Speaker: Brianna Gilmore and Corin Zaragoza Estrera
Date: June 12, 2020
Time: 2:00pm – 3:00pm
Join us for a virtual Latin American dance party to celebrate the end of the 2019-2020 school year! We will learn the history and culture of MERENGUE, BACHATA, and SALSA, explore resources about dance to use in the K-12 classroom, and of course, dance!
Register at the button below
Speaker: Hannah Gill
Date: June 4, 2020
Time: 3:15 pm – 4:15 pm
Explore the history of North Carolina’s Latin American communities through the online resource
New Roots Oral Histories with a conversation with Hannah Gill, the Institute for the Study of the Americas Associate Director.
Sign up to register for the event via Zoom at the Read More button!
Date: April 24, 2020
Time: 1:00pm- 2:00pm
Learn about how Building Integrated Communities’ (BIC) partner cities and towns are communicating with immigrant residents during the current crisis, as well as the challenges they are facing. The goal of the roundtable discussion is to help UNC BIC staff gain a better understanding of how to support local governments during this time. We will also be sharing some of the resources and effective strategies that we have found helpful so far.
To attend the roundtable discussion, please fill out the registration form below; you will receive a Zoom link shortly after registering.
Date: April 25, 2020
Time: 11:00-12:30
Members of the Area Studies Teacher Advisory Council will meet to provide feedback on area studies events and discuss how the centers can strengthen their programming and resources for K-12 educators.
Date: April 12, 2020 – April 18, 2020
This online festival has been custom curated for the Institute for the Study of the Americas at UNC-Chapel Hill. The link to the film festival is below at the Read More button! The password to access is isa-connect-20
Two films will be available each week from March 29 – April 18, 2020.
April 12-18
“Maestra”
A film by Catherine Murphy. 2012. 33 minutes.
In 1961, over 250,000 Cubans joined their country’s National Literacy Campaign and taught more than 707,000 other Cubans to read and write. Almost half of these volunteer teachers were under 18. More than half were women.
Narrated by Pulitzer Prize winning author Alice Walker, “Maestra” explores the experiences of nine of the women who, as young girls, helped eradicate Cuban illiteracy within one year. Interweaving recent interviews, archival footage, and campaign photos, this lively documentary includes one of the first Cubans of her generation to call herself a feminist and one of the first openly proud members of Cuba’s LGBTQI community. With wit and spirit, all recall negotiating for autonomy and independence in a culture still bound by patriarchal structures.
Eight years in the making, “Maestra” highlights the will and courage that made the monumental endeavor possible and the pivotal role of women’s and youth empowerment in building a new society.
“I Wonder What You Will Remember of September”
A film by Cecilia Cornejo. 2004. 27 minutes.
Cecilia Cornejo presents a haunting personal response to the events of September 11, 2001, informed and complicated by her status as a Chilean citizen living in the U.S. With evocative imagery from both past and present, Cornejo weaves together her own fading childhood memories, her parents vivid recollections of the September 11, 1973 coup in Chile that brought Augusto Pinochet to power and post-9/11 conversations with her own young daughter. The resulting montage thoughtfully explores how personal and collective histories intersect, as well as how trauma is lived, supposedly erased, and passed on from one generation to the next.
The film maker also alludes to what she believes is a deep contradiction within the American consciousness, one that makes it possible to view the 9/11/01 attacks as tragedy, while failing to interpret “outside” events such as the Chilean coup or the invasion of Iraq as such. Cornejo’s mesmerizing experimental film provides a striking new context with which to view the World Trade Center attacks- from the point of view of an immigrant whose home country has endured its own tragedies.
Date: April 5, 2020 – April 12, 2020
This online festival has been custom curated for the Institute for the Study of the Americas at UNC-Chapel Hill. The link to the film festival is below at the Read More button! The password to access is isa-connect-20
Two films will be available each week from March 29 – April 18, 2020.
Week 2: April 5-11
“Las Madres: The Mothers of Plaza De Mayo”
Film by Susana Blaustein and Lourdes Portillo. 1985. 64 minutes
This Academy award-nominated documentary about the Argentinian mothers’ movement to demand to know the fate of 30,000 “disappeared” sons and daughters remains as extraordinarily powerful as when it was first released. As well as giving an understanding of Argentinian history in the 1970s and 1980s, “Las Madres” shows the empowerment of women in a society where women are expected to be silent. “Las Madres” provides a banner of hope in the international struggle for human rights.
“Councilwoman”
A film by Margo Guernsey. 2018. 57 minutes.
