Proximities: Cross-Cultural Collaboration in Latina/o Literature and Performance Since 1960

FAIN: FEL-262728-19

Roy Perez
Regents of the University of California, San Diego (Salem, OR 97301-3922)

Research and writing leading to a book on the cultural and ethnic identity of Latina/o writers and artists since the 1960s.

This project will be the first book-length study of cross-cultural collaboration and representation in Latina/o writing and visual art. During the civil rights movements of the 1960s, Latino/a artists often expressed their cultural identities and political aspirations through their collaborations with, and representations of, other ethnic groups such as Native Americans, Asian Americans and African Americans. Proximities examines collaborations across race and ethnicity in Latina/o literature, visual art, and performance in order to model cross-cultural methods that reveal instances of vital collaboration and representation. Such a perspective rewrites the history of Latina/o culture in the US. Through a combination of historical and aesthetic analysis, Proximities reveals a hidden archive of vital Latina/o cross-cultural flashpoints, beginning at the turn of the nineteenth century and then proceeding from the civil rights era to the contemporary moment.