Productive Rememberings and Performances of Indigenous Mexico’s Past

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

This panel addresses the ways in which the selected past of indigenous Mexico has been productively utilized, both consciously and unconsciously, by indigenous and non-indigenous peoples over the past five centuries. In particular, we focus on the context(s) that have given rise to such rememberings and performances of the past, and how people and/or communities have responded to them. Following James Wertsch, in using the term “remembering” as opposed to “memory” we seek to emphasize the dynamic nature of social memories and the way they are arranged to serve the present moment (“Collective Remembering,” 234-5). Our aim is to better understand how selected rememberings and performances of Mexico’s past have rippled back and forth through time, and to what end. Together, these panelists make a compelling case not only for how collective/social memory works (and is worked), but also in a broader fashion the significance of Colonial Studies for making sense of the past and the present.

Sub Track

• Performance and Visual Studies

Chair

• Patricia A Ybarra, Brown University

Individual Presentations

• Pasts and Presence: Elite Nahua Rhetorical Strategies in Colonial Letters to the King - Kelly S McDonough, University of Texas at Austin

• Lo propio y lo ajeno: Re-Membering Mexico’s Ancient Past - Pablo García Loaeza, West Virginia University

• Re-membering Erasure of our Indigenous Past in the 21st Century: Seeing Nahua and Otomí Women at the End of Mexico’s Colonial Period - Miriam L Melton-Villanueva, University of Nevada Las Vegas

• Indigenous Histories of "Conquest": 16th Century Nahua Perspectives - Tania García-Piña, The University of Texas at Austin