemeyer, who would go on to become some of the country’s most influential architects. The building, completed in 1942 but only inaugurated in 1945, was located on the site of the leveled Castelo Hill landmark. It was among the first to incorporate bold elements of the International Style—reinforced concrete, pilotis, and a shading system known as brise-soleil. The use of Cândido Portinari’s modernist azulejos other side of downtown Rio, towards the bay. Like the MEC, both of these imposing projects were commissioned by the state, were widely covered by the press, and sought to project the image of a modern nation. The three buildings, however, embodied competing versions of what modernity meant. The monumental designs for the buildings facing the new avenue no longer took their cues almost exclusively from architecture based in France. Brazilian urban historian Evelyn Furquim Werneck Lima suggests the influence of Hugh Ferriss’ The Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929), which conceives of numerous toweredifices resembling Mesopotamian towers known as ziggurats for the business district of Manhattan (Avenida Presidente Vargas: uma drástica cirurgia). In his designs for the Quartel General do Exército (now known as the Palácio Duque de Caxias) Cristiano Stockler das Neves, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, sought to ally the Beaux-Arts classic spirit with practical aims developed by North Americans. The building, planned and built before Brazil (CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE) PROGRAM IN LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES NEWSLETTER 20 Photo courtesy of Bruno Carvalho RECENT FACULTY WRITINGS ESTADO NOVO (CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE) of the press. For example, the April 10, 1943 Revista da Semana celebrates the new Central Station as a “brilliant demonstration of labor and of progress.” In the following year, similar terms would be employed during the official inauguration of the Avenida Presidente Vargas. In a period when the World War dominated the front important in the universe […], it will give to the city features worthy of its grand nature.” The portrayals of the three major buildings in the tightly-controlled press clearly favored the version of architectural modernity represented by the Army Headquarters and the Central do Brasil. As early as September 1937 (the month of Brazil’s independence day) the Perhaps symbolically, the Central Station has its back to the Morro da Providência, the very first of the city’s favelas. pages of newspapers, the September 3rd, 1944, edition of the newspaper A Manhã, directed by the modernist writer Cassiano Ricardo, dedicated its prime spot to a picture of the new avenue and buildings, under the heading “it will be one of the greatest avenues in the world!” The caption read: “one of the most Revista da Semana published the project for “The New Palace of War,” along with photographs of the president and other authorities laying down the foundation stone. In the pages of that same publication, the nearly ubiquitous (CONTINUED ON PAGE 49) WWW.PRINCETON.EDU/PLAS 21 Photo courtesy of Bruno Carvalho joined the Allies on August 22, 1942, also has elements bearing great similarity to projects by Albert Speer and Wilhelm Kreis in Third Reich Germany, reminders of the Estado Novo’s ideological affinities to the Axis Powers. The imposing symmetric spatial arrangement of its façade—vast ten-story wings on both sides of a twenty-three story tower building—were meant to evoke a general marching in front of his divisions. The layout and position of the building in relation to the avenue take into account its use as a stage for military parades—a function highlighted by weeklies with nationwide distribution in their Independence Day spreads, which covered the very first parades after Brazil’s official entrance into the war. The Revista da Semana and O Malho, distributed throughout the country, dedicated several pages to photographs of marching soldiers, with the building’s massive façade and tower frequently in the background. Right beside the Army Headquarters, the new main railway station Central do Brasil certainly seems to echo its neighbor through the iconic tower, scale and use of similar materials. Begun in March 1936, the building’s design was altered during the Estado Novo to dramatically increase its proportions and monumentality, ending up with an Art Déco tower of twenty-nine floors upon its inauguration on March 29, 1943. Adorned on its four faces with enormous clocks spanning six of the top floors, the new building was Rio de Janeiro’s tallest skyscraper, and Brazil’s second after the Edifício Martinelli in São Paulo. Media coverage of the inauguration, timed to coincide with the station’s 85th anniversary, highlighted the clock as one of the four largest in the world. Architects Adalberto Szilard and Geza Heller were primarily responsible for the final design, a modification on Roberto de Carvalho’s original project. All three buildings seem to embody the Vargas regime’s vision for a new, modern nation, drawing on different versions of progress in various architectural forms. The buildings were intended for major institutional functions: the national army, transportation (and indirectly, industrial labor—represented by the clock), education and health. Official rhetoric—particularly in regards to the avenue—attempted to insert the constructions within discourses of the Departamento de Imprensa e Propaganda (Department of Press and Propaganda, or DIP). The goal was to substitute the culture of malandragem and bohemianism with the exaltation of discipline, highlighting a work ethic. The echoes are clear in the language Rubén Gallo (Spanish & Portuguese) was promoted to full professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Lanugages and Cultures, effective February 1, 2010. The launch of Review 80 (Mexico: The 21st-century Issue), on May 20, 2010, featured comments, readings, and discussion with Rubén Gallo (Freud’s Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis), the issue’s guest editor. Gallo moderated a discussion with authors Mónica de la Torre (Talk Shows), Fabrizio Mejía Madrid (Tequila, DF), Guillermo Sheridan (Poeta con paisaije [biography of Octavio Paz]), and Martín Solares (Los minutos negros; The Black Minutes). The work of the preceding appears in the special issue, together representing an idiosyncratic cross-section of contemporary Mexican writing. This Americas Society program was co-presented by the Mexican Cultural Institute of New York. Review 80 is comprised of articles by leading scholars and writers Christopher Domínguez, Viviane Mahieux, John Mraz, and Juan Villoro, on key figures and iconoclasts in Mexican literature including Heriberto Yépez, Cube Bonifant, the Casasolas brothers, and Roberto Bolaño; and fiction, poetry, and essays by the above writers as well as by Humberto Beck, Valeria Luiselli, Antonio Ortuño, and Ignacio Padilla. Leon-François Hoffmann (French & Italian) Selected Recent Publications Haïti: Regards (L’Harmattan, 2010). Faustin Soulouque d’Haïti dans l’histoire et la littérature (L’Harmattan, 2009). “Representations of the Haitian Revolution in French Literature.” In The World of the Haitian Revolution. D.P. Geggus & N. Fiering, eds. (Indiana University Press, 2009). “La République dominicaine et les Dominicains dans la fiction haïtienne.” In The Caribbean Writer as Warrior of the Imaginary. K. Gyssels & B. Ledent eds. (Rodopi, 2009). “L’haïtienne fut-elle une révolution?” Haïti 1804: Lumières et ténèbres. (Vervuert, 2008). “La Littérature d’Haïti: quelques repères.” In Analyse et enseignement des literatures francophones. Marc Quaghebeur, ed. (Peter Lang, 2008). James Irby (Spanish & Portuguese Languages & Cultures) Selected Recent Publications: “Speaking to the Living & the Dead: Lezama’s Ode to Casal.” La Habana Elegante: Revista Semestral de Literatura y Cultura Cubana, Caribeña, Latinoamericana, y de Estética (March 2010). Translations of two poems by José Lezama Lima: “Thoughts in Havana” and “Ode to Julián del Casal.” In The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry, M. Weiss, ed. (University of California Press, 2009). Robert Karl (History) Selected Recent Publications H-Net/H-Diplo roundtable review of Bradley Lynn’s, Colombia & the United States: The Making of an Inter-American Alliance, 1939–1960. www.h-net. org/%7Ediplo/roundtables/PDF/Roundtable-XI-17.pdf Douglas S. Massey (Sociology and Public Affairs) delivered the second talk in this year’s President’s Lecture Series, titled “America’s War on Immigrants: Causes, Consequences & Solutions” on Thursday, December 10, 2009, in Friend Center. Massey studies international migration, race and housing, discrimination, education, urban poverty and Latin America. In his lecture, Massey addresses U.S. border enforcement efforts from the 1980s to the present. He argues for a new course based on a philosophy of immigration management rather than immigrant repression, following the successful model of economic integration under the European Union. Massey earned the Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton in 1978 and joined the faculty of the Department of Sociology and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public & International Affairs in 2003. Selected Recent Awards and Honors: President, American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2006–present. Distinguished Career Award, International Migration Section, American Sociological Association, 2009. Award for Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship in Population, for “From Illegal to Legal: Estimating Previous Illegal Experience among New Legal Immigrants to the United States” (published in Demography). Selected Recent Publications: Connor, Phillip, and Douglas S. Massey. “Economic Outcomes among Latino Migrants to Spain and the United States: Differences by Source Region & Legal Status.” International Migration Review (2010). Pedro Meira Monteiro (Spanish & Portuguese Languages & Cultures) has been appointed Chief Editor of ellipsis, the peer-reviewed journal of the American Portuguese Studies Association (2010–16). In addition to the printed edition, ellipsis has an online open-access version: www.ellipsis-apsa.com. Professor Meira Monteiro recently lectured in Mexico at the Instituto Mora, in Brazil at the Instituto Cultural Itaú and the University of São Paulo, and in Canada at the University of Toronto. Selected Recent Publications “As raízes do Brasil no espelho de Próspero.” In O Código Morse: ensaios sobre Richard Morse. B. Domingues & P. Blasenheim, ed. (Belo Horizonte: Editora da UFMG, 2010). “Afterword: No pertenecer perteneciendo: En torno a las cinco estaciones del amor.” In Las cinco estaciones del amor, by João Almino. (Buenos Aires 2009). “O último conto policial de Borges e o que havia no labirinto.” Translation of “El últmo cuento policial de Borges y lo que había en el laberinto,” by Pablo M. Ruiz. Revista do Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros (48, 2009). “Richard Morse, a paixão latino-americana.” In Um enigma chamado Brasil: 29 intérpretes e um país. A. Botelho & L.M. Schwarcz, eds. (São Paulo, 2009). Ignacio Rodríguez-Iturbe (Civil and Environmental Engineering) an environmental engineer and pioneer in the field of ecohydrology, has been elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors in all areas of science. Rodríguez-Iturbe, the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is a leading figure in the field of ecohydrology, which combines hydrology and ecology to understand how the flow of water through the landscape interacts with living organisms and ecosystems. In a paper published in Nature in 2008, Rodríguez-Iturbe and colleagues developed a simple model for predicting the biodiversity of fish in river networks. He has been widely recognized for his contributions, including the Stockholm Water Prize in 2002 and the Bowie Medal and Edward O. Wilson Biodiversity Technology Pioneer Award in 2009. Rodríguez-Iturbe was among 72 new members and 18 foreign associates elected April 27, 2010, at the academy’s 147th annual meeting. Adapted from http://www.princeton. edu/main/news/archive/S27/23/98C53/index. xml?section=people (CONTINUED ON PAGE 44) PROGRAM IN LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES NEWSLETTER 22 Photos (left to right) courtesy of the Sigmund Freud Foundation, Douglas Massey FACULTY UPDATES WORK-INPROGRESS FALL 2009 LUNCH SEMINARS JOCELYN OLCOTT The PLAS lunch seminar series is designed to foster intellectual exchange among Latin Americanists at Princeton and to encourage dialogue among various disciplines. During the 2009-10 Academic Year, seven members of PLAS’s Associated Faculty presented their current research projects. Shelby Cullum Davis Center for Historal Studies & Duke University • September 23, 2009 Pulled out of the Closet?: International Women’s Year and the Event of the Mexican Lesbian Mexican feminist literature on the 1975 International Women’s Year Conference in Mexico City presents starkly dichotomous views of its importance. Although the historiography on transnational feminism often depicts the conference as a watershed moment, Mexican feminists, many of whom received their political education during the 1968 student protests viewed these officially endorsed proceedings with suspicion and mentioned them principally as a backdrop to the more radical counter-conferences orchestrated by leftist and feminist organizations. Lesbian feminists, however, continue to point to the 1975 conference as the moment that Mexican lesbians emerged, as activist Claudia Hinojosa put it, “out of the darkest corners of the closet.” Olcott’s lecture considers what philosopher Alain Badiou might call the “event” of the Mexican lesbian—the “interpretive intervention” during which a subject is named and interpreted as such—and argues for the critical role of cosmopolitanism in framing this interpretive intervention. ROBERT KARL History • October 7, 2009 Community Development and Colombia’s Cold War, 1960—1966 Karl recasts Colombia’s Cold War experience in the 1960s by emphasizing peaceful forms of political participation in community development programs rather than the traditional focus on violence and insurgency. No government initiative in the 1960s involved as many people as the community development movement, which also brought in Colombian academics, clergy, and students, making it a dense site of Cold War activity, as contesting groups sought to define the direction and content of community development. Karl highlights the transnational nature of the movement, going beyond U.S. foreign aid programs to consider how different kinds of transnational networks influenced the movement. He also underscores the deep ambivalence of “progress” in Latin America’s so-called “decade of development.” GUSTAVO GUERRERO Program in Latin American Studies & Université de Picardie Jules Verne • November 11, 2009 Latin American Literature Looking East The relationship between contemporary Latin American literature and the cultures of Asia, which until now has received little attention, are long-standing, extensive, and significant. Indeed, these relations, which began with modernism, run through nearly the entire twentieth century. The early travels of Mexican José Juan Tablada (1871–1945) to Japan in 1900 reconnect two histories which earlier had been united by the Spanish Empire for several centuries. Tablada was followed by Argentine Ricardo Buiraledes (1886–1927) and Chilean Pablo Neruda (1904–1973), who visited Asia in the 1910s and 1920s. Later, rediscovering their common past and creating new ways of rethinking their identity, twentieth-century Latin American writers like Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), Octavio Paz (1914–1998), and Severo Sarduy (1937–1993), distanced themselves from Westerners’ visions of Asia and opened the way for a different and unique intercultural dialogue. Beyond examining these individual cases, Guerrero approaches the larger phenomena from a comparative perspective, tracing the evolution of these relations over time. BEATRIZ JAGUARIBE DE MATTOS Program in Latin American Studies & Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro • December 9, 2009 Memories of the Future: Images, Narratives, Monuments, and the Aesthetics of Memory in Brazil and Argentina Jaguaribe examines how the future, envisioned as access to a redemptive national modernity, was projected via narratives, images, and monuments during the Vargas era (1930–1945) in Brazil and the Perón regimes (1946–1955) in Argentina. From a contemporary perspective, she examines how these fabrications of the future were converted into modernist ruins, consumer nostalgia, media products, and monumental sites. By exploring public photography, the rhetoric of propaganda in graphic design, specific architectural constructions, and imagined monuments, she seeks to understand what has become of these legacies, how they respond to current cultural predicaments, and how they are disputed in contending politics of national memory. WWW.PRINCETON.EDU/PLAS 23 SPRING 2010 RACHEL PRICE Spanish & Portuguese Languages & Cultures • February 8, 2010 The Uses and Abuses of “The Atlantic” Price evaluates the promises and pitfalls of working within an “Atlantic” frame by returning to the history of the Atlantic as a concept. Even before Columbus’ first voyages, the Atlantic existed as a theological and philosophical idea, one that would persist throughout the work of modern philosophers such as Hegel and Ortega y Gasset. To use the Atlantic as a productive frame today, it is crucial to address its ambiguous role in the history of philosophy and in philosophies of history. While pioneers of “Atlantic studies” frequently highlight the extent to which the Caribbean and the Atlantic are at the center of “modernity,” rather than peripheral to it, Price argues that Atlantic studies must go beyond demonstrations of the modernity of the Atlantic to suggest the extent to which “modernity” as a concept—not a historical condition—is indebted to trans-Atlantic historiography. LILIA KATRI MORITZ SCHWARCZ Program in Latin American Studies & Universidade de São Paulo • March 1, 2010 Lima Barreto: The Anxious Thermometer of a Young Republic Schwarcz examines the political and social vitality in Brazil at the end of the 19th century. On one hand, the abolition of slavery in May 1888 held out the promise of equality present and future; on the other, the Republican project of November 1889 heralded a liberal political ideology and a utopia in the practice of free will, something previously unknown in a nation built upon forced labor. Yet, while politicians and ideologues waved the banner of citizenship, the evolutionary science of the times precluded full citizenship. Being black or mestizo in such a context was to be denied real equality, liberty, and intellectual autonomy. This was the core dilemma faced by black intellectuals of the time as they strove to combat scientific racism, even if that meant drawing politically upon the notion of race. The few individuals who took up a strong public position, writers such as Lima Barreto, ended up living a dilemma of permanent conflict: in their struggle to recuperate their social identity, they ran up against a science that categorically denied the essence of their human dignity. BRUNO