FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2007
Translocalities/Transmodernities: Thinkspace
11 – 1 p.m. Polycentric Session, UC-Berkeley, Townsend Center
for the Humanities
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As Imperial County celebrates its 100th anniversary
its residents are poised to reflect on the past century and give consideration
to the next hundred years of life in the U.S./Mexico borderlands. One
venue, more than any other, has emerged to literally house these critical
ruminations; Imperial County Historical Society’s Pioneers Museum
and Cultural Center (PMCC). In the early 1990’s important changes
to the Historical Society overturned a tradition of white supremacy
in the representation and interpretation of Imperial Valley’s
historical development. In an effort to expand museum facilities, a
fund raiser offered future gallery space to various racialized groups
who had immigrated to the valley in exchange for helping to raise the
money necessary to build the new facilities. Now the PMCC houses gallery
space in which decedents from Africa, China, India, the Philippines,
France, Greece, Italy, Japan, Korea, Lebanon, Mexico, Portugal, and
Switzerland strive to represent themselves and their role in the development
of Imperial Valley. Each ethnic group formed a committee where members
debated the cultural politics of their own representations and internal
heterogeneity in order to form their own museum collections.
This investigation seeks to ask questions of
this visual culture by interrogating the translocal circuits of cultural
production in the formation of museum collections. Each ethnic group’s
gallery committee offers a keyhole in which to peer into the material
and social processes which underwrite each gallery’s representation
of Imperial Valley’s history. As Imperial Valley’s residents
rewrite their own history they also influence the narrativity of the
U.S./Mexico border at large which reveals dynamic, and underappreciated,
intersections with the Pacific Rim. While Imperial Valley’s racialized
residents trade silent memories for museum real estate, the future of
this border community remains uncertain.
Participant Bio:
Jason Oliver Chang, born in Fort Wayne, Indiana,
is a third year graduate student of the University of California at
Berkeley’s Ethnic Studies graduate program. He received his BA
from Prescott College in Arizona. Later, he earned a Masters in Public
Policy and Administration from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst
and was recently awarded a Masters in Ethnic Studies through his current
affiliation. He is currently working toward doctoral candidacy and refining
a methodology for pursuing his dissertation topic, Asian Américans
of the U.S./Mexico Borderlands.