How Indigenous peoples represent themselves in Abiayala, the region also known as Latin America, will be the topic of a roundtable featuring leading scholars in the field. “Indigenous Voices in Abiayala/Latin America” will be held on April 9 at 4:45 p.m. in room 108, A.D. White House, followed by a reception. The event is free and open to the public.
“Indigenous cultural production offers crucial critiques of and responses to exclusionary mainstream media. Indigenous creators and thinkers have fought to represent themselves on and in their own terms,” said Polly Lauer, Klarman postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Romance Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences, the event organizer. “This panel’s stakes are clear in its name, too – Abiayala is a territorial term in the Guna language used by many Indigenous thinkers to reimagine and reclaim the region otherwise called Latin America."
Roundtable participant Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante, Ph.D. ’01, will discuss his recent book, “Acoustic Colonialism: Acts of Mapuche Interference.” The book is a groundbreaking work, said Lauer, that highlights how Mapuche creators have produced multiple expressions in the form of literature, radio, music and more that disrupt ongoing acts of “acoustic colonialism” in the settler-colonial Chilean mediascape.
María de los Ángeles Aguilar Velásquéz, another participant, will focus on her work as a Maya K’iche’ historian from Guatemala. She spent nine years as a columnist discussing perspectives on everything from film to law for Guatemala’s major opposition newspaper, el Periódico, before the outlet was forcibly silenced in 2023.
Lauer will also participate in the roundtable. She said she has been committed to supporting Indigenous broadcasters’ fight to sustain Native-language media and has worked for seven years alongside the country’s oldest Maya radio station in a Maya K’iche’ town in Guatemala’s highlands.
At 11 a.m. on April 9, the roundtable speakers will join Cornell’s Quechua instructor, Nohelia Tacca Apaza, at the Language Resource Center for a discussion of Indigenous languages, in room G25, Stimson Hall. This discussion is open to interested students.
Cárcamo-Huechante is a scholar who belongs to the Mapuche people. He is currently president of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) and an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Cárcamo-Huechante is also a founding member of the Comunidad de Historia Mapuche, a collective of engaged Mapuche researchers based in southern Chile. His books include “Tramas del mercado: imaginación económica, cultura pública y literatura en el Chile de fines del siglo veinte.” He received his Ph.D. from Cornell in 2001 in Romance Studies.
Aguilar Velásquez is a Guatemalan Maya K´iche´ historian whose research centers on the policing and criminalization of Maya Spirituality in Guatemala during the second half of the twentieth century. She has worked on collaborative research projects centered on historical memory, collecting testimony from Indigenous communities and genocide survivors. She received her Ph.D. in History from Tulane University.
Lauer works collaboratively with Maya K'iche' media makers in Guatemala. Her book project, “Struggling for Air: The Politics of Resilience in a Maya K’iche’ Radio Station, 1959-2020,” documents the history of the oldest Maya K’iche’ radio station in Guatemala. This interdisciplinary project illustrates how Indigenous actors wielded communications technologies to defend language, community and autonomy through periods of crisis. Lauer holds a Ph.D. in Latin American History from Yale University and is an incoming assistant professor of Native American Studies at the University of Montana.
The event is sponsored by the Departments of Romance Studies and History (A&S), the Latin American & Caribbean Studies Program, the Klarman Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (A&S), and the Language Resource Center (A&S), and is hosted by the Society for the Humanities (A&S).
