Professor of English at Bucknell University
Thank you to Bucknell’s Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Gender for inviting me to present as part of their Faculty Colloquia series!
My talk was entitled, “Songs of Solidarity: The Potential and Limits of Latinx Allyship,” and I discussed the depiction of US Latinx activism and solidarity in the musicals Anita (2019) by Milta Ortiz and Siluetas(2024) by Erlina Ortiz.
It’s official! My essay on the musical and film, In the Heights, which appears in the essay collection, From Broadway to the Bronx: New York City’s History Through Song, is slated to come out on Jul 26, 2024!
The collection, edited by Veronika Keller and Sabrina Mittermeier, is credited with providing a “fascinating and vibrant depiction of New York City in song across a variety of different genres, focusing on Broadway, musical theatre, hip hop, punk, folk, and jazz genres, as well as the work of New York born artists and those who are intimately connected with the city.”
Check out my chapter (#16), which is entitled, “‘North of 96th Street’: Latinx Class Mobility and In the Heights by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes.”
I had the opportunity to chat about my current research project with Brooke Andrade, Vice President for Library and Digital Services of the National Humanities Center. Our conversation was recently shared on the podcast series she hosts for the NHC, Discovery and Inspiration.
Here’s the abstract for the interview: “Theatrical productions allow playwrights and audiences alike to engage with historical and contemporary social realities. But what are the consequences when particular types of dramatic texts and performances are inadequately disseminated and preserved? Elena Machado Sáez (NHC Fellow, 2022–23) is analyzing the ways that Latinx theater in the United States depicts forms of activism and resistance while building shared archives and communities.”
Tegan Zimmerman’s monograph, Matria Redux: Caribbean Women Novelize the Past (U Press of Mississippi 2023) cites chapter 1, “Mixed Blessings: Readerships, Postcolonial Ethics and the Problem of Intimacy,” and chapter 4, “Messy Intimacies: Postcolonial Romance in Ana Menéndez, Dionne Brand, and Monique Roffey” from my book, Market Aesthetics: The Purchase of the Past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction (UVA Press 2015).
I’m indebted to this lovely group of people who were in residency at the National Humanities Center during the 2022-2023 year. Our lunch conversations, project talks, happy hours, and ping-pong sessions were so generative for me as a scholar and human being. Thank you to the staff at the NHC for fostering a vibrant intellectual community and to the John G. Medlin, Jr. Fellowship for financially supporting my research on Archival Activism and US Latinx Theatre as well as my digital humanities projects.
Kristi Ulibarri‘s monograph, Visible Borders, Invisible Economies: Living Death in Latinx Narratives (U Texas Press 2022) cites chapter 2, “Mercado Dreams: The End(s) of Sixties Nostalgia in Contemporary Ghetto Fiction,” and chapter 3, “Movin’ on Up and Out: Lowercase Latino/a Realism in the Works of Junot Díaz and Angie Cruz” from my co-authored book, The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature (Palgrave Macmillan 2007).
She also cites chapter 1, “Mixed Blessings: Readerships, Postcolonial Ethics and the Problem of Intimacy,” and chapter 3, “Writing the Reader: Literacy and Contradictory Pedagogies in Julia Alvarez, Michelle Cliff, and Marlon James” from my book, Market Aesthetics: The Purchase of the Past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction (UVA Press 2015).
I coauthored an op-ed in Salon with my colleagues in US Latinx Studies, David J. Vázquez and Magdalena L. Barrerra, in response to Pamela Paul’s commemoration of the 3-year anniversary of the American Dirt controversy. In it, we argue that the NY Times decision to publish Paul’s piece distracts us from “a problem that truly deserves a spotlight, especially now in the era of book bans and other censorship: the harmful and persistent under-representation of Latinx and other people of color in the publishing business.”
We ask that the public make a “concerted effort to read beyond “American Dirt” and the Big 5 — for example, reading Myriam Gurba and books by the small presses […] like Arte Público. If we must commemorate the anniversary of the “American Dirt” debacle, then let us do so by considering the authors who are actually in the shadows, whose voices and stories are largely excluded from the publishing world. Such exclusion cheats us all, robbing us of the light needed to view the complexity and nuance of what it means to live in this world.”
On February 28th at 4:00 pm (EST), the English Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is hosting my virtual presentation about US Latinx theater and archival activism.
Come join in the conversation and REGISTER HERE.
Abstract: By situating archival work as a form of activism, we can appreciate how US Latinx playwrights are responding to a problem of generational discontinuity, to the gaps in community knowledge about US Latinx history and activism. Archival activism finds expression through representation (narrative, visual, sound, and prop elements of a performance) and institutional practices that create new spaces for community building and belonging (oral history projects, educational programming, and social media). US Latinx theatre archives a history of US Latinx activism while also opening up the definition of activism to include Other models and voices. This presentation will highlight the institutions of Borderlands Theatre in Dallas, Texas and Cara Mia Theater in Tuscon, Arizona, as well as analyze Guadalis del Carmen’s pandemic play, “Mami’s Recipe Book” (2020).
My research was highlighted by the National Humanities Center this January, alongside the work of my fellow fellows, Martha M. F. Kelley and W Jason Miller. Every month the Center highlights a set of fellowship projects that share a common theme, in our case, “the influence of the artist.”
Rather than ask us for abstracts of our research in progress, the Center requested that we respond to questions that provide deeper insight into why we think our scholarship matters.
The prompts included, ‘”What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?”, “In the course of your research have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?”, and “What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?”
Check out our answers here: https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/featured-research-the-influence-of-the-artist/