Filmmaker Gabriela Martínez with Juana Vásquez Vásquez
The purpose of The Américas RIG is to strengthen the work of, and foster contact among, scholars interested in women in the Americas (that is, women in Latin America and Latinas in the United States and Canada) on issues of gender, sexuality, and feminism. Our mission is to explore those topics from an interdisciplinary perspective and look at how they intersect with key political processes, power structures, and cultural narratives. We are interested in diverse women's lives as shaped by the influence of gender, class, race, ethnicity, culture, nationhood projects, State policies, colonialism, and globalization. We hope to promote collaborative work and a stronger awareness and understanding of these themes within the university community.
RIG activities include the following:
sharing members' writing and work-in progress
reading selected authors' work
watching and analyzing relevant films
sponsoring brown bags
inviting speakers or performers to campus
developing one or more research centers abroad.
RIG Coordinators, for more information:
Erin Beck, Political Science, beck(at)uoregon.edu, (541) 346-4483 Lynn Stephen, stephenl@uoregon.edu
Today we went to some Zapotec communities not far from Oaxaca city, accompanied by Beatriz (“Bety”) Cruz, a graduate student from the same region who is studying to be an ethnohistorian. Her thesis, under the guidance of María de los Angeles Romero Frizzi, will have as its focus several manuscripts, including an 18th-century mapa that we are digitizing at WHP for our Mapas Project. Bety arranged with the local town council of Guelacé for us to take a copy of the mapa and walk around the boundaries and sites that appear on the manuscript, marking various coordinates using a GPS instrument. Four town council members accompanied us, helping us locate various boundary points that mark the limits of the community-held lands.
Oaxaca, Mexico—On March 22nd Gabriela Martínez and I went deep into the Mixteca Alta to visit an archive in search of early manuscripts (kind of a bust) and then to go to a pueblo where one of the young women comes from who is on scholarship at our sister-institution, the Casa de la Mujer. Reyna Bautista invited us for lunch and to meet her family. Her mother, Zoila Bautista Hernández, is a monolingual Mixtec speaker. Zoila sat for the video camera and told us a legend about the monolith that towers over the community. In ancient times, it had two parts, a male and a female part.
Oaxaca, Mexico—Yesterday, we began work on a pilot film for a larger documentary on the "triple rescue" of colonial Mexican manuscripts. We are speaking of 16th- through 18th-century indigenous-authored manuscripts that have been decaying on dirt floors in municipal and provincial archives. Besides being subjected to worrisome conditions of humidity, insects, rodents, and grime, these documents have also been ignored and neglected over the centuries in favor of a Eurocentric history. And, the information they contain about the history of Mesoamerican women has suffered even further disparagement. These are manuscripts primarily authored by elite indigenous men about their own activities over the centuries. But, sometimes, almost in spite of their own self-interest, such male authors did mention or paint women into these manuscripts.
Filmmaker Gabriela Martínez with Juana Vásquez Vásquez