CARVALHO Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures • April 19, 2010 Writing the “Cradle of Samba”: Carnival, Race, and Urban Reform in Rio de Janeiro (1930–1945) Intended as the fifth and final chapter of a cultural history of Rio de Janeiro’s Cidade Nova, Carvalho’s lecture explores the role of the neighborhood’s street carnival in incipient racial discourses, through a reading of texts that became influential during the 1930s, especially Graça Aranha’s A Viagem Maravilhosa and Arthur Ramos’ O Folk-lore Negro do Brasil. Despite the porosity that characterized Cidade Nova’s history within Rio’s urban fabric, throughout that decade it was increasingly portrayed as heterotopic, a space of the “other.” Considering changes at a national level–the 1930 coup that brought Getúlio Vargas to power and the development of radio–Carvalho turns to a discussion of the first comprehensive urban plans for Brazil’s capital after the “belle époque,” commissioned to the French urbanist Alfred Agache. CHECK THE PLAS WEBSITE FOR THE FALL 2010-11 EVENTS SCHEDULE PROGRAM IN LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES NEWSLETTER 24 FELLOWS PLAS VISITING SCHOLARS, 2010–11 CAROLA BARRIOS DE ADAM Visiting Research Scholar, PLAS and Visiting Professor, PLAS and the School of Architecture (Fall 2010-11) Carola Barrios is assistant professor at the Instituto de Urbanismo at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas. In Fall 2010-11 Barrios will teach LAS 406/ARC 411/SPA 406 Latin American Studies Seminar Modern Architecture Goes South: Museum, Mass Media and Pan-Americanism. The seminar will closely examine the displacement of the architecture of the Modern Movement from Europe and the United States to Latin America. Using comparative case studies of Venezuela and Brazil, the course will analyze the common influences of MoMA’s cultural strategies and the impact of mass media on the dissemination of Modern Architecture to the «South» in the context of WWII. By putting these two relevant experiences in parallel, the architectural journey intends also to make a comprehensive review of Latin American contributions to Modern Architecture through some of the most significant projects developed in both countries. AGUSTÍN FERRARO Visiting Research Scholar, PLAS and Visiting Associate Professor, PLAS and the Department of Sociology (Spring 2010-11) Agustín Ferraro is associate professor in the Institute for Iberoamerican Studies at the University of Salamanca. His research interests include the public administration in Latin America, and governance and theory of state. Most recently, he has published Reinventando el Estado. Por una administración pública democrática y profesional en Iberoamérica (2009), a research essay which received an award in 2008 from Spain’s Instituto Nacional de Administración Pública, and “Friends in High Places. Congressional Influence on the Bureaucracy in Chile” ( Latin American Politics and Society, 2008). In Spring 2010-11, Ferraro will teach LAS 402 Latin American Studies Seminar: Surviving Good Governance: Public Administration after the Reforms. CHRISTINA HALPERIN Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and Art and Archaeology; Latin American Studies-Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows (2010–2013) Images courtesy of named individuals Christina Halperin, a Meso-american archaeologist, will teach LAS 302 Gender and Latin American States in Spring 2010–11. Halperin’s course will examine the intersection of gender, power, and identity in various states in Mesoamerica. It will explore states of different time periods and political movements (e.g., pre-Columbian, colonial, national and transnational state systems), bisecting traditional divides in prehistory and history. Rather than approach gender from an evolutionary perspective, readings and discussions will focus on comparative analyses that both challenge monolithic perspectives of social power and underscore historical contingency in the constitution of gender. WWW.PRINCETON.EDU/PLAS 25 ROUND-UP: 2009-10 PLAS VISITING SCHOLARS Gustavo Guerrero (Université de Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens, France) Visiting Research Scholar, Program in Latin American Studies, and Visiting Associate Professor, Program in Latin American Studies and Spanish & Portuguese Languages & Cultures (2009–2010) José Lezama Lima/Recordando a José Lezama Lima.” Included presentations by Princeton faculty members Gustavo Guerrero, James Irby, and Rachel Price; moderated by Arcadio Díaz Quiñones, May 4, 2010, Prospect House Library. Fall 2009-10 Course: LAS 406/COM 411/EAS 406/SPA 406 Latin American Studies Seminar: Borges, Paz and Sarduy: A Window on Asia Research: Finishing bibliographic research for the Project “El llanero: historia de un símbolo nacional”. Activities: Participation in the symposium Beyond the Nation in Twenty-First Century, Latin American Literature and Criticism, October 9-10, 2009 at the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University (paper: “A Post-national Latin American Literature?” to be published in Revista Iberoamericana) PLAS Work-in-Progress Lunch Seminar: “Latin American Literature Looking East”, November 18, 2009, Princeton University. Research: Final editing for Cuerpo Plural, an anthology of contemporary Latin American Poetry. (58 poets of the global era from 23 countries and Spanish speaking areas of the Americas, selected and edited, with a general introduction to XXI century Latin American Poetry). Bibliographic research for the project “El llanero: historia de un símbolo nacional”. Spring 2009-10 Course: LAS 403/COM 420/SPA 407 Latin American Studies Seminar: Latin America, Literature in Movement Between Two Centuries, 1990-2010 Activities: Participation in the symposium V International Congress of the Spanish Language, The Americas and the Spanish Language at Valparaiso University, Chile, March 1-7, 2010 (Congress suspended after the earthquake of February 27th; paper: “Bello and globalization” published on the Website of the Congress http://www. congresodelalengua.cl/programacion/seccion_i/ guerrero_gustavo.htm) Presentation of “New poetry from the Americas”, in the occasion of the publication of Cuerpo Plural (Editorial Pre-Textos and Instituto Cervantes, Valencia-Madrid-Buenos Aires, 2010, 640 pp. and a DVD, with interviews with the poets) at Santiago de Chile, March 11, 2010. Attendance at the conference “Literature and globalization in Latin America, 1990-2010,” The Kronik Lectures Series at Cornell University, April 27, 2010. Participant in the roundtable “To Remember Beatriz Jaguaribe de Mattos (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) Visiting Senior Research Scholar in the Program in Latin American Studies, and Visiting Professor, Program in Latin American Studies and Spanish & Portuguese Languages & Cultures (2009–2010) During the fall 2009-10 semester my initial endeavors were geared toward adjusting my course syllabus in order to meet the needs and interests of the Princeton undergraduates I was teaching in the course LAS 401/SPA 410 Latin American Studies Seminar: Latin American Cities: Realism and Urbanism, which was not envisioned as an overall survey of Latin American cities but consisted of a selective exploration of the cultural repertoires of key Latin American cities and how they are represented in literature, photography and film. The course stressed the link between the use of realist aesthetics and the emergence of new social protagonists, urban violence, and political testimony. It emphasized, in this sense, the production of new films, photographs and novels that make use of a diversity of realist aesthetics in their attempt to diagnose the urban uncertainties of Latin American metropolitan experiences. Each case study had a specific theme such as the visibility of the favelas in Rio de Janeiro, the politics of memory and the emergence of new immigrants in Buenos Aires, and the implosion of the urban in Mexico City. The students in this course came from a variety of disciplines. While seeking to engage their diverse research interests, my attempt was also to provide them with an informed conceptual and theoretical analysis that would be exemplified by the case studies. While dealing with the case studies, they were shown photographs and films not readily available in the United States. In the spring 2009-10 semester, I taught LAS 404/SPA 409/POR 409 Latin American Studies Seminar: Memories of the Future: National Imaginaries in Brazil and Argentina, which had a reduced number of students. In the first part of the course we focused on an analysis of the imaginaries of the nation and the future and on how these were enacted during the Vargas era in Brazil during the Estado Novo of (CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE) PROGRAM IN LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES NEWSLETTER 26 ROUND-UP (CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE) 1937-45 and the Perón governments of the late 1940’s and 50’s in Argentina. Through public propaganda, photography and architectural constructions, we examined how the national future was depicted. In the latter part of the course, we questioned how these memories of the national past are now recast in museums, media products, and testimonies. In contrast to the previous semester, this course had a much more defined historical and aesthetic agenda. The discussions were enthusiastically undertaken, class attendance was absolute and we were able to establish a very personalized dialogue. In contrast to the first course, the students were offered a denser historical background on Argentina and Brazil, just as they were exposed to the contending national formations during the period of the Second World War. As in the first course, they were given a rich variety of iconographic material. Research Activities: As a visiting scholar, I attempted to make the most of Princeton’s extraordinary libraries and research facilities. During my research period I had to both amass information regarding the project that I was researching, namely the cultural imaginaries of the future during the Estado Novo of Vargas in Brazil and the first Perón governments in Argentina, as well as researching and writing for my book “Through the Eye of the City” that will be published by Routledge in 2011. While at Princeton, I wrote an essay for the Americas Society entitled “Devouring Cities: Cannibal Metaphors in the Works of Dias & Riedweg” and wrote a paper, “Beyond the Real: Realities, Myths and Revelations,” to be submitted for academic publication this year. I also wrote three chapters of the aforementioned book for Routledge and completed the research on my project “Memories of the Future”. Rio de Janeiro. Other seminars I gave during my period as a PLAS fellow were: “Nobody is like Anybody Else: Realist Aesthetics and the Inventions of the Self.” Paper given at the seminar “ The Politics of Transparency: New Uses of Realism in Spanish and Latin American Film” organized by Professor Alberto Medina, Spanish and Portuguese Department, Columbia University, November 13–14, 2009. “Favela Tours: The Tourist Gaze and the Representations of the Real”. Paper presented at the University of Texas, Austin, March 31, 2010 organized by Professors Arturo Arias and Sonia Roncador, of the Spanish and Portuguese Department. “Beyond the Real: Realities, Myths and Revelations”, Paper presented in a seminar with Consuelo Lins (ECO/UFRJ, Brazil) and Sandra Kogut (Independent Filmmaker), organized by Professor Marta Peixoto, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, New York University, April 20, 2010 “Favelas: Violence, Agency, Media”. Paper presented at a seminar at Fordham University together with Professor Jean Franco (Columbia University), organized by Professor Arnaldo Cruz, Spanish and Portuguese Department, April 27, 2010. Lima Barreto and a nostalgic generation: Brazilian intellectuals in the beginning of the XX century. Lilia Katri Moritz Schwarcz (Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil) Visiting Senior Research Scholar, Program in Latin American Studies, and Visiting Professor, Program in Latin American Studies and History (Spring 2010) “Um Beethoven Húngaro em NY,” Brasil Econômico (3 de abril de 2010). Spring 2009-10 Course: LAS 402/HIS 402/POR 410 Latin American Studies Seminar: History of Brazil: An Introduction History of the intellectuals: Latin-American interpreters: race, culture and history. Selected Recent Publications: A complete anthology of Lima Barreto’s short stories (Companhia das Letras, forthcoming). “Culture in the begining of the XIX century in Brazil”. In O final do período colonial brasileiro, Costa and Silva, org. (Madrid, forthcoming). “O medo que vem do Haití,” Brasil Econômico (30 de janeiro de 2010). ‘É a promessa de vida” Brasil Econômico (13 de fevereiro de 2010). “Entre tigres e mijões, ” O Estado de São Paulo, Caderno Aliás (21 de fevereiro de 2010). “A neve sabe onde cai,” Brasil Econômico (27 de fevereiro de 2010). “Tim Burton: você ainda vai ser um!” Brasil Econômico (13 de março de 2010). “A generosidade do livreiro-mor: homenagem a José Mindlin,” O Estado de São Paulo (1 de março de 2010). “Dilemas de um nariz,” Brasil Econômico (27 de março de 2010). “No templo dos modernos,” Brasil Econômico (10 de abril de 2010) “No Museu dos bichos mortos,” Brasil Econômico, (24 de abril de 2010). Lectures Presented: “Quota system and affirmative action in Brazil”. February 24, 2010, at Columbia University. “Lima Barreto a difficult barometer of Brazil”. March 1, 2010 at Princeton University. “Racial theories in Brazil”. March 30, 2010 at Princeton University. Seminars: While at Princeton, I gave two talks at the PLAS Work-in-Progress sessions. The first entitled “Memories of the Future” was about my ongoing project on the imaginaries of the national future undertaken during Vargas’ Estado Novo and Perón’s first governments in Argentina and how these national memories are now evoked in contemporary Argentina and Brazil. The second talk given together with Bruno Carvalho from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures was focused on the phenomenon of the “Favela Tours” in “3 Mulatos,” with José Miguel Wisnick, Arcadio Díaz Quiñones, Pedro Meira Monteiro (moderator), April 9, 2010, at Princeton University. “The Brazilian sun: Nicolas-Antoine Taunay and the French Mission in Rio de Janeiro: 1816-1821”. (The presentation was selected as a John H. Parry Lecture at Harvard), April 16, 2010, at Harvard University. “Lima Barreto, and his nervous Brazil,” April 22, 2010 at the University of Columbia. Research Topics: WWW.PRINCETON.EDU/PLAS 27 STUDENT NEWS PLAS 2010 SENIOR THESIS PRIZES AWARDED On May 31, 2010 PLAS held its annual Class Day Ceremony during which the winners of the Stanley J. Stein Senior Thesis Prize in Latin American Studies and the newly established Kenneth Maxwell Senior Thesis Prize in Brazilian and Portuguese Studies were announced. This was the first year in which PLAS awarded the Kenneth Maxwell Senior Thesis Prize in Brazilian and Portuguese Studies, given to the best thesis on a topic related to Brazil. Kenneth Maxwell received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1970 and went on to become one of the most eminent historians of Brazil and Portugal. Alex Kerbel Gertner ‘10, a major in Anthropology, won the Stanley J. Stein Prize and the Kenneth Maxwell Prize for his senior thesis Pharmaceutical Care, Public Experiments, and Patient Knowledge in the Brazilian Public Healthcare System. Gertner’s thesis is an anthropological study of the delivery of high-cost, complex medical treatments through Brazil’s ailing public health system and efforts to expand treatment access through rights-based judicial mobilization and South-South technology exchange programs. As his adviser João Biehl reports, “Alex Gertner is a mature and socially-minded intellectual, committed to hand-on learning, and who moves comfortably between the social and the medical sciences as well as the humanities.” Gertner shared the Maxwell Prize with cowinner Andrew Michael Segal ‘10, a major in Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures, with a certificate in Latin American Studies. Segal’s thesis, Imaginação Geográfica: An Examination of the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro’s 19th Century Efforts to Territorialize Brazil, provided a carefully researched and nuanced analysis of that institution’s response to the dangers of national disintegration in the first decades of the Brazilian empire. His adviser Pedro Meira Mon- teiro compliments the work as “outstanding” and a “real contribution.” Second reader Lilia Schwarcz deems it “a magnificent thesis that deserves to be published.” Ruth Ngolela Byrnes Metzel ’10, a major in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, with a certificate in Latin American Studies, won an honorable mention for the Stanley J. Stein Senior Thesis Prize in Latin American Studies for her thesis From “Finca” to Forest: Forest Cover Change and Land Management in Los Santos, Panama. Her thesis successfully integrates the natural and social sciences and, according to Stephen Pacala, Metzel’s adviser, “because she has caught the process right at its beginning,” Ruth’s “work should lead to a remarkable case history of spontaneous reforestation that could serve as model for the rest of Latin America.” Ruth Metzel ’10 has been selected to receive the prestigious Henry Richardson Labouisse ’26 Prize for 2009–10. Administered by PIIRS to support postgraduate work, research, or study, the $25,000 prize will fund Metzel’s work as a staff member of the Azuero Earth Project (AEP), an NGO dedicated to conserving biodiversity on the Azuero peninsula in Panama. Metzel’s interest in the region developed when she studied abroad on the ecology and environmental biology–sponsored semester in Panama in spring 2008. She met AEP Board President Edwina von Gal and Vernon Scholey, director of the Achotines Laboratory (a field station of the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission), through one of her courses and was inspired by their work. The Azuero peninsula, Metzel explains, has been used for cattle ranching and agriculture for centuries. The people who work the land range from cattle barons to subsistence farmers. A recent trend to develop the coast for tourism is pushing the cost of property out of reach for many and putting pressure on the existing ecology. The AEP, she says, is working to preserve the ecosystem of the peninsula, protect its biodiversity, and promote sustainable development by being a resource for information for farmers, ranchers, and developers. “When I heard Edwina speak about [AEP’s] vision for the peninsula and the opportunity for economic development to be coupled with environmental sustainability ... I got really interested,” says Metzel. “I wanted my [senior] thesis to contribute to [their] efforts to develop a cohesive conservation strategy for the peninsula.” Her thesis about forest conservation on the peninsula began with a graphic information system project estimating the area’s current forest coverage. The Labouisse prize will support Metzel as she expands her thesis by using the map she is creating to designate priority areas for conservation and environmental education. This undertaking will include mapping forestcover change and surveying local landowners on past, current, and projected land-use practices. The funding also enables her to assist AEP Executive Director Omar Lopez in producing events and educational activities in this, the organization’s first operational year. “I am very excited about this opportunity,” says Metzel. “It is a wonderful chance to translate the conclusions of my senior thesis, written in an academic setting, into practical environmental solutions.” Metzel, who grew up in northern Virginia, will live and work at the AEP offices in Pedasí, Los Santos. Her year there begins in September 2010; when it ends, she plans to enroll in a graduate program in environmental management and/or international development. The Labouisse prize enables a graduating senior to engage in a project that exemplifies the spirit of Henry Richardson Labouisse’s life and works. Labouisse was a diplomat and international public servant who championed the causes of international justice and international development. During his long diplomatic career, Labouisse not only designed policies aimed at rebuilding war-torn and crisis-ridden societies around the globe but also played a leading role in implementing those policies, beginning in post–World War II Europe. The Labouisse prize was established by his daughter and son-in-law, Anne and Martin Peretz, in 1984. Adapted from PIIRS NEWSLETTER Spring 2010, with permission. PROGRAM IN LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES NEWSLETTER 28 Photo courtesy of PIIRS RUTH METZEL ‘10 2010 LABOUISSE PRIZE Five Undergraduates Named Scholars in the Nation’s Service The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs has selected five students (Jared Crooks, Kevin McGinnis, Megan McPhee, Marian Messing, Elias Sánchez-Eppler) to be the 2010 undergraduate cohort of the Scholars in the Nation’s Service Initiative (SINSI), a scholarship program designed to encourage and prepare exceptional students for careers in the U.S. government. “This year saw a particularly rich pool of applicants for the SINSI scholarship program,” said SINSI director Barbara Bodine, a former U.S. ambassador and career senior Foreign Service officer and a diplomat-in-residence at the Wilson School. “Those selected represent the best that Princeton has to offer—academically strong, deeply committed to public service and enthusiastic about the opportunities to apply their talents, skills and ambitions to the most daunting challenges facing us as a country, a people and a government going forward in the years ahead.” All Princeton juniors are eligible to apply for the competitive program. Selected students devote the final three semesters to completing their majors along with courses in public policy, develop a familiarity with career opportunities in the federal government, and spend the summer after their junior year in a federal government internship. Upon earning their bachelor’s degrees, students are admitted into the Wilson School’s two-year master in public affairs (MPA) program. After completing their first year of graduate study, students work for two years in federal government as part of the SINSI fellowship then return to campus to complete the MPA program. Scholars also have the opportunity for intensive language training during one summer. The five 2010 scholars include three Latin American Studies certificate candidates: • Kevin McGinnis, a Wilson School major and certificate candidate in Latin American studies from Salisbury, Md., who studies environmental issues—specifically sustainable water resource management— and Latin American politics. McGinnis has gained experience in his areas of interest through serving with Engineers Without Borders in Ethiopia and interning with the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, D.C. He will participate in the Wilson School’s inaugural semester abroad program at the University of Havana this spring. He is exploring internships and long-term career options at the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the U.S. Department of Justice. • Megan McPhee, a native of Sudbury, Mass., is a Wilson School major and certificate candidate in Spanish, Latin American studies, and musical performance. She held a PLAS-funded summer internship with La Asociación Pro Arte y Cultura, a non-profit organization in eastern Bolivia, and spent a semester abroad in Buenos Aires, Argentina. McPhee hopes to combine her passion for music and the arts with her interest in international affairs, public diplomacy and stabilization initiatives through a career at the U.S. Department of State or USAID. She has accepted an internship for this summer at the Department of State’s Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization working on Haiti, Cuba and an emerging initiative on Central America. Kevin McGinnis ‘11 • Elias Sánchez-Eppler, of Amherst, Mass., who is interested in Latin American issues and hopes to promote international development through a career in the U.S. Foreign Service. He is a Wilson School major and certificate candidate in Latin American studies. Sánchez-Eppler has lived in Costa Rica, Spain and Chile. This spring he will join the Wilson School’s study abroad program at the University of Havana and study demography and development through a policy task force at the University’s Center for Demographic Studies. He is pursuing a summer internship with USAID or the Millennium Challenge Corp. Outside of Princeton, Sánchez-Eppler serves on the governing corporation of the American Friends Service Committee. Elias Sánchez-Eppler ‘11 Adapted with permission from www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S26/27/13I98/index.xml?section=topstories. WWW.PRINCETON.EDU/PLAS 29 Photos courtesy of the Woodrow Wilson School Megan McPhee ‘11 “The need for talented and committed men and women to enter public service has never been greater. The challenges we face at home and abroad require a new generation of policy innovators with excellent analytical skills, a deep understanding of substantive policy issues and a wealth of experience,” said Wilson School Dean Christina Paxson. “These outstanding individuals demonstrate the remarkable range of talents among Princeton students as well as a common passion for public service.” The purposes of the scholarship program, modeled after the Rhodes and Marshall scholars, are twofold. The first is to raise awareness and the prestige of career government service among a new generation of college students. The second is to provide these students with the firsthand experience in federal service and the rigorous academic preparation, language skills and workplace skills needed to succeed. Princeton formally launched SINSI in February 2006. In February 2007, the Wilson School expanded the program to include up to five scholarships (two years of study combined with a two-year federal fellowship) for any U.S. citizens who apply for enrollment in the school’s MPA program. To date, scholars have pursued internships and fellowships with the departments of State (including a number of embassies abroad), Defense, Treasury and Agriculture; the Central Intelligence Agency; USAID; the Millennium Challenge Corp., the Department of the Army; the Council of Economic Advisors; and the White House. STUDENT AWARDS GRADUATE STUDENT FIELD RESEARCH FUNDING, SUMMER 2010 NAME DEPARTMENT PROJECT LOCATION Gavin Arnall Comparative Literature Marxism and Psychoanalysis: Art, Literature, and Philosophy Argentina Felipe Cala Buendia Spanish and Portuguese Culture and Transitional Justice in Peru Peru Duanel Diaz-Infante Spanish and Portuguese Passions of the Real, Dialectics of the Revolution (Cuba 1959-2009) Cuba Daylet Dominguez Spanish and Portuguese Ethnography, Narration and National Projects in the Hispanic Caribbean (1820-1920) Dominican Republic & Puerto Rico Maria Fajardo History When Economists from the North and South Meet: ECLA and IMF Missions to Latin America Colombia & Chile Laura Gandolfi Spanish and Portuguese Narrated Objects: Material Culture and Literature at the Turn of the XIX Century in Mexico and Uruguay Argentina & Mexico Camilo Hernandez-Castellanos Spanish and Portuguese The Ethics of the Gaze: Enrique Metinides and the Mexican Photojournalism of the Fifties Mexico Vinay Jawahar Politics Decentralization and Police Control in Post-Authoritarian Latin America Peru Alejandra Josiowicz Spanish and Portuguese Discourses of Childhood in Argentina and Uruguay (1850-1970) Argentina & Uruguay Pablo Landa Ruiloba Anthropology Housing, Modernization and the Shifting Histories of Mexico and Brazil Brazil & Mexico Noam Lupu Politics Party Breakdown in Argentina Argentina Marco Martinez Spanish and Portuguese Trans-Migrant Artists in the Jazz Age: Covarrubias, Lam, Homar and Canepa Mexico & Cuba Jason McMann Politics An Analysis of the Buenos Aires Protocol: Understanding Mercosur's Failed Attempt to Harmonize Member-State's Foreign Direct Investment Regulation Uruguay & Argentina Iwa Nawrocki History Church-State Relations in Greater São Paulo, 1970-1989 Brazil Andrea Oñate-Madrazo History Transnational Revolutionary Alliances: Mexico, Cuba, and Central America, 1968-1992 El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, & Honduras Daniel Polk Anthropology Water Scarcity and Latin America: A Study of the Politics and Ecology of Infrastructure in Costa Rica Costa Rica Ana Sabau Spanish and Portuguese Between Art and Politics: A Research on Teresa Margolles Mexico Adedoyin Teribe Art and Archaeology Afro-Brazilian Artisans and Their Architecture in Brazil from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century Brazil Matthew Treme Spanish and Portuguese Theater & Resistance: Colombia's Children and Mexico's Women Mexico & Colombia Enea Zaramella Spanish and Portuguese Musical Enterprise in the Modernist Era: Dialogues Between Political and Literary Languages Argentina & Mexico SENIOR THESIS FIELD RESEARCH FUNDING, SUMMER 2010 NAME DEPARTMENT PROJECT LOCATION Adrian Gallegos ‘11 Spanish and Portuguese Photographic Experimentation, Researching the Researchers Honduras Daniel Growald ‘11 Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Red Soil, Black Charcoal, Green Grass: A Recipe for Productivity, Carbon Sequestration, and Soil Improvement on Degraded Lands? Panama Ryan Huynh ‘11 Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Effects of Climate Change on Anole Species in the Bay Islands and Consequences for Habitat Honduras Loss and Competition Pauline Nalikka ‘11 Spanish and Portuguese Changing Relationship between Brazilian Funk Carioca, Music of the Rio de Janeiro Favelas, and the Brazilian State Brazil Emily Nguyken ‘11 Politics Voting Policy in Latin America Chile, Peru Juliet Phillips ‘11 Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Large Mammal Population Structure in Response to Human Activity and Disturbance Honduras Patricia Sever ‘11 Spanish and Portuguese Macedonio Fernández & Jorge Luis Borges Argentina Julia Tsui ‘11 Music Cross-Cultural Analysis of Street Musical Performance Brazil, Ecuador Kaya Zelazny ‘11 Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Correlation between Leaf Character & Nitrogen Fixation in Tropical Forests Panama PROGRAM IN LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES NEWSLETTER 30 SIGMUND SCHOLARS, SUMMER 2010 NAME PROJECT LOCATION Stephanie Alvarez ‘12 Displaced Populations in Bogotá, Medellín, & Florencia Colombia Luciana Chamorro ‘12 CIPPEC internship (via IIP) Argentina Courtney Crumpler ‘13 The Art of Healing in Brazil: Alternative Approaches to Health Promotion and Care Delivery Brazil Aparajita Das ‘12 Terra de paixão e futebol (documentary in Rio de Janeiro) Brazil Hannah (Cybil) George ‘12 Sorata: El pueblo de perros Bolivia Ricardo Mayo ‘13 Educando a Cuba Nueva Miami, Florida PLAS CERTIFICATES, CLASS OF 2010 NAME DEPARTMENT SENIOR THESIS TITLE Carolina Isabel Ardila-Zurek Politics “The Rise and Fall of the Medellín and Cali Cocaine Organizations” Felipe Gutiérrez Cabrera Comparative Literature “Responses to Latin American State Terrorism in Literature and the Visual Arts” Denzel R.B. Cadet Comparative Literature “The Indelible Stain of Blackness: Expressions of Nationalism in Dominican and Haitian Poetry” Andrés Rodrigo Guerra Anthropology “Pride, Polvo, and Pharmaceuticals: A Case Study on the Asthmatic Anomaly in Puerto Rico” Carlos Santiago Imberton Politics “Understanding Patterns of Violence in El Salvador: Gangs, Governmental Policy and Civilian Response” Maria J. Lacayo History “A Fervent, Frail Hope: Fragile Democracies and the Human Rights Conventions in Europe and Latin America” Thomas Vincent López Woodrow Wilson School “Combating Coca: From the District of Columbia to el Distrito Capital” Eric Javier Macías Woodrow Wilson School “Assessing the Cycle of Poverty in the Evaluation of Oportunidades and Bolsa Família: A Cross-national Study of Conditional Cash Transfer Programs” Ruth Ngolela Byrnes Metzel Ecology and Evolutionary Biology “From Finca to Forest: Forest Cover Change and Land Management in Los Santos, Panama” Anna Trumbull Moccia-Field Woodrow Wilson School “Worker Participation in Latin American Pension Systems: Lessons from the Reforms in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay” Rafael G. Palomino Badilla Sociology “Take It or Leave It: Perceptions towards a Victim Compensation Fund in Northern Mexico” Kalyani Parthasarathy Economics “Capacity Utilization and Economic Policy: Argentina and Brazil: 1970–2004” Alejandro Perez Spanish and Portuguese “A Devious Odyssey: Roberto Bolaño’s Anti-epic” Mónica Teresa Ramírez de Arellano Woodrow Wilson School “Drilling through the Layers of Uncertainty: Brazil’s Social Gain or Resource Curse?” Fernando Salvador Sánchez Sociology “Keeping the Planner’s Promise: The Impact of Building for Olympic Events on the Social and Economic Demography of the City” Andrew Michael Segal Spanish and Portuguese “Imaginação Geográfica: An Examination of the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro’s 19th Century Efforts to Territorialize Brazil” Gustavo Andrés Silva Cano Woodrow Wilson School “The Worst Solution Except For All the Others: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Drug Prohibition and Legalization in Colombia” Catalina Valencia Politics “Colombia: Bending the Rules to Reparative Justice” Christine Elizabeth Vidmar Sociology “Ironbound: An Ethnographic Study of Brazilian Immigrants in Newark, New Jersey” CONGRATULATIONS! WWW.PRINCETON.EDU/PLAS 31 ALUMNI NEWS JILL JANAÍNA OTTO ’02 NAMED YOUNG GLOBAL LEADER Jill Janaína Otto ’02, Vice-President of Companhia Financiera Otto, Brazil, has been named a 2010 Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum (WEF), which reports, “The Forum of Young Global Leaders is a unique, multi-stakeholder community of exceptional young leaders who share a commitment to shaping the global future. Each year the World Economic Forum identifies 200–300 extraordinary individuals, drawn from every region of the world. Together, they form a powerful international community that can dramatically impact the global future. Otto is a share holding manager of her 75–year old family business, one of Europe’s largest waste haulers and recyclables traders as well as the world’s largest waste logistics equipment company. Otto also is President of the Rio Leadership Institute (ILRIO), a Brazilian think tank. She serves on the Boards of ORT (Organização, Reconstrução e Trabalho) Brasil and the Durham (NC) Nativity School, an inner-city school; and as adviser to Princeton University’s Council on International Teaching & Research. Otto earned the B.A. from Princeton University with a certificate in Latin American Studies, and a Master’s from the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University in 2004. She is fluent in Portuguese, English, German, Spanish, and French.” KRISTA BRUNE ’06 With a ReachOut ’56 fellowship, Krista Brune ’06 spent a year researching arts programs in prisons, jails, and juvenile detention centers throughout the United States. Prison Arts is a site created by Brune as a resource for those in the field. As a Fulbright recipient, Brune more recently spent a year in Brazil studying the social and political role of popular Brazilian music during the 1960s and 1970s. She is currently working toward a Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages & Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley, focusing on Luso-Brazilian literature. AMANDA FULMER ’01 After leaving Princeton I worked at two non-profit think-tanks in Washington, D.C. As a Project 55 fellow at the National Policy Association (NPA), I travelled with NPA President Anthony Quainton ’55 to Lima, where we organized a conference on sustainable development. Later, I spent a year working with Oxfam America in Lima, working on extractive industries and indigenous communities, the eventual focus of my graduate studies. In 2005 I entered a doctoral program in political science at the University of Washington-Seattle, and in September 2009 began a year of fieldwork funded by the Inter-American Foundation. My dissertation concerns citizen participation in mining projects, focusing on three mines that affect indigenous populations; two in Peru and one in Guatemala. I am researching how these communities respond to and resist the projects, with an eye to how they use (or do not use) legal means and conceptions of human rights. I will be interested in the region for the rest of my life, and have fond memories of several excellent LAS classes and other experiences at Princeton—Amanda Fulmer ’01 ANADELIA A. ROMO ‘96 PLAS ALUMNI: LET US HEAR FROM YOU! SEND NEWS TO [email protected] PROGRAM IN LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES NEWSLETTER 32 Photo courtesy of Jill Janaína Otto Published by the University of North Carolina Press, Brazil’s Living Museum: Race, Reform, and Tradition in Bahia is Anadelia A. Romo’s most recent publication. Says Seth Garfield of the University of Texas at Austin, “In her historical analysis of Bahia’s contemporary claim to embody the essence of Afro-Brazil, Anadelia Romo demonstrates the critical role played by local elites, foreign anthropologists, and state officials in promoting cultural images that have stymied redress of the deep-seated and racially-based socioeconomic inequalities in the region. This book will be of considerable interest to students of anthropology, history, and cultural studies.” Romo is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Texas State University - San Marcos. MICHAEL HIDALGO ’08 Sometimes it’s difficult to believe that less than a year ago I wouldn’t have thought twice about skipping my 9:00 am biology lecture. Now my day starts at the break of dawn with the sound of my cell phone alarm. Within twenty minutes I leave my apartment, built on the slope of a steep mountain that overlooks the enormous city below. After an hour-long commute on a Bogotá metro bus, I enter the office around 7:00 am, ready to start class at the charter school where I have been teaching since September 2008. At Alianza Educativa, an organization founded by the city’s most elite university and private schools that run five charter schools in the poor southern sections of Bogota, I am one of two people who administer the English newspaper, recently brought attention to the fact that the expanse of cinder block homes, pool halls, and furniture shops 100 yards down the street from the school is the neighborhood with the most homicides in the capital. Nevertheless, in this same neighborhood one can find a well maintained tourist information center—the only one of its kind in the capital. I pass by the module twice a day and in eight months have not once seen a tourist use it. Apparently that’s not why it’s there. The information center, like the equally pristine school down the street where I work, are symbolic of the pride Bogotanos take in their city and, more importantly, their eternal optimism that the future will be far better than the past. These two values—pride and optimism—best This placement has not only been tremendously gratifying, but it has also helped me develop an invaluable set of skills that will serve me in my future endeavors. describe the attitude in the schools administered by Alianza Educativa. They are what make them extraordinary among schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods and my placement particularly rewarding. Their consistent optimism is no easy accomplishment in a country that is often reminded of its violent past. The school where I teach, Jaime Garzón, was named after a popular comedian and satirist who was murdered by paramilitary forces less than a decade ago, and just last week, the father of one of my 12th–grade students was killed while eating in a bakery. Despite the numerous hardships these students face, everyone, from the custodian who comes in on Saturdays to make sure the grounds are spotless, to the principal who seems to know the name of every one of the 1,250 students at the school, is committed to making Alianza’s motto a reality: academic excellence for a better quality of life. Reprinted from PiLA’s April 2009 newsletter, with permission. WWW.PRINCETON.EDU/PLAS 33 Photo courtesy of Michael Hidalgo program. One of my primary responsibilities was to design the majority of the curriculum for grades 5–12 by reinforcing the teaching of grammar (which for years was inconsistently taught in the schools), writing, and test taking with the teachers. I have created workbooks that include grammar lessons, exercises, and readings specific for each grade level, to inform teachers what material they should be teaching at each level. It’s a good deal of responsibility. I chose what grammar the students will learn at each grade level and pick a large portion of their readings for English class. In addition, I meet weekly with the 26 English teachers from the five schools to improve their English and teaching skills. I spend most of my time at the school where I teach English to 7th and 12th graders, and an ethics course in Spanish. As a teacher I am learning far more than I ever could have imagined. Since I started working with Alianza, I have been constantly perfecting my administrative capabilities, my preparation and planning skills, and my public speaking ability. This placement has not only been tremendously gratifying, but it has also helped me develop an invaluable set of skills that will serve me in my future endeavors. This unique job has also given me the opportunity to see a side of this city rarely visited by outsiders. El Tiempo, the national SPOTLIGHT MARIO VARGAS LLOSA 2010 PLAS DISTINGUISHED VISITOR CONVERSACIÓN CON MARIO VARGAS LLOSA: LA MODERNIDAD A CUALQUIER PRECIO ENTREVISTA REALIZADA EN PRINCETON POR ARCADIO DÍAZ QUIÑONES Y TOMAS ELOY MARTÍNEZ EN MAYO DE 1993 Y PUBLICADA EN EL DIARIO ARGENTINO PÁGINA 12 Mario Vargas Llosa vuelve a Buenos Aires tras una larga década de ausencia. En vísperas del viaje, tuvo una conversación a puertas cerradas con Arcadio Díaz Quiñones, director del Latin American Studies Program, de la Universidad de Princeton, y Tomas Eloy Martínez, editor de este suplemento. Habló de su autobiografía, de Borges, de Sarmiento, de los avances del liberalismo en América Latina y de los tiempos que se vienen, tanto aquí como en los Estados Unidos. Lo que ahora se publica es una síntesis de dos horas y media de diálogos. En la primavera, la noche cae temprano sobre Princeton. A las ocho ya no se ve a nadie caminando por las avenidas arboladas, siempre silenciosas. Las torres austeras de la Universidad se deslíen en la penumbra. En la calle principal, Nassau Street, se cierran casi a un tiempo las persianas de las tiendas Woolworth y de la bien nutrida librería Micawber. Enfrente, tras las verjas que circundan el campus, unas luces tenues iluminan las ventanas del edificio amarillo donde funciona el Latin American Studies Program, dirigido por Arcadio Díaz Quiñones. Adentro hay una sala de conferencias con una gigantesca mesa oval, a cuya cabecera se han sentado algunos de los más notables investigadores del continente. Contra la pared yacen, vacías, algunas decenas de sillas. Fue allí donde, a fines de abril, el Latin American Studies Program y este suplemento de Pagina 12 organizaron una conversación a puertas cerradas con Mario Vargas Llosa, quien llegó a Princeton a comienzos de año como profesor visitante del Council of the Humanities. Un par de veces por semana, el novelista de Conversación en la catedral y de La guerra del fin del mundo, ex candidato a la Presidencia del Perú, dicta allí clases en ingles sobre seis narradores latinoamericanos ya traducidos: Arguedas, Bioy Casares, Borges, Cortázar, Onetti, Rulfo. Cada tanto, da conferencias a las que acuden multitudes (lo que se entiende por multitudes en el ámbito exclusivo de una universidad como la de Princeton: nunca más de cien personas), o toma el tren de la noche para ir al teatro, en Nueva York. No puede ocultar su entusiasmo por la última obra de David Mamet, Oleanna, que lo mantuvo durante dos horas “sentado”, como él (CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE) PROGRAM IN LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES NEWSLETTER 34 Photo by Fiorella Battistini Born in Peru, Mario Vargas Llosa (1936–) is one of Latin America’s most influential writers. Dr. Vargas Llosa, who holds a doctorate from the Universidad de Madrid (1959), has asserted that “reading is an essential part of being a citizen.” He has taught at Princeton, Harvard, and the Sorbonne—among numerous other institutions—and he is a member of the Real Academia Española. Among the most prominent figures of the so-called Latin American literary “Boom,” Vargas Llosa has authored numerous volumes, including La ciudad y los perros (The City and the Dogs, 1962), La casa verde (The Green House, 1966), Conversación en la catedral (Conversation in the Cathedral, 1971), Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1978), The War of the End of the World (1981), Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto (The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, 1997), La fiesta del chivo (The Feast of the Goat, 2000), El paraíso en la otra esquina (The Way to Paradise, 2003), and Travesuras de la niña mala (The Bad Girl, 2006). Two of Mr. Vargas Llosa’s novels have been turned into films, directed by Francisco J. Lombardi: The City and the Dogs (1985), and Pantaleón y las visitadoras (2000). During much of the 1980s and 1990s, Vargas Llosa turned his attention to politics, journalism, essay writing, and the theatre; he also ran for the office of president in Peru in 1990. Vargas Llosa has been on the short list for the Nobel Prize for literature, and has received the most important awards and distinctions, including the Cervantes prize. As a critic, he has published essays on the work of Flaubert, Victor Hugo, Gabriel García Márquez, Onetti and Borges. Of particular relevance are the Mario Vargas Llosa Papers (1944–2000), deposited in Firestone Library’s Rare Books & Special Collections, Manuscripts Division. The collection consists of the author’s notebooks, novel manuscripts, plays and screenplays, short stories, nonfiction, correspondence, documents, and miscellaneous printed and recorded material. Most recently at Princeton, Mario Vargas Llosa delivered the Spencer Trask Lecture “Onetti and the Shadows of Faulkner and Borges” on April 22, 2008. During his campus visit, Mr. Vargas Llosa also met privately with members of the Program in Latin American Studies associated faculty, in an open-ended conversation about his most recent novel, Travesuras de la niña mala. During Fall 2010, Vargas Llosa will teach two courses: LAS 401/SPA 410 Latin American Studies Seminar: Borges and Fiction and CRW 345/LAS 375/SPO 360 Special Topics in Creative Writing: Techniques of Novel Writing. VARGAS LLOSA (CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE) La Autobiografía T.E.M. —Tu obra abunda en confesiones personales como las de La tía Julia y el escribidor, en rendiciones de cuentas políticas como las de tus artículos periodísticos, en reflexiones sobre las mudanzas de tu propio pensamiento intelectual como las que se compilan en los dos volúmenes de Contra viento y marea. Que ahora aparezca una autobiografía titulada El pez en el agua parece casi un pleonasmo. ¿Cómo lo explicas? —La razón fue la campaña política por la Presidencia del Perú. Después de la campaña, la revista inglesa Granta me pidió una crónica o memoria de esa etapa: La escribí, y se publicó con el título de El pez fuera del agua, que indicaba lo excéntrica que esa experiencia había sido en mi vida1. Quede insatisfecho. Me pareció que al circunscribir mi crónica a lo político estaba dando una versión falaz de mi mismo. Soy algo más que un político, o al menos algo distinto, aunque haya hecho política profesional. Así surgió la idea de un texto que diera una impresión más matizada y compleja de lo que fue aquella experiencia. La pensé, al principio, como una crónica limitada a esos tres años de participación en la política peruana. Pero no bien empecé a escribir, me di cuenta de que era imprescindible ubicar esos (left to right) Arcadio Díaz Quiñones, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Tomás Eloy Martínez Soy algo más que un político, o al menos algo distinto, aunque haya hecho política profesional. años en el contexto de mi actividad intelectual, de mi vocación literaria y de la relación que he tenido con mi país. Así, termine intercalando el relato de la campaña con el de los primeros veintitrés años de mi vida, en los que se cuajó todo lo que yo seria. T.E.M. —Y El pez fuera del agua termina convirtiéndose en El pez en el agua. No entiendo, de todos modos, la razón profunda de tanta abundancia autobiográfica. —Seguramente conoces el esfuerzo de Sartre por recurrir a todas las disciplinas de su tiempo para explicar el caso Flaubert. Eso lo lleva a escribir un libro inmenso, El idiota de la familia, que deja sin terminar porque, al cabo de miles de páginas, Sartre llega a la conclusión de que no hay escritura capaz de agotar la vida de un solo hombre. Todo escritor utiliza su experiencia personal como materia prima de su trabajo. En algunos eso es más consciente, obsesivo e inevitable. Tal es mi caso. En El pez en el agua asumo por primera vez, de manera deliberada, el relato de historias que han marcado no sólo mi vida sino también mi trabajo literario. Un ejemplo es la relación con mi padre. Mi padre es uno de los personajes centrales del libro. Tuve con él una relación difícil, traumática, que acabo por condicionar mi vocación—si él no se hubiera opuesto a mi vocación de manera tan drástica, tal vez yo no me habría entregado a ella con terquedad. T.E.M. —Los obstáculos te estimulan. —Sí, siempre lo han hecho, desde el punto de vista intelectual. Mis novelas son diferentes entre sí porque cada una era para mí un desafío nuevo. Lo mismo me ha sucedido con la política. En el libro refiero, un poco en broma, lo que le respondí cierta vez a un periodista: que si la Presidencia del Perú no fuera el oficio más peligroso del mundo, nunca se me habría ocurrido ser candidato. A.D.Q. —Estoy pensando en otros escritores que también fueron candidatos a la Presidencia de su país, que perdieron en esa batalla y que también reflejaron esa experiencia en su autobiografía. Es el caso de José Vasconcelos y de su Ulises criollo,2 donde ajusta cuentas consigo mismo, con su formación literaria y con el vendaval político que termina marginándolo. Me pregunto si tuviste a mano modelos como ese al escribir El pez en al agua. —No. Nunca tengo modelos, al menos de manera consciente, mientras escribo cualquiera de mis libros. Trabajo aislándome casi por completo del contorno. Las novelas, las obras de teatro y esta autobiografía exigieron una especie de reclusión en un mundo muy privado, casi egoísta. No puedo decir que tenga presente ni siquiera a los lectores potenciales. En esa ceremonia se produce, por supuesto, una suerte de desdoblamiento, porque para utilizar la escritura de una determinada manera, tienes que estar siempre desdoblándote y tratar de reaccionar como un lector. A.D.Q. — ¿Cómo deslindas lo público y lo privado? Por lo que dices, en tu autobiografía parecieran fundirse esas dos esferas. —No, no se funden. El pez en el agua cuenta dos periodos de mi vida y lo hace con la mayor sinceridad. No hay ánimo de justificación. Es un libro tan autocritico como crítico. Es muy (CONTINUED ON PAGE 40) Cf. Granuta 36, Summer 1991, «Vargas Llosa for President». Incluye el texto al que alude Vargas Llosa y otro de su hijo Álvaro, que luego formaría parte de un libro de este ultimo sobre la campaña presidencial, publicado en 1992 por Seix Barral. 2 Vasconcelos fue candidato a la Presidencia de México en 1929. El Ulises criollo fue publicado en 1935. 1 WWW.PRINCETON.EDU/PLAS 35 Photo courtesy of Arcadio Díaz Quiñones dice, “en el borde de la butaca”. Teme que su viaje a Buenos Aires, previsto para el 14 de mayo, sea una maratón de fatiga. No ha regresado desde el estreno de La señorita de Tacna, hace más de una década, y aun recuerda con añoranza el momento en que llegó por primera vez, en 1965, y pudo caminar por Corrientes, Florida y Santa Fe con el anonimato que le consentían su juventud extrema (tenía entonces menos de treinta años) y la difusión restringida de sus dos primeras novelas, La ciudad y los perros y La casa verde. Entrara a Buenos Aires con el polvo de un largo camino. Pasara primero por México, donde va a presentar su autobiografía El pez en el agua, y por Guatemala, cuya geografía piensa recorrer de cabo a rabo. La conversación que sigue duró dos horas y media y fue grabada tanto para el archivo oral de la Universidad de Princeton como para su publicación en este suplemento. En la transcripción, las intervenciones de Arcadio Díaz Quiñones y de Tomas Eloy Martínez van en letras cursivas, precedidas por las iniciales de sus nombres (A.D.Q. y T.E.M.). Las intervenciones de Vargas Llosa están en letras redondas, sin indicación de nombre. ODA A JULIÁN CASAL (CONTINUED FROM PAGE 5) que lo detiene en su visita a la corista. Le entrega las flores y el maniquí se rompe en las baldosas rotas del acantilado. Sus manos frías avivan las arañas ebrias, que van a deglutir el maniquí playero. Cuidado, sus manos pueden avivar la araña fría y el maniquí de las coristas. Cuidado, él sigue oyendo cómo evapora la propia tierra maternal, compás para el espacio coralino. Su tos alegre sigue ordenando el ritmo de nuestra crecida vegetal, al extenderse dormido. that halts him in his visit to the chorus girl. He gives her the flowers and the mannikin breaks on the broken tiles of the cliff. His cold hands enliven the drunken chandeliers that are going to swallow the beach mannikin. Be careful, his hands can enliven the cold chandelier and the chorus girls' mannikin. Be careful he goes on hearing how his own maternal earth evaporates, keeping time with the coral space. His happy cough goes on structuring the rhythm of our vegetal growth, as it extends in sleep. Las formas en que utilizaste tus disfraces, hubieran logrado influenciar a Baudelaire. El espejo que unió a la condesa de Fernandina con Napoleón Tercero, no te arrancó las mismas flores que le llevaste a la corista, pues allí viste el aleph negro en lo alto del surtidor. Cronista de la boda de Luna de Copas con la Sota de Bastos, tuviste que brindar con champagne gelé por los sudores fríos de tu medianoche de agonizante. Los dormidos en la terraza, que tú tan sólo los tocabas quejumbrosamente, escupían sobre el tazón que tú le llevabas a los cisnes. The forms in which you used your disguises, could have managed to influence Baudelaire. The mirror that connected the Countess of Fernandina with Napoleon III didn't extract from you the same flowers you took to the chorus girl, because there you saw the black aleph at the top of the fountain. Chronicler of the wedding of the Moon of Cups to the Page of Wands, you had to offer a toast with champagne gelé because of the cold sweats of your midnights as a dying man. The sleepers on the terrace, whom you only touched as you complained, spat on the breakfast bowl you were taking to the swans. No respetaban que tú le habías encristalado la terraza y llevado el menguante de la liebre al espejo. Tus disfraces; como el almirante samurai, que tapó la escuadra enemiga con un abanico, o el monje que no sabe qué espera en El Escorial, hubieran producido otro escalofrío en Baudelaire. Sus sombríos rasguños, exagramas chinos en tu sangre, se igualaban con la influencia que tu vida hubiera dejado en Baudelaire, como lograste alucinar al Sileno con ojos de sapo y diamante frontal. Los fantasmas resinosos, los gatos que dormían en el bolsillo de tu chaleco estrellado, se embriagaban con tus ojos verdes. Desde entonces, el mayor gato, el peligroso genuflexo, no ha vuelto a ser acariciado. Cuando el gato termine la madeja, le gustará jugar con tu cerquillo, como las estrías de la tortuga nos dan la hoja precisa de nuestro fin. Tu calidad cariciosa, que colocaba un sofá de mimbre en una estampa japonesa, el sofá volante, como los paños de fondo de los relatos hagiográficos, que vino para ayudarte a morir. El mail coach con trompetas, acudido para despertar a los dormidos de la teraza, rompía tu escaso sueño en la madrugada, pues entre la medianoche y el despertar hacías tus injertos de azalea con araña fría, They didn't respect the fact that you had glassed in the terrace and taken the waning of the hare to the mirror. Your disguises, like the samurai admiral who blotted out the enemy squadron with a fan, or the monk who doesn't know what he expects in the Escorial, could have produced another chill in Baudelaire. Those somber scratches, Chinese hexagrams in your blood, equaled the influence your life could have left on Baudelaire, just as you managed to astonish Silenus with his toad-like eyes and frontal diamond. The resinous ghosts, the cats who slept in the pocket of your star-studded vest, were intoxicated with your green eyes. Since then, the biggest cat of all, the dangerous kneeling one, hasn't been caressed anymore. When it finishes the skein, the cat will like to play with your bangs, just as the creases on the tortoise give us the exact page of our end. Your caressable quality, that put a wicker sofa in a Japanese print, the movable sofa, like the backdrops of the hagiographic tales that came to help you die. The mail coach with trumpets, arriving to wake the sleepers on the terrace, interrupted your scant early-morning hours of sleep, for between midnight and waking your graftings of azaleas onto cold chandeliers (CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE) PROGRAM IN LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES NEWSLETTER 36 ODA A JULIÁN CASAL (CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE) que engendraban los sollozos de la Venus Anadyomena y el brazalete robado por el