1:00 pm – 1:15 pm | Welcome 

Dr. Thomas F. Reese, Executive Director Stone Center for Latin American Studies.  

 1:15 pm – 2:45 pm | Panel 1: Affect, Gender, and Politics in Latin American Media
Moderator: Irene Depetris Chauvin, Greenleaf Scholar-in-Residence, Stone Center  

• Antonio Gómez (Spanish & Portuguese Department). Visible Contracts: Pornography and Documentary Filmmaking in Pornomelancholia de Manuel Abramovich

Manuel Abramovich’s Pornomelancholia (2022) occupies the uncertain terrain between documentary film, fiction, and reality TV, which in recent years has become a privileged space for experimentation and theoretical reflection. The film’s protagonist is an influencer, or someone aspiring to be one, and also a gay pornographic actor based in Mexico City. At times, Pornomelancholia “documents” his daily life, family and work relationships, and his activity on social media. However, at one point, it shifts to become the “making of” a gay porn film starring Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa. In four feature films and five short films, Manuel Abramovich (Buenos Aires, 1987) has developed a distinctive approach to documentary filmmaking, shaped by his collaborations with Vivi Tellas and Lola Arias—central figures in Argentine documentary theater in recent decades. In Abramovich’s work, the concept of the film, its script, and even shooting decisions emerge from a collaborative process between subject and director. One of the central strategies the director employs is the staging of his “contract” with the protagonists of his films. This paper analyzes the representation pacts between subject and filmmaker, the gestures of self-representation in a film that frequently incorporates social media posts into its own footage, and the theoretical relationship between pornography and documentary. Ultimately, we aim to question the documentary status of Pornomelancholia.   

• Rebecca Atencio (Spanish & Portuguese Department).
  Women’s Documentary Filmmaking and Brazil’s Feminist Spring 

Beginning in 2015, Brazil witnessed a massive feminist uprising in response to a series of attacks on the rights of women and girls in the legislature and media. Unfolding simultaneously online and in city streets, this “Primavera feminista” also reverberated in Brazilian cinema. Documentaries such as Paula Sacchetta’s Precisamos falar do assédio (Faces of Harassment, 2016) and Amanda Lemos and Fernanda Frazão’s Chega de fiu fiu (Enough with Catcalling, 2018) transposed viral hashtags into the medium of film, helping connect tweets to the streets. In this presentation, I focus on the latter documentary, arguing that it is much more ambitious than its titular denunciation of catcalling would suggest. As I will show, the film approaches street harassment as but one manifestation of intersecting systems of oppression in urban spaces. In doing so, Chega de fiu fiu exposes the multitude of ways that women—especially those who are not white, cisgender, heterosexual, affluent, and able-bodied—have historically been denied full access to Brazilian cities, while also mapping out paths of resistance for the present and future. 

• Watufani Poe (Department of Communication). Queering Quilombismo: Representations of Non-normative Black Brazilian Families in Film and Media 

 In Abdias do Nascimento’s 1980 text “Quilombismo: An Afro-Brazilian Political Alternative,” Nascimento presents quilombismo as epistemic resistance and survival for Black communities drawn from Black ontological traditions in Brazil. Central to his concept of quilombismo is the unity of Black communities. This unity is not meant to erase difference, but to construct amongst Black people a coalition that seeks to defend and build up one another. Nascimento’s articulation of quilombismo has been used by scholars, artists, and activists alike to analyze and fashion Black Brazilian communities. Utilizing film as a case study, this presentation seeks to analyze the manifestations of quilombismo within the media representations of two different Black families on screen, one within Gabriel Martins’s feature film Marte Um, and another in an episode from the Netflix documentary series My Love: Six Stories of True Love. Both of these works prominently feature Black families at the center of their stories, including Black LGBTQ+ people who struggle to figure out their place of belonging within these families. Foregrounding how both of these audiovisual works process the complexities of Black unity through family, especially as it relates to varied expressions of gender and sexuality, I analyze how these representations of forms of quilombismo bring forth a renewed racial theory of Brazil centered on Black relationality.

• Mauro Porto (Department of Communication). Whiteness and middle-class revolt in Brazil: Representations of domestic workers in the telenovela Cheias de Charme 

This talk presents the results of a textual analysis of the telenovela Cheias de Charme, broadcast by TV Globo in 2012. This popular TV series is often praised for portraying three domestic workers as protagonists. The paper demonstrates, however, that representations of middle-class families and maids in the telenovela reinforced historical traits of Brazilian white identity. They framed domestic workers, especially dark-skinned ones, as individuals that are naturally positioned to take care of manual work, including domestic chores. Cheias de Charme also reinforced the association between whiteness and generosity by promoting the trope of the benevolent and friendly patroa (female employer). Theses representations often ridiculed the ways in which the previously poor, including domestic workers, started to occupy social spaces that the white middle class used to monopolize, disseminating resentment, and feeding the rise of the far right. 

