This talk revisits the opening chapter of Spirals in the Caribbean (2024), focusing on El Comegente, a recurring figure of racialized monstrosity that emerged in 1791 Santo Domingo amid local Black rebellions and neighboring French Saint-Domingue insurrections. Initially mobilized to justify repression, El Comegente later became a folk figure, recycled in late 19th- and 20th-century Dominican fiction and national narratives, and haunting today’s collective memories.

Join the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the Stone Center for Latin American Studies, the Department of History, and the Africana Studies Program for the annual Tulane University poetry reading of “O Navio Negreiro” (“The Slave Ship”).   

“O Navio Negreiro” is a classic piece by Brazilian abolitionist Castro Alves describing the middle passage. The reading will be done in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole. All attendees are welcome to sign up to read in the language of their choice.  

Verónica Cruz Sánchez, a renowned Mexican human rights defender and founder of the feminist organization Las Libres, will deliver a public lecture and Q&A via Zoom on March 3rd from 3:30-4:45 PM. She has spent more than two decades advancing reproductive autonomy, challenging the criminalization of abortion and miscarriage, and organizing legal and community-based strategies to support predominantly poor, Indigