Marking the 400th anniversary of the first major European ethnic cleansing, an international, bilingual conference speaks of cultural unity.
The “Moros, Moriscos, Marranos y Mestizos: Alterity, Hybridity Identity in Diaspora” continues this celebration Friday and Saturday to remember Spanish history and learn from it.
The issues addressed in the conference are still applicable in today’s world, said Enrique Lamadrid, the director of Chicano Hispano Mexicano Studies.
“Things that happened 400 years ago are still very much with us,” he said. “We are sending soldiers to a lot of these places even now. Just because these things happened 400 years ago doesn’t mean they were resolved. It’s a very timely topic because here we are in the middle of two wars, and these wars are kind of a continuation of the wars that occurred back in history.”
The three-day conference features presentations aimed at helping attendees understand the importance of learning from history’s past, Lamadrid said.
“Becoming aware of this larger history can make us understand contemporary problems more profoundly,” he said. “There are issues of cultural heritage that
understanding how deep our roots are will assist in resolving. We are having discussions on the centuries of cultural and political relations between Jews, Christians and Muslims.”
Keynote speaker Anouar Majid from the University of England said the necessity of separate identities within a given culture are crucial to societal success.
“When I talk about a nation-state, I am identifying a particular kind of entity that was developed at a particular historical period,” he said. “The thing is, I have never found a group of people who do not come together around some kind of principle … We attach ourselves to an essence, an essence which excludes others which are not part of that group.”
Harmonious living is a goal for today’s world, Lamadrid said.
“The magic words ‘to live together’ is what we strive for,” he said. “Jews, Christians and Muslims were living together in the same society and were thriving together — that was Spain before 1492.”
Presenter Ricardo Martinez, who focused his lecture on the community’s role in Chicano literature, said community living is fundamental to society.
“At its best, the community serves as a beloved place — a place of comfort, a place with no apologies needed, a place of utopian acceptance,” he said. “At its worst, it is a normalizing force. When people try to construct their identity outside of the lines of the community, it is difficult.”
Defining a community as a gathering of individuals, Martinez said the impact of culture is dependent upon unity.
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“An aggregation is a group, body or mass composed (of) many distinct parts or individuals,” he said. “A singular Chicano experiences a tangible, definable aggregation that functions as a foundation to a structure of a more meaningful
understanding of the myriad forces exerting influences upon it.”
Culture is fabricated, Majid said, and the people who define that culture have the power to alter it for the better.
“Even when you are talking about biology, I like to offend my biology friends by saying, ‘I don’t believe in biology. Prove to me there is a biology,’” he said. “In other words, everything is cultural. It’s true I have a liver; I have a head, but what’s interesting is I become me only what happens beyond the biological. Biology is inert — is immaterial. It has no existence. It is the symbolic that provides me with an identity. So when I talk about identity and national identity, we will always be in the realm of the symbolic.”
For a schedule of events go to unm.edu/~spanconf/
