The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) proposes to reconceive Latin American Studies from the perspective of the border--defined both as geopolitical space and as a theoretical category. UTEPs Center for InterAmerican and Border Studies will initiate a reconceptualization of teaching, research, and outreach activities, drawing explicitly on study of the border to reinvigorate study of Mexico and Latin America on campus and in the El Paso-Cd. Jurez region, a binational, multicultural area of approximately 2 million inhabitants. UTEP is a comprehensive university with about 15,000 students and a long tradition of Latin American and Border studies. Given its location directly adjacent to the international boundary and a study body that is overwhelmingly Mexican American or Mexican, UTEP is particulary well placed to lead an area studies initiative. The border perspective inherently challenges some of the foundational assumptions of area studies: the accumulation and analysis of information regarding exclusive and foreign societies and cultures and the determination and management of that process in North American and Western Europe.
For the initial grant period, UTEP proposes four closely linked activities. A faculty Latin American Studies committee will engage in rethinking the existing Latin American studies curriculum concentrating on the development of a pilot interdisciplinary course and a core of additional course. Members of that committee will also participate in a Border Latin American Studies forum, convened by the Center for InterAmerican and Border Studies and including faculty and students from UTEP and universities in Cd. Jurez as well as representative of key border institutions, agencies and organizations. This forum will explore the interplay between key theoretical questions relating to social and cultural difference and practice. An oral history project will fund the collection of testimonies that address the dynamics of these questions over time. The oral histories will also become models for the oral history projects that will be a central element in the Latin American studies course to be piloted during the grant period. Finally, the project will involve the creation of a border web sit that will provide a venue for reporting on and debating the issues that emerge from the other actives as well as building a basis for a more structured relationship among students, faculty, and members of a communities in the entire U.S.-Mexico border region. The initial grant period will also lay the groundwork for a broader development of Latin American studies at UTEP and at linked institutions, for the development of research, and for the expansion of community-based conversations that stretch beyond El Paso and Cd. Jurez.
In an environment of limited resources and compelling demands for economic and social development in the Texas border region, UTEP has maintained a firm commitment to the core areas of Latin American studies in the social sciences and humanities and in Spanish language study. In addition to undergraduate and masters degree programs, UTEP intends shortly to initiate a Ph.D. program in history focused on the Borderlands. This grant will provide the impetus and support to develop that base into an innovative program that crosses many borders--among disciplines, institutions, between university and community faculty and students and across international and cultural boundaries
Introduction
The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) proposes a project to reconceive its Latin American Studies program from the perspective of the border--defined as both a geopolitical space and a conceptual category. At UTEP, located directly adjacent to the international boundary, the study of the border in both theoretical and empirical terms has been closely linked to study of Latin America and particularly Mexico. But the implications of this linkage have been more implicit than explicit. This project would create an ongoing and critical dialogue on the relationship between local border and more global Latin American processes. At the same time it would intensify and institutionalize the process of connecting research, teaching and learning about Latin America and the US-Mexico border in an integrated program of curriculum revision, research and community outreach. This approach could become a model for a revised, reconceptualized understanding of Latin American societies and cultures at a time when the rapid growth of Latin American heritage communities in the United States and the impact of globalization processes on communities across Latin America itself have challenged and complicated the traditional conception of Latin American area studies. Whereas, peripheral areas, whether of the United States or Latin America, have traditionally been conceived as idiosyncratic and unrepresentative, in the late twentieth century the border (in theoretical terms) and the border region (in the concrete) has come to provide powerful insights into the critical processes of mainstream social, economic and cultural change. This is because in an era of increasing hemispheric integration, this border is farther along in the process than the interior regions of either side, due to its long history of binational relations and its current hybridity. In this sense, the US-Mexico border, and our region especially, has become a laboratory of the future, a window into the Americas of the next century.
UTEP, with approximately 15,000 students, is situated in the largest community on the US.-Mexico border: Ciudad Jurez has a population of more than one million and El Paso, more than 600,000. UTEP is a comprehensive urban university offering 64 bachelors degrees, 57 masters degrees, and seven doctoral degrees in six colleges (Business Administration, Education, Engineering, Liberal Arts, Nursing and Health Sciences, and Science) and the Graduate School. One of the most remarkable aspects of UTEPs institutional development during the past five years has been its almost five-fold increase in extramural funding for research and development. UTEP is a national leader in research and education focusing on the US-Mexico border, and the institutional home of a number of its organizations and journals. UTEP has formal agreements (convenios) with 15 universities and educational institutions in Mexico for cooperative research and educational activities.
