Ecofascism & Migration in the Americas | Traces...

Migration and Aesthetics Seminar series. 

Speakers: Emily Celeste Vázquez Enriquez and Fiamma di Montezemolo

Register for the meeting on Zoom here 

Biography

Emily Celeste Vázquez Enriquez received her PhD in Romance Studies from Cornell University. Focused on Central and North America, her research studies the intersections between the Environmental Humanities and the fields of Border and Migration Studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript that thinks through the concept of “border biomes” to examine the complex relationships that exist between border demarcations, ecosystems, the nonhuman dwellers of these regions, and people. Her second book project focuses on the notion of invasive species, through which she addresses questions related to different forms of environmental violence in the context of migration flows in the Americas. Emily grounds these questions in 20th and 21st-Century Central American, Latinx, and Mexican film, literature, and art. 

Fiamma Montezemolo is both an artist and a cultural anthropologist. She is an established scholar in border studies and the author of two monographs:  La Mia Storia Non La Tua: La Dinamica Della Costruzione Dell’identita’ Chicana (Guerini, 2004) and Senza volto: L’etnicità e il genere nel Movimento Zapatista (Liguori, 1999). She is also a co-author of Here is Tijuana (London: Blackdog Publishing, 2006) and co-editor of Tijuana Dreaming: Life & Art at the Global border (Duke U.Press, 2012). 

Abstracts

Emily Celeste Vázquez Enriquez's talk: Ecofacism and Migration in the Americas

This talk will be focusing on the context of Central and North America, this talk examines practices rooted in eco-fascist interpretations of migration movements and migrants. To do this, I study contemporary art and literature that expose, defy, and interrogate dangerous and wide-spread eco-fascist narratives.

Fiamma di Montezemolo: Traces...

In this video-essay contemplative images, confessions, theoretical reflections, and an enigmatic electronic musical motif merge to form a meditation on border life between the United State & Mexico. Based on both years of ethnographic work in Tijuana and an ascetic shooting schedule of 24hrs, the artist and anthropologist refracts her own experience in the region by attempting to sculpt a textured living portrait of the Wall that separates Tijuana and San Diego. Images of a rusty wall, unruly topography, decaying surveillance structures, furtive moments of undocumented migrant crossings, and dystopian landscapes are interwoven with a mournful voice-over enunciated from a different time and place.