Oaxaca: Crossroads of a Continent

FAIN: EH-50071-06

Community College Humanities Association (Baltimore, MD 21237-3899)
Laraine Anne Fletcher (Project Director: March 2006 to August 2009)

A four-week summer institute, in Oaxaca, Mexico, for twenty-four college and university teachers to engage in on-site, interdisciplinary study of Zapotec and Mixtec indigenous cultures.

The Community College Humanities Association (CCHA) requests funding for a National Endowment for the Humanities summer institute for twenty-four faculty from community colleges and four-year colleges and universities on the topic of "Oaxaca: Crossroads of a Continent," based on-site in Oaxaca, Mexico, a region of the Americas where some of the most important cultural developments in human history have taken place, such as early agriculture, writing and monumental architecture. Building on our previous successful NEH institutes on the topics of Andean, Maya, Aztec and Puebloan cultures, this project is designed as part of an on-going effort to ehance current knowledge and teaching about the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The project aims at highlighting the history and culture of the Zapotec and Mixtec indigenous peoples from prehispanic through colonial to contemporary times.