University of Texas at Austin
Latinx: The Future is Now
Thursday, April 12, 2018
Stern Center, Great Room, 7 p.m.
This lecture charts out the histories of how we went from using Mexican American and Puerto Rican to Chicano and Nuyorican and then to the latest iterations, Latina/o and now Latinx. While millennials are leading the charge with the Latinx conversation, Guidotti-Hernández argues their boomer intellectual forerunners are often outright resistant to the use of Latina/o let alone Latinx, indicating the futurist potential and political necessity of the term.
This program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Departments of English, American Studies, Latin American, Latino & Caribbean Studies, and the Women’s & Gender Resource Center. It is also part of the Clarke Forum’s semester theme, Citizen/Refugee.
Biography (provided by the speaker)
Nicole Guidotti-Hernández is associate professor of American Studies and Mexican American and Latina/o studies at UT Austin. She is an expert in Borderlands History after 1846, Transnational Feminist Methodologies, Latinx Studies, and Popular Culture and Immigration.
Her book titled Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries, Duke University Press (2011) won the 2011-2012 MLA Prize in Chicana/o and Latina/o Literature and was a finalist for the 2012 Berkshire Women’s History First Book Prize and has received many favorable reviews. Her articles such as “Reading Violence, Making Chicana Subjectivities” appear in anthologies such as Techno/futuros: Genealogies, Power, Desire (2007), edited by Nancy Raquel Mirabal and Agustin Lao-Montes. She has also published in journals such as Women’s Studies International Forum, ELN, Social Text, American Quarterly, Cultural Dynamics, The Latin Americanist, and Latino Studies, where her article “Dora the Explorer, Constructing “Latinidades” and the Politics of Global Citizenship” is one of the most downloaded articles in the history of the journal. She is also the co-editor Radical History Review special issue number 123 entitled “Sexing Empire.”
Video of Lecture