pico del alción. engendered the sobs of the Venus Anadyomene and the bracelet stolen by the kingfisher's beak. Sea maldito el que se equivoque y te quiera ofender, riéndose de tus disfraces o de lo que escribiste en La Caricatura, con tan buena suerte que nadie ha podido encontrar lo que escribiste para burlarte y poder comprar la máscara japonesa. Cómo se deben haber reído los ángeles, cuando saludabas estupefacto a la marquesa Polavieja, que avanzaba hacia ti para palmearte frente al espejo. Qué horror, debes haber soltado un lagarto sobre la trifolia de una taza de té. Haces después de muerto las mismas iniciales, ahora en el mojado escudo de cobre de la noche, que comprobaban al tacto la trigueñita de los doce años y el padre enloquecido colgado de un árbol. Sigues trazando círculos en torno a los que se pasean por la terraza, la chispa errante de tu errante verde. Todos sabemos ya que no era tuyo el falso terciopelo de la magia verde, los pasos contados sobre alfombras, la daga que divide las barajas, para unirlas de nuevo con tizne de cisnes. No era tampoco tuya la separación, que la tribu de malvados te atribuye, entre el espejo y el lago. Eres el huevo de cristal, donde el amarillo está reemplazado por el verde errante de tus ojos verdes. Invencionaste un color solemne, guardamos ese verde entre dos hojas. El verde de la muerte. May anyone be damned who blunders and tries to offend you, laughing at your disguises or at what you wrote in La Caricatura, so successfully that no one has been able to find what you wrote for fun so you could buy the Japanese mask. How the angels must have laughed when in astonishment you greeted the Marquise of Polavieja, who came forward to pat you on the back in front of the mirror. How awful, you must have let loose a lizard on the trefoil of a teacup. You make after your death the same initials, now on the wet copper shield of the night, that had been evidenced by touch by that dark-haired twelve-year-old girl and her crazed father hanging from a tree. You go on tracing circles around the people strolling on the terrace, the errant spark of your errant green. We all know now that none of these were yours: the fake velvet of green magic, the steps counted out over carpets, the dagger dividing the decks of cards, so as to join them again with swan soot. Nor was yours the separation that the evil tribe attributes to you, between the mirror and the lake. You are the glass egg where the yellow is replaced by the errant green of your green eyes. You invented a solemn color, we keep that green between two leaves. The green of death. Ninguna estrofa de Baudelaire, puede igualar el sonido de tu tos alegre. Podemos retocar, pero en definitiva lo que queda, es la forma en que hemos sido retocados. ¿Por quien? Respondan la chispa errante de tus ojos verdes y el sonido de tu tos alegre. No stanza of Baudelaire's can equal the sound of your happy cough. We can retouch, but in the last analysis what remains is the form in which we've been retouched. By whom? Let the answer come from the errant green of your green eyes and the sound of your happy cough. (CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE) WWW.PRINCETON.EDU/PLAS 37 ODA A JULIÁN CASAL (CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE) Los frascos de perfume que entreabriste, ahora te hacen salir de ellos como un homúnculo, ente de imagen creado por la evaporación, corteza del árbol donde Adonai huyó del jabalí para alcanzar la resurrección de las estaciones. El frío de tus manos, es nuestra franja de la muerte, tiene la misma hilacha de la manga verde oro del disfraz para morir, es el frío de todas nuestras manos. A pesar del frío de nuestra inicial timidez y del sorprendido en nuestro miedo final, llevaste nuestra luciérnaga verde al valle de Proserpina. The vials of perfume you began to open now make you rise up from them like a homunculus, an image-entity created by evaporation, bark of the tree where Adonai fled from the boar to attain the resurrection of the seasons. The cold of your hands is our fringe of death, it has the same frayed edge as the green-gold sleeve of the death disguise, it is the cold of all our hands. Despite the cold of our initial timidity and the cold suddenly found in our final fear, you took our green firefly down to the valley of Proserpina. La misión que te fue encomendada, descender a las profundidades con nuestra chispa verde, la quisiste cumplir de inmediato y por eso escribiste: ansias de aniquilarme sólo siento. Pues todo poeta se apresura sin saberlo para cumplir las órdenes indescifrables de Adonai. Ahora ya sabemos el esplendor de esa sentencia tuya, quisiste llevar el verde de tus ojos verdes a la terraza de los dormidos invisibles. Por eso aquí y allí, con los excavadores de la identidad, entre los reseñadores y los sombrosos, abres el quitasol de un inmenso Eros. Nuestro escandaloso cariño te persigue y por eso sonríes entre los muertos. The mission entrusted to you, to go down to the depths with our green spark, you chose to carry out right away and that's why you wrote: longings for annihilation are all I feel. For all poets hasten unknowingly to carry out the indecipherable orders of Adonai. Now we know the splendor of that statement of yours, you wanted to take the green of your green eyes to the terrace of the invisible sleepers. That's why, here and there, with the excavators of identity, among the reviewers and the murky ones, you open the parasol of an immense Eros. Our scandalous love pursues you and that's why you smile among the dead. La muerte de Baudelaire, balbuceando incesantemente: Sagrado nombre, Sagrado nombre, tiene la misma calidad de tu muerte, pues habiendo vivido como un delfín muerto de sueños, alcanzaste a morir muerto de risa. Tu muerte podía haber influenciado a Baudelaire. Aquel que entre nosotros dijo: ansias de aniquilarme sólo siento, fue tapado por la risa como una lava. En esas ruinas, cubierto por la muerte, ahora reaparece el cigarrillo que entre tus dedos se quemaba, la chispa con la que descendiste al lento oscuro de la terraza helada. Permitid que se vuelva, ya nos mira, qué compañía la chispa errante de su errante verde, mitad ciruelo y mitad piña laqueada por la frente Baudelaire's death, muttering over and over: Sacré nom, Sacré nom, has the same quality as your death, since, having lived like a dauphin dead tired, you managed in the end to die laughing. Your death could have influenced Baudelaire. The one who among us said: longings for annihilation are all I feel, was covered by laughter like a layer of lava. In those ruins, concealed by death, now reappears the cigarette that was burning between your fingers, the spark with which you went down to the slow darkness of the chill terrace. Allow him to return, he sees us now, what great company the errant spark of his errant green, half plum tree and half pineapple lacquered in front. Translated by James Irby From The Whole Island - Six Decades of Cuban Poetry, A Bilingual Anthology; edited by Mark Weiss PROGRAM IN LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES NEWSLETTER 38 LIFE’S WISDOM (CONTINUED FROM PAGE 7) for Princeton and for the staff we have here.” Passionate yet unassuming, Lajeunesse drives a taxi until the early morning hours after finishing his duties at Princeton to support his five children, who now all live with him in New Jersey, and his extended family in Haiti. Even with his intense schedule, he finds time to help students in the dormitories where he works and has completed two human resources learning and development programs. “Working at Princeton, you have opportunities to move up to another level and improve yourself economically and socially,” he said. “Anyone who comes here to work, they take you in with two hands and arms open.” Through his hard work, Lajeunesse has been able to send money and supplies to bring purified water to his hometown of Lasource, where villagers once traveled to a nearby mountain for clean water. “When I was a little boy, I asked my dad how can we do better and get clean water for our town,” Lajeunesse said. “Since then, this idea has always been in my mind.” While in the military in Haiti, Lajeunesse said he was able to get the government to commit to bring water to his village, but the project never happened because of political unrest in the country. In addition to providing support to his family in Haiti since moving to the United States, Lajeunesse began sending funds to his brother in 2003 so the two could take on the water project themselves. They have brought a clean water source closer to the village and are now raising money to build cisterns so that each house can have water all the time. The film shows Lajeunesse during a trip to Lasource in summer 2008 breaking down in tears as he speaks of the responsibilities that rest on his shoulders. “Now where they have water, the town is green—there is life,” he said. “But the job is not finished.” His connection to Haiti is why Shen said he and Bennick selected Lajeunesse for the documentary. The filmmakers contacted the University about researching possible candidates for the film, and Lajeunesse was one of a handful of janitors recommended by Baer. “In speaking with Josue we instantly knew we had a very compelling individual on our hand. When we went with him to Haiti, we were blown away by the poor living conditions there but also so impressed with his water project,” said Shen, adding that the film is now helping raise money for the project through a partnership with the nonprofit organization Generosity Water. Still striving to do more for his home, Lajeunesse is now seeking help from doctors in Haiti and New Jersey to create a health clinic in the remote area of Lasource. Lajeunesse said he also hopes to raise funds to buy computers for the local school and to build solar panels to power the machines because the village does not have electricity. As a janitor in Blair and Buyers halls, Bowman expects the student residents to treat the buildings with as much respect and care as she does. “If I come in to work and clean the building, when I come back the next day I expect that you have tried to keep it clean. I tell the kids that if they want a maid, they have to pay for a maid,” Bowman said with a laugh. “I’m the same way at home with my family.” Bowman grew up in Lawrence Township with her seven sisters and a brother, and she has two daughters, three sons and six grandchildren. Princeton runs in her family, with one sister also working in Building Services and two other sisters working in Dining Services. “Natasha is someone who tells it to you straight and will speak her mind,” Baer said. “She possesses a wisdom about life that I think is needed in this world.” After cleaning academic buildings for a number of years, Bowman said she enjoys the relationships she’s developed with students who live in the dorms. “I have a lot of foreign students in my dorms, and I enjoy seeing the students from different backgrounds and nationalities,” she said. “There also have been a few special kids who I’ve looked after while they were here.” Bowman recalled a particular student from the class of 2008 who she “got a feeling” about when seeing him around the building while she cleaned. The student admitted he was having trouble getting to an early morning class, so Bowman knocked on his door at 7 a.m. twice a week to make sure he woke up. “I took a liking to him, and I told him ‘Your parents sent you here to go to class, so I’m going to make sure you do,’” Bowman said. She and the student remained friendly, and he included her name in the dedications for his senior thesis, according to Bowman. As a fellow dormitory janitor, Bowman said she’s known Lajeunesse for many years but had no idea about his work in Haiti until “The Philosopher Kings” movie. “I’m really proud of Josue for what he’s doing for his country,” Bowman said. “The janitors that work in the dorms all know each other, but we don’t sit down often and talk about our personal lives.” Also an immigrant to the United States, Flites shares with Lajeunesse the experience of adjusting to life in a new country on his own. He’s worked at the University for about seven years, cleaning academic and administrative buildings from 4 p.m. to midnight. “We try to create the best working environment for the people who work and study in the buildings,” Flites said. “The way I look at it, we all want Princeton to be the best university. If we as janitors can contribute a little bit, I think that’s great.” Flites was pursuing his master’s degree in literature in Algeria when civil war jettisoned his studies. After leaving the country in 1996, he worked as a building supervisor and mechanic in Philadelphia and also met his wife, who is a teacher and native of New Jersey. Whether it’s traveling to U.S. Civil War battlefields or listening to books on tape while he cleans, Flites is constantly soaking up knowledge. “I would consider Mohamed an expert on the Civil War. He is always teaching me new things,” Baer said. On campus, Flites said he usually keeps a small camera in his pocket to document the inspiring architecture and scenery or the interesting people he meets. Although it was once his dream, Flites said he is no longer interested in finishing his graduate degree. “My friends, my family, the people I’ve met at Princeton, that’s the best education for me,” he said. “Being a janitor is just a title. It’s what I get from my experiences every day that matters.” Adapted from the Princeton University Bulletin 99(6), December 14, 2009. WWW.PRINCETON.EDU/PLAS 39 VARGAS LLOSA (CONTINUED FROM PAGE 35) explicito en todo aquello que ayuda a entender mi vida como candidato y como escritor. Eso me ha llevado a revelar ciertas intimidades. Pero ya que no se puede contar todo, ya que una autobiografía no puede ser una mera acumulación de informaciones, he seleccionado lo importante, tal como lo hace un novelista. La diferencia es que en este libro hay afán de objetividad. He tratado de no desnaturalizar el recuerdo. La excepción son algunos episodios donde ya no tengo muy claro que es lo verídico y que lo ficticio. Uno de esos episodios es un viaje a la selva que hice en 1958, por el Alto Marañón, y del que han salido varios relatos e historias fértiles para mí. He hablado y escrito tanto sobre ese viaje que ya no puedo discriminar entre lo que viví entonces y lo que fantasee después. Pero en lo político, que es muy cercano, he tratado de ser muy objetivo. Siempre creí que, si llegaba a escribir mi autobiógrafa, lo haría después de los setenta años. La etapa política fue lo que me movió a escribirla ahora. Temí que, con el tiempo, se diluyera la memoria de esa experiencia. El Escritor Comprometido A.D.Q. —Me llama la atención que en tus ensayos sobre otros escritores—sobre Flaubert, sobre García Márquez, sobre Sartre, sobre Borges—parezcas estar hablando de ti mismo tanto como de ellos, de tu propia vocación literaria y de tus proyectos. —La crítica literaria ha sido siempre una forma creativa, donde la imaginación tiene su propio derecho. Es para mí un género tan personal, tan comprometido como la ficción. T.E.M. —Quiero conectar el tema de los ensayos con el de los modelos, aunque has negado tenerlos. No has escrito todavía, creo, sobre ninguno de esos creadores latinoamericanos en cuya tradición pareces inscribirte: la tradición del intelectual que diseña naciones a la medida de sus sueños. Pienso en Alberdi, en Sarmiento, en Martí, en Vasconcelos, en Rómulo Gallegos. —Me forme en una época de América Latina en la que ser escritor era inseparable de una cierta forma de compromiso político. Para un peruano de mi generación, era imposible vivir de espaldas a los enormes problemas sociales y políticos. En el mundo universitario, por otra parte, la influencia de existencialismo era decisiva. Me eduqué en un clima marcado por las ideas de Sartre, Camus, Merleau-Ponty y, para los católicos, Gabriel Marcel. La preocupación ética no se disociaba entonces de la vocación artística. Y creíamos, además, que la literatura era un instrumento de acción para cambiar la realidad. Las palabras son actos, enseñaba Me forme en una época de América Latina en la que ser escritor era inseparable de una cierta forma de compromiso político. Para un peruano de mi generación, era imposible vivir de espaldas a los enormes problemas sociales y políticos. Sartre. Asumí esos postulados con gran convicción, como se refleja en mis primeros libros. La manera como se debía obedecer al mandato del compromiso varió en muchos escritores; también en mi caso. Pero nunca he cuestionado esa idea. He cambiado mi manera de pensar en política, pero no he cambiado de principios. No he podido nunca separar al escritor de su preocupación social. Son muy pocos, en mi generación, los que de buena o mala gana no se sintieron empujados a formas diversas del compromiso político. Eso, por supuesto, se inscribe dentro de una tradición antiquísima en América Latina. Quiero añadir algo. Si la evolución del continente continúa en la misma dirección en la que va, tal vez los nuevos escritores sean radicalmente distintos. En una América Latina más democrática, con instituciones más consolidadas, la literatura se irá despolitizando. Y quizá también ira dejando por el camino las inquietudes sociales, tal como ahora sucede en los Estados Unidos y en Europa occidental. A.D.Q. —En tu obra veo las dos líneas. Por un lado, está la vocación política y una relación con el Estado tan fuerte que te lleva a querer ocupar el lugar central del Estado. Pero por otro lado veo también una fuerte vocación por conferir autonomía a lo literario. Me pregunto si no hay en ti una tensión profunda entre el escritor que duda, el escritor que sabe decir “no se, de eso no se” y busca respuestas a través de las novelas, y el hombre público que está obligado a ofrecer afirmaciones, a veces tajantes y aun intransigentes: el político que no tiene derecho a dudar. —Hay una tensión, en efecto, pero no de esa índole. La tensión se da en el hecho de que la política y la creación artística son actividades muy absorbentes. Ambas exigen una entrega total. No se hacen con horario. Te las llevas a tu casa, duermes con ellas. Lo difícil es hacer que coexistan, porque asumir una significa inevitablemente el sacrificio de la otra. T.E.M. —No siempre. Hay intelectuales que asumen el ejercicio político con voluntad pedagógica, y el mismo afán didáctico los impulsa a escribir. Son los casos de Sarmiento, de Martí, y ahora mismo, el de Vaclav Havel. —Si, pero yo me refiero al creador, al que asume la literatura no para desarrollar deter- minadas ideas sociales o políticas sino para crear mundos que a veces se alzan como un desacato frontal contra lo establecido. Havel, claro que sí, ha superado esas barreras. Pero el suyo es un caso excepcional. Era un creador autentico, movilizado por pasiones de tipo social. Y esas pasiones, creo, han acaban por prevalecer en el. Ahora es sobre todo un político que felizmente no ha sepultado al creador, como se nota en sus discursos. Entre Dos Fuegos T.E.M. —Ante esa alternativa de vida completa, de tiempo completo, deduzco que, si conquistabas la Presidencia del Perú, estabas decidido a renunciar a la literatura durante el lapso de tu mandato. —Había decidido, por supuesto, cumplir con los compromisos asumidos en la campaña, aunque eso significara no escribir una sola línea de literatura. Pero también estaba decidido a que la experiencia durara los cinco