The 2018 Annual Las Casas Lecture on Human Rights Thursday May 3rd 5:30-7:00 p.m. in PLC180.

This year’s speaker is Mexican priest Father Alejandro Solalinde, a candidate to the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 and a tireless fighter for migrant rights in Mexico. He is the founder of the network of shelters hermanosenelcamino.org and has been the target of death threats, harassment, as well as institutional ostracism from both church and state in Mexico. His talk The Migrant’s Path/El camino del migrants will address the ongoing humanitarian crisis of Central American refugees who cross through Mexico on their way North to the US and who become victimized by both narcos and police forces intent on charging a hefty “fee” for their passage in the form of money, but very often, psychological and physical abuse, rape, torture and in many cases death and disappearance.

[embeddoc url=”https://las.uoregon.edu/files/2018/05/Solalinde-1dsd0s5.pdf” download=”all” viewer=”google” ]

Julie Weise’s new book on Mexicanos in the South has just been released by University of North Carolina Press. Julie Weise is an assistant professor in the UO Department of History and a faculty member associated with LAS and CLLAS.

Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910, by Julie M. Weise (November 2015, University of North Carolina Press) 358 pp., published with support provided by the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas; David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History.

When Latino migration to the U.S. South became increasingly visible in the 1990s, observers and advocates grasped for ways to analyze “new” racial dramas in the absence of historical reference points. However, as this book is the first to comprehensively document, Mexicans and Mexican Americans have a long history of migration to the U.S. South. Corazón de Dixie recounts the untold histories of Mexicanos’ migrations to New Orleans, Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, and North Carolina as far back as 1910. It follows Mexicanos into the heart of Dixie, where they navigated the Jim Crow system, cultivated community in the cotton fields, purposefully appealed for help to the Mexican government, shaped the southern conservative imagination in the wake of the civil rights movement, and embraced their own version of suburban living at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Rooted in U.S. and Mexican archival research, oral history interviews, and family photographs, Corazón de Dixie unearths not just the facts of Mexicanos’ long-standing presence in the U.S. South but also their own expectations, strategies, and dreams.