‘Esteem thy Neighbors:’ The United States and Central America

Speaker: Colonel John C. McKay

Date: November 2, 2021
Time: 6 PM

Colonel John C. McKay, USMC (retired) was appointed from the ranks to the US Naval Academy, Annapolis. He served two combat tours in Vietnam and was subsequently appointed at US Naval Attaché to the republic of El Salvador. Among his postings include the Cuban-Haitian migrant transference out of Guantánamo and service with the Drug Enforcement Administration working with counter-narcotics in Mexico and Central America. Selected as an Olmsted Scholar, he studied two years at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He has served as Adjunct Professor of Latin America at California State University at Sacramento.

Read more

All events

Southern Skies: Stories from Latin America

Date: November 13, 2021
Time: 9:00AM
Address: 250 E Franklin Street, Chapel Hill

Humans have looked at the night sky for thousands of years to understand the world around us. Take a journey inside the Morehead Planetarium Dome to see Latin American skies and listen to stories from indigenous Inca, Maya, and Kaxinawá communities. These stories will be available in Spanish and English languages.

This event is best for grades K-8 and tickers are $3 per person. Tickets are available at go.unc.edu/SouthernCielos.

All events

Celebration of Children’s and Young Adult Latin American and Latinx Literature

Speaker: Angela Burke Kunkel, Aida Salazar and Yamile Saied Méndez

Date: October 11, 2021
Time: 6:00PM
Address: Virtual

Join the Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs (CLASP) and the Hispanic Reading Room at the Library of Congress in a virtual celebration of children’s and YA Latin American and Latinx literature. Hear from authors and illustrators amplifying stories and voices from across Latin American and Latinx communities. We invite families, educators, and students to take part in this unique celebration during Hispanic Heritage Month, on Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

The Zoom webinar will feature award-winning authors Angela Burke Kunkel (Digging for Words: José Alberto Gutiérrez and the Library He Built), Aida Salazar (Land of the Cranes), and Yamile Saied Méndez (Furia).

Check out the event on Américas Book Award’s Facebook page.

The Américas Awards are administered by the Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs (CLASP) and coordinated by both Tulane University’s Stone Center for Latin American Studies and Vanderbilt University’s Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies. Generous support is also provided by Florida International University, Stanford University, The Ohio State University, UNC-Duke Consortium in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, University of Florida, University of New Mexico, University of Texas at Austin, University of Utah, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Read more

All events

Latin Film Fest: House of Mama Icha

Date: October 14, 2021
Time: 7:00 PM

La casa de Mama Icha

Dir. by Oscar Molina. USA/Colombia. 2020. 85 min. In Spanish with English subtitles.

La Casa de Mama Icha is an intimate observational about a 93-year Afro Colombia woman, Mama Icha in her heroic decision to return home to Colombia after living in the US for 33 years. There, in Mompox, burrowed into the Magdalena River Valley, a house awaits her, a house she funded piece by piece with money she earned in the States. But her long-imagined homecoming is no easy return. The house that she patiently built through years of savings and transnational contracting is crumbling due to the tensions of the pending bills and increasingly deteriorating family relationships. This is a story of reverse migration. It is a story about the dream of return. A story of a mother, a dispersed family, a longing, and a striving for agency, for home.

Viaje de María
Dir. by Camilo Pérez, Nancy Gómez, Risa Whitson. 2019. Colombia. 9 minutes. Spanish with English subtitles.

Maria is a mother who lives peacefully with her two daughters in a peasant house in a Colombian village. One night, a group of armed men break into her house, and Maria is forced to leave everything behind and escape with her daughters in a truck heading to a big city. In the midst of an unfamiliar environment, Maria finds the solidarity of her aunt who welcomes her so that she can start over. This animated film was created with a group of Colombian victims of violence in Colombia who currently live in Barranquilla after being displaced from their home towns.

For more information visit their website.
Via Zoom. Click to access.

All events

Latin Film Fest: Bacurau

Date: October 13, 2021
Time: 7:00 PM

Bacurau

Dir. by Juliano Dornelles, Kleber Mendonça Filho. Brazil. 2019. 131 minutes. In Portuguese with English subtitles.

Bacurau, a small village in the Brazilian sertão, mourns the loss of its matriarch, Carmelita, who lived to be 94. Days later, its inhabitants (among them Sônia Braga) notice that their village has literally vanished from online maps and a UFO-shaped drone is seen flying overhead. There are forces that want to expel them from their homes, and soon, in a genre-bending twist, a band of armed mercenaries led by Udo Kier arrive in town picking off the inhabitants one by one. A fierce confrontation takes place when the townspeople turn the tables on the villainous outsiders, banding together by any means necessary to protect and maintain their remote community. The mercenaries just may have met their match in the fed-up, resourceful denizens of little Bacurau.

For more information visit their website.
Via Zoom. Click to access.

All events

Latin Film Fest: Guillermina

Date: October 13, 2021
Time: 12:00PM

Guillermina

Dir. by Aida Esther Bueno-Sarduy. Cuba/Spain. 2019. 15 minutes. In Spanish with English subtitles.

Based on a true story, Guillermina is a film that reconstructs the memories of the trace left in a 9-year-old child, the son of a well-to-do family in Havana in the 1940s, his wet-nurse, a black woman named Guillermina.

Afro-reconstructions in the Caribbean. Visual archives and embodied memories. Aida Esther Bueno-Sarduy. Cuba.

Aída Esther Bueno Sarduy holds a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from Complutense University of Madrid and has completed advanced studies on race relations and black culture. She has studied African American cultures in Latin America for several years, specifically focusing on African religions in Cuba and Brazil. She has worked as a researcher at the Centre for Studies on Migration and Racism (CEMIRA), part of the Department of Social Anthropology at Complutense University. Since 1999, she has worked as a professor for Middlebury College, NYU, BU, Hamilton and San Lorenzo programs in Madrid, teaching courses in Spanish Anthropology, Anthropology of Ibero-American and Migration Studies, as well as Cultural Diversity.

For more information visit their website.

Read more

All events

Latin America Film Fest: Stateless

Date: October 12, 2021
Time: 7:00 PM

Stateless
(Apátrida)

Dir. by Michèle Stephenson. Dominican Republic. 2020. 96 minutes. Haitian Creole & Spanish with English subtitles.

In 1937, tens of thousands of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent were exterminated by the Dominican army, based on anti-black hatred fomented by the Dominican government. Fast-forward to 2013, the Dominican Republic’s Supreme Court stripped the citizenship of anyone with Haitian parents retroactive to 1929, rendering over 200,000 people stateless, without nationality, identity or homeland. In this climate, a young attorney named Rosa Iris launches a grassroots campaign, taking on electoral corruption and advocating social justice.

Mugan Boe: The Cry of the Grandmothers (El llanto de la abuelas)
Dir. by Olowailli Green. Panamá/Colombia 4min.

Mugan boe is a call to reconciliation and commemoration of the memory of our grandmothers, seeking to heal and forgive the historical event that occurred with the Spanish invasion that massacred, dispossessed and displaced this ancestral culture. “An buggi binsae, anmal sergan saed igala an iegosuli.” “It worries us, it hurts us, but we will never forget the teachings of our grandmothers and grandfathers.”

For more information visit their website.
Via Zoom. Click to access link

All events

Latin Film Fest: Marighella

Date: October 10, 2021
Time: 7:00PM

Marighella

Dir. by Wagner Moura. Brazil. 2019. 155 min. In Portuguese with English subtitles.

The debut feature by acclaimed actor Wagner Moura (Narcos, Tropa de Elite) is a searing and energized portrait of one of Brazil’s most divisive historical figures, Afro-Brazilian poet and politician, the legendary Carlos Marighella—played by famous actor/musician Seu Jorge (City of God; The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou).

Driven to fight against the erosion of civil and human rights following the CIA-backed military coup of 1964 and the brutal, racist right-wing dictatorship that followed, the revolutionary leaves behind his wife and son to take up arms, becoming a notorious enemy to the power structure. Relentlessly pursued as the government’s number one enemy, Marighella cleverly evades capture, all the while continuing to inflict damage and further enraging his sadistic pursuers.

Lenses (Lentes)

Dir. by Carlos Smith Rovira. Colombia/Costa Rica. 2019-2020. 11min.

Mr. X has a boring life. One day he comes across a pair of glasses which show him the world really as it is, a city full of beasts killing and eating each other.

For more information visit their website.
Via Zoom. Click to access link

All events

Latin Film Fest: Negra

Date: October 8, 2021
Time: 7:00 PM

Negra

Dir. by Medhin Tewelde-Serrano. 2020. Mexico. 73 minutes. In Spanish with English subtitles.

“I was about seven years old the first time someone called me ‘black’ on the street. I turned around to see who they were talking to, until I realized it was me. That day I understood I was black, and the laughter it caused among the people nearby made me think being a black person wasn’t that great… Was this only happening to me? Or did it happen to other black women?” Negra shows the director in her search of exploring what it means to inhabit Mexico as a black woman. It tells the story of five afro-descendant women from southern Mexico, exposing racism, resistance and the process of self-acceptance, strategies for transcending stereotypes, and the celebration of their identity.

Meraya

Dir. Pedro Favoron. Peru. 32 minutes. In Shipibpo-Konibo with English subtitles.

An intercultural film project that shows the visionary world of Meraya doctors, who are Shipibo-Konibo sages. The documentary introduces the viewer to the intimacy of the Peruvian Amazon, to the wisdom of forests and plants, and to the healing experience with ayawaska, which is also part of today’s Shipibo-Konibo culture. It is visual anthropology from a poetic standpoint and with video art techniques. Meraya intertwines fundamental art and everyday practices of the Shipibo civilization: kené patterns and textile craft, and an understanding and profound respect for the forest and its beings (earthly and spiritual). These elements relate to equilibrium and to the ordered beauty of connecting.

For more information visit the website.
Via Zoom. Click to access link

All events

Global Careers for LGBTQ Folk

Speaker: Various Speakers

Date: October 5, 2021
Time: 4:00 PM

Members of the LGBTQ+ community play key roles in international business, diplomacy, advocacy, and scholarship, but they can also face unique challenges in global careers because of their sexuality, sexual orientation, gender identity, and/or gender expression (on top of all the other challenges of global careers). This panel brings together members of the LGBTQ+ community who are navigating careers that cross borders and tackle international issues to talk about some of the continuing challenges, unique opportunities, and best strategies for pursuing global careers as a queer person.

Our panelists come from different sectors and work on different parts of the world:

Lacy Ferrell, an historian of Africa at the University of Central Washington and a member of the AHA Committee on LGBTQ Status in the Profession
Anna Kirey, UNC alum who has been active in NGOs promoting LGBTQ rights in Eastern Europe
Camilo Ramirez, UNC alum who has been working with the Brookings Institution and is soon headed to the State Department
Holing Lau, a scholar of law and LGBTQ rights and Willie Person Mangum Professor of Law at UNC with an expertise on Asia.

This panel will take place virtually on Zoom. Register below!

Read more

All events