In a political, social and cultural moment when borders, limits and zones of exclusion have become realities that (Greater) Mexico cannot evade, an unprecedented variety of literary, cultural and linguistic manifestations of national, ethnic and ethnoracial, linguistic and social identities have come to the forefront of conversations across academic fields. The II Annual Greater Mexican Studies Conference seeks to assembles spaces where various disciplines, from visual studies, film studies, literary studies, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology and the greater studies of the arts can come together to share their responses to the heterogeneity (Antonio Cornejo Polar) that characterizes the multiplicity of social, cultural and linguistic realities of migration, sociolinguistic ideologies, border crossings, cultural identities, journeys and liminal spaces, bilingualism/biculturalism. While mestizaje has historically been a lens through which to understand these combinations, we seek to create a richer vocabulary to spark new conversations and go beyond the ideas of harmonious mixtures in the face of the violent realities we are facing.
The idea of border, as the dividing structure between two or more spaces, as the third space generated in coexistence, as the limit of identities and racial formations, as the cultural milieu that is neither here nor there, pushes us to consider the economic, social, political and cultural realities where the powers of States become stronger and more enforced, while at the same time revealing its ultimate shortcomings, particularly in the face of increasingly authoritarian governments. In these geographical, political, ideological and racial spaces where policing coexists with radical inclusion, the limits of disciplinary studies become visible as cultural, linguistic and artistic phenomenon often cross from the street to the museum gallery and other spaces.
“At the brink of el bordo, I become blade” – Sayak Valencia
While the standard use of bordo in Mexican Spanish refers to the naturally occurring and man-made containment bank of rivers, dams and other waterways, the border writer, activist and artist Sayak Valencia brings to the forefront the word as it circulates in the border regions to refer to the containment walls, fences, and riverbeds of the border. El bordo signals these limits not as impenetrable, unmovable and strictly controlled zones, but as zones where the various and heterogenous collide and rearrange each other. El bordo is a policed, fenced, walled, militarized and closely surveilled zone, but it is also a zone of extreme porosity and exchange, just as the earthen walls of bordos contain water while allowing it to seep deeper into the ground and generate a healthier and more diverse ecosystem.
In this light, this conference seeks to push us all to consider how borders have existed and functioned historically (as geopolitical boundaries between nations and economies and also as territorial demarcations that make visible the borders of our racialized, gendered and fully intersectional embodiments), how they are being mobilized today as technologies of exclusion and as radical tools of inclusion and permeability where the lines between language, gender, race and other identities are being challenged and redrawn, and how borders become catalysts for the generation of alternatives to our current geopolitical, ecological and economic realities of precariousness, exploitation and radical change.
We encourage submissions from a variety of disciplines, including but not limited to: literary, visual, media and performance studies, political and social sciences, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, semantics, musicology, religious studies, history, and anthropology.
The conference will be held in Spanish, English, Spanglish and any variation of the above. We encourage participants to consider the particular politics of language characteristics of Greater Mexico and its borders.