Their adventures can be followed at the group blog here:

http://nmsucostarica2013.blogspot.com/

NASON SCHOLARSHIP FOR STUDENT RESEARCH TRAVEL TO LATIN AMERICA

– CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN AND BORDER STUDIES

–DEADLINE APRIL 26

The Center for Latin American and Border Studies makes a call to NMSU students to apply for the Nason Scholarship for Research Travel  to Latin America.    Please submit a 2 page proposal, a detailed budget, and a c.v.   The maximum request will be $1000.   Deadline: April 26.    Please send proposals electronically to sewilson@nmsu.edu.

by Jay Rodman

The New Mexico State University Center for Latin American and Border Studies continues its speaker series tradition with a set of five spring semester presentations by researchers from NMSU and universities in Arizona, Kentucky and Mexico.

This diverse group of national and international scholars will present their most recent research in the series titled “The Border and Latin America.” The late-afternoon talks are scheduled between late February and late April.

“I am excited about the diversity of the scholars and disciplines in our spring 2013 speaker series,” said Inigo Garcia-Bryce, director of CLABS and an associate professor in the history department. “From these diverse perspectives, the presentations address a common theme: the assertion of rights by people on both sides of the border seeking to empower themselves.”

The series kicks off Wednesday, Feb. 27, with Jennie Luna, a new NMSU assistant professor of women’s studies, whose topic is “Land and Identity through a Nahua World View.” The Nahua are an indigenous group in Mexico, descended from the Aztecs, whose traditional language is known as Nahuatl. Luna’s talk will review Nahuatl revitalization movements and the importance of indigenous language work in the context of “the sustenance of culture, identity, and relationships with land, the environment and spirituality.”

“The Taste of a Different World: Maya Farmers and the Global Coffee Market” is the title of the presentation on Thursday, March 7, by Sarah Lyon of the University of Kentucky. An anthropologist, she will present the case of a group of Maya fair trade coffee farmers in Guatemala. “I demonstrate that while fair trade confers many positive benefits to small farmer communities, there are also significant drawbacks to their participation,” she said.

Hector Padilla, a social scientist at the Universidad Autonoma de Ciudad Juarez, will present “Border Crossing Experiences at Bridges in the El Paso-Juarez Region” on Tuesday, April 9. The talk will be delivered in Spanish. Padilla’s research involves anecdotes of students from Ciudad Juarez attending the University of Texas, El Paso. He will address “…the international bridge as a third country, with its own rules and actors, as well as the questions of subjectivity that naturally arise from the complicated, yet ordinary, act of crossing al otro lado.”

On Wednesday, April 17, Jesus Rosales of Arizona State University will deliver “Chicano Literary Journals in Spanish: Creating Cultural Bridges on the U.S./Mexico Border.” Rosales is an associate professor of Spanish who is especially interested in Chicano literary journals published in Spanish and how they help connect Mexicanos and Chicanos in the Border region.

The final presentation, on Wednesday, April 24, will be “’From the Moment That I Made My Wedding Vows My Suffering Began’: A Divorce in the Mexican Frontier, 1823-1838.” Jamie Starling, an NMSU college assistant professor of history, discusses the case of Barbara Aguirre and her husband Francisco Belarde, which she says “…illustrates the social history of northern Mexico during the early years of independence, the hardships that victims of abuse faced in the 19th century borderlands, and the civil rights that women asserted in early republican Mexico.”

All talks will be at 4 p.m. at Nason House, located on the NMSU campus at 1070 University Ave. They are free and open to the public and refreshments will be provided.

The CLABS speaker series is supported by the College of Arts and Sciences.

For more information, contact Seth Wilson at 575-646-6814

The series will open on September 26^th with NMSU Professor and Librarian, Molly Molloy, whose talk “An Inconvenient Truth – Bringing the Testimony of a Drug Cartel Assassin to Page and Screen”  will give the backstory of the writing and filming of El Sicario, a unique first-hand testimony of a  paid assassin hired by the drug cartels.

The next talk on October 11 by historian Brandon Morgan of the University of New Mexico will explore the history of how 100 years ago Columbus, New Mexico attempted to  transform itself into a vibrant town that would rival El Paso – until these plans were interrupted by Pancho Villa.