años del mandato y no más. Esas decisiones son racionales, ¿pero cómo adivinar lo que va a pasar en el día a día? Recuerdo la angustia de ciertos momentos ante la idea de que, si ganaba, tendré que dejar de lado mi vocación durante cinco largos años. Me angustiaba, sobre todo, que ciertos instrumentos centrales para mi vocación, como el uso del lenguaje, se convirtieran en algo muy diferente. A.D.Q. —Por eso, precisamente, hablé de dos registros dispersos. Un novelista puede darse el lujo de ser ambiguo y de negarse a dar definiciones, pero un político no puede hacerlo. Es, por definición, aseverativo. —Es así. Un político profesional no puede ser ambiguo. El político tiene que persuadir, ser no sólo didáctico sino también llegar a un público muy heterogéneo. Y es muy difícil llegar a él si no se hace por lo bajo, a través de simplificaciones y repeticiones. Porque así es el lenguaje del político: simple, reiterativo. Todo lo contrario del lenguaje literario. El escritor trabaja con un lenguaje condensado, personal, tratando de diferenciarse del lugar común. El mensaje político, en cambio, es más eficaz mientras más cerca esta de la lengua del común. En un político, el compromiso con la verdad es transitorio y relativo, porque el político se mueve en el mundo de lo práctico. Eso no (CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE) PROGRAM IN LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES NEWSLETTER 40 VARGAS LLOSA (CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE) significa que sean mentirosos irremediables o ventrílocuos estereotipados. Una gran parte de ellos sí lo son, y por eso admiro a quienes han sido capaces de superar esos escollos manteniendo en pie una actitud ética y una coherencia de ideas. Hay algo que no quisiera dejar incompleto. No me parecería honesto descalificar al político y afirmar, en cambio, que todo intelectual es puro e integro ante la verdad. Eso no es cierto. La pureza es más fácil, por supuesto, cuando se es un intelectual. Pero eso tiene que ver con la responsabilidad que cada quien asume. Ante un papel en blanco se puede decir o hacer cualquier cosa Con impunidad el político, en cambio, debe saber que con sus actos puede desencadenar situaciones apocalípticas. La Modernidad A.D.Q. —Yo no hablé de pureza, sino de autonomía ante el poder. Voy a tomar un ejemplo concreto: he observado en tu discurso publico sobré la modernidad y en tus celebraciones del progreso una cierta intransigencia can los que no están de acuerdo y una cierta condena del multiculturalismo, mientras que en el conjunto de tu obra narrativa la modernidad se ve, en cambio, como alga muy problemático. —La modernidad sólo es problemática para los que ya son modernos. Porque si eres moderno, puedes darte el lujo de desacreditar la modernidad y reivindicar en cambio lo primitivo, lo arcaico. Pero vista desde la perspectiva de un peruano, o de un paraguayo, o de un somalí, la modernidad es un problema de vida o muerte para inmensas masas que viven en el primitivismo, no como si fuera un juego intelectual de antropólogos y politicólogos, sino como gente desamparada ante un mundo cada vez más hostil. Si eres un político y tienes un mínimo de responsabilidad, no puedes plantear la modernidad como un tema de debate académico. En el Perú, la modernidad significa trabajo para los que no trabajan, instrucción básica para los que no tienen instrucción, y un mínimo de oportunidades para gentes condenadas a la marginalidad desde su nacimiento puedan ganar su vida. T.E.M. —Pero ganarse la vida puede significar, cuando la modernidad es algo impuesto o forzado, perder la vida que ya se tiene. En casos como los de los indios de la etnia quiche en Guatemala o la etnia yanomami en Venezuela y Brasil, la modernidad (o cierto símil de modernidad) se consigue con el mismo lenguaje de tierra arrasada que esgrimieron nuestros modernizadores del siglo XIX. En la Argentina se consiguió acabar con el gaucho, con el indio y con el negro casi al mismo tiempo. Be alcanzó a costa del exterminio. —Así es. Pero la modernidad a la que yo me refiero y a la que tú te puedes también referir en estos finales del siglo XX no es ya la de quienes creían que el único modo de ser moderno en América Latina era matando indios e importando italianos. Lo extraordinario de esta época es que la modernidad puede ser alcanzada por cualquier sociedad o por cualquier cultura, a condición de que se pague pensar que puede haber resistencias en esos sujetos a los que convertimos en objetos, que puede haber en ellos el deseo de que su modernidad sea de otra manera. —Supones que las culturas son todas equivalentes. Y no lo son. T.E.M. — ¿Estás postulando, entonces, que algunas culturas son superiores a otras? ¿O entiendo mal? —Quiero decir que hay culturas retrogradas y culturas progresistas. Hay culturas La modernidad es la lucha por la civilización. el precio. Ese precio no es el exterminio, por supuesto. Al contrario. Ciertos indígenas de la selva peruana, por ejemplo, son diezmados por los narcotraficantes, por los terroristas y por las fuerzas contrainsurgentes. No tienen como defenderse porque no son modernos. Si se los hiciera acceder a la modernidad, se los ayudar la a que sobrevivan. Naturalmente, no todo lo que ellos han creado va a sobrevivir. Pero eso ocurre con todas las formas de cultura. La modernidad es la lucha por la civilización. Y en nombre de cierta pureza racial (porque ahora hasta la raza parece que se ha convertido en un valor) no puedes condenar al exterminio a sociedades enteras que viven al margen. A.D.Q. —Hay, sin embargo, otras concepciones de la civilización y de la modernidad, que son mas criticas... —¿Cuáles son? A ver si me convences de que hay una forma alternativa de la modernidad a la que estamos aludiendo. A.D.Q. — Cuáles? Por ejemplo, una forma de la modernidad que pone el énfasis en una palabra que hasta ahora no hemos usado: la palabra “democracia”. —Para mí, la modernidad es la democracia. A.D.Q. —No hablo en un sentido electoral... —Mi campaña electoral estuvo basada en la necesidad de modernizar al Perú: modernizarlo políticamente, con la democracia política; económicamente, con el mercado, e internacionalizar la vida peruana. A.D.Q. —Pero la democracia también es reconocer que hay sujetos múltiples en una sociedad... —Desde luego. A.D.Q. —...y no un solo proyecto nacional. —La democracia es la diversidad, y es también la coexistencia en la diversidad. A.D.Q. —Al aludir a los indígenas de la selva peruana has dicho que hay que “hacerlos acceder a la modernidad”. Hacerlos acceder. Ese nosotros imperativo que habla es antidemocrático. Seriamos “nosotros”, entonces, los que vamos a hacer que otros accedan a la modernidad que “nosotros” definimos, sin que reprimen el desarrollo del individuo. A esas no las llama ni siquiera primitivas. Las llama bárbaras. Un ejemplo, en comparación con la cultura occidental y democrática, sería el fundamentalismo islámico. Ahí tienes una cultura que reprime a la mujer, considerándola un objeto; que sanciona aberraciones tales como imponer justicia mediante la amputación de miembros, que permite la castración femenina. Nadie me va a convencer de que yo debo condenar a inmensas masas humanas a padecer esa cultura sólo por el accidente geográfico de haber nacido en determinado lugar. T.E.M. —Repruebo esas costumbres, por supuesto. Pero también repruebo el afán de imponer, en nombre de cierta superioridad civilizadora, una determinada cultura sobre las otras. —Sucede que hay culturas incompatibles. Y esa incompatibilidad está representada para mí por polos que son los de la civilización y la barbarie, los de la modernidad y el arcaísmo. A.D.Q. —Veamos si hay algún modo de zafarnos de esas oposiciones tan drásticas. Civilización o barbarie. Creo reconocer ese discurso. Ese discurso viene acompañado de otro: el del darwinismo social. El discurso de las sociedades fuertes y las sociedades débiles. —No. La modernidad es justamente la ruptura de esos esquemas dogmaticos. Es el reemplazo de la idea de cultura por la idea de individuo. Un individuo construye su cultura, escapando a los condicionamientos religiosos y étnicos: eso es la modernidad. Y la única cultura que permite esa inmensa diversidad en la que uno puede ser lo que quiere es la cultura democrática. En esa cultura, no hay otro modo de medir lo que quiere la gente que a través de las elecciones. Tú eres puertorriqueño. Y Puerto Rico es, para mí, uno de los ejemplos más interesantes del espíritu pragmático de un pueblo capaz de hacer concesiones en puntos que a primera vista parecen irrenunciables para alcanzar su modernidad y su desarrollo. (CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE) WWW.PRINCETON.EDU/PLAS 41 VARGAS LLOSA (CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE) Puerto Rico, México y la Soberanía A.D.Q. —En ideas como la de nación y la de Estado. —Así es. En ideas como la de nación y la de soberanía. Esas ideas están ya devaluadas por la cultura democrática. Mucho antes de que eso se convirtiera en una evidencia, los puertorriqueños—por intuición, por voluntad de supervivencia y por espíritu de superación nacional-pasaron el deseo de soberanía a un segundo plano. Con lo cual, parecieran haberse anticipado a una de las metas del mundo actual. A.D.Q. —Esa anticipación ha derivado, sin embargo, en una catástrofe social que se expresa en la música y en la literatura. —Claro, siempre hay un precio doloroso que pagar. Pero si tú cotejas la situación de Puerto Rico con la de países latinoamericanos equivalentes, como Honduras o la Republica Dominicana, hablar de “tragedia puertorriqueña” resulta una broma de mal gusto. A.D.Q. —Los modernizadores puertorriqueños de los años 50 tenían una consigna cuyas consecuencias se ven ahora. “Gobernar”, decían, “es despoblar”. Era una consigna que se alzaba en nombre de la razón, de la democracia y del futuro. Contra esa modernización hubo una resistencia cultural. —Pero el pueblo puertorriqueño, con un olfato más afinado que el de muchos de sus intelectuales, ha preservado cosas esenciales como el idioma, sin sacrificar sus posibilidades de desarrollo material. O sea que no se dejó colonizar culturalmente, a la vez que económicamente supo convertir su condición colonial en algo beneficioso para las mayorías. Si los intelectuales hubieran decidido la suerte de América Latina, todo el continente sería ahora un inmenso Gulag. Hoy la democracia ya es algo asumido, pero en un principio fue una decisión instintiva de los pueblos y no un movimiento que los intelectuales hayan encabezado. No: los intelectuales fueron a remolque de esa decisión. T.E.M. —No siempre. En el caso de México, por ejemplo, fueron los intelectuales, desde Azuela, Reyes y Vasconcelos, los que contribuyeron a poner orden en el caos postrevolucionario ya afianzar la democracia. Has hablado de un precio que se debe pagar. ¿Crees que en tu país, el Perú, hay que pagar el inmenso precio de la soberanía nacional para alcanzar una modernidad para la que nadie te ofrece ninguna garantía previa? ¿Crees que México debe pagar ese precio para ingresar en el Tratado de Libre Comercio con los Estados Unidos y Canadá? —Lo que sí creo es que la modernidad significa la disolución de la soberanía. Si te acercas a un campo decisivo como el económico, descubres que las fronteras son ya algo muy relativo, que está desapareciendo. Los mercados comunes están convirtiendo la idea de nación en una idea retórica. Si las sociedades primitivas quieren modernizarse ahora no tienen otro remedio que abrir sus fronteras. Si quieres mantenerlas, estas condenado a la suerte de Cuba o a la de Corea del Norte. Un país pequeño, que no figura en el pelotón de los países modernizados, tiene muy pocas posibilidades de decidir sobre las cuestiones políticas centrales que le conciernen. Fíjate en un país tan poderoso como Rusia. Pues bien: buena parte del destino de Rusia se está decidiendo fuera de Rusia. Y lo que vale para Rusia, ¿cómo no va a valer para Argentina o Perú? Empujemos esa realidad. Acabemos con las fronteras. Por primera vez en la historia de la humanidad, eso es ahora posible. T.E.M. —La utopía que acabas de exponer es la que se puede expresar desde un país desarrollado, no desde la periferia. Los países exporta masas de hambrientos. No niego que haya dificultades en este proceso. Las hay. Fíjate en la internacionalización creciente de la cultura. Las comunicaciones han hecho volar las fronteras. Por primera vez, todos los hombres son ahora contemporáneos. T.E.M. —Tu frase me recuerda a lo que escribía Octavio Paz hace cuarenta años, cuando los tiempos eran otros, al final de su libro El laberinto de la soledad. Escribió, si la memoria no me traiciona, “Somos, por primera vez en nuestra historia, contemporáneos de todos los hombres”. —Cuando Paz lo escribió, era mucho menos cierto de lo que es ahora. Hoy es una realidad flagrante. Si haces a todos los hombres contemporáneos, los grandes beneficios de la modernidad van a convertirse en un apetito, en un deseo. T.E.M. —Sigo sin ver como Mexico pagaría con su soberanía el precio de la modernidad. No cree que el Tratado de Libre Comercio valga un precio tan alto. —Soy un defensor acérrimo del Tratado de Libre Comercio. Creo que es el más rápido Es que el mercantilismo destruye el liberalismo. La única manera de afrontar la competencia es compitiendo. Si las industrias no están en condiciones de competir, deben reformarse o desaparecer: ese es el principio básico de la libertad. desarrollados pueden predicar, mientras les convengan, la apertura de fronteras económicas, pero simultáneamente están cerrando cada vez más las fronteras políticas. No hay barreras ni aduanas para recibir los dividendos económicos de los pueblos subdesarrollados, pero las barreras se alzan de inmediato cuando se trata de recibir a los emigrantes de esos mismos pueblos. Les pasa a los turcos en Alemania, a los árabes en Francia y les pasaba o les pasa a los sudacas en España. O el liberalismo se da en todos los terrenos a la vez, o hay que desconfiar de su sinceridad. —El proceso de la modernización es largo, esta llene de reveses y retrocesos, pero no es utópico. La utopía da sensación de irrealidad y no es irreal lo que postulo. Lo que ya ha pasado en el campo económico abre la puerta, de hecho, a una internacionalización creciente también en otros campos. ¿A quienes Europa les pone visas? A los dominicanos y a los peruanos, pero no a los chilenos. ¿Por qué los chilenos pueden hoy entrar adonde quieren? Porque tienen trabajo en su país y porque Chile no instrumento para la democratización de Mexico. Si el Tratado se hace realidad, será muy difícil que pueda sobrevivir un sistema como el del PRI,3 que está montado básicamente sobre el patrimonialismo, es decir, sobre el poder mantenido en base a prebendas y privilegios. En el momento en que haya una liberalización económica, no creo que el PRI pueda mantenerse. A ese Tratado deben incorporarse todos los demás países que vayan abriendo sus economías. Chile puede muy bien postularse para ser admitido. Mientras más empujemos al mundo y a América Latina en el camino de la integración económica, lo que equivale a una disolución de las fronteras comerciales, hay más posibilidades de acabar con aventuras bélicas y con aventuras imperialistas, puesto que nadie va a querer conquistar a quien ya le sirve y es su socio. Y en América Latina es donde se puede llegar más rápido. Las nacionalidades son allí más artificiales, se han montado de modo arbitrario, sin obedecer a criterios geográficos, étnicos o históricos. (CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE) Sigla del Partido Revolucionario Institucional, del que han salido todos los presidentes de Mexico en las últimas seis décadas. 3 PROGRAM IN LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES NEWSLETTER 42 VARGAS LLOSA En la Era de Clinton T.E.M. —Habría que saber si los Estados Unidos coinciden con ese punta de vista. —La última campaña electoral en Estados Unidos ha mostrado la capacidad de regeneración que tiene el sistema. Había hartazgo y pesimismo con la recesión y con los reveses económicos internos. Se eligió entonces a una figura joven, de otro partido. Y eso ha despertado nuevas ilusiones en el sistema como instrumento de cambio. Para mí eso es muy positivo, porque creo en el sistema. Ahora bien: Clinton representa un peligro en el campo de la internacionalización. En el veo el riesgo de una vuelta al proteccionismo y de un nuevo confinamiento en el localismo. Lo que vaya a ocurrir no está claro, porque Clinton envía señales aun equivocas. T.E.M. —Había desanimo antes de Clinton, dijiste. ¿Por qué había desanimo? Pues justamente porque había fracasado una política de mercados abiertos, porque, al llegar a sus extremos, el liberalismo estaba mostrando sus grietas. —No. Si Bush fracasó es porque frenó el impulso hacia la liberalización, que había sido muy fuerte en tiempos de Reagan. Sucede que Bush nunca fue un liberal. Fue un conservador. T.E.M. —Bush, de todas maneras, pone al descubierto el hecho de que, tras ocho años de impulso liberalizador, como dices, tras ocho años de Reagan, Estados Unidos habra perdido todas las ventajas que tenía en su competencia con los japoneses, por ejemplo. —Es que el mercantilismo destruye el liberalismo. La única manera de afrontar la competencia es compitiendo. Si las industrias no están en condiciones de competir, deben reformarse o desaparecer: ese es el principio básico de la libertad. T.E.M. —La experiencia histórica demuestra, sin embargo, que el liberalismo económico rara vez va acompañado por el liberalismo político. Más bien sucede al revés. —Pero a los países que han llevado más lejos su liberalismo les ha ido mejor. Los países con grandes sectores públicos están en desventaja ante los que ya han descentralizado su economía. Esas son leyes generales para las que no hay excepciones. T.E.M. —Uruguay, sin embargo, decidió democráticamente, a través de un plebiscito, oponerse a la venta de sus empresas públicas. Y no me parece que le esté yendo tan mal. —Ellos eligieron regresar a la idea de la tribu. No es infrecuente si no les va mal ahora es por la apertura sensata que se aplicó durante la presidencia de [Julio María] Sanguinetti. Su sucesor, Luis Lacalle, quiso llevarla un poco más lejos, y los uruguayos le dijeron “No queremos”. Pues bien. No quieren. Eso debe respetarse, porque no creo que esos procesos se deban hacer a la fuerza. ¿Quieren un Estado fuerte? Entonces hay que darles un Estado fuerte. Pero si existe la democracia, van a terminar descubriendo que esa política los pone en desventaja. De Sarmiento a Borges A.D.Q. —A esta altura de la conversación, advierto que el verdadero modelo de Mario Vargas Llosa para el espacio público es Sarmiento, con su discurso civilizador y modernizador, y sus ideas de civilización y barbarie. No Borges, al que dedicaste un ensayo en el que lo oponías a Sartre, sino Sarmiento. —Sarmiento me parece un escritor extraordinario. Facundo es, pienso, la gran obra narrativa del siglo XIX. Pero, a diferencia de él, no creo en la europeización racial. Su racismo es para mí inaceptable. T.E.M. —Vuelvo a Borges, entonces. Por un lado están las erráticas ideas políticas de Borges, que se le han perdonado para dejar que prevalezca la grandeza innegable de su obra. Pero por otro lado esta, también, la intención de Borges, a través de sus declaraciones públicas y de conferencias como “El escritor argentino y la tradición”, de que su visión o no visión del