News and Events
Upcoming Events
Past Events
April 17, 2024
April 15, 2024
April 11, 2024
April 10, 2024
April 5, 2024
April 3, 2024
April 2, 2024
April 1, 2024
April 1, 2024
March 13, 2024
Gather with friends, artists, and colleagues, and enjoy light refreshments as the Rose Art Museum marks the opening of "Noé Martínez: The Body Remembers" with a celebratory reception.
March 5, 2024
Liberman-Miller Hall, Women's Studies Research Center
February 27, 2024
February 9, 2024
ÍNDIO PRESENTE”: Indigenous self-representation in the arts of Brazil
This class will discuss the emergence of Indigenous self-representation in the arts of Brazil, with special focus on the last decade. It will look at landmark exhibitions and closely examine the recent works of Indigenous artists active in the national and international art scene today. The class will also discuss the challenges of producing art from the border space between cultures inhabited by these artists.Denilson Baniwa, Natureza Morta (Still-life/Dead Nature), Digital print, 2017.
February 6, 2024
November 3, 2023
October 25, 2023
October 23, 2023
October 4, 2023
October 2, 2023
April 28, 2023
April 16, 2023
The Latin American Jewish Experience: A Kaleidoscope of Shared Pasts, Present Activism and Future Legacies
The Launch Event celebrates the establishment of the Brandeis Initiative on the Jews of the Americas (JOTA) as a convener of study and collaboration, where the diversity of Latin American Jewish experience is known and valued, and where creative academic and community enterprises are nurtured.
April 4, 2023
March 23, 2023
March 16, 2023
January 27, 2023
December 5, 2022
Argentina vs. Poland World Cup Party
2 p.m. | Mandel Center Room 128
Please join the LACLS program as we host an exciting afternoon of World Cup Soccer. Come cheer on your favorite team!
1-3 p.m. May 6, Fellows Garden
Join us for ice cream from JP Licks and a musical performance from DJ Radical One
Noon-1 p.m. May 2, Zoom
A virtual award ceremony for our graduates
3 p.m. Sunday, March 13
Tour of Bittersweet exhibition at Somerville Museum, led by the artist Santiago Montoya and curator José Falconi
Admission paid for by LACLS program
3:30-5 p.m., Lown Hall 201
Guest speaker in ANTH/HIST 143, Sugar: Cultivation, Circulation, Power
Vincent Brown
Charles Warren Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies
February 17, 2022
Join us for a virtual Screening and discussion of "Fruits of Labor"
5-7 p.m. Feb 17, Zoom
Filmmaker Emily Cohen Ibañez will be present for a Q&A Conversation after the film.
"Fruits of Labor" follows Ashley, the film's protagonist and co-writer, a Mexican-American teenager who dreams of graduating high school and going to college. But when ICE raids threaten her family, Ashley is forced to become the breadwinner, working days in the strawberry fields and nights in a food processing factory. "Fruits of Labor" is a coming of age story about an American teenager traversing the seen and unseen forces that keep her family trapped in poverty.
October 19, 2021
"Under the Skin," fresco, by Claudia Bernardi
Tuesday, Oct. 19, 2021
Noon-1:30 p.m., Zoom
Please join the minor in Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation (CAST), Hispanic Studies, Latin American, Caribbean and Latinx Studies (LACLS), and Theater Arts, for an online workshop of "Under the Skin," a new one-person play about the artist and human rights activist Claudia Bernardi’s life growing up in Argentina under a military junta, and her subsequent work digging up the past. This presentation is hosted by Professor María J. Durán as part of her course, Latinx Theatre: Politics, Performance, and Social Change and is funded in part by the Dean's Research Fund.
"Under the Skin"
A new play by award-winning playwright Catherine Filloux
Performed by Mercedes Herrero
Directed by Elena Araoz
Commissioned by INTAR (Lou Moreno, Artistic Director; Paul Slee Rodriquez, Executive Director)
After the workshop, Claudia Bernardi and Catherine Filloux will join us online for a discussion.
April 16, 2021
2-4 p.m.
Film screening and discussion. Please join us and meet LACLS faculty, fellow LACLS students, and students interested in learning more about the LACLS major and minor!
April 12, 2021
Paul Joseph López Oro, Smith College
4-5:30 p.m.
Ancestral memory is conjured, performed, and reenacted in multiple spaces and times in the Garifuna diaspora. Garifuna peoples are descendants of shipwrecked enslaved West Africans and Carib Arawak Indians on the lesser Antillean island of St. Vincent. Their exile by British colonial powers in 1797 from St. Vincent to the Bay Islands of Honduras marks a collective nostalgia of arrival memorialized and invoked as an act of resistance to enslavement and European colonial governance. Garifuna Settlement Day marks this arrival to Central America’s Caribbean Coast as one of ancestral exile, maroonage, and history of cultural survival. In this chapter, I turn to ancestral memory as an embodied archive performed to conjure a past in the present to reenact marronage and survival.
In conversation with the works of M. Jacqui Alexander, LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant, and Omise’ke Natasha Tinsley, I closely examine the sacredness and spirituality of memory as a manifestation of ancestral presence onto and through the flesh in the public spaces of Garifuna Settlement Day, visual mediums of films such as El Espíritu de mi Mamá (1999) and Garifuna in Peril (2011), and digital spaces of Twitter #GarifunaTwitter, Facebook, and YouTube as multi-sited spaces of embodied archives of Garifunaness.
Paul Joseph López Oro is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Smith College. His research and teaching interests are on AfroLatinidades in the Américas, specifically on Black Central Americans in the United States, by closely examining hemispheric political mobilizations of Garifuna New Yorkers and by engaging with Black Feminist Queer theory & ethnography, he argues that queer politics are at the center of how and why Garifuna New Yorkers perform, articulate, and mobilize their multiple subjectivities as Black, Indigenous, and Latinx.
Co-Sponsored by:
April 12, 2021
JoanaToro
2-3:30 p.m.
Being an immigrant is an enormous challenge, this book provokes a reflection on the status of Latin immigrants in the U.S., their cultural appropriation and new identities, ironies of immigrant life on the margins of a globalized world.
“Hello I am Kitty” is the result of a personal journal to find my new “identity” viewing right through an eye hole in the head of my Hello Kitty costume while I asked for donations after posing for pictures in Times Square between 2012-13.
The phenomenon of Latino immigration is a cultural issue of social appropriation, in which symbols play an integral role in generating images and self-images of Latinos in a society that is itself globalized. This project challenges symbols and misconceptions about Latino immigrants.
April 8, 2021
7 p.m.
Undocumented immigrants in the United States who engage in social activism do so at great risk: the threat of deportation. In "Organizing While Undocumented," Kevin Escudero shows why and how — despite this risk — many of them bravely continue to fight on the front lines for their rights. Drawing on more than five years of research, including interviews with undocumented youth organizers, Escudero focuses on the movement’s epicenters — San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City — to explain the impressive political success of the undocumented immigrant community. He shows how their identities as undocumented immigrants, but also as queer individuals, people of color, and women, connect their efforts to broader social justice struggles today.
March 17, 2021
March 11, 2021
7-8: p.m.
HBI Project on Latin American Jewish & Gender Studies
Ron Duncan Hart, anthropologist and author of "Crypto-Jews: The Long Journey (2020), and Mary Morris, author of Gateway to the Moon" (2018), will engage contemporary cultural and political ramifications of the historic crypto-Jewish presence in the Americas. The event will also feature a complimentary private link to the movie "A Long Journey" by Isaac Artenstein for those registered.
Panelists:
- Ron Duncan Hart, PhD, is a cultural anthropologist, author and filmmaker. He is the author of numerous books, most recently "Crypto-Jews: The Long Journey" (2020).
- Mary Morris, author of author of "Gateway to the Moon" (2019), was awarded the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts & Letters for "Vanishing Animals & Other Stories." Her many novels and story collections have been translated into Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Swedish and Japanese.
Co-sponsors: Brandeis Near Eastern & Judaic Studies, Hispanic Studies, Latin American and Latino Studies
February 22, 2021
12:30-1:30 p.m.
HBI Project on Latin American Jewish & Gender Studies
Join LAJGS for a mediated conversation between Edith Scott Saavedra, author of "The Lamps of Albarracín" (2019), and Spanish historians Lucía Conte Aguilar and Miguel Angel Motis, as they discuss the feminist experience of the Inquisition and end of Iberian Jewry, as well as the revival of Spain’s Jewish heritage in the present day.
Moderated by Dalia Wassner, PhD, Director, HBI Project in Latin American Jewish & Gender Studies
Panelists:
- Edith Scott Saavedra, author of the historical novel "The Lamps of Albarracin/Los Candiles de Albarracin" (2019).
- Lucía Conte Aguilar, Ph.D., lecturer at the Humanities Department and the Hispanic and European Studies Program at Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
- Miguel Ángel Motis Dolader, Ph.D. Professor of Communications and Social Sciences, University of San Jorge de Zaragoza and author of "Vivencias, emociones y perfiles femeninos. Judeoconversas e inquisición en Aragón en el siglo XV" (2020).
Co-sponsors: Brandeis Near Eastern & Judaic Studies, Hispanic Studies, and Latin American and Latino Studies
November 18, 2020
FEATURE EVENT:
Your Healing is Killing Me
by Virginia Grise
Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2020
5-6:20 p.m., Zoom
Part performance, part lecture, part writing workshop — this event is unprocessed and gluten and guilt free.
Co-sponsored by the Department of Romance Studies, The Latin American and Latino Studies Program, and the Minor in Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation (CAST).
November 14, 2020
Topic: Voices of Comedy
7 p.m. Nov. 14
November 13, 2020
We are inviting interested students, including but not limited to people already majoring and minoring in LALS, to a "town hall" from 10:30 a.m.-noon Nov. 13.
November 10, 2020
Out there without fear: A dancehall ocumentary
November 6, 2020
Please join us at 2 p.m. Nov. 6 for the Brandeis Anthropology Research Colloquium Hunt Lecture in Economic Anthropology, featuring David Freidel. "Flashing Cash: Celts, Mirrors, Money and Power in Olmec and Maya Civilizations."
October 23, 2020
Border South: Anthropology, Documentary Film, and the Politics of Border Crossing.
November 4, 2019
Thank you to the Intercultural Center (ICC) for opening their space and allowing us to host the movie COCO while we enjoyed authentic Mexican hot Chocolate and spent a bit of time telling stories about our ancestors and what this day means to us.
November 1, 2019
6:30 p.m.Nov. 1
"Eddie's Perejil" is a gripping solo play, written and performed by Edward Paulino, about a working-class Dominican-American college student who stumbles upon a document describing a long-forgotten genocide against Haitians by Dominicans known as the 1937 Haitian Massacre, el Corte, and temwayaj kout kouto. This discovery and subsequent self-reflection sets him on an inescapable collision course with his romanticized notion of what it means to be Dominican in the diaspora.
September 19, 2019
Come and join us at the Intercultural Center from noon-2 p.m. Sept. 19, 2019. We will be having a meet and greet with LALS for an opportunity for current and interested students to meet each other, learn more abou the program and meet some of our LALS faculty!
May 3, 2019
We gathered with graduating LALS students and Jane's Award and Prizes' recipients to celebrate another year with our program.
February 4, 2019
The Modern Jungle screening, a film by Charles Fairbanks (USA) and Saul Zak (Mexico).
November 1, 2018
Held in the Intercultural Center (ICC).
October 19, 2018
Presented by Stephen Ferry and Elizabeth Ferry.
La Batea Presentation: Elizabeth Ferry and Stephen Ferry present their book on Gold Mining in Columbia.
October 11, 2018
September 28, 2018
Two-day film festival held this year at Brandeis held Sept. 28-29.
Past Events
April 27, 2018
October 23, 2023
March 3, 2023
April 20, 2018
Film screening of "En el séptimo día" (On the Seventh Day) to promote the September 2018 Boston Latino International Film Festival at Brandeis.
March 27, 2018
Screening of "Clínica de Los Migrantes," a medical drama about a year in the life of Puentes, one of the only health clinics in the U.S. involved in the politically controversial practice of providing health care to undocumented immigrants. By law, illegal immigrants cannot obtain health insurance and receive no regular medical treatment. At Puentes, a team of volunteers led by Dr. Steve Larson attend to an ever-growing population of housekeepers, prep cooks and construction workers. Many come to Puentes after being turned away at other hospitals. Full of unforgettable patient-doctor interactions and human portraits, "Clinica de Migrantes" tells the story of America's true untouchable class and of the heroic few who reach out to help them.
March 16, 2018
March 12, 2018
Exclusive screening of a 35mm copy of a classic film, "Kiss of a Spider Woman," the story of political imprisonment during a military dictatorship in a Latin American country. But it is also a story about the emergence of queer identities and the power of film and storytelling.
March 9, 2018
February 9, 2018
"Touched by Music: Enchantment and Aspiration in Venezuela," presented by Dr. Yana Stainova, Dartmouth University.
February 2, 2018
Lunch field trip to Panela de Barro (Brazilian per kilo and churrascaría) co-sponsored by IBS Latin American and Brazilian Initiative.
January 25, 2018
Screening of the movie "Dolores," co-sponsored and hosted by Sin Frontiers, Heller School. Documentary followed by discussion.
January 19, 2018
BARS Anthropology Friday Seminar, "Violence Unresolved: Argentina and the Problem of the Perpetrator," presented by Professor Ram Natarajan, University of Arkansas.