In Spring 2008, YouTube documented violent, physical attacks against "emo" youth in Mexican and Latin American metropoles. Journalists and media commentators around the globe wondered three things: how to define “emo,” how to explain the presence of this youth subculture in Mexico and Latin America, and why did it elicit such a violent reaction?
This symposium explores these questions in the context of post-NAFTA angst and changes in latinidad, considering what emo is, how it travels, whether it means the same things in Mexico and the United States, and how music is marketed to U.S. Latin@ youth. Speakers include music journalist Nikki Darling, José “The Mexican Morrissey” Maldonado, and UCLA professors Marissa López and Miguel M. Unzueta.
This event is FREE.
Watch the video of this event here.
Speakers:
Nikki Darling is a music writer and cultural critic for the
Los Angeles Times and the
L.A. Weekly, and her work - which you can read more of at
http://ndarling.com/ - has been widely published elsewhere. A third generation Angelino on her father’s side and an indigenous American on her mother’s, Darling holds an MFA in Critical Studies from the California Institute for the Arts, and is currently at work on a memoir about growing up in the San Gabriel Valley as a mixed-race Chicana in the 1990s.
José "The Mexican Morrissey" Maldonado, portrayed Morrissey in the feature film "My Life with Morrissey," and founded the Sweet and Tender Hooligans, a Smiths tribute band, which has performed to sold out audiences across the southwestern U.S., Mexico, and the United Kingdom. The band covers material spanning the range of Morrissey's career and has recorded Spanish language translations of his songs. They have appeared in several documentaries about Morrissey's Los Angeles Latino fan base and each year at Hollywood's House of Blues celebrate Morrissey's birthday in grand fashion complete with a live string section and guest musicians.
Marissa López is Assistant Professor of English and Chicana/o Studies and Associate Director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. Her research and teaching interests include: Chicana/o literature; nineteenth century literature, especially the literature of the west and California; globalization and transnational studies; disability studies; and digital humanities. Her first book, Chicano Nations (NYU 2011), is about how Chicano literature, from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, represents the nation. She is currently at work on a book-length study of feelings in Chicano cultural production and has written about emo as an affective performance of transnational latinidad.
Miguel M. Unzueta is Associate Professor of Management and Organizations at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. His research explores how people understand their position within social and interpersonal hierarchies and the impact this understanding has on their perceptions of self, others, and group-based inequality. His latest research explores the manner in which members of majority and minority racial groups define the concept of diversity. Unzueta is also an avid music fan. On any given weekend, he can be found perusing bins at record stores or catching live music at one of L.A.’s many music venues. He also runs the music blog What the Kids (Are Into) -
http://whatthekidsareinto.tumblr.com/ - dedicated to new music discovery and the occasional digression into musical nostalgia.
