Becoming Latinx-Canadian(s) : Artists, Curators, and Filmmakers of the Latin American Diaspora(s) in Canada @ LASA 2022

Organizer: Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda
Co-chairs: Analays Alvarez and Zaria Zarza
Discussant: Alessandra Santos

In Canada, the identity category “Latinx-Canadian,” and other Latin American identities, have evolved under the hegemony of categories developed in the United States such as “Latino/a” and, more recently, “Latinx.” While the latter are deeply embedded in the historical and contemporary race and culture-making discourses of the United States and its imperialist policies in the Americas, we use the term “Latinx- Canadian” to highlight the perceived otherness––e.g., racialized and/or gendered and/or class constructions––of individuals from the region known as Latin America. With this in mind, we suggest “Latinx-Canadianness” and “Latinx-Canadian” as starting points to open a conversation on practices, experiences and identity issues attached to the groups that these terms attempt to name. Papers in this panel will address how do artists and filmmakers position themselves––if at all– in the Latinx-Canadian discourse? What does it mean to self-identify as Latinx-Canadian in an officially bilingual settler-colonial context? And whether and how such identity constructs are complicit in reinforcing these dominant structures? Ultimately, this panel seeks to bring visibility to the contributions of Latin American diasporas within Canadian artistic and academic milieus through a lens that brings together the fields of Art History, Cinema and Media Studies and engage in an ongoing dialogue that acknowledges how categories of identity and cultural belongings are entangled in a complex web of colonial pasts and presents that have shaped and obscured the recognition and visibility of individuals with a Latin American background in Canada.

Gendering Research-Creation Practice: Canadian Latinas and Cinematic Return
Dr. Zaira Zarza

Scholarship on diasporic flows has often concentrated on analyzing departures from homelands and arrivals in host societies, whereas returns to the migrants’ countries of origin are still understudied. This paper will examine the symbolic connotations of return in the work of two Latina filmmakers —first-generation migrants— living in Canada: Toronto-based Colombia-born Lina Rodríguez and St. John’s-based Cuba-born Tamara Segura. Both women graduated from York University’s Cinema and MediaArts MFA program with the projects Aquí y Allá (2018) and Father Figures(2021), respectively. These first-person thesis films are process-oriented experimental short stories through which Rodríguez and Segura explore intergenerational relations within their families. By engaging critically with the spaces of struggle of the new mestiza (Anzaldúa), the filmmakers go back to their home countries in a quest to revisit violence and trauma. Their feminist research-creation projects extend their scholarly work to audiences beyond the university as they challenge the hegemonic nature of film education in Canada, the masculinist predicament of the film industry, and mainstream cinematic language itself. Through ethnographic methodologies and textual analysis, I seek to answer the following questions: in what ways has the practice of research-creation serve migrant student artists as a tool to decolonize academia? How have these filmmakers utilized intersectional representations of their families’ patriarchal domesticity to tackle discriminations? In examining their creative journeys, I argue that –although geopolitically situated— the category “Canadian Latinas” with its cross-cultural gendered and ethnic implications, reinforces in these narratives the diasporic dimension of the broader category “woman”.

“¡Luz!”: Visualizing alternative domesticities, queerness and latinité throughcinematic voyages Quebec-Cuba.
Darien Sánchez-Nicolás, darien.sancheznicolas@concordia.ca;Concordia University

This presentation is an assessment of the involvement of domestic hospitality businesses in Cuba (paladares -private restaurants located in family households-, and casas particulares -bed-and-breakfast-type hostels-) as unofficial partners in transnational film productions between Quebec and Cuba, through the example of the Latinx-Quebecois documentary Sur les toits Havane (Pedro Ruiz, 2018). First, I will foreground the idea of the film as a cinematic voyage, that is the marginal, intuitive application of entrepreneurial tactics to international leisure travels, transcultural personal affective relations, and domestic spaces and activities in Cuba towards the completion of foreign independent film projects.

In a second moment, drawing from film analysis, ethnographic material and interviews I propose a queer and hauntological examination of non-traditional homemaking in Cuba, and Latinx film practices and “latinité” in Quebec as social and cultural categories of shifting historical values. Iinvoke Derrida’s notion of hauntology (1993) in conversation with Juana María Rodríguez concept of queer latinidad (2003) to posit the process of transnational filmmaking of this film as one nurtured by the ambivalent,s pectral position imposed by the Cuban socialist regime on homosexualidentities, transcultural and multiracial affective and sexual arrangements, private tourism venues as well as para-legal domestic practices. In the same manner, both ideas serve to think about the tactical deployment of an iteration of Pan-American latinidad or “latinité” by the social actor saround the documentary, equally at odds with contemporary discourses present in Quebec.

(Re)locations: Latinx-Canadian Art and Latin American Art in Montreal in the 21st Century
Dr. Analays Alvarez

In the last two decades, museums, galleries, artist-run centres, and foundations in Montreal seem to express a lively and exponential interest in Latin American (art)ists as well as in those of the Latin American diaspora. However, artists of this diaspora are (still) struggling with issues of invisibility and under-representation, and few have access to major art institutions. This paper aims to verify whether the occurrences of Latin American art in Montreal benefit artists from this diaspora; or if, on the contrary, these occurrences rather contribute to the reinforcement of a condition of “subalternity” attached to the latter. The term “(re)localizations” names in this paper the urgency 1) to locate Latinx-Canadian art in Montreal – where is it exhibited? Who are its producers?; 2) to extricate these artists from a position of “double subalternity” and to replace them in this city’s art circuit; and 3) to distinguish Latinx-Canadian and Latin American art in order to better redefine their relationship. I will thus explore the historical and conditions of insertion of Latinx-Canadian artists in the Montreal contemporary art scene in light of re-westernization processes raging within the so-called globalized art; the reinvention of Latin America as “geo-aesthetic” category (Barriendos 2009); the role played by the art market in the construction of “Latin American art” as a collecting category; the perception of certain regions of the planet and its inhabitants as “authentic,” and the transformation of this condition into one of subalternity when they find themselves in a diasporic situation.