A talk by Gabriel Meléndez

Wednesday, March 5, 4:30 – 6pm,
Cornerstone Art Center Film Screening Room

This presentation looks at how popular Latino religious traditions in New Mexico are at once local and global, and have their origins in the global transfer of religious iconography and ceremonial practices in the Spanish colonial and post-colonial world.  It will show how such practices moved across continents on the Caminos Reales or the inland Royal Roads and across oceans on routes as the famous Manila Galleon trade network.

A. Gabriel Meléndez is Professor and former Chair of the Department of American Studies at the University of New Mexico, where he has been Professor of American Studies since 2002. Meléndez is a literary, social and cultural critic with research interests in ethnic and cultural representations in film, autobiography, ethnopoetics and ethnocritical theory. He has been the recipient of a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship and several other research grants including awards from the New Mexico Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for Regional Studies (UNM) and the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project (University of Houston).