This year, ALLA is proud to sponsor nine sessions spread over three days (Th-Sat) at the 103rd AAA Annual Meeting in San Francisco. Two are Invited Sessions, five volunteered sessions, one a session comprised of excellent volunteered papers and a workshop for mentoring ALLA student members. All promise to be very exciting. In this column I highlight session themes to be discussed. The workshop is discussed below (ALLA Student Events/Issues). Please consult the preliminary program published in the AN September issue for the dates and times of the sessions.

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After reading the session and panelists’ abstracts, I imagined a scenario at this year’s AAA Meetings whereby their shared themes and critiques stimulate and sustain active participation and discussion by ALLA members over several days. For example, at least three sessions examine not only important issues affecting Latinos in the U.S. but also “different” approaches employed by scholars avowedly committed to the production of an anti-hegemonic scholarship. In one of our Invited Sessions, “Public Anthropology, Cultural Critique, and Mexican Immigration,” organized by Lynn Stephen (UO) and Richard Flores (UT), two sets of scholars are distinguished from one another, the first described as addressing contemporary immigration issues and policies from a “perspective of a public anthropology often centered on….policy, social movements, and political economy;” and the second described as, “those who have focused on the cultural side of the experience of immigration and the cultural sensibilities of U.S. immigration policy.”

Stephen and Flores’ goal to “foster dialogue between [these] two different approaches to immigration,” should resonate with session organizers/chairs Victor Ortiz / Martha Chew-Sanchez and Olga Najera-Ramirez among others. In “The U.S.-Mexican Border: Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Anthropological Uses and Abuses of the Borderlands As An Allegorical Trope,” Ortiz (NIU) and Chew-Sanchez (N/A) contend that the use of the image of the border has become “increasingly ‘removed’ from the concrete circumstances of the region” to become “a favorite trope for semiotic approaches to ethnographic writing and analysis.” As such, they maintain that the realities of the border itself have been “occluded into irrelevance” all the while recognizing that “the compelling aura of blurriness and transgression allows for free-flowing emphasis and discursive resources in anthropological work and ethnographic formats.” Still, Ortiz and Chew-Sanchez propose to highlight in their panel “the concrete situation of border residents beyond metaphorical representations or overriding policies in order to bring to clear focus their epistemological limitations and political costs.”

Stephen/Flores, Ortiz/Chew-Sanchez and fellow panelists may be remiss in their efforts to critically examine these purported distinct approaches if they fail to attend Najera-Ramirez’ (UCSC) session, “Performing Mexicanidades: Popular Culture in a Transnational Context.” While it requires being at the AAA Meetings early enough to catch this 11/18 Thursday 8:00 AM session, the panelists’ analyses of Mexicanidades or Mexican identity situated in historical and global contexts of power, promise to inform the broader discussion at hand. Defining identity as “always a contingent negotiation of power” and their examination of “mariachi music, tequila, folkloric dance, domestic collections, indigenous rituals and the Latino punk scene,” as a “politics of cultural articulations,” they claim these expressive forms of struggle have been devalued or ignored “as legitimate locations of analyses.” They further argue that, “[u]nderstood as modes of representation, such expressive forms raise questions of agency, authority, ideology, and process in transnational cultural production and thus constitute an important site for anthropological inquiry.”

It is not hard to imagine a Special Issue of a journal (i.e., Critique of Anthropology, Latino Studies, among others) or book dedicated to this lively discussion. Dovetailing issues raised in the session, “Latino/a Studies: A Dialogue on the Implications of Critical Scholarship in the Field,” organizer/chair Suzanne Oboler (Latino Studies Journal/UIC) and Karen Biegel (UIC) focus on the construction of Latino Studies as a diverse field of scholarship as well as a venue for this scholarship via the new journal, Latino Studies.

While the metaphorical use of “the border” may indeed be stretched, the border’s material manifestations are also plastic as when those crossing the U.S.-Mexican and other Latin American borders find themselves in “non-border” regions such as the Midwest and South. “Border Lives in the Heartland: Exploring the School and Community Contexts of Latinos in the Midwest,” organized by Katherine Bruna (ISU) and Karen Haslett (UI) focuses on this new migration pattern of Latinos (primarily Mexicans) to Iowa and Nebraska.

The second ALLA Invited Session, “Health Issues Among Latinos in the US: Approaching Latinos’ Diversity by Crafting Innovative Research Approaches,” organized/chaired by Anahi Viladrich (CUNY) and Delia Easton (CDC) also directs our attention to another region of the country – the Northeast - with large and expanding Latino populations. Latinos’ diversity in terms of nationality, social economic status (the uninsured) and maginalization (legal status, sexual orientation) also challenges conventional medical care and research approaches, and is the focus of this panel.

“Contemporary U.S. Latino Issues: Housing, Identity, Education, Criminalization, and Military Service, “ chaired by Karen Davalos (LMU)expands still further on the diversity of Latino concerns, nationalities and regions where Latinos have settled (Latino soldiers in Iraq, Mexicans in Chicago, “non-Puerto-Rican Latinos” in NYC, Chicano/Latino prisoners in California, and Afro-Cubans in Tampa).

ALLA also continues its tradition of dialoguing with and sponsoring sessions organized by our AAA Native American Indian colleagues. This year, the panel organized by Antonio Chavarria (MIAC / Anthro Lab) focuses “On the Complexities of Being Brown: Globalization of Indigenous Identity.” Part of the discussion will regard the recent settlement of Mexican and other Latino indigenous groups in the U.S. and what it portends for indigenous identity and entitlements. Among the panel discussants not listed in the program due to AAA on-line registration technical difficulties are Charles Cambridge (CU Denver) and myself.