mundo, su anti sentimentalismo, el pudor y la elusión que eran característicos de su obra, se conviertan en paradigmáticas para la literatura argentina: la intención de que toda la literatura argentina sea como era la literatura de Borges. —Borges no fue un político y no puede juzgárselo como tal. Fue un escritor que descreía ya no solo de la política sino también de la realidad. Pero eso que racionalmente tal vez sea un disparate, produjo en su caso una obra magistral. De todos modos, tuvo actos de extremo coraje. Se opuso a la guerra de las Malvinas cuando su país estaba ganado por la histeria nacionalista, fue antifascista cuando las mayorías abrazaban el peronismo, que era en aquel momento la forma argentina del fascismo. Pero lo que queda de Borges no es eso, como tampoco es el lado político lo que ha quedado de Neruda, con quien habría que ser severísimo. Lo que queda de Borges es su extraordinaria capacidad para transformar la lengua literaria española con una fuerza que no se conocía desde los clásicos del Siglo de Oro. Y queda también su originalidad, que nace de sus carencias personales. Reemplazo cierto tipo de experiencias no vividas con una erudición monstruosa. Y, además, nos ayudo a todos los escritores de América Latina a romper con un complejo provinciano de inferioridad. A.D.Q. —Hacia el final de ese mismo ensayo, “El escritor argentino y la tradición”, Borges afirma que el escritor latinoamericano es como los judíos, que pueden innovar más fácilmente en la cultura occidental porque actúan dentro de esa cultura pero no se sienten atados a ella. Pareciera estar marcando así nuestra marginalidad frente al centro, que es la cultura occidental. ¿Esa es también tu posición? —Borges refuta allí el nacionalismo con argumentos contundentes. Para él, la cultura está en un plano distinto del de la historia, (CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE) 4 En su libro de 1950, Octavio Paz define a los “pachucos” como a “bandas de jóvenes, generalmente de origen mexicano, que viven en las ciudades del Sur [de Estados Unidos] y que se caracterizan tanto por su vestimenta como por su conducta y su lenguaje”. Los pachucos son también conocidos como “chicanos” y constituyen ahora casi un tercio de la población en el sur de Texas y de California. WWW.PRINCETON.EDU/PLAS 43 Photo of (left to right) Mario Vargas Llosa and Tomás Eloy Martínez courtesy of Arcadio Díaz Quiñones (CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE) (CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE) que también es, el lo insinúa, una rama de la ficción. Pero creo que Borges representa la cultura occidental. No hay otro escritor en América Latina que sea tan universal como él. Antes de Borges, tal vez haya que citar a Ruben Darío, quien fue también capaz de decir: Yo me apodero de lo que me gusta. Y lo que me gusta es mío. A.D.Q. —Pero eso sólo se puede hacer desde el margen. Desde el centro es imposible hacerlo. —Cuando ellos lo hicieron no se podía, en efecto. Creo que ahora si se puede, cada vez mas. Aun así, no ser nada o ser todo es una de las maneras más autenticas de ser latinoamericano. Es el caso de Darío, a quien no se puede encasillar en una tradición concreta, porque está en todas a la vez. Lo concreto es su obra, que tiene un sello muy personal. También Borges y Octavio Paz son eso. Octavio Paz es un caso notable de universalismo que se expresa claramente en algo muy personal. A.D.Q. —No entiendo entonces muy bien porque Paz, en el comienzo mismo de El laberinto de la soledad, se refiere despectivamente al “pachuco”,4 que es justamente producto de la hibridez y de la mezcla. —No creo que Octavio Paz haya hablado despectivamente del pachuco. A.D.Q. —No lo ve como una cultura. Lo describe como un no ser. —Lo ve como a la encarnación de una falta de identidad. Y en eso descubre un símbolo. Pero no lo trata de modo despectivo. Más bien hace de él una descripción trágica. A.D.Q. —Yo veo una actitud despectiva: la misma actitud despectiva que hay en ciertos intelectuales del Caribe ante la emigración. Cuando sales de tu territorio, pierdes tu identidad. —No lo creo. Ahí tienes a grandes escritores del Caribe como Alejo Carpentier que se construyen su propia identidad, lo que les permite elaborar una obra muy rica en la que no están presentes sólo el Caribe, Francia y sus culturas, sino todo eso: una mezcla admirable en la que aparecen también las curiosidades históricas del propio Carpentier. Otro caso notable de creación de identidad es [José] Lezama Lima. Ahí tienes a un hombre que, sin salir de Cuba, se inventó un mundo que pasa por todas las geografías y todas las culturas, tal como había hecho Darío. donde esta lo afro. Pero lo afro nos rodea por todas partes. Ahí tienes un serio problema de identidad. —Creo que la identidad es un mito, una ficción. Lo afro es tan ficticio como lo blanco o como lo judío. La identidad es un producto de la ideología. Se trata de hacernos pensar que existen comunes denominadores a los que no podemos escapar, y eso no es verdad. Sólo adviertes que hay una identidad autentica cuando te vuelves hacia lo individual. Mira tú lo de las identidades nacionales: eso es una pura ficción, una invención de los antropólogos. A.D.Q. —Cuando veo a los puertorriqueños bailando sus plenas en Nueva York, no necesito hablar con los antropólogos para darme cuenta que allí hay una identidad, algo que es propio de ellos y solo de ellos. —Pero ese es sólo un nivel donde yo también puedo ser un puertorriqueño. Oigo una plena y lloro. Me produce una emoción infinita. La bailo mal, pero no por eso me conmueve menos. Si de la plena hablamos, yo también soy puertorriqueño. A.D.Q. —Sucede que en América Latina se tiende a negar lo que es inmediato, no lo que es remoto: Insisto, con Henríquez Ureña, uno de los grandes escritores del Caribe. Henríquez Ureña no podía ver lo afro. —No lo veía. Pero la identidad tampoco puede ser acumulativa, porque entonces desembocas en el artificio. Hablar de identidades puede ser equivoco y peligroso. A.D.Q. —Pero si se puede hablar de construcción de identidades. Lo que pasa es que la negación de lo afro, sobre todo en el Caribe, revela un conflicto cultural muy vivo todavía en la tradición latinoamericana. —En lo que veo en peligro es en establecer un esquema intelectual, ideológico, político, y en juzgar una obra exclusivamente en función de ese esquema. Eso es una distorsión, la vieja distorsión ideológica, de la literatura y de la cultura en general. Según eso, quienes son políticamente correctos son buenos y son validos, y quienes no, no lo son. Así se establecen unas jerarquías aberrantes. Quiero añadir algo sobre la identidad. Hay identidades que aproximan a ciertos seres, pero no en función de la geografía o de la religión, por ejemplo, sino en función de sus propias semejanzas como individuos. Lo demás es artificio. FACULTY UPDATES (CONTINUED FROM PAGE 22) Magaly Sánchez R. (Office of Population Research) Selected Recent Publications “Distant but Linked: Venezuelan Immigrants in United States” In Multicultural Americans: The Newest Americans (Westport, CT: Greenwood, forthcoming). Massey, Douglas S., & Magaly Sánchez R. Brokered Boundaries: Creating Immigrant Identity in Anti-immigrant Times (Russell Sage Foundation, 2010). “Latino Youths: From Exclusion to International Migration.” Urbana (39, 2009). Massey, Douglas S., & Magaly Sánchez R. “Restrictive Immigration Policies & Latino Immigrant Identity in the United States.” UNDP Human Development Research Papers 43 (United Nations Development Program, 2009). Alexandra Vazquez (African American Studies and English) is the recipient of a 2010–2011 Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship, awarded by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. Selected Recent Publication “Can You Feel the Beat? Freestyle’s Systems of Living, Loving, & Recording.” Social Text, special issue, “Politics & Sound Recording” (March 2010). Photo courtesy of Alexandra Vazquez VARGAS LLOSA La Identidad A.D.Q. —Admiro profundamente a Lezama Lima, pero tanto el cómo [Pedro] Henríquez Ureña y otros intelectuales caribeños de primera magnitud tienen una ceguera plena ante el mundo afro. No pueden verlo como un mundo capaz de generar cultura. La otredad empieza PROGRAM IN LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES NEWSLETTER 44 LA BREGA (CONTINUED FROM PAGE 17) being there, an imprecise mode of struggle, a negotiation between presence and absence. In situations that announce themselves as less than propitious or outright impossible, a different tone of voice is struck and the expression becomes: Yo con eso no brego (that is not for me to take on or, more idiomatically, I wouldn't touch that with a ten-foot pole). Where could such a deep familiarity with la brega have come from? For some twenty or thirty years now, the word has been embedded in the oral idiom, in the ethos and specific laws of cultural memory. It has made its way into pithy and straightforward expressions, as when a query about someone's behavior is answered with a Si tú bregas bien, ella brega bien (If you handle it well, she'll handle it well; in other words, expect measure for measure). Bregar, even when we account for all its twist and turns, essentially bears the imprint of three elements. Work, and by implication discipline and talent, comprises the first term. Next, we have bregar in its sexual sense in which the two spheres of work and eroticism intersect with the rhythms of the body. The third term is marked by intense psychological, spiritual, and political dilemmas that have a direct effect on individuals as well as the community. The third term, with its back and forth between indecision and decision in the face of precarious situations, is the one that interests me most in this essay. The word may be uttered in hope or melancholy. Whether it be in Chicago or on the Island, the concise expression, hay que bregar (you gotta do. what you gotta do) can be an appeal to new ideas and initiatives, including those with a certain militancy, that seek to confront policies, behaviors and tecbnical challenges. In different contexts, however, as in other duplicities of Puerto Rican life, it can come across as a lifeless response that allows the speaker to disconnect while saving appearances, a formula without beginning or end running circles around itself. The appeal of this nonepic mode of the brega is in its sanction for life to proceed so that some part may be salvaged from the ruins. For many decades many Puerto Ricans placed their hopes on the avant-garde poet and politician Luis Muñoz Marín; certainly, he would know how to deal (bregar) with the North Americans, how to negotiate with the disproportionate Empire without compromising dignity or resorting to violence. And indeed, Muñoz Marín, whose father and forebear was Luis Muñoz Rivera, responsible for the “posibilismo” school of Puerto Rican politics, succeeded, with the help of his remarkable charisma and a noteworthy democratic consensus, in making the unyielding yield. In the post Cold War years, he took on the role of the doubleagent of political culture. Muñoz Marín seemed to be the perfect embodiment of la brega: he was two in one, perfectly bilingnal, with solid Creole and modern affiliations and loyal to both Puerto Rico and North America. In political terms, the brega efficiently served to buttress social action. A great finesse in negotiation, expertise in translation and dexterity in times of flight were some of the qualities it exacted. Bilingualism cannot be under-emphasized as one of the credentials that gave political validity to Muñoz Marín's brega. A key work in this respect is the heretofore little known Historia del Partido Popular Democrático. This brief work, written in the 1940s, includes an "unfinished autobiography," a first-person chronology that was not published until 1984. The anonymous editor informs us that the early chapters that make up the incomplete life were written between 1941 and 1942, in the wake of the great political triumph of 1940. In the sketchy retelling of his childhood in New York, Muñoz Marín lays claim to some very telling beginnings: "I do not recall any moment at which I did not speak English, just as I do not recall any moment at which I did not speak Spanish." His persona was to be invariably engaged on this mental and linguistic frontier. In the self that Muñoz Marín constructed, fluency in both American English and Puerto Rican Spanish would in the end constitute the real difference. In his self-portrait, he speaks like a man secure in his own role, like one entrusted with a mission. One could almost describe his exposition as utopian—a translator's utopia where poet and politician can merge. In this way the figure of the translator, that most secret and strange and nostalgic of writers, to borrow Maurice Blanchot's words, was given greater substance. What follows is a sampling of what Muñoz Marín somewhat self-contentedly thought of himself in the text that dates from 1941 or 1942: In the sketchy retelling of his childhood in New York, Muñoz Marín lays claim to some very telling beginnings: “I do not recall any moment at which I did not speak English, just as I do not recall any moment at which I did not speak Spanish.” (CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE) WWW.PRINCETON.EDU/PLAS 45 LA BREGA (CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE) In that bout of giving names to things— that day-in-day-out imperturbable christening by way of which a child configures the habitat of his soul-things, it turned out, had two names. They had their Spanish name and their English name. This went well beyond the mere translation of syllables whose equivalents dictionaries seek to provide. Dictionaries may translate a series of parallel connotations, but these continue to be differentiated by their meanings— connotations that carry whole histories in their innermost recesses, a whole way of seeing, a whole mentality [ ... ] Through fortuitous accidents in the comings and goings of my early years, I think that English, in its American expression, and Spanish, in its Puerto Rican expression, understand each other quite well in my person. In its political sense, the brega also exacted a mastery of the art of the fugue, that tradition with so many moorings in maroon communities. In the second volume of Memorias, also posthumously published in 1992, Muñoz Marín relates an enlightening parable of the brega and exposes it for the finely-honed instrument of political practice it is. In the years that the Dominican Republic was under Trujillo's dictatorship, Admiral Barbey, a commander in the United States Naval Fleet in the Caribbean which was headquartered in Puerto Rico, agreed to accept an honor that had been conferred on him by the dictatorship. Unbeknownst to Governor Muñoz Marín who had not been consulted beforehand, arrangements were made to hold the ceremony in San Juan. This sequence of events resulted in an extremely awkward diplomatic and political dilemma: "I did not wish," Muñoz Marín wrote, "to create an embarrassing situation for the government of the United States in its dealings with a government that it officially recognized, but I, for one, was not about to receive the high officials arriving from Santo Domingo to attend the ceremonies." How was one to escape without upsetting political relations? Muñoz Marín's solution to the dilemma is an illustration of the methodical duplicity and craftiness that are characteristic of the brega. The account is introduced under the following seemingly innocuous heading: Con café no se puede brindar (You Can't Toast with Coffee). Indeed, there was to be neither an open denunciation nor a justification of the military men in attendance. Muñoz Marín needed a roomier exit and found his escape in the Caribbean archipelago. When, as an older man, Muñoz Marín recorded this incident in Memorias, he recalls the intellectuals and poets. Among them, Luis Palés Matos, who is directly quoted and who accompanied him in the escapade. Together with his complicit friends, he pitched camp in a free zone, a private world beyond the reach of the imperial state for "four days of elation and superlative talk." With irony, he narrates how the double game of concealment and disclosure was played, trusting that hindsight would enable his readers to recognize the virtue of his moves. This parable could be a mirror in which the colonial brega can contemplate its image: ... as I did not want to create international complications for a matter of tin-ware ... I decided to make myself scarce for a few days and went on a small boat to the Virgin Islands along with a handful of friends: Jaime Benítez, Antonio Colorado, Mariano Villaronga ... the poet Luis Palés Matos and the future Senator Ramón Enrique Bauzá. I left Sol Luis Descartes, the Treasurer of Puerto Rico, in charge of the government, with instructions to honor the medal-recipi- (CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE) PROGRAM IN LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES NEWSLETTER 46 LA BREGA (CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE) ents at the reception at La Fortaleza with black coffee instead of the customary champagne that is the de rigueur tradition on such occasions. Had they been served champagne, they would most certainly have raised their glasses to the Leader of the Government of Puerto Rico, that is me, which would have left Descartes no choice but to drink to the health of Trujillo. But, "you can't toast with black coffee." Four days of elation and superlative talk were had on those "lagging island” waters, as Palés had said, whose luminosity and magic could only be compared to the seas of Greece such as the one before me as I sit composing this page. Palés, in the most renowned phase of his poetic work, wrote his Afro-Caribbean poems without once setting foot outside Puerto Rico. Some years ago, I had wanted to take him with me to New York to publish a literary journal of projected hemispheric reach, but his shyness and a marriage promise held him back in Puerto Rico. As we walked the sandy streets of a forgotten village on the island of St. John, Palés, with all the openness of a profound poet, said: "This looks a lot like what I've written." Descartes received the delegation and served coffee. There were not toasts. The medal was pinned on the Admiral at his residence on the Naval Base. I could have opposed adamantly the reception of the representatives of the dictatorship at La Fortaleza. By deciding not to do so, I expressed my attitude that when it comes to things of this kind, once the principle has been clearly stated, what's the point of causing further disruptions to the normal functioning of government. The Puerto Rican nation understood the lesson in democracy and that was enough. There was no need to over-dramatize. He advances by retreating. Is this a stance of cautious resignation in the face of a formidable foe? Or, is Muñoz Marín, late in the day, writing only for the imaginary time of posterity, attempting to have a hand (bregando) in his place in history? The serpentine paths taken by the political brega in "You can't toast with coffee" are a clear exposition of the colonial drama and the narratives it eventuates. Politics were, in fact, seen as a theatrical proceeding that frowned on “over-dramatization." A frontal attack, given the enormous disparity of powers, was, by defInition, impossible; hence, even a