Ithaca College

MACLAS Keynote Speaker: 9:45-10:45am --Dr. Jennifer Jolly- Professor of Art History, Ithaca College

Dr. Jolly was awarded the 2019 Arthur P. Whitaker Prize for the best book. Her book is titled Creating Pátzcuaro, Creating Mexico: Art, Tourism, and Nation Building under Lázaro Cárdenas (Univ. of Texas Press 2018).

The title of her keynote talk is: Afro-Mexican Visibility in 19th century Mexico: The Case of José Maria Morelos.

In 1946, Mexican anthropologist Aguirre Beltrán published La Población Negra de Mexico, seeking to make visible Mexico’s “third root.” In it, he offered a history of Afro-descendent peoples in Mexico and identified famous Mexicans who had crossed the “color line,” including independence hero Jose Maria Morelos, whose portraits “reveal” the truth of his heritage. This talk asks us to reconsider what we are looking for when we look to portraits record as evidence of Morelos’s racial status and addresses two core questions. First, how do ideas about blackness and brownness (and moreno status, as opposed to the more commonly discussed mestizo status) develop and change in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Mexico? Second, given that many nineteenth-century Afro-mestizos placed great stakes on finally being able to become invisible as such and blend in to the larger mixture that was Mexico, what does it mean for today’s scholars to try to see them again?

for a full description of the MACLAS Conference, see:

http://www.maclas.org/maclas-2020-virtualconference

to register and get the zoom link:

https://maclas2020.exordo.com/registration