The IU Latin American Ensemble's La Orquesta Escuela Vieja is thrilled to be back after a brief hiatus to perform our spring concert for you via live stream. Join us virtually for an evening of classic Cuban dance music: Danzon, Charanga, Chachacha, and Salsa. Clear some space in your living room, grab your dancing shoes, and turn up the volume!

Music by José Pablo Moncayo, Juan Orrego-Salas, and Astor Piazzolla performed by Edward Gazouleas (viola) and Aram Arakelyan (piano).

Ethnomusicologists and filmmakers Cassio Nobre and Xavier Vatin, along with director Gabriela Barreto, will join IUB faculty members Maria Hamilton Abegunde and Solimar Otero in conversation about this new documentary examining the impact of linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner's work with Candomblé communities in Bahia, Brazil. Those registered for this event will receive a link to screen the film from November 13-21.    

This Salón Latino celebrates the music of Afro-Latin American composers and showcases a sampling of their rarely performed chamber works, including new arrangements. This concert is just one of many events offered to the IU community through the Afrolatin Coalition in the Arts Series, a month-long interdisciplinary initiative coordinated and sponsored by Indiana University’s Latin American Music Center (LAMC), Latino Studies Department (LATS), Graduate Mentoring Center (GMC), and Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS). Tonight’s concert turns the focus of this series to the world of art music and offers a diverse sampling of pieces written by four composers who address Afrolatin culture in their works.  Register for the concert here.  Download the program supplement (program notes & performer bios) here. 

Director, Joe Galvin   View Live: https://iumusiclive.music.indiana.edu/

In 2000, the newly formed music and theater collective Grupo Teatro del Milenio produced a short experimental play Karibú. Written collectively by the founding members of the group, the play critiqued the role that black performers have historically had in Peruvian society, simultaneously beloved and marginalized by the largely non-black audiences that claim their music as an expression of cultural diversity. In celebration of Teatro del Milenio’s 20th anniversary, this presentation will feature a virtual screening of a revival production of Karibú that took place in Atlanta in 2007 and will be accompanied by an introduction and post-screening discussion hosted by Javier León, who has worked with various members of the groups for more than fifteen years.  

Reyita: The Life of a Black Cuban Woman in the Twentieth Century written by Maria de Los Reyes Castillo Bueno, discusses the story of her grandmother, parents and her experience of slavery, prejudice, gender biases colorism and racism during the Cuban Independence War and the abolition of Slavery in 1898.  This presentation will include a reading from the biographical novel “Reyita” followed by a Dance Performance dedicated to the embodiment of Reyita’s story.

This paper engages the aesthetic modes of racial discourse in the Hispanophone Caribbean in order to understand the economy of desire which reproduces ethnonational representation in Puerto Rico. In doing so, this paper performs a double move that follows the significance of the aesthetic as an imposition of ethnonationalism on one end, and illuminates its interpellation of desire on the other. As such, this paper creates a push and pull effect that encapsulates a frame of reference for multiple histories and geographies that both reproduce and refuse ethnonationalism in general in Puerto Rico.​

In Afrolatinx religious practices such as Cuban Espiritismo, Puerto Rican Santería, and Brazilian Candomblé, the dead tell stories. Communicating with and through mediums’ bodies, they give advice, make requests, and propose future rituals, creating a living archive that is coproduced by the dead. Solimar Otero's Archives of Conjure (Columbia University Press 2020), explores how Afrolatinx spirits guide collaborative spiritual-scholarly activist work through rituals and the creation of material culture. By examining spirit mediumship through a Caribbean cross-cultural poetics, she shows how divinities and ancestors serve as active agents in shaping the experiences of gender, sexuality, and race. 

Grab a coffee and join us as we meet up with JavierLeón, director of the Latin American Music Center - LAMC at Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, and Cristina Amescua, researcher from the Center Regional and Multidisciplinary Studies at UNAM. We will be chatting about how intangible cultural heritage initiatives are unfolding in Mexico and compare and contrast it with the work happening in Perú in the same field.-----------Toma un café y únete a nosotros para reunirnos con Javier León, director del Centro de Música Latinoamericana de la Escuela de Música IU Jacobs, y Cristina Amescua, investigadora del Centro de Estudios Regionales y Multidisciplinarios de la UNAM. Charlaremos sobre cómo se están desarrollando las iniciativas de patrimonio cultural inmaterial en México y lo comparamos y contrastamos con el trabajo que se realiza en Perú en el mismo campo.