CLACS Blog

Don Orlando Tobón at his travel agency in Jackson Heights, Queens. Photo by Jordan Cooper

He slips a stack of papers between the metal jaws of a stapler and swiftly strokes the device with the heel of his clenched fist.

“This is what you put in the mail.” He shakes a manila envelope in his left hand, glaring out over a pair of spectacles resting decidedly lopsided at the end of his nose.

His lower lip juts out and he licks his thumb. His tongue flicks the side of his mouth.

Again he strikes the stapler like a judge who bangs his gavel at the end of a hearing.

His fingers are stubby and wide but they work with the kind of certainty and conviction inherited only through thousands of repetitions. “And this…”—he adroitly stuffs a second package—“…is what you bring with you to the office.”

He passes the materials across the desk to a Colombian couple grinning with satisfaction.

They have just done their taxes.

But to meet the sixty-year-old Tobón under such ordinary circumstances reveals very little of his remarkable life outside of work.

It is difficult not to carry into your nightmares the tattooed face of Lil’ Mago (Tenoch Huerta Mejia), the leader of the infamous Mara Salvatrucha gang (MS-13) portrayed in Cary Fukunaga’s debut film Sin Nombre. With MS emblazoned across his skin, Lil’ Mago is terror incarnate, his body’s markings a testament to a life beyond our comprehension.

Sin Nombre gives us a glimpse of these unimaginable lives. The film’s protagonist, Willy (Edgar Flores) is an MS-13 member who in a moment of reflection, kills Lil’ Mago before he can rape a girl on top of a freight train carrying Central American migrants north, through Mexico. The murder condemns Willy to the life of persecution, as his blood brothers set out to find him. It also binds him to the train and to Sayra (Paulina Gaitan), the young girl he rescues.

Two plots are intertwined with the journeys of the young protagonists. One is the story of the gang, largely unfamiliar to American audiences. The other is a more familiar tale of the south-north migration.

Photo by Jelena Kopanja in 2008 while in Spain on a CLACS summer grant

Pending funding, The NYU Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies offers an annual competition for summer research grants. Graduate students in all NYU schools and programs may apply for assistance with summer research in Latin America and the Caribbean for periods ranging from two to twelve weeks. M.A. candidates may research master’s theses or Major Projects; Ph.D. students may carry out preliminary research for dissertations.

The following students come from a range of departments across NYU, and we are pleased to be able to support their research projects in the countries listed. You can find more information on the CLACS website. Please stay tuned to the CLACS blog, as summer research grant winners will be contributing stories from the field. Congratulations!

Jen Lewis
Assistant Director and Outreach Coordinator, CLACS

Thanks to a classmate, I recently discovered this version of Wikipedia in Quechua.

Wikipedia is a user-generated entity accessible by anyone with internet. As such, the multiple groups and dialects of the Quechua language pose a challenge to producing one version of Wikipedia in Quechua. In addition, Quechua has been and is primarily an oral language; it does not have one overarching alphabet or method of translating sounds to written words that is shared by all Quechua speakers. How to produce a unified, collectively created website in Quechua? This project can’t be incredibly inclusive, as participants must both have access to the internet as well as be able to write in Quechua in order to contribute. But on the other hand, there’s potential for it to be a kind of collage, a Quechua crockpot in which dialects meet and mingle. Whether you can read Quechua or not, it’s worth checking out at least to see what it’s like.

Visit the Meta-Wiki for a complete list of languages in which Wikipedia exists.

Christine Mladic
MA Candidate at CLACS

Photo credit: Hillary C. Schiff, Phd Candidate in Neuroscience at NYU

For those who have not attended, you missed a series of compelling lectures that discussed questions about memory and how we deal in the present with traumatic events of the past. Among the many topics raised were school pictures used by contemporary artists, films made by children of the Disappeared in Argentina, and the politics of commemorative dates and public memorials. Definitely check out any CLACS sponsored lecture series in the future.

As a complement to this lecture series, which relies on social sciences to frame debates about dealing with memories, I thought the following two pieces of material from the world of neuroscience might prove interesting. First, this New York Times article talks about a neuroscience project at Brooklyn’s SUNY Downstate Medical Center which studies the altering of traumatic memory in mice and rats. Second, this RadioLab episode about “Memory and Forgetting,” which focuses in part on the research of NYU Neuroscientist Joe LeDoux and the erasing of memories of fear in rats – and humans. Food for thought -- feel free to share opinions.

Christine Mladic
MA Candidate at CLACS