All are invited to attend the Cuban Studies Working Group’s conversation with Dr. Katherine Gordy, Professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University, which will take place tomorrow, November 7, 2025, at 11 am in Dwinelle 5125 (Level E)
Katherine Gordy is an accomplished author and editor in the field of political science. Her published works include the single-authored book Living Ideology in Cuba: Socialism in Principle and Practice (2015) and the co-edited volume Globalizing Political Theory (2023).
Gordy’s research spans Latin American political thought, Cuban socialism, imperialism, and Marxism, with articles published in notable journals such as Polity, Public Culture, Postcolonial Studies, Alternatives: Global, Local and Political, and Viewpoint Magazine, as well as various edited collections.
Currently, she is engaged in a research project exploring empirical imaginaries and historical relativism as present in the works of two prominent Latin American Marxist thinkers: the Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui and the Cuban Walterio Carbonell.
Film Screening & Discussion: “State of Silence”
Date & Time: Wednesday, November 5, 2025, 4:30 PM – 6:30 PM
The title of a film is “Estado de Silencio” (The State of Silence).
“State of Silence/Estado de Silencio” delves into the challenges facing press freedom in Mexico, chronicling the dangerous work of four journalists as they uncover the ties between organized crime and government corruption. Through their eyes, the documentary reveals the obstacles and risks they face in breaking the silence around systemic abuse and violence. A panel discussion and audience Q&A with will follow the screening:
Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) is an essential Mexican holiday, primarily celebrated on November 1st and 2nd. It is a time for families and friends to gather, pray for, and remember loved ones who have died. The celebration is vibrant, focusing on life and remembrance, rather than mourning. Key traditions include creating ofrendas (altars) decorated with marigolds (cempasúchil), favorite foods and drinks of the departed, candles, and colorful sugar skulls (calaveras).
The Bancroft Library: Located within the Doe Annex, Bancroft is the university’s premier special collections library. Its Latin Americana Collection is a critical resource for primary materials related to Día de los Muertos and broader Mexican culture. This collection has been known to feature items such as:
Rare publications and historical documents on Mexican traditions.
Original materials related to the arts and political satire, including the iconic works of artist José Guadalupe Posada (known for his skeletal figures, or calaveras), whose prints have heavily influenced the holiday’s visual iconography.
Illustrating Mexico one page at a time-Print Art of José Guadalupe Posada
Several venues across the East Bay feature Día de los Muertos altars. The Oakland Public Library is among the organizations hosting a related activity. Below are photos of the altar created by the library’s César Chávez branch (formerly the Latin American Library) to commemorate this important cultural tradition.
Photos below: Credit: Liladhar P.
Our Social Sciences Library at UC Berkeley Library, my departmental colleagues have created also an altar whose pictures I am sharing. Two colleagues who took initiative in supporting this activity are Angelica V.M. and Cody H.
Photos below: Credit Angelica VM.
A dia de los muertos altar at Social Sciences Research Library
The following subject terms can be helpful to our students when trying to locate materials on Dia de los muertos in our library’s collections.
Please submit your feedback to your librarian for Latin American and Caribbean Studies: Liladhar
Latin America Commons Landing Page
Latin America Commons by Coherent Digital is a full-text, richly-indexed database that provides unified, cross-searchable access to millions of pages of Latin American and Latinx primary-source materials, including books, magazines, photographs, maps, letters, diaries, ephemera, videos, and audio files that were previously scattered across the internet and in archives. The project aims to preserve at-risk content, rare documents, and often overlooked resources spanning from the 16th to the 21st centuries, making it easier for scholars and students to discover vetted, high-quality material for research and study.
