Latinx Colombianidades: Critical Regionalisms and Diasporic Subjects

This microseminar offers students a base for entering into an interdisciplinary dialogue with the scholars and others in the UW community on Latinx Colombianidades. Latinx Colombians are simultaneously hyper-visible (i.e. associated in the media with new migrants or with drug production/smuggling) and their particular experiences remain unseen in US society. This conversation seeks to move beyond, and indeed challenge, dominant assumptions about Colombians in the US: that they are a “new” group in the US; that they are an “other” within the broader Latina/o/x imaginary; that Colombians (and South Americans in general) are more privileged middle- and upper-class white migrants; and that the community can be comprehensively understood through the paradigms of narco-trafficking and hypersexualized femininity.

Latinx Colombianidades from the Margins develops a set of dialogues from an understanding of how deeply impactful Colombian people have been to US history and culture and seeks to document the experiences of diasporic Colombians and their communities. The four editors of a related edited book project–Ariana Ochoa Camacho (University of Washington), Jennifer Harford Vargas (Bryn Mawr College), Maria Elena Cepeda (Williams College), and Johana Londoño (Rutgers University)–will facilitate conversations with students in the microseminar and discuss the common topics and theoretical approaches to frame and introduce this interdisciplinary project.

Image: Paola de la Calle, “Untitled (Nostalgia)”