Alejandra Vela
Moderator
Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures. Harvard University.
ARTS & HUMANITIES WORKSHOP: Taco
Date and Time
February 25, 2027
05:30PM - 07:30PM EST
Location
CGIS South, Room S216
Taco is a deep dive into the most iconic Mexican food from the perspective of a Mexico City native. In a narrative that moves from Mexico to the United States and back, Sánchez Prado discusses the definition of the taco, the question of the tortilla and the taco shell, and the existence of the taco as a modern social touchstone that has been shaped by history and geography.
Challenging the idea of centrality and authenticity, Sánchez Prado shows instead that the taco is a contemporary, transcultural food that has always been subject to transformation.
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
This event is presented in collaboration with the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University.
Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado
Speaker
Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies, Washington University in Saint Louis.
Mariano Siskind
Moderator
Smith Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature, Harvard University.
Bios
Alejandra Vela, research Interests: 20th-21st Century Mexican Cultural Studies, with broad interests in transnational mass culture, archives, feminine periodicals and literature, diasporic and border feminine literature, their reception and preservation throughout Latin American Modernity. I have also researched Latin American cinema, T.V. and their role in creating specific notions of gender, womanhood, and queerness.
As a whole, my research questions the Latin American cultural field by looking at how different “counter-archives”, as I call them in my current book manuscript, illuminate literary and cultural history involving feminine writers and materials. I defend the need, within the Humanities, to celebrate the ways femininity has intervened in the public sphere, while rethinking the limits of what is considered Literature and Culture. I consider this a necessary step towards a reconceptualization of intellectual history based on feminized aesthetics that unearth a myriad of female and women writers, editors, readers heretofore left out of the canon.
My current book manuscript, Newsstand Feminism: Cursi Aesthetics and Feminist Genealogies in Mexican Women’s Periodicals, analyzes women’s magazines from the 1940s to the 1980s. I argue that these periodical publications, though not considered feminist by current canons, were instrumental in the creation of a transhemispheric feminist press, both at the level of content and form. In addressing the oeuvre of Rosario Castellanos, Rosario Sansores, Vicente Leñero, and the collective behind fem magazine, I identify and track the ambivalent presence of what I call “cursi (corny) aesthetics” –that is, formal principles constructed by particular understandings of femininity associated with the subjects that produce and consume them. By using an interdisciplinary approach that involves affect theory, queer theory and theory of the archive, I challenge the hermeneutical paradigms through which we evaluate cultural production. Thus, my research reveals that prejudice impacts reception studies, regulating consumption patterns and current perceptions of culture and canon.
As a postdoctoral fellow at the UNAM, I edited a forthcoming critical volume of Mexican writer and “cronista” Rosario Sansores’ work in the Novedades newspaper. Sansores’ daily column “Rutas de emoción” expanded from 1939 to 1972 and made her one of the most read columnists of mid 20th-century Mexico. However, and even though she had a broad feminine readership, she was forgotten by both the general public and academia. As this volume shows, I am invested in reintroducing into academic conversation different feminine aesthetics, still dismissed by certain feminist viewpoints because of their relationship with conservative notions of womanhood.
With my second book project, From Female Magazines to Family Longings: Border-Crossing Ideologies in 20th Century Greater Mexico, I aim to demonstrate the complexities behind the genealogies of female thought within Hispanophone communities, by rethinking the role of cultural objects deemed too “conservative” or frivolous, such as magazines Hola! or Para ti, through their presence in the Greater Mexico markets and “estanquillos” (newsstands). I believe this highlights a form of memory that has rarely been made visible from the perspective of literary and cultural studies.
Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Washington University in Saint Louis, USA. He is the author of El canon y sus formas: La reinvención de Harold Bloom y sus lecturas hispanoamericanas (2002), Naciones intelectuales: Las fundaciones de la modernidad literaria mexicana 1917-1959 (2009, winner of the LASA Mexico 2010 Humanities Book Award) Intermitencias americanistas: Ensayos académico y literarios 2004-2009 (2012), Screening Neoliiberalism. Transforming Mexican Cinema 1988-2012 (2014), and Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican Fiction, The Neoliberal Book Market and the Question of World Literature (2018). He has edited and co-edited nine books, the most recent of which are Democracia, Otredad y Melancolía. Roger Bartra ante la crítica (with Mabel Moraña, 2015) and A History of Mexican Literature (with Anna Nogar and José Ramón Ruisánchez, 2016).
Mariano Siskind, Academic Degrees: BA in Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina; MA, PhD, in Comparative Literature, New York University. Research Interests: Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Latin American Literature; Travel Writing; Histories and Theories of Globalization and cosmopolitanism; Marxism; Psychoanalysis; Critical Articulations of Literature and Philosophy