Two Events Will Commemorate Latino Heritage Month

Ithaca College will celebrate Latino Heritage Month 2001 with two events. On Tuesday, September 18, poet, lecturer, and storyteller Bobby González will discuss "The Native Heritage of Latin America" at 8:15 p.m. in Park Hall Auditorium. On Monday, September 24, video artist Alex Rivera will present "Retrospective: Video and Net-Based Satires on Latino/Latina Identities and Cyberculture" at 7:00 p.m. in Park Hall Auditorium. He will screen and discuss two of his works. The events are part of the Office of Multicultural Affairs Awareness Series and are free and open to the public.

González (left) is a Native American descended from the Taino, the indigenous people of the Caribbean islands. It was, in fact, the Taino who first encountered Christopher Columbus in 1492.

In addition to two collections of poetry --- The Puerto Rican Indian Wars: Part Two and Song of the American Holocaust --- González has published poems in such periodicals as Red Ink, Dark Night Field Notes, and La Concha. His repertoire of stories includes tales from North, South, and Central America as well as the Caribbean, and his one-man show, Tales from the American Holocaust, chronicles the tragic clash of cultures that started with Columbus and still goes on as indigenous tribes in Mexico and South America struggle to preserve their heritage.

González is a founding member of Taino del Norte, an organization dedicated to the study and promotion of Taino culture. He also writes a monthly column for the Latino Village Press in New York City, where he resides.

Video artist Alex Rivera (right) also lives in New York City, although he was raised in New Jersey by a native Peruvian father and an American-born mother. The works he will be screening, Why Cybraceros? and Papapapá, reflect his bicultural, suburban upbringing.

"With my work I try to address and reflect the experiences of the Latino community through a language of humor, satire, and metaphor," Rivera says. "This is easy since our reality these days is increasingly becoming a dark comedy."

Why Cybraceros? is a mock documentary playing off the 1940s promotional film Why Braceros? which was used by the California Grower’s Council to defend the use of temporary Mexican farmhands (braceros). In Rivera’s updated version, the workers (cybraceros) stay in Mexico and remotely perform their menial tasks on farms in the United States by way of high-speed Internet connections. The narrator explains that in this imagined future, cybraceros are the perfect immigrants: they’ll do the dirty work without bothering the locals with demands for citizenship and higher wages.

Also being screened is Rivera’s Papapapá. The title is a play on the Spanish words for father (papá) and potato (papa), which was first cultivated in Peru as an Incan food staple. Sometime after the indigenous vegetable traveled north, it was transformed by the fast-food culture into the potato chip and the french fry. The video also follows another Peruvian native in motion, Augusto Rivera, the video maker’s father. The stories of these two journeys converge as the senior Rivera, who grew up in the slums of Lima, is eventually transformed into an affluent couch potato, munching potato chips on his sofa and watching Spanish-language television broadcast images of a culture he left long ago.

Papapapá won a Silver Award at the New York Expo of Short Film and Video, a Silver Hugo at the Chicago Intercom Competition, and a First Work Award from the San Antonio Cinefestival.

Rivera’s appearance at the College is also part of the "Cinema on the Edge" series of film and video screenings and the "Race and Its Meanings" lecture and discussion series.

For more information on Rivera, visit his home page at www.invisibleamerica.com. For more information on Latino Heritage Month, contact the Office of Multicultural Affairs at 274-1692.