Opening Plenary

6:00pm-9:00pm

Miriam Jiménez Román is Executive Director of afrolatin@ forum, a research and resource center focusing on Black Latin@s in the United States. For over a decade, she researched and curated socio-historical exhibitions at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where she also served as the Assistant Director of the Scholars-in-Residence Program. She was the Managing Editor and Editor of Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies. She has taught courses on race, ethnicity, and gender in Latin America and the Caribbean at Binghamton, Brown and Columbia universities. A frequent speaker and consultant on African American and Latino issues, her essays on diasporic racial formations and inter-ethnic relations have appeared in a number of scholarly publications. A visiting scholar in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, she is co-editor of The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in The United States (2010), which received this year’s American Book Award.

Juan Flores is Professor of Latino Studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. His research interests focus on social and cultural theory, Latino and Puerto Rican studies, popular music, theory of diaspora and transnational communities, Afro-Latino culture. Professor Flores is the author of numerous books, including Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity (1993), From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity (2000), and The Diaspora Strikes Back: Caribeño Tales of Learning and Turning (2009). A co-founder and Chair of the afrolatin@ forum, he is the co-editor of The Afro-Latino Reader (2010). He was awarded the Casa de las Americas Prize in 1979 for his essay Insularismo e ideología burguesa, and again in 2009 for his book Bugalú y otros guisos: ensayos sobre culturas latinas en Estados Unidos. In 2009 he was honored with the Latino Legacy award of the Smithsonian Institution.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad is the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. A scholar of African-American history, he is the author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (2010).

Luz E. Benitez Delgado is the deputy director in Food, Health & Well-Being, Racial Equity, Civic Engagement, New Mexico, and New Orleans areas of focus at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Before taking on her current role she served as the Operations Management Liaison for its seven Latin American and Caribbean offices.

Round-Table Discussion

James Counts Early is Director of the Cultural Heritage Policy Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage at the Smithsonian Institution. His Applied-Research-Advocacy specialties include culture and politics, participatory cultural democracy and museology, cultural democracy statecraft in capitalist and socialist discourses in cultural policy, Latin American and Caribbean history and politics and Afro-Latino politics, and cultural democracy.

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva is a professor of sociology at Duke University. He was born in Pennsylvania but raised in Puerto Rico, where he received his BA in sociology and economics in 1984. He received his MA (1987) and PhD (1993) in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In addition to numerous scholarly articles, he is the author of White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era (co-winner of the 2002 Oliver Cox Award of the American Sociological Association) and Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (2004 Choice Award), and co-author of White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism and co-editor of White Logic, White Methods: Racism and Social Science. His most recent book, with Moon Kie Jung and João H. Costa Vargas, is State of White Supremacy: Racism, Governance, and the United States (forthcoming, Stanford University Press).

Maria Rosario Jackson is a senior research associate in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Center at the Urban Institute and director of its Culture, Creativity and Communities Program. Her research focuses on urban policy, neighborhood revitalization and comprehensive community planning, the politics of race, ethnicity and gender in urban settings, cultural policy and the role of arts and culture in communities. Jackson’s work has appeared in academic and professional journals as well as edited volumes. The daughter of an African-American father and a Mexican mother, Jackson earned a doctorate in Urban Planning from the University of California, Los Angeles and a Master of Public Administration degree from the University of Southern California. She is currently adjunct faculty at Claremont Graduate University.

Born and raised in Venezuela, Evelyne Laurent-Perrault is the daughter of Haitian and Venezuelan parents. She was trained as a biologist and has studied, lived, and traveled throughout Europe, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. Currently a Ph.D. candidate at New York University’s History Department, African Diaspora program in Latin America and the Caribbean, her research explores Afro-Creole notions of identity and dignity during the colonial period in Venezuela. She is the founder of the annual Arturo Schomburg Symposium at Taller Puertorriqueño in Philadelphia, which is now in its 15th year, and ENCUENTRO, Inc., an Afro-Latin@ advocacy organization. Laurent-Perrault has presented at various venues in the United States and abroad on Afro-Latin@ issues and initiatives.

Silvio Torres-Saillant is Professor of English and William P. Tolley Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Humanities at Syracuse University. He founded the Dominican Studies Institute at the City College of the City University of New York. His publications include An Intellectual History of the Caribbean (2006); Caribbean Poetics: Toward an Aesthetic of West Indian Literature (1997); El Tigueraje Intelectual (2011); An Introduction to Dominican Blackness (1999); and El Retorno de las Yolas: Ensayos Sobre Diaspora, Democracia y Dominicanidad (1999). He co-authored The Dominican-Americans (1998). He is the co-editor of Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage, Vol. IV (2002); The Challenges of Public Higher Education in the Hispanic Caribbean (2004); and Desde La Orilla: Hacia Una Nacionalidad Sin Desalojos (2004), among other volumes. He has served as Associate Editor of the journal Latino Studies since its inception and was a senior editor of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States.

Cultural Presentation

Kwami Coleman is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at Stanford University and a pianist, composer, and percussionist living in New York City. He attended the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts and went on to complete his undergraduate and graduate studies at Hunter College, CUNY. A founding member of the afrolatin@ forum, he is currently working on a dissertation on Miles Davis’s 1960s quintet and an EP of original music.