Columbia Center for Archaeology Online Salon

Albert D. Gonzalez
Assistant Professor of Anthropology and 
Director, C.E. Smith Museum of Anthropology, California State University - East Bay

Excavating Latinidad:

Archaeologies and Material Cultures of Latinxs in the United States

Friday November 6th EST

4.10-6.00pm

Please register here

Abstract

Latinx is a story the size of five continents, binding countless ethnic threads in service of cultural legibility, enabling its oppressors perhaps as often as it empowers its own constituent groups.  I am currently working to produce a book that explores the historical trajectories and ethnic and economic tensions associated with the ethnonym in the United States.  I will present an outline of the work at this talk, revealing the results of a decade of archaeological research connected to populations conceptually folded into the idea of North American Latinidad.  The book’s scope is broad, drawing the material culture of nineteenth-century California rancherosinto conversation with that of New Mexican industrial laborers and of contemporary Afro-Latinx spiritual and occult practitioners.  I work to reveal meaningful historical and cultural connections between those disparate networks of people and objects, evaluating the prospects for a new archaeological field of study, one that places emphasis on comparative analysis of the archaeologies and material cultures of Latinxs in the United States.  I propose a methodological re-conceptualization of North American Latinidadin the process, arguing for the co-option of the term “Latinx” as a vehicle for analytical coalition over inorganic efforts to fuse its disparate threads into genuine social memory.

Biography

Dr. Gonzalez is a formerly incarcerated high school dropout who grew up in the barrios of East Dallas, raised by working-class Latinx parents. He earned a GED in place of the high school diploma and followed it by completion of an AA degree from Richland College, a community college close to home.  He later earned BA and MA degrees in history at the University of Texas at Dallas and completed the MA and PhD in anthropology at Southern Methodist University, where he specialized in historical archaeology.  Dr. Gonzalez served as a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University and as a Visiting Researcher at the University of California, Berkeley before becoming an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Cal State East Bay (CSUEB) in 2015.  His research taps the methods of historical and experimental archaeology alongside those of material culture and Latinx studies to address questions of importance to indigenous and Latinx descendant populations and stakeholders in California, New Mexico, and Florida.  He directs both the C.E. Smith Museum of Anthropology and the Pacific Earthen Architecture Research Laboratory at CSUEB, where he trains students in museum and laboratory methods as they relate to the interpretation of indigenous and Latinx documents and material culture.

 Prof. Gonzalez’s website