Free with Museum admission. No additional ticket required.

This open discussion, hosted by Museum as Hub Fellows Melissa Amezcua and Elisa Díaz, elaborates upon the exhibition, “Tlatelolco and the localized negotiation of future imaginaries,” organized by the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, and on view in the 5th floor Museum as Hub space until May 4, 2008.

The notion of the local is often besieged in a city with approximately 23 million inhabitants. What are the tensions that arise between a neighborhood and a massive city? What sort of trouble does a neighborhood encounter as result of demographic explosion? How does the neighborhood’s distinctive character survive? We invite visitors to an open discussion on the social and cultural mechanisms that enliven and develop the neighborhood as a salient entity, despite the size of the city.

Melissa Amezcua, born in Guadalajara, Mexico, has worked on different collective research projects concerned with democratic processes in contemporary Mexico. She is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology in the New School for Social Research with a scholarship awarded by the Mexican Council for Science and Technology. Amezcua’s research focuses on political sociology, social theory, and interpretative methods. In addition to the analysis of the political, she is interested in the implications of estrangement within communities, practices of exclusion, and the discursive analysis of legitimating notions such as “the people” in twentieth century Mexico. Her work considers the centrality of the cognitive role of fiction. Amezcua is currently collaborating on a research project on associational life and spaces of sociability in nineteenth century Latin America. She is a Museum as Hub Fellow until May 2008.

Elisa Díaz, born in Tabasco, Mexico, worked in Tlatelolco for two years. With a background in International Relations, she holds a M.A. in Political Science from the New School for Social Research and is completing her Ph.D. at the same institution. With a scholarship awarded by the Mexican Council for Science and Technology and the New School for Social Research, she moved to NY in 2004. Díaz’s research focuses on contemporary continental political theory, international immigration, identity politics, and sovereignty. Her dissertation explores the tension that outdated classical conceptions of sovereignty and identity cause at border areas, transforming them into buffer zones and spaces of exception. Last year Díaz presented a paper titled “The border between the Spectacle and the Myth” at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting in Chicago. She also designed and taught a class on International Migration at the Universidad Iberoamericana in 2007. She is a Museum as Hub Fellow until May 2008.