Join us for a lecture by Dr. Rebecca Janzen on How to Cover Up a Mine: Peyote, Catholicism, and Tourism in Mexico.
In this presentation, Dr. Janzen looks at the legacies of mining in Latin America, in particular, the ways that former mine sites are memorialized. This talk offers a case study of Real de Catorce, Mexico, and explores the ways that the town has shifted from an economy based on mining to a one based on tourism, relating to hallucinogenic trips and Catholic pilgrimages, which obfuscates the human and environmental costs of mining. This research is part of a larger book-length project entitled Mining, Memory and Religious Practice in Latin America, under contract with Bloomburg.
Dr. Janzen is McCausland Fellow and Professor of Spanish & Comparative Literature at the Unviersity of South Carolina. She is a scholar of gender, disability and religious studies in Mexican literature and culture whose research focuses on excluded populations in Mexico, is the autor of four monographs: The National Body in Mexican Literature (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015), Liminal Sovereignty: Mennonites and Mormons in Mexican Culture (SUNY, 2018), Unholy Trinity: State, Church, and Film in Mexico (SUNY, 2021), and Unlawful Violence: Law and Cultural Production in 21st Century Mexico (Vanderbilt, 2022). She has recently received the highly competitive and prestigious Humboldt Fellowship to spend time in German conducting research at the German Mining Museum and was chosen for a fellowship in Global Catholicism at St. Louis University.
This talk is open to the public.