2:45 pm – 3:00 pm | Coffee Break

3:00 pm – 4:30 pm | Panel 2. From Transnationality to Transmediality in Latin American Media

Moderator: Carolina Sánchez, Zemurray-Stone Post-Doctoral Fellow, Stone Center for Latin American Studies  

• Zorimar Rivera Montes (Spanish and English Departments). No hago más ná: Labor and Leisure in El Gran Combo and El Banco Popular de Puerto Rico

In 1983, salsa legends El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico recorded their hit “Y no hago más ná,” an anti-work anthem that is one of their greatest hits to this day. In 2011, in the midst of a growing economic crisis, el Banco Popular de Puerto Rico, the island’s largest banking institution, launched a massive advertising campaign that paid the band to rewrite the song into a work-positive uplift celebration. At stake in the re-writing were shifting conceptions of labor and race, as well as the role of private institutions and mass media in shaping social discourse regarding Puerto Rico’s economic crisis. In this presentation, I consider El Gran Combo’s racial and class coordinates in relation to the song’s lyrics and the multivalent meanings of its writing at the onset of Puerto Rico’s neoliberal crisis.

• Mike Bromberg (Stone Center). Improvisation on the Air: Media Representations of the Trova Paisa 

This project examines the media representation of trova paisa, a genre of improvised poetic dueling from northwestern Colombia, which has defied the trend of limited media visibility typically associated with improvised performance. The trova, rooted in both medieval Iberian troubadour traditions and Colombia’s 19th-century “Antioqueño colonization,” evolved from rural to urban spaces, especially during the period of La Violencia. The research focuses on how the genre gained media attention in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly through radio and television, and became closely associated with humor. This shift to media platforms contributed to the growth of the trova’s popularity but also shaped its public perception, often overshadowing other forms of poetic expression. The study also explores how the trova served as a launchpad for performers to transition into broader media, and how its media presence facilitated a cultural exchange between rural and urban areas, allowing for the negotiation of regional identity and the reinvention of tradition in Colombian popular culture.  

• Adrian Anagnost (Newcomb Art Department).Extractivism and Equivocation: Indigenous Art from Amazonia and Beyond at the 2024 Venice Biennale

At the 2024 Venice Biennale, Indigenous art occupied a prominent space, from national pavilions like Brazil’s Hãhãpuá, celebrating Tupinambá lifeways and activism, to Amazonian artists at the biennial’s “Contemporary Nucleus.” This presentation explores the divergent trajectories of Indigenous artists at the Biennale, focusing on Amazonian practitioners such as André Taniki Yanomami, Abel Rodríguez and the Yahuarcani family. It contrasts their figurative depictions of cosmovision, rooted in historical encounters with anthropology, with installation- and conceptual-based works by Glicéria Tupinambá and other artists whose practices are shaped more by North Atlantic contemporary art training. 

• Laura-Zoë Humphreys (Department of Communication). Video Memories in Cuba: From Analog to the Paquete

In the early 2010s, Cuba’s paquete—approximately 1 terabyte of pirated digital information circulated hand to hand over hard drives and flash drives—transformed media consumption in Cuba and became an international sensation. Touted as Cuba’s Netflix, Hulu, or Spotify, or, more broadly, as Cuba’s version of the Internet, foreign journalists presented the paquete’s offline digital circulation as an exotic curiosity and a failed copy of a digital modernity to be found elsewhere, namely, in the Global North. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, oral histories, and archival research carried out between 2014 and 2024, this presentation instead demonstrates how the paquete emerged from a longer history of video in Cuba. It tracks how the arrival of analog video and satellite technologies in the 1980s re-opened the nation to U.S. and other capitalist world media flows, leading to increased conflicts between the state and citizens as both worked to control and to maximize media piracy through competing yet interlinked systems of state and citizen video libraries and salons. In so doing, this research also challenges dominant White Euro-American narratives of the digital, tracking an alternative history of analog through digital video from the socialist world and the Global South. The presentation will focus on published and in-progress public-facing writing for the project and the research process itself.   

4:45 pm | Tango music by Walter Romero and Eric Johns  

Presenter: Marilyn G. Miller, Professor (Department of Spanish and Portuguese) 

 5:30 pm | Reception