Insert Press was found in 2005 by Mathew Timmons to focus on interdisciplinary and/or hybrid works.[1] Initially, Insert Press focused on poetry in chapbook form, but over the following decade turned to increasingly toward “translation, poetics, artist books.”[2]
For over 150 years, residents and visitors alike have not run short of reasons to support the claim, “There’s no place like California.” And since the 1960s, that claim has been echoed—albeit in whispers—among cannabis circles around the globe. This summer, Oral History Center historian Todd Holmes has been traveling up and down the state to document the overlooked history of California cannabis communities as part of the multidisciplinary project, Legacy Cannabis Genetics: People and their Plants, A Community-Driven Study. Funded in 2023 by a $2.7 million grant from the California Department of Cannabis Control, the project is now in its final year charting the history and genetic heritage of the state’s famed cannabis communities.
LCG Research Team at community engagement meeting in Mendocino County. (Left to Right): Hannah Nelson (Origins Council); Genine Coleman (Origin Council); Todd Holmes (UC Berkeley Oral History Center); Dominic Corva (Cal Poly Humboldt); Kerin Law (LeafWorks and Canndor Herbarium); Caleb Chen (Research Assistant, Cal Poly Humboldt); Yaw Reinier (Research Assistant, Cal Poly Humboldt)
In many respects, the study can be seen as one of the first of its kind. The research team is composed of academic and community researchers from across the state: sociologist Dominic Corva from Cal Poly Humboldt; historian Todd Holmes from UC Berkeley’s Oral History Center; Genine Coleman from Origins Council, a nonprofit public policy and research institute serving the state’s historic rural cannabis farming regions; Khalil Ferguson of United CORE, a statewide equity advocacy organization representing the interests of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) in urban communities; and Eleanor Kuntz, co-founder of Canndor the world’s first cannabis herbarium, and co-founder and CEO of LeafWorks, a genomics and plant science company. Moreover, the project operates through Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR), a methodology premised on a partnership approach to research that equitably involves community members, organizational representatives, and academic researchers in all aspects of the research process. “CBPR is an approach that not only affords community members an equal seat at the table,” Holmes explained, “but more importantly recognizes them as the real experts in this field.” Typically used in public health research, the CBPR approach of the project represents the first time the methodology has been used in cannabis research.
Cannabis Farm in Nevada County, California, getting ready for harvest.
For the oral history component of the project, Holmes is conducting around 100 hours of oral history interviews with cannabis farmers and breeders throughout the state. When complete, the oral histories will comprise the California Cannabis Oral History Collection at the Bancroft Library, another first-of-its-kind component of the project. “For most of the communities in this project, this is the first time they have told their stories,” Holmes explained. “It’s a powerful reminder of the importance of oral history and a real honor to help place California cannabis within the historical record.”
Be on the lookout for the release of the California Cannabis Oral History Collection in the fall of 2026. For more on the project, visit the Legacy Cannabis Genetics website.
Left to right: Malcolm, Wilbert. Photograph by Paul Burnett
I have two snow-white rabbits.
One night, recently, they both started thumping. Rabbits thump for any number of reasons, including their disapproval and pleas for attention. But the main reason rabbits raise up their enormous hind legs to shake the ground is because they sense danger. They are trying to warn the warren that something very bad is about to happen. I ignored them at first, then tried to calm them. Sometimes they just want food, so I fed them. Sometimes they just freak each other out. Thump. Thump!
I was tired of their noise, and tired, so I indulged them by looking outside. Peering back at me on their hind legs were two enormous raccoons who seemed very interested in the rabbits and completely unafraid of me.
In my job as an interviewer, and in my life, I think a lot about listening, what it is, and what it is not. There is probably no clearer signal than an animal making a noise to alert their group. Humans, by contrast, have evolved elaborate languages for expressing themselves. Language should give us greater powers of precise, lightning-clear communication. But language often fails us. Words so often conceal, deflect, or deceive. Social media platforms promise instant, global, direct connection to others, but we know by their design that they privilege extreme and polarizing speech. How are we doing with all of that?
Part of the problem is just the medium of text, which is so often shorn of other signals: the tone, the pauses, the momentary facial expressions, the emotions, the signs.
