{"id":2,"date":"2014-08-05T15:44:57","date_gmt":"2014-08-05T15:44:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/wvalentin\/?page_id=2"},"modified":"2016-04-04T18:35:41","modified_gmt":"2016-04-04T18:35:41","slug":"sample-page","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/wvalentin\/","title":{"rendered":"Wilson Valent\u00edn-Escobar"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\"Wilson-Valentin-Escobar\"<\/a>Associate Professor of Sociology and American Studies<\/h4>\n

Chair, Five College Latin American, Caribbean, and Latin@ Studies Program<\/p>\n

Wilson Valent\u00edn-Escobar, is an Associate Professor of American Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, and Sociology at Hampshire College. He holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Michigan. His research centers on the politics and poetics of cultural production.\u00a0 Valent\u00edn-Escobar’s early research documented the process and cultural significance of musical production within the Puerto Rican, Nuyorican diasporic community, highlighting how salsa and Latin jazz are inter-musical, transnational processes that embody popular memory, resistance struggles, and diasporic transracial alliances.\u00a0\u00a0 His current work focuses on the critical role that community arts centers have in fostering how Latino\/a avant-garde artists engage in artistic collective practices for decolonial emancipation through public performances and alternative art spaces.<\/p>\n

A Brooklyn New York-native, Valent\u00edn-Escobar is currently completing the book, Bodega Surrealism:\u00a0 The Emergence of Latin@ Artivists in New York City<\/i> (New York University Press, 2016).\u00a0 The manuscript, which derives from his award-winning Dissertation, examines the cultural activism, or “artivism,” of two community-based art communities and projects that originated in the 1970s within the Lower East Side neighborhood of New York City: the New Rican Village Cultural Arts Center and El Puerto Rican Embassy.\u00a0 Based on the premise that culture has the potential to create anti-hegemonic, emancipatory social change for a generation of working-class Puerto Rican and Latina\/o artists, their art responded to the social and political alienation they and their accompanying communities experienced.\u00a0 By examining cultural performances, art installations, and arts programming, Valent\u00edn demonstrates how the artists embarked upon aesthetic, social, spatial, and political interventions.<\/p>\n

In analyzing the New Rican Village\u2019s Latin jazz musical performances and workshops, Valent\u00edn-Escobar proposes that the Center\u2019s musicians were harbingers of a new Latina\/o identity and style that posited a dialectical relationship between aesthetics, racial identity, and community. This eventually gave rise to an avant-garde Latin jazz music scene and community that he identifies as a \u201cLatin jazz Left.\u201d In addition, through the musicians\u2019 collaborations with poets, dancers, and artists, an inter-artistic space and aesthetic emerged.\u00a0 In addition to music, the artists at the New Rican Village also engaged in aesthetic innovations, highlighted by the spurious El Puerto Rican Embassy project and accompanying Spirit Republic of Puerto Rico.\u00a0 A spaceless institution that exists virtually on the Web and emphasizes liberation as a conceptual and decolonial space, El Embassy serves as a creative response to the material constraints afforded to a colonized community struggling for autonomy.\u00a0 These expressions have given rise to \u201cBodega Surrealism,\u201d a working-class aesthetic \u201csancocho\u201d or collage that merges disparate cultural ensembles that engage the everyday logics and spaces of marginality.<\/p>\n

Drawing from extensive oral history interviews, as well as other primary and archival documents, this interdisciplinary study chronicles an alternative, counter-narrative of avant-gardism rooted in working-class and racial struggles and experiences.\u00a0 This project documents the creative and significant artivism employed by the New Rican Village and El Puerto Rican Embassy and reveals a community acutely able to engage in decolonial social action through cultural practices.<\/p>\n

In addition to his current project, Valent\u00edn-Escobar is the co-editor, along with Dr. Juan Flores, of Rican-Structing the Roots and Routes of Puerto Rican Music<\/i> (Forthcoming, Centro Press), and author of several articles, including: \u201cRejecting the Shadow:\u00a0 Steve Berrios, An Apache of the Skins, Discusses His Musical Influences, Latin Jazz Music and the Significance of the Fort Apache Band,\u201d Centro:\u00a0 Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies Vol. 16, No. 2 (Fall 2004); \u201cMemorializing La Lupe and Lavoe:\u00a0 Singing Vulgarity, Transnationalism, and Gender\u201d (with Dr. Frances R. Aparicio), Centro:\u00a0 Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies Vol. 16, No. 2 (Fall 2004); \u201cEl Hombre que Respira Debajo del Agua: Performing Memory and Diasporicity through the Death of H\u00e9ctor Lavoe,\u201d in\u00a0 Situating Salsa: Global Markets and Local Meanings in Latin Popular Music (Routledge Press, 2002); \u201c\u2018Nothing Connects us all but Imagined Sounds\u2019: Performing Trans-Boricua Memories, Identities, and Nationalisms Through the Death of H\u00e9ctor Lavoe,\u201d in Mambo Montage: The Latinization of New York City (Columbia University Press, 2001); and was invited Guest Editor (with Dr. Juan Flores) of Centro:\u00a0 Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies. Special Issue on Puerto Rican Music:\u00a0 Roots and Routes, Parts I and II, Volume 16, Nos. 1 and 2 (2004).<\/p>\n

During the 2011-2012 academic year, Professor Valent\u00edn was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University.\u00a0 His scholarship has been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship, the Fred C. Andersen Fellowship at Carleton College, the Rackham Merit Fellowship at the University of Michigan, and the George Washington Henderson Fellowship at the University of Vermont.<\/p>\n

In May 2012, Valent\u00edn received the Best Dissertation Prize from the Latina\/o Studies section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA).<\/p>\n

Committed to community-centered scholarship, his research and teaching interests include American Studies, U.S. Ethnic Studies, Latin@ and Puerto Rican Studies, Critical Cultural Studies, Social and Cultural Theory, Qualitative Research Methods, and Oral History Theory and Methodology.<\/p>\n

Before arriving to Hampshire, Valent\u00edn worked in film and video production, and had a non-commercial radio show.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Associate Professor of Sociology and American Studies Chair, Five College Latin American, Caribbean, and Latin@ Studies Program Wilson Valent\u00edn-Escobar, is an Associate Professor of American Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, and Sociology at Hampshire College. He holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Michigan. His research centers on the politics and poetics of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/wvalentin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/wvalentin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/wvalentin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/wvalentin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/wvalentin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/wvalentin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48,"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/wvalentin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2\/revisions\/48"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/wvalentin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}