The UC Berkeley Folklore Roundtable Presents:

"Critical Latinx Folkloristics for the 21st Century:
Rhetoric, Revision, and Practice"

Wednesday December 6, 2017
4:30-6:00 PM
554 Barrows Hall, UC Berkeley

Dr. Rachel Valentina González-Martin
University of Texas, Austin

Drawing on her ethnographic research on contemporary consumer culture associated with quinceañeras--elaborate coming-of-age celebrations for fifteen-year-old girls--and the social reception of racialized cultural practice, Dr. González-Martin will discuss the state of folklore studies among, with, and through minoritized communities geographically located in the United States. Her focus will be primarily on the experience of Latina/o/x identifying women and youth living under different forms of national citizenships, analyzing how cultural practices rooted in translocal cultural experiences and transnational memories can be collaboratively narrated through a lens of race, class, and gender politics that prioritizes self-documentary/un-documentary practices as acts of ethnographic refusal and cultural re-imagination.

Rachel Valentina González-Martin is a folklorist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, Center for Gender and Women’s Studies, and Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her forthcoming book, Coming Out Latina: Quinceañera Style and Latinx Consumer Identities investigates the cultural and gendered economies of practice surrounding contemporary Latina coming-of-age celebrations.

Co-hosted by the UC Berkeley Folklore Graduate Program & the Department of Ethnic Studies