BIO

Pedro Lasch (Duke University) was born in Mexico City in 1975 and lived there until he moved to New York City when he was nineteen. Since 1999 he has focused on creating multiple art initiatives that bridge the local concerns and interests of recent Latino immigrants in Queens and other boroughs with the current state of international politics. A preoccupation with the theory and practice of socially engaged art has led Lasch to develop his work as a series of public interventions within the flow of the everyday. These interactions or temporal rearrangements form a chain of open routines that develop within specific social situations originating mostly outside of the conventional art context. His various roles as artist, educator, activist, cultural organizer and producer should be understood as building upon one another to form an interdisciplinary practice.

Jean Franco (Columbia University) is the winner of the PEN 1996 award for lifetime contribution to the dissemination of Latin American literature in English and has been recognized by the Chilean and Venezuelan governments for advanced scholarship on Latin American literature in the United States. She has served as president of the Latin American Studies Association in Great Britain and of the Latin American Studies Association in the US. She is currently Professor Emerita at Columbia University. Her most recent books include: Critical Passions: Selected Essays, edited by Mary Louise Pratt and Kathleen Newman (1999) and The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America and the Cold War (2002).

Renato Rosaldo (New York University) is a Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences; he has done field research among the Ilongots of northern Luzon, Philippines. He is the author of one of the key texts of 20th century anthropology: Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (1989). He has been conducting research on cultural citizenship in San Jose, California since 1989, and contributed the introduction and an article to Latino Cultural Citizenship: Claiming Identity, Space, and Rights, published in 1997.

CLOSE