Stephanie M. López (she/ella) is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Romance Studies with a focus on 20^th and 21^stcentury Latin American literature and film and a minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her dissertation, Birthing a Common Mother calls for a re-evaluation of maternity as a practice of daily transgression. Her work has been supported by Humanities New York, the Latin American and Caribbean Studies program and the Society for the Humanities as a Mellon Graduate Fellow and recipient of a Dissertation Writing Grant at Cornell University. 

Stephanie’s talk, “Of Matriarchs and Mangroves: Políticas de lugar and Rebuilding Communities on the Colombian Pacific Coast,” conceptualizes Pacific Afro-Colombian maternal subjects as matriarchs engaging in políticas de lugar to regenerate ecologies of care and reconstitute communal ties as resistance to state development projects insistent upon dismantling the traditions of solidarity and mutual aid in the region. Forming part of the twenty-first century contemporary Colombian cinema corpus of the “rural turn,” Jhonny Hendrix Hinestroza’s Chocó (2012) and Guille Isa and Angelo Faccini’s Dulce (2018) situate their narratives in the rural space to consider historic tensions between land, race, and gender in relation to the Colombian armed conflict and extractivism. Within the context of the rural turn in Colombian cinema and the Colombian peace process (2012-2016), Chocó and Dulce illustrate políticas de lugar defined by Betty Ruth Lozano as a “praxis of appropriation, defense, and reconstruction of place.” This talk’s focus on Pacific Afro-Colombian matriarchs lays the foundation to rethink broader questions of maternity in twenty-first century Colombia, place-based knowledge practices as resistance to development projects, the armed conflict, and establishing ecologies of care beyond institutions of the state. 

To join remotely use this Zoom link:
https://cornell.zoom.us/j/92633780917?pwd=rkPVekw8nJo88aKEiM2AlpWfFP1b0e.1