On October 25, Raul Lira, a visiting researcher from Chile,  will discuss his research at the arid-lands agricultural field station Kampanaike located in the Patagonian region on the border of Chile and Argentina.   His talk is titled “Ranching at the End of the World: Sheep in Chilean Patagonia.”

On November 7, historian Barry Carr from the University of La Trobe, Australia will give a talk titled “Red Mexico City, Havana and New York: Transnational Networks of Radicals, Revolutionaries and Exiles 1918-1940″ exploring the interconnections between these three cities at a time of revolutionary fervor throughout the Americas.

Local organization against the violence in Ciudad Juarez will be the topic of the next talk on November 28 by CLABS visiting scholar Daniel Esser from American University in Washington D.C.  Dr Esser will discuss his ongoing research in a talk titled “Practices of non-violent local collective action against violence in Ciudad Juarez: evidence from a pilot survey”

The Series will conclude on December 5 with a talk in Spanish by CLABS visiting scholar Virgilio Lopez Lemus of the University of Habana.  Dr. Lemus’ lecture “La poesía y las identidades en la segunda mitad del siglo XX de Cuba y América Latina” will discuss the role of poetry in helping to shape a national identity in twentieth-century Cuba.

This summer Engineers Without Borders will be traveling to Bolivia, near the state of Cochabanba to the community of Azerca Cancha to build a suspended pedestrian bridge.  The community there is unable to cross the river 5 months out of the year during the rainy season, leaving them without a link to the major towns, medical supplies or a way to take their crops to market.  16 students and 2 faculty members will spend 2 weeks in August building the 49 meter bridge.

They have also built another bridge in Nicaragua last summer in the community of Hondura Azul in the municipality of Condega.  Last May 18 students and 2 faculty built a 56 meter pedestrian bridge over a period of 2 weeks.

Engineers Without Borders have also built a small bridge and a potable water well in Chihuahua, Mexico.

For more information, pictures and videos of projects please visit: http://web.nmsu.edu/~ewb/Home.html.

Aggie visits Falkland Islands
Annie Muirhead, who just finished her first year in the Public History
Master’s Program at NMSU, spent two and a half months in the Falkland
Islands. Based in Stanley, she’ worked with the Falkland Islands Museum
and National Trust to catalog, transcribe, and expand their Oral History
Collection. Annie is the first historian outside the Falklands to access
these incredible recordings and she’s planning to base her Master’s Thesis
on what the Islanders have to say for themselves. Her adventures in the
South Atlantic can be read at http://www.anniemuirhead.blogspot.com.

NMSU Anthropology Student Travels to Peru

Ashley Remy has travelled to Marcajirca, Peru, north of Lima, to study bioarchaeology.  While there she will examine dental microwear using vinyl soloxane to make teeth impressions from human remains at a 13^th-16^th funerary site. She will also take impressions from locals, to study wear patterns on teeth. Once the samples have been collected, she will use the EMS lab on the NMSU campus to create 3D images of the teeth in order to compare wear through time and between sex and class. Ashley will in Peru for a month doing this research.

2012 Immigration Policy Conference A Success

NMSU, UNM, and UTEP presented the first annual Immigration Policy Conference entitled “Immigration Policy and Human Rights; Perspectives From Border Communities” June 16-22. The Keynote Speaker, Emmy-award winning journalist Maria Hinojosa presented the documentary “Lost In Detention” followed by a discussion. Other speakers included Dr. Iñigo García-Bryce and Dr. Neil Harvey of NMSU, Dr. Sandra Garabano of UTEP and Dr. Susana Tiano of UNM.

ACLU and Centro de Derechos Humanos del Migrante A.C. visit CLABS

Josefina  Lizeth Martinez Torres and  Blanca Cynthia Navarrete García of the Juarez-based Centro de Derechos Humanos del Migrante A.C. shadowed their counterparts in the Las Cruces ACLU for a week in July, culminating in a visit to CLABS on July 12. Blanca is an attorney who studied at UACJ and Lizeth is an attorney who also studied at UACJ.  The Centro has offices in Juarez as well Agua Prieta, Sonora. The visit was part of a trip to coordinate and strategize with the ACLU’s Regional Center for Border Rights.

SALAS President investigates Mayan ruins

Addison Warner, President of SALAS is in the Mirador Basin area  of Northern Guatemala excavating a chultun, or underground storage chamber. These chambers were often used to store water and comestible goods, and later, became burial chambers or refuse pits, making them valuable resources for archaeologists studying Mayan society. Addison will be attempting to determine the dates and uses of a chultun in relation to the surrounding residential and elite structures. Addison also visited the La Danta Pyramid, the largest know structure in the world, in terms of volume.

Honors College Scholarship Recipient Travels to Peru

Ashley Remy applied for and won an Honors College Scholarship to travel to Peru. Her project involved creating dental molds/impressions on various mandibles in which she would then work with Dr. Cook in the EMS lab at NMSU to work with electron microscopy to examine various wear patterns of teeth. By examining teeth one can find diet and health along with gender and tribe identifications and her  hope is that after examining to see if there was a difference between individuals with cranial modifications and those without which may help support a theory that cranial modification was more intentional for a higher class. In addition to her project work, Ashley got to help identify bone fragments, work inside of a chullpa, and excavate a pit that consisted of a modified cranial individual along with ceramics, beads, and burned animal bones. Ashley’s project was directed by Dr. Bebel Ibarra and various other professors from around the nation and globe, such as Tulane University and the University of Paris. The site of the project is located in Marcajirca, north of Huari and situated on a small peak. Here there are hundreds of individuals buried in above ground tombs, chullpas, as well as pits and are dated between 12th to 16th century. Camping in extreme conditions and with a crew of various other students from colleges around the United States and Canada, they excavated, surveyed, mapped, and basically examined patterns of the hundreds of bones recovered. Ashley’s main project idea was given to her under the guidance of Dr. Benefit from NMSU.

NMSU Anthropology Professor Takes Sabbatical Leave in Argentina

Between September 2012 and May 2013 Dr. William Walker will be a visiting scholar at the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia y Pensamiento Latinoamericano.  He plans to spend the majority of his time writing a book designed to develop new method and theory for archaeological study of religion.  Dr. Walker’s  writing will be enhanced by the scholarly give and take of my colleagues at the Institute, many of whom he has worked with in research expeditions in northwest Argentina and southwest Bolivia.  Although his primary area of archaeological research has been the North American Southwest, particularly the borderlands, he has maintained a long term interest in the southern Andes and is looking forward to the intellectual life of Buenos Aires.

Dr. Rodolfo Acosta, Ph.D.
New Mexico State University
4 pm, March 14, 2012
“Conspicuous Consumption and Drug-Trafficking: The Mexican Case”

Barbara Tenenbaum
Hispanic Division of the
Library of Congress
4 pm, April 4, 2012
“Vámonos: The Mexican Revolution in Sights and Sound at the Library of Congress”

Dr. Alberto Harambour
Universidad Diego Portales, Chile
4pm, April 12, 2012
“Borderland Sovereignties. Capital, State Making in Patagonia´s Triple Frontier”

Dr. Alvaro Martinez
Universidad Autónoma de Chiapas
4pm, April 18, 2012
“Transmigration and Insecurity on the Mexican-Central American Border”

Dr. Andrea Orzoff
New Mexico State University
4pm, April 25, 2012
“Mozart in the Andes: Nazi Refugees and Latin American Classical Music, 1933-1960”

Lectures are free and open to the public
Place: Nason House (1070 University Ave. directly across from FedEx/Kinko’s)

Oct. 12th: Neil Harvey: Rural rebellion and indigenous autonomy in Chiapas: a review of scholarship on the Zapatista movement since 1994

Oct 26: Luzma Fabiola Nava: Integrated Water Resources Management and the integral vision of the watershed: the Rio Grande case study

Nov 2nd: Mary Alice Scott: Extending the Border Zone: The Production of Health Vulnerabilities among Family Members of Undocumented Mexican Trans-migrants

Nov 16th: Sandra McGee Deutsch: A Bad Reputation? The Intimate Lives of Argentine Jewish Women, 1890s-1940s.

Refreshments will be served Lectures are free and open to the public Place: Nason House (1200 University Ave. directly across from FedEx/Kinko’s)