politician at the height of his power had no other recourse but to deploy the arts of the brega—to come up with a way to be both present and absent. To this day, both epigones and apologists acknowledge Muñoz Marín's clever move and applaud his nimble wit in handling the situation. There are, of course, other ways of reading this passage. An alternate reading forcibly gives rise to an image of helplessness and sets a whole slew of interpretive discrepancies in motion. There are those who, in the name of anti-imperialism, will prove incapable of resisting a reproach to Muñoz Marín for his deceptive duplicity, or, who, at the very least, will condemn his retiring servility in the face of military authority. Perhaps. There are, nonetheless, doubts of (CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE) WWW.PRINCETON.EDU/PLAS 47 LA BREGA (CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE) a completely different nature that must also be addressed. Lest we forget, the anti-imperialist tradition may very well be heroic, but it has not always been democratic. We need only compare the course of the Cuban Revolution or the authoritarianism of certain leftist sectors of the Puerto Rican "revolutionary" movement, whose belligerence has frequently proved humiliating, or what is worse, demoralizing, to so many adherents, with any equivocal maneuver that can be attributed to the brega. That said, for many present-day readers of Muñoz Marín the disappointment is inescapable. But the ideal readers for this work were his contemporaries, “the people" who could appreciate the deployment, craft and skill of the Maestro because they shared in the same consciousness and ironic sensibility when faced with the high stakes exacted by an open confrontation with power. Today, the thread has been cut short. ( ... ) What may strike some observers as an absurd hieroglyphic is, in fact, absolutely coherent and necessary to many Puerto Ricans. All that was needed was for a figure such as the poet-translator-politician Muñoz Marín to ply his skill at extracting the riches of the brega, uprooting it from its popular context and introducing it into an active discourse for social and economic change. During the thirties and forties, the bilingual Vate Muñoz Marín reinvented himself many times. He constantly relied on the term to legitimize his policies, always insisting on the necessity for flexibility in the relations with the metropolis. An awareness of the profound orality that still held cultural sway was behind Muñoz Marín's understanding that the vernacular brega was a byword for identity. He reclaimed the word and recast it, precisely because of its vagueness and ambivalence, as the catch phrase for a poetics of action. It was the essential word for casting what Roger Bartra has called the imaginary nets of political power with which one tries to ensnare "the quick-silver fish of legitimacy." If we are to understand the nuanced ways in which Muñoz Marín used the term, we need look no further than his speeches, even if the texture of his measured eloquence is not entirely conveyed on the page. His speeches, especially when compared to the banalities from the governors who preceded him, excepting Rexford G. Tugwell, and to the superficiality of almost all those who succeeded him, are historical documents of undeniable substance. The radio was his medium of choice, an ideal means as he saw it for a society that was in large part illiterate or semi -literate and where oral exchange was the mainstay of social intercourse. He did not, however, shun the printed word. During the War, in 1942, while he was the President of the Senate, he delivered a passionate speech in which he reiterated the slogan of Manos a la obra! (Operation Bootstrap) and called on "All hands to avail themselves, as human hands should, to the brega of the present and the future!" And again, in his 1950 "Mensaje" that was an exposition on the necessity of attracting capital investment and of amassing contributions to assist the needs of public education and health, he said: "This is the difficult dilemma with which we are dealing (estamos bregando)." Ten years later, his 1960 "Mensaje" opened with a statement that confirms the word's political ascent: "We dedicated the decade that began in 1940 to the initiation of the brega (struggle) for the abolition of poverty." Even toward the end of his life, as attested to in Memorias, the word crops up time and again. He even used it to characterize Rexford G. Tugwell, the last North American to govern Puerto Rico, who was both his sometime ally and sometime rival during the years of World War II. There is a key definition of the word to be found among the virtues Muñoz Marín ascribed to Tugwell: "He had an emphatic sense of social responsibility, of innate radicalism, and a serene and firm disposition with which to tackle (para bregar) the root of the problems reality sets before us without resorting to theoretical dogmas." The brega, therefore, finds itself accordingly aligned with the politics of the New Deal in which Tugwell played a notable role. What is certain, irrespective of the ways in which the word may have come to him, is that Muñoz Marín endowed it with dignity and introduced it as a worthy term of the political fray. The leap would be irrefutable. Muñoz Marín's unexpected break from the Independence movement is most succinctly stated in articles that made their appearance in June 1946 and was entitled "Nuevos caminos hacia viejos objetivos" ("New Ways Toward Old Objectives") to which we must now turn our attention. These fundamental texts were written in the wake of the massive destruction of World War II and of the terrible massacre at Hiroshima. In them we witness a dramatic political shift and an emended dedication. For today's reader, its optimism and enthusiasm for a futurist technological civilization, will, no doubt, prove perturbing, Fundamentally, these articles establish a dichotomy between progress and nation and makes a distinction between what it dubs the "foolish imperialism" of the political policies of the United States and the "aggressive and controlling” imperialism of its economic policies. Modernization, according to Muñoz Marín, is inevitable, a destiny that must (CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE) PROGRAM IN LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES NEWSLETTER 48 LA BREGA ESTADO NOVO (CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE) (CONTINUED FROM PAGE 21) be embraced if one is to escape destruction by the forces of progress. La brega achieves the status of a mighty and vigilant deity, standing in for a "reality" that may turn vengeful when "Destiny" is hindered. "If our thinking is capable of handling (bregar) that reality, then we can change it, improve it, defend it. But if our minds balk at handling (bregar) it, then that reality will mishandle us (bregará con nosotros) as freely and capriciously as it sees fit." Modernity expected no less than a tabula rasa—a foregone adaptation to the new and a shedding of old notions. In the process, la brega ceased being synonymous with conciliation and reverted to its warlike dimension. The Free Associated State was a partial solution in which the disproportionate power of Empire, its imposing machinery, and the Cold War's centers of grayity were implicit. We cannot overlook the fact that the so-called Commonwealth was established in 1952, in the midst of the Korean War and one year before the end of New Deal policies and the change of government in the United States. The utopia consisted in separating present action from its eventual problematic consequences; in supplying a buffer, as wiping the slate clean was not an option, to a tremendous colonial power. The Island was, and continues to be, a frontier military outpost for the United States. We must, if we are to understand the uneasy existence of that brega and its uninterrupted dialogue with the heroic figure of Pedro Albizu Campos, read what Muñoz Marín himself had to say in the pages of his very melancholy Memorias. The work was conceived as a long chronicle, a montage of documents and fragments written against the perpetual backdrop of Empire; the gaps and lapses are many. This was the swan song with which Muñoz Marín perhaps hoped now, as his life was ending and the future had become present and irremediable, to exorcize the loss of faith and attain an illusion of peace in the shelter of the brega's generous shade. This is a translation of fragments from the first essay in El arte de bregar (San Juan: Ediciones Callejón, 2000). Reprinted with permission from Latino(a) Research Review (4)3, Winter 2000. Translated by Nadia Benavid and revised by the author. advertisements for the brain tonic “Neurobiol” contained images like an executive working, with similarly ziggurat-styled skyscrapers in the background, and the announcement: “In the maelstrom of modern life, victory belongs to the strong brains!” On the other hand, newspapers initially condemned the slow pace and high costs of the MEC building, as Zilah Quezado Deckker shows in Brazil Built: The Architecture of the Modern Movement in Brazil. In a time of war, criticism of the building as a “Palace of Luxury” must have resonated in particularly negative ways with the reading public. But then, New York MoMa architect Philip Goodwin praised the MEC as the “most advanced building in America” on a visit to Rio with the architectural writer George Everard Kidder-Smith. The tide began to turn. Nonetheless, while a headline in the July 2, 1942 edition of A Notícia repeated the phrase, it also tempered the enthusiasm by referring to the construction as “long and extremely expensive” (Longas e caríssimas as obras do Palácio do Ministério da Educação, reproduced in Deckker, p. 189.) The MEC’s prominence in the 1943 “Brazil Builds” exhibition at the MoMA and in Kidder-Smith and Goodwin’s book (Brazil Builds: Architecture New and Old, 1652-1942), though, catapulted the building, as well as those Brazilians involved in the project, into the vanguard of architectural practice. Although the MEC design’s version of modernity “won” and remained, in a sense becoming canonized even before its inauguration as the ministry’s office building, in a historical context the MEC’s design did not signify modernity or progress any more than the new architecture of the Presidente Vargas Avenue. An argument could be made that the Avenue’s and the MEC’s respective buildings responded to antagonistic currents within Getúlio Vargas’s regime: one, led by the Departamento de Imprensa e Propaganda, more aggressively nationalist and with totalitarian leanings; the other “softer” and more willing to compromise, centered around education minister Gustavo Capanema—whose name would be used to designate the building to host the ministry. Today, the Central do Brasil and the Palácio Duque de Caxias might stand together not just physically but in how passersby experience them—as two iconic relics of a long-gone vision of what the future should look like. It is clear that the designs of the Central do Brasil and the Palácio Duque de Caxias were rendered to highlight the effects produced by the avenue’s open spaces. The version of modernity and progress represented by the avenue and its accompanying architecture, as well as the Brazil that they sought to replace, also become clear once we consider the building’s locations. Perhaps symbolically, the Central Station has its back to the Morro da Providência, the very first of the city’s favelas. In order to allow for the new vistas, much of the neighborhood of the Cidade Nova, including its Praça Onze, had to be destroyed. The Praça Onze, a public square, had served as the epicenter of Rio’s “Little Africa” and of a vibrant Ashkenazi Jewish neighborhood. It had also hosted the city’s most popular street carnival, and figured in the collective imaginary as the “cradle of samba.” At the same time, the differences between them should not be overlooked. To invert the old adage of composition teachers, buildings might show, but they do not necessarily tell. Despite sharing certain aesthetic elements and general influences, details that can go unnoticed today can be quite revealing in the context of the 1930s and early 1940s. There is a relevant, if obvious difference in their functions—one serves as a public space, the other forbids entry to the non-authorized. One also thinks immediately of the Central do Brasil’s ribbon windows, which simultaneously evoke industrial architecture, give an impression of openness and provide light. Ribbon windows, not coincidentally, were one of Le Corbusier’s five points of new architecture. In other words, the architects involved in the pioneering design for the MEC by no means held a monopoly on elements of the International Style in Brazil. The Central do Brasil can be seen as a type of compromise among the aesthetic programs and political currents vying for control of the country’s representation of itself during the Getúlio Vargas regime—at least from a historical perspective, a compromise amidst “culture wars.” When it comes to architecture, it is perhaps the case that politics, like beauty, lies in the eyes of the beholder. From ReVista Harvard Review of Latin America Spring/Summer 2010, with permission. WWW.PRINCETON.EDU/PLAS 49 From The Princeton Club of Brazil Rio de Janeiro, May 21, 2010 The Princeton Club of Brazil today laments the loss of one of its most outstanding members. Francisco Gros ’64 succumbed May 20, 2010 to a brain tumor, after months of valiant struggle. Francisco was no stranger to struggle. He was an integral and upright professional, dispassionate and well-reasoned, absolutely unafraid of challenges. He was called upon to serve his nation as head of the Central Bank twice (1987 and 1991), both times in the middle of severe economic crises. Previously he had been the Superintendent of CVM, still in its relative infancy, and the President of BNDES. He then accepted appointment as President of Petrobras, where he introduced his world vision to a still closed corporation. “Princeton in the Nation’s Service” defines his public life. As if that were not enough, he had an equally distinguished career in the private sector. Kidder Peabody, Multiplic Corretora and Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, where he was Managing Director for Brazil, were financial concerns where he shone. In industry, he became the head of both Fósfertil S.A. and OGX Petróleo & Gas, followed by Board positions in many well-known companies. Most important to those of us in the Princeton family, he was instrumental in the re-structuring and rejuvenation of the Princeton Club of Brazil in 2008 and 2009. He was a member of our Advisory Board, participated in our events and gave unwavering support. Last year, still recovering from surgery, he graciously granted an interview to a rising Princeton senior whose thesis topic was the Brazilian energy market. That was the last time I saw my classmate François. I wish it were not so. Michael R Royster ‘64 Francisco Gros ‘64 died on May 20, 2010 at the Hospital Sirio Libanês in São Paulo, Brazil. Slated to be a member of the PLAS Advisory Council, Gros was the Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors for OGX Petoleo e Gas, Ltda., where he had previously served as President and Chief Executive Officer. Gros earned the B.A. from the Woodrow Wilson School and later pursued courses in the Masters in Economics Program at Columbia University. He began his career as an investment banker in the 1970’s when he spent several years originating and executing international corporate finance transactions at a major Wall Street firm. Later, he became Executive Director of Unibanco, in charge of capital market transactions, when Unibanco was the Brazilian market leader for both equity and debt transactions (1981 to 1985). As a leading figure in his field, he was employed in many roles including President and CEO of Petroleo Basileiro S.A. and of the Brazilian Development Bank; as a Managing Director of Morgan Stanley, governor of the Central Bank, Chairman of the Board for Wilson Sons, Ltd., and served on the Boards of several companies including Energias do Brasil S.A. and Globex Utilidades S.A. He is survived by his wife, Isabel; and three children. PROGRAM IN LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES NEWSLETTER 50 Photo from O Globo Francisco Roberto André Gros ‘64 (1943-2010) 2010–11 LAS Course Offerings See the PLAS website (www.princeton.edu/plas/Courses) for a complete and updated listing of LAS cross-listed courses and courses of interest. Fall 2010–-11 LAS 401/SPA 410 Latin American Studies Seminar: Borges and Fiction This course will study the sources Borges used in writing his short stories and will examine the prose and writing techniques he utilized. The course will also devote special attention to the relationship between Borges’ short stories and essays as many stories are disguised as essays, and several essays are short stories in disguise. Mario Vargas Llosa. Schedule: S01 1:30pm-4:20 T. LAS 406/ARC 411/SPA 406 Latin American Studies Seminar: Modern Architecture Goes South: Museum, Mass Media and Pan-Americanism This seminar closely examines the displacement of the architecture of the Modern Movement from Europe and the United States to Latin America. Using comparative case studies of Venezuela and Brazil, the course will analyze the common influences of MoMA’s cultural strategies and the impact of mass media on the dissemination of Modern Architecture to the “South” in the context of WWII. By putting these two relevant experiences in parallel, the architectural journey intends also to make a comprehensive review of Latin American contributions to Modern Architecture through some of the most significant projects developed in both regions. Carola Barrios. Schedule: S01 1:30pm-4:20 Th. Spring 2010–-11 LAS 302 Gender and Latin American States This course examines the intersection of gender, power, and identity in various states in Mesoamerica. It explores states of different time periods and political movements (e.g., pre-Columbian, colonial, national and transnational state systems), bisecting traditional divides in prehistory and history. Rather than approach gender from an evolutionary perspective, readings and discussions focus on comparative analyses that both challenge monolithic perspectives of social power and underscore historical contingency in the constitution of gender. Christina T. Halperin. Schedule S01 1:30pm–4:20 M. LAS 402 Latin American Studies Seminar : Surviving Good Governance: Public Administration after the Reforms This seminar introduces students to the main issues in state and public administration reform carried out in Latin America over the last fifteen years. The three main points to be discussed are Classical Weberianism, New Public Management and Neo-Weberianism. The seminar will present a critical review of each, both in theory and implementation. In addition, the seminar has the practical goal of providing students with the capacity not only to understand, but also to reproduce and further elaborate arguments for and against each of the main reform models, generally and in specific cases of application. Agustín Ferraro. Schedule S01 1:30pm–4:20 T. PROGRAM IN LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES Princeton University 309–316 Burr Hall Princeton, NJ 08544 WWW.PRINCETON.EDU/PLAS 51