Last weekend I had the honor of presenting my paper, “Se robaron mi qiunceañera: Female Performativity and Coming of Age in Latina Narratives,” at the conference of the Mid-Atlantic Council of Latin American Studies, at American University, Washington, D. C. In my previous post I presented part of the research I had conducted in preparation of the presentation at the conference. As with any conference paper, you end up with a whole bunch of regrets. Like I would have liked more time to edit a little better, instead of reading from two copies, the “big glob” with all the data on it, and my blog entry, which helped to summarize my arguments in a really useful way, at least useful to me.

Another pleasure of such a conference is the intellectual pleasure of moving into a state of a Virginia Woolf-sian “Room of One’s Own,” at least for a weekend. At work, I have to split my time among my Russian and Spanish classes, and the bureaucratic demands of my home institution, in addition to the demands of everyday life (who would think fitting in filling up the gas tank at the local cash-only gas station would be so complicated?). The result after interacting with over 90 persons in one day in three languages, as well as trying to answer emails and keeping up with paperwork is a headache and a state of existential headache. A conference allows me the opportunity to sit, center, and figure out where my research fits within the general landscape of contemporary scholarship, as well as providing inspiration for future topics of research. The weekend ended up with an entirely refreshing visit to one of my favorite Washington, D. C. getaway places, the Politics and Prose bookstore on Connecticut Avenue.

So first to the interesting presentations/cool stuff I experienced at the conference. The most suggestive/interesting/energizing panel I attended was panel 11, titled “Confronting Stereotypes: Women and Image in 20th Century Latin America.” The first paper proved personally exciting. Ivette Guzmán-Zavala from Lebanon Valley College presented the paper “Fotografía del siglo XX en Puerto Rico: Delano, Rosskam y el sujeto femenino.” This paper proved exciting for a number of reasons. First, as an alumna of the Ivy Leagues in the 1980s, I lived in an institution where the Puerto Rican presence was miniscule. Furthermore, Caribbean and Puerto Rican studies still had to find their way as a well-represented discipline in the curriculum. We did have a few Puerto Rican graduate students in the Spanish department, which worked more as an “aliento,” a moral encouragement, more than a marker of the presence of the discipline in a visible way on campus. As an undergraduate, being Puerto Rican meant being active with the Federación de estudiantes puertorriqueños, know by its initials F. E. P.

Professor Guzmán Zavala’s presentation used materials from the National Archives and showed a wide range of images from across the island, including some from my family’s home town, Guayanilla. The images showed a lifestyle gone with the advent of “modernization,” which meant some good things: clean potable water, rural electrification, public education. It also meant some bad things, most specifically the treatment by the federal government as a second class territory and its assumption that they could get away with a fair amount of things that would not work in the mainland, like running a bombing range in one of the most pristine waterfronts of the island. The United States returned the bombing range to the island after years of activism by islanders and Puerto Ricans on the mainland – I would say newyoricans, except that I have spent so little time in New York City that that really does not apply to me. The images were evocative, nostalgic, and a visual reminder that if I some days I feel the rupture necessary to negotiate mainland English culture a little more heavily than others, that I am not necessarily going mad.

Compartmentalization of cultural identity – putting those things assumed as givens in Puerto Rican culture but not accepted in mainland “Anglo” culture – is a necessary survival strategy. At the simplest level, it is necessary to come to peace with the fact that Folger’s coffee, fine, now Starbucks coffee, is the cultural standard for morning drinks, and not a nice cup of Puerto Rican espresso, is a simple, evocative, physical marker of this necessary compartmentalization.

Rupture and compartmentalization leads to negotiation: negotiating language, politics, gender roles, and pretty much every other major aspect of everyday life. Sometimes, on a good day, it leads to hybridity, as when I discover my local Korean supermarket not only expands my cooking options by adding hoisin sauce to my pantry, but also when I discover I can find everything to make pasteles there. I guess it is cultural progress when my personal reply to Esmeralda Santiagos’ question of whether liking pizza more than pastelillos made her any less Puerto Rican is that I wonder if liking Korean barbeque sauce better than KC Masterpiece barbeque sauce makes me any less Americanized?

Toss S. Garth from the United States Naval Academy (Annapolis) presented the paper “The Self-Possession of Evita: Woman, Citizen, Leader, Patient, Corpse, Saint.” It really highlighted how the use of popular culture for the popularization of political ideology and agendas was not a singularly Soviet phenomenon. Meredith Glueck of American University presented “The debate over street vendors’ clothes: baianas of acarajé, authenticity, and tourism in Salvador, Bahia’s 1960s.” Outside of showing the important of clothes as political markers, it made me hungry in spite of the fact that the panel immediately followed lunch.

This panel, as well as the other panels, indicated that my interest in Latino studies as an intellectual pursuit is not illegitimate. It did show that there are some ways in which my insights as a Slavic scholar can help expand and innovate research methodologies – as in the case of Cuba. Cuba now would not be so without their engagement with the Soviet Union. To do that, however, requires a trilingual approach – English, Spanish, and Russian. And that is something I can do, when I am not overwhelmed with all my Spanish I midterms or Russian cinema essays.

It is time to restock my Korean barbeque sauce.