The university student body closely reflects the greater community: the large majority of students are of Mexican descent. One in 10 is a Mexican national. The international boundary itself almost directly abuts the campus and the presence of the US Immigration Service continually remind faculty and students of its proximity. Notwithstanding this presence, the boundary is porous and indistinct. More than 1,200 Mexican nationals daily cross the international boundary to attend university classes on a campus where courses in a wide range of fields are offered in Spanish and where outside the classroom Spanish is heard as often as in English and where the two languages continually intermingle. From the vantage point of this border university, Latin America emerges in distinctive shape and form. UTEP (and El Paso itself) is in one sense located in a fixed place, on the southern periphery of the United States on the north edge of a political border between North and South. In another sense, UTEP is the major university in a binational city populated largely by Latin Americans. Finally, UTEP is situated amid the flow of people north that stretches in time from the Spanish colonial period to the present and in space from the interior of Mexico and Central America through El Paso to California, Denver and Chicago and across the United States.
Thus, at UTEP research, teaching and learning about Latin America begin in rich and complex collaborations between faculty from UTEP and institutions in Ciudad Juarez, and among Mexican faculty and students and those of Mexican and Anglo descent. The tensions and opportunities inherent in these collaborations and the insights that they generate throw into relief many of the defining characterestics and trends of late twenieth century Latin American societies. Distinctive and contradictory border phenomena--hybridity, fluid identity, chauvinism and the politics of difference, and dislocating and relocating movement--increasingly and pervasively shape understanding of Latin American societies and cultures. What had been marginal (an aspect of border) has become central. For example, the processes through which Juarez residents have connected themselves with yet resisted United States media and institutions now surface in segments of the Mexco City poulation (and those of major and provinical urban centers) linked north through satellite dishes and electronic communications; the neo-liberal economic policies that have planted in Ciudad Juarez hundreds of off-shore or maquiladora factories owned by major transnational corporations increasingly emerge as the model for national economic "development" throughout Latin America: the highly gendered and age-graded nature of sectors of this work populations reflects a labor trend in many parts of Latin America; and indigenous autonomy and integration issues that have recently gained profile to the south of us are prefigured by the experience of the Tigua Pueblo Native American in El Paso. These are examples of how the border has become a binational, multicultural laboratory for understanding hemispheric globalization, as an economic process but also as a social and cultural one, as we approach the next century.
Intellectual Rationale and Thematic Focus
The UTEP program will emply our border location to understand Latin American differently by examining themes maturing in the border region. We will reflect upon concepts of border and "border crossing" and an intellectual metaphor in including socially and culturally diverse voices from both nations of the border area. We will examine issues of migration, cross-border circulation, gender roles, and cultural hybridity, the impact of these change on identity reformulations, as well as on the shifting degress and forms of civic participation on the border, patterns that reflect and often anticipate similar trends in Latin America. Our rationale is that Latin America cannot be seen in isolation from its northers neighbors and that the encounter at this border at this time in history provides uniques insights into the impacts of globalization on Latin American as an "Area." We also recognize that the border reflects more intensely and with more and with more temporal depth the complexities of interactions between Anglo and Latin heritage Americans, and that this needs to be included in a reconceived "Area" stdies program. Further, we privilege the specific dynamics of the part of the border, in such things as language retention, cultural revitalization, the growing regional literary and arts tradition, and the mutual cultural impacts between El Paso and Juarez, forces that increasingly blur the segregating role of the border. Our position is that the border serves as a critical place and perspective to bring together US and Latin American perspectives on each other as well as on the border itself. Our urban and instituional ambiance of blurring difference also works to break down the disciplinary boundaries between Latin American studies and fields such as cultual studies, anthropology, history, literature, and gender studies. It also helps to integrate academics from both sides of the border with popular intellectuals and other critical women and men in the community and, of course, with each other. This in turn becomes a boundary-blurring model for rethinking Latin American studies elsewhere.
Proposed Activities
The UTEP Center for Inter-American and Border Studies, directed by Dr. Ducan Earle, will organize the activities planned for the academic year 1997-1998 and fall 1998. Dr. Earle will also coordinate the development of the broader Latin American Studies initiative to be built from these planned activities.
