'The Mexican Quetzalcóatl' Focus of LAII Lecture

February 15, 2013

Cynthia Casas, visiting assistant professor in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese, presents, "The Mexican Quetzalcótl (The Feathered Serpent): Cultural Hero and Modern Aesthetic" from noon to 1 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 19. The presentation is cosponsored by the Latin American & Iberian Institute and the UNM Student Organization for Latin American Studies (SOLAS). This event is free and open to the public.

Casas' lecture is an inquiry into the abundant and illuminating appearance of the Feathered Serpent or La Serpiente Emplumada Quetzalcóatl within a modern cultural and literary context. This guardian of civilization, recreative power, wind and penitence (in his form as a priestking) maintains his presence across Mexican history dating back to ancient sources. The recurring references to the Feathered Serpent within modern Mexican literature point to a preoccupation with his significance within the Aztec/Mexica cosmovision as well as outside of it.

The foundational value of this Indianist preoccupation in the modern Mexican cultural and literary imagination operates along a distinct paradigm severed and extracted from Aztec mythology and preHispanic primary sources. As disconnected as this paradigm may be, it still heavily depends upon Aztec images and aesthetic leitmotifs transferred into a modern framework on the part of Mexican writers, primarily Octavio Paz and José Vasconcelos, who inscribe this inherited neoAztec aesthetic into a political, historical, cultural and ideological vision.

The discussion revolves around the intellectual and cultural symbol Quetzalcóatl within Mexican literary and cultural production as an archetypal emblem of revolution, change, renovation and a vision toward the future while maintaining the anchor of Mexican 'tradition' based on an originary mythical source which resists a eurocentric paradigm of thought. These writers employ this inherited aesthetic, specifically concentrated in Quetzalcóatl as a medium to exercise a political and ideological critique of Mexico after the Revolution.

Casas received her Ph.D. in 2012 from Stanford University. Here, she coordinated the Spanish for HomeBackground Speakers program (SHBS) and taught Heritage Spanish. She also taught Spanish as a foreign language at Stanford and previously taught French at UNM. Her background in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies complements her research interests in intercultural and globalizing processes as well as transhistorical formations within social, political and literary spheres.

In addition to cultural theory and critical discourse, Casas is also interested in the appearance of Mesoamerican myth and iconography in modern Mexican literature and their contribution to poetic/intellectual aesthetics and nationalistic discourses. Her research areas include nineteenth and twentiethcentury Latin American literature; Mexican and Chicano literature; analyses of cultural production, social movements, discourse and ideology; Mesoamerican mythology and anthropology in Modern Latin American/Chicano literature and culture; and the Latin American vanguard alongside artistic, intellectual and cultural discourses.

Note: For reference, please see the event flyer.