TITLE: And Wheat Completed the Cycle: Flour Mills, Social Memory, and Industrial Culture in Sonora, Mexico
SPEAKER: Maribel Alvarez
EVENT DATE: 04/21/2010
RUNNING TIME: 59 minutes
DESCRIPTION:
"The abandoned flour mills throughout the region," said a Mexican researcher interviewed during fieldwork in northern Mexico, "are the equivalent for Sonorans of the pyramids in Central Mexico." In this talk about her research as a Fulbright Fellow in Sonora, Mexico for the last nine months, folklorist and anthropologist Maribel Alvarez explores the role of wheat - a grain introduced by the Spanish to Mexico in the 16th century - as a central element in the construction of a distinct regional identity that prides itself on a simultaneous, and often contradictory, association with tradition AND modernity. As an alternative to the corn-based cultures of Mesoamerica and the ancient Southwest, Alvarez's work interrogates the role of social memory, desire, and nostalgia in relationship to the invention of patrimony. Her research on wheat embraces a multidisciplinary approach that illuminates in both scholarly and popular ways the existence of a "wheat-based worldview" in Sonora expressed through what Sonorans eat, how they talk, how they labor, and what they deem to be the greatest contribution of Sonoran farmers to humanity.
Speaker Biography: Maribel Alvarez holds a dual appointment as Assistant Research Professor in the English Department and as Research Social Scientist at the Southwest Center, University of Arizona. She teaches courses on methods of cultural analysis with particular emphasis on objects, oral narratives, and visual cultures of the US-Mexico border. She has a Doctorate in Anthropology from the University of Arizona and a Masters Degree in Political Theory from California State University, Long Beach. She is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress.
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SERIES: Benjamin Botkin Lecture Series
