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Over the last sixty years, my community in San Antonio, Texas has gone by many names—Mexicano, Tejano, and “Meskins;” Americans of Mexican descent, Mexican Americans, La Raza, Chicana/Chicano; and most recently Chicanx, and Chicané. Each of these cascading terms, refractions in an opaque (smoking?) mirror, marked chapters in a community’s ever-unfolding story of itself. They were partly martialed in resistance to an often inhospitable and exclusionary environment in South Texas, but more importantly, they represent urgent improvisations on the deep, still largely unknown origin story out of which we emerged, the epic of Mexico and the meeting of worlds that took place there between the Spanish and Indigenous worlds, resulting in the emergence of New Spain and a new Mestizo people.
If there is a destination for all of this protean re-naming of ourselves, it’s still coming to light.
San Antonio, a great American city and an ancient sanctuary of myriad Indigenous peoples, was founded by Spanish and Mestizo settlers two centuries after the Conquest, but its DNA came from the eventful meeting of these worlds in Tenochtitlán in 1521. Like Mexico, it would become a crossroads of the world. In recent years, the city has embraced these origins, in the recognition of the historic Spanish Missions as UNESCO World Heritage sites, and in numerous civic projects that have brought the Chicanx history of the city to light. We’ve also come to recognize that our challenges as a borderlands capital of a deep history imparts a kindred connection to other contested borderlands around the world, places where cultures meet and transform each other.
In this presentation, we’ll explore how the ever-transmuting identity of the Chicanx community of South Texas, is using a Borderlands Humanities practice, expressed in archaeology, new scholarship, visual art, music, and literature to re-connect communities to their unique American ancestral story.
Speaker: John Phillip Santos, Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities and Distinguished Senior Lecturer in Mestizo Cultural Studies, University of Texas - San Antonio.
Moderated by Davíd Carrasco, Neil L. Rudenstine Professor of the Study of Latin America, with a joint appointment with the Department of Anthropology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University
John Phillip Santos is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker from San Antonio, Texas. His two memoirs, Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (a National Book Award Finalist) and The Farthest Home is in an Empire of Fire, together tell the ancestral stories of his mother and father’s families, an American origin story of the centuries-long migrations that emerged out of Spain, Mexico, and the lands that became South Texas. His book of poems is Songs Older Than Any Known Singer. During his six years as a program officer at the Ford Foundation, he directed the philanthropic program in media infrastructure and production, making more than $40M in grants to support the development of independent media networks in the US, Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and to fund the production of documentaries around the world. A proud graduate of Texas public schools, Santos was the first Latino to be selected as a Rhodes Scholar and holds degrees in English Literature and Language from Oxford University, and Philosophy and Literature from the University of Notre Dame. He is an Emmy-nominated television producer, he has produced more than 40 broadcast documentaries and news programs on cultural themes in sixteen countries for CBS and PBS. His journalism and commentary have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the San Antonio Express-News, the Manchester Guardian, Texas Monthly, and other publications in the U.S., Mexico, and Europe. This work is archived in the Special Collections of the University of Texas San Antonio.
Davíd Carrasco (Neil L. Rudenstine Professor of the Study of Latin America) is a Mexican American historian of religions with particular interest in Mesoamerican cities as symbols, and the Mexican-American borderlands. His studies with historians of religions at the University of Chicago inspired him to work on the question, "where is your sacred place," on the challenges of postcolonial ethnography and theory, and on the practices and symbolic nature of ritual violence in comparative perspective. Working with Mexican archaeologists, he has carried out research in the excavations and archives associated with the sites of Teotihuacan and Mexico-Tenochtitlan resulting in Religions of Mesoamerica, City of Sacrifice, and Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire. An award-winning teacher, he has participated in spirited debates at Harvard with Cornel West and Samuel Huntington on the topics of race, culture, and religion in the Americas. He also directs the Moses Mesoamerican Archive and Research Project at Harvard University.
Presented in collaboration with the Moses Mesoamerican Archive at Harvard University.