“Councilwoman” is the inspiring story of Carmen Castillo, an immigrant Dominican housekeeper in a Providence hotel who wins a seat in City Council, taking her advocacy for low-income workers from the margins to city politics.
The film follows Castillo’s first term as she balances her full-time day job as a housekeeper with her family life and the demands of public office. She faces skeptics who say she does not have the education to govern, the power of corporate interests who take a stand against her fight for a $15 hourly wage, and tough re-election against two contenders. As Castillo battles personal setbacks and deep-rooted notions of who is qualified to run for political office, she fiercely defends her vision of a society in which all people can earn enough to support themselves and their families.
Date: April 1, 2020 – April 4, 2020
This online festival has been custom curated for the Institute for the Study of the Americas at UNC-Chapel Hill. The link to the film festival is below at the Read More button! The password to access is isa-connect-20
Two films will be available each week from March 29 – April 18, 2020.
March 29-April 4
“The Rest I Make Up”
A film by Michelle Memran. 2018. 79 minutes.
Maria Irene Fornes was one of America’s greatest playwrights and most influential teachers, but many know her only as the ex-lover of writer and social critic Susan Sontag. The visionary Cuban-American dramatist constructed astonishing worlds on stage, writing over 40 plays and winning nine Obie Awards. At the vanguard of the nascent Off-Off Broadway experimental theater movement in New York, Fornes is often referred to as American theater’s “Mother Avant-Garde.” When she gradually stops writing due to dementia, an unexpected friendship with filmmaker Michelle Memran reignites her spontaneous creative spirit and triggers a decade-long collaboration that picks up where the pen left off.
The duo travels from New York to Havana, Miami to Seattle, exploring the playwright’s remembered past and their shared present. Theater luminaries such as Edward Albee, Ellen Stewart, Lanford Wilson, and others weigh in on Fornes’ important contributions. What began as an accidental collaboration becomes a story of love, creativity, and connection that persists even in the face of forgetting.
“Ni Aquí, Ni Allá”
A film by Gabriela Bortolamedi. 2014. 24 minutes.
“Ni aquí, ni allá” illuminates the challenges facing an undocumented college student and her family. Blanca, a second-year student at the University of California, Berkeley, crossed the border from Mexico into the United States with her parents when she was a child. As a student under the California Dream Act who possess DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), Blanca qualifies for financial aid and has temporary protection from deportation, though her undocumented parents, who live and work in California’s agricultural Central Valley, do not. “Ni aquí, ni allá” paints an intimate portrait of an undocumented family as they support each other during a turning point in their lives and stay together through the distance. At a time in this country’s history where the debate around immigration is highly contested and demands to close the border are in the daily news, “Ni aquí, ni allá” offers a very human face on an issue national debate.
Speaker: Carolina Navigator Volunteers
Date: April 13, 2020
Time: 10:00am – 3:30pm
Travel the world through Carolina Navigators Virtual Cultural Festival on Monday, 4/13/20! All sessions are FREE and open to all K-12 educators, parents, and students. Our presenters are UNC students who have intercultural expertise. Our Spring 2020 schedule is below. Sign up for the session(s) you’re interested in and we’ll email you the link to join the session before the festival!
Our festival will work a bit differently this year, since most K-12 students are not currently in school. Typically, a teacher signs up their class to attend. This year you have few options:
1) The teacher can sign up their classes to attend, and then forward our emails with links to join to K-12 students and their parents to join from their homes.
2) Parents can sign their children up to attend.
3) If they are old enough, students can sign themselves up to attend.
The Read More button contains the link to sign up for the festival!
Speaker: Monika Gosin
Date: April 9, 2020
Time: 3:30pm
This virtual zoom book talk with Monika Gosin will examine her new book The Racial Politics of Division: Interethnic Struggles for Legitimacy in Multicultural Miami. The Racial Politics of Division deconstructs antagonistic discourses that circulated in local Miami media between African Americans, “white” Cubans, and “black” Cubans during the 1980 Mariel Boatlift and the 1994 Balsero Crisis. Monika Gosin challenges exclusionary arguments pitting these groups against one another and depicts instead the nuanced ways in which identities have been constructed, negotiated, rejected, and reclaimed in the context of Miami’s historical multiethnic tensions
Registrants can RSVP at the Read More Button below
Speaker: Career Fair
Date: March 31, 2020
Time: 1:00pm – 4:00pm
Address: Great Hall, Student Union
The Education & Helping Professions Job Fair: Come meet employers in education and other helping professions that have full-time positions and internships available. Bring multiple copies of your resume! Business attire recommended. This event is open to all UNC-CH students.
Register today: http://go.unc.edu/EducationJobFair2020Employers