Maybe, in our most urgent situations, with our alligator brains activated, language serves us just fine. Danger we know, right? We know how to thump, right?
Regardless of the medium – through video, audio, or text-based conversations – it might be our receivers that are jammed, defective, and underpowered. I think of all the filters I had that prevented me from hearing rabbit danger. I had an idea that our home was safe, from anything that would threaten a rabbit, anyway. I had a story in my head that was blocking me from hearing, a story about my rabbits as needy, hungry, spoiled, and mischievous, in part because, let’s face it, they are. They were thumping just to mess with us. They were thumping because of something in them, the default fear of a prey animal. Their thumping didn’t really mean danger because I had read about rabbit motives in a book.
But sometimes it’s just raccoons.
Here, at UC Berkeley, and at any school, students will be asked to speak, to develop their knowledge and skills, to contribute to innovation in the communications technologies we will all be using in the near future, to engage with others, to deploy their speech-and-debate championship rhetoric when they are out in the world. They will be asked to speak, and hopefully to speak freely.
But speech is only one small part of communication. Some of our popular public figures are really good with a simple story, with a rhetorical trick, to make us feel good, or aggrieved, or righteous, or inspired. But so often they are just tapping into our filters, our ideas of who we already think we are. The Pied Piper is not such a hot musician; it’s just that our ears resonate at that frequency. If I’m going to really hear someone else, some fellow rabbit, I need to check all the reasons I have developed not to listen.
What oral historians have to do in interviews is think really critically about our own backgrounds, assumptions, preferences, and frameworks for understanding the topic at hand and the person with whom we are creating a life history. Only by grappling with our subjectivity can we hope to understand that of another. Empathy is not putting ourselves in the shoes of someone else; it’s gazing deeply at our own shoes, trying to walk without them, feeling how they shape our feet, and understanding that we can’t walk in someone else’s shoes. But we can ask other people about their shoes, and what it’s like to walk in them. That’s where empathy begins. Empathy is not a capacity; it’s a space you have to choose to step into.
To the incoming students of UC Berkeley, I don’t know how to navigate this world. All I can offer is what seems to work for oral historians who work with others to tell their stories.
You may need to burn through a bit of who you think you are to really hear someone, and you may find that the you who comes out the other side is not tricked, indoctrinated, or weakened. You may find yourself bigger, stronger, more capable, more resilient, more useful, and more of what we all need right now and from now on. That’s what everyone here is betting on.
So listen, okay?
Sometimes it’s raccoons.
Thump!
Welcome to the bigger, stronger, more capable you, class of 2029.
Please find this selection of books in Catalan recently received and cataloged for your reading pleasure. Catalan is a Western Romance language and is the official language of Andorra, and the official language of three autonomous communities in eastern Spain: Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and the Valencian Community, where it is called Valencian.
Catalan is considered a Less Commonly Taught Language (LCTL) in Europe and has received special support from the U.S. Department of Education under the auspices of Title VI of the Higher Education Act of 1965. Other languages of interest to research and teaching at Berkeley and historically supported by this program administered by the Institute of European Studies include Dutch, Portuguese, Modern Greek, Occitan, Yiddish, Galician, Danish, Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and more.
All are invited to attend our 2025 Hispanic American Heritage Month webinar that this time focuses on Afro-Latinx heritage.
The webinar will take place on September 16th from 12:45 pm to 2:15 pm PST (3:45 pm to 5:15 pm EST). The webinar is free and open to all with prior registration.
This webinar features three scholars whose work advances understanding of Latin American and Afro-Latinx communities through social policy, culture, and education. In recognition of National Hispanic Heritage Month, the event explores racial and gender justice, ethnoracial legislation, climate ethnography, and Afro-Indigenous knowledge systems. Presenters offer critical insights into how law, environment, heritage, and pedagogy shape the lived experiences of Hispanic and Afro-Latinx communities.
