11/27: Yvette Martínez-Vu

Please join us for our next Chew on This

Yvette Martínez-Vu
Tuesday, November 27 at 12pm
Kaufman Conference Room 160

Surrogated Objects and Cultural Performances in Rosi’s Botánica

Among Latino communities in southern California, multiple botánicas offer immigrant populations ways to create and sustain support systems through object-centered syncretic practices. My investigation will focus on the ways that glass candles sold in my mother’s botánica are continually surrogated to set in motion a series of performances that produce spaces of cultural and economic capital as well as communities of female solidarity and survival.

Yvette Martínez-Vu is a PhD student in Theater and Performance Studies at UCLA, where she also holds a Bachelor’s Degree in English. Her research investigates the role that ceremonial objects in contemporary Mexican and Chicana performance play in manifesting nonwestern forms of knowledge production and transmission. As an undergraduate, Martínez-Vu was awarded the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Research Fellowship and for two years now she has served as a Mellon Mays mentor and program coordinator through UCLA’s Undergraduate Research Center. At the moment, Martínez-Vu is thrilled to be co-organizing Hemi GSI Convergence 2013, an interdisciplinary conference among activists, artists, and scholars across the Americas, which will be hosted at USC and UCLA.