1. Latin American Studies Steering Committee - Covenor: Dr. Roberto Villarreal, Professor of Political Science
Latin American and Border Studies faculty will select a Steering Committee (including a representative from Ciudad Juarez Universities) that will examine the existing Lain American Studies major program curriculum and develop a proposal for a substantial revision of that curriculum around a core, which includes and inter-disciplinary team-taught course. This core would also serve as the basis for a minor field to complement programs across the university that have substantial international or Latin American concentrations. The Steering Committee would also organize the development of the core inter-disciplianry course, which would be piloted in the Fall term 1998. Reflecting the central intellectual premise of the proposal, the core course (and the larger curriculum) will connect the study of Latin American to the study of the border. This will not be a course on the border region, but a course in which students will be asked to consider the relationships between the diverse political, economic, social and cultural phenomena that can be observed across Latin America nad parallel phenomena that can be observed and studied in El Paso-Ciudad Juarez. The course will drawn in part on an oral history project (described below) and ask student to engage in their own field research projects. The Center for Interamerican and Border Studies will organize a series of seminars, led by local and invited scholars, that explore crucial issues in Latin American scholarship in terms of questions raised in theoretical and concrete terms in border studies. For example, a presentation might discuss the relationships between gender and labor migration in Chile or Central Americal in light of the scholarship on the maquiladora workforce. similarly, studies of management organization and managerial culture in the maquilas could be compared to similar phenomena in central Mexico or Brazil. The series would draw together UTEP Latin American and Border Studies faculty and graduate students. Modest stipends funded by the grant would make it possible for scholars from Universidad Autonoma de Ciudad Juarez and Colegio de La Frontera Norte to participate on a regualr basis. This series would overlap in part with the Borderlands Latin American Forum.
2. The Borderlands Latin American Forum - Convenor: Dr. Duncan Earle, Director, Center for InterAmerican and Border Studies
The forum will bring together community leaders and intellectuals and academics from El Paso-Juarez in an on-going discussion of issues related to defining the real and conceptual boundaries between the United States and Mexico-- and hence Latin America. Part of this project will be a consideration of quesiton of representations of Latin America (and the border) in the United States and how area studies programs might more effectively shape the production of knowledge and teaching about Latin America, primarily in the United States but in Mexico as well. Mexican representations of the US and the border will also be assessed. In addition, the group will explore how issures related to defining and problematizing a boundary between the United States and Latin American play into the concrete draws on Mexican, Southwest US, Native American and other traditions to make something both new and familiar, rooted in the past yet uniquely current. The bi-national series will hold forums in Juarez and El Paso, offering a venue for new voices to contribute to the debate on Latin American issues. The goal will be to structure opportunities for the creative development of area studies paradigms through the exchange of ideas within a diverse local community, stretched to include visiting scholars, activists, artists, and so forth. for example, wheras crude assumptions about cultural difference--about the way that "Mexicans" or "Americans" act--often define assumptions about the behavior of workers in assembly plants, or border patrol officials, or clients in public hospitals and clinics, the forum would provide a context in which to bring together in an on-going conversation people who experience these assumptions and those who write and teach about them. Another example involves exploring and questioning the popular formulations of cultural purity and contamination that manifest themselves in negative views of "spanglish", of code switching, and of other culturally hybrid linguistic practices normal on the border but increasingly common elsewhere in the US.
3. Oral History Project - Convenor: Rebecca Carver, Director, Institute of Oral History
UTEP's Institute of Oral History will organize a pilot oral history project to provide a body of evidence that exposes through family histories some of the central questions in the twenitieth century experience of Mexican people and explores critical questions of culture, class and gender identity across generaitons and bi-national socipolitical space. As a model, the institute will conduct interviews to buld a single multi-generational history of several families from roots in the interior of Mexico to members currently living in Juarez, El Paso and elsewhere in the United States. In addition, interviews will be conducted in the area of origin with people who have remained there. The collection of the testimonies will be focused on elicting information relating the actions and attitudes of individuals and families to the broader societies and cultures in which they live. In this way the lives of ordinary individuals will become the basis for serious discussion, in the seminars and in the classroom about the transformation of Mexican communities during this century and about the nature and impact of gender, generational, ethnic and cultural distinction. These interviews will be models for community-based learning projects that will be part of the proposed inter-disciplinary Latin American studies course. The Institute of Oral History staff will train faculty and students in the course to work with oral evidence and to conduct their own oral research. Working with faculty mentors, these students will explore the questions raised in the Borderlands Forum and in their classes through a program of oral interviews with local families. They will record the human experiences of displacement, identity (re)formation, discrimination and resistance, economic opportunity and exploitation, and political repression and empowerment in relationship to fundamental questions of cultural difference, economic policy, and national workshop series. These interviews will be deposited in the permanent archive of the UTEP Institute for Oral History (which alreay maintains the largest oral history collection relating to the US-Mexico border to date).
4. Web Site - Webmaster: Phillip McCarty, Project Director, The Borderlands Encyclopedia
UTEP will establish a bilingual Interamerican/ Borderlands web site with a high degree of electronic interactivity and linkages to other web resources. This site will be used to disseminate information about Latin American and Border area studies, serve as a resource for Latin American and Border Studies faculty and students, report to the larger campus and regional communities and institutions (border and interior) on issues emerging from the Border Forum and Faculty Workshops; and share innovative strategies for teaching about Latin America and the U.S.-Mexico border at all levels. The web site will also serve as a forum for discussion of the impact of a border perspective on Latin American area studies and its relationship to Chicano studies, Cultural studies, Latin American and border literature, and so on.
Institutional Commitment
UTEP has a long-established and strong commitment to Latin American studies, with particular strength in Mexican studies. The Center for Inter-American and Border Studies was created in 1961 to develop and coordinate Latin American area studies teaching and research. The University funds the Center through a special Texas Sta either or both languages. A Ph.D. program in Psychology has recently been established that trains professionals in cross-cultural practice. The University has made a commitment to the establishment of a Ph.D. program in history, tentatively scheduled to begin in September 1998, that would focus on the study of Mexico and the Borderlands region.
Future Plans
In addition to the continuation and expansion of the activities detailed, the project would lay the foundation for the further development of Latin American Studies based at UTEP. UTEP foresees the implementation of a new Latin American studies curriculum, including continued development and possible expansion of the team-taught inter-disciplinary core course. The development of key courses will provide the basis for a program of university in reach designed to advance the Latin American studies curriculum, based in the humanities and social sciences, into crucial areas such as business, nursing, social work, environmental studies, public administration and educationon both the graduate and undergraduate levels. This inreach would take the form of lectures, brown-bag presentations, and presentations on curriculum resources that would be further developed by the Center for Inter-American and Border Studies in conjunction with UTEP master educators. Cross-disciplinary courses would be expanded that have a Latin American/Border content, and steps would be taken to institutionalize this practice university-wide, and to promote it as a model for other institutions through the Web, conferences and publications.
This would be matched by outreach activities. These would involve the border community more broadly in the discussion of issues raised in the Borderlands Forum and would also promote the further development of a new and growing Latin American studies network among institutions along the US-Mexico border. UTEP is the home of the secretariat of the Association of Borderlands Studies, has many members of the Latin American Studies Association and enjoys several other professional networks that link scholars along the border and into interior Latin America, as well as connections with the interior US Mexican and Mexican-American communities. These distinct disciplinary organizations would be tied together through the Center for Inter-American and Border Studies (CIBS), via electronic and print media means. Efforts are underway to establish a Border Heritage Trail to link up historical, artistic and other cultural resources along the bi-national border, with UTEP as the lead coordinating institution. This would be linked with North-South networks, for example the National Institute and School for Anthropology and History in Chihuahua City (INAH/ENAH, with whom we have a cooperation convenio) and the Center for Chicano and Border Studies in Mexico City (INAH/UNAM), as well as US Institutions such as New Mexico State University, PROFMEX, University of Texas Austins Institute for Latin American Studies (and its Mexico Center), the University of Californias Institute for Mexico and the United States (MEXUS), and many more.
Additional multi-year support would allow us to expand the pilot oral history project to create a major archive at UTEP of oral records of the histories of Mexican migrant families. The goal is to create a migration documentation center in connection with CIBS, the Oral History Institute, and Chicano Studies at UTEP. These resources would feed into the curriculum development and expansion at UTEP, and also provide access to this curriculum along the entire international and border-wide network.
Additional support would also allow for institutionalizing UTEP support for the new literary and expressive arts activity in the region, and bringing these creative voices into the curriculum and to the awareness of the immediate and larger communities. This would involve support for conferences, performances, and publications in conjunction with our bi-national regional partners, and support efforts to connect contemporary cultural production with the Latin American Forum, and the larger network referred to above. Regionally, this would help UTEP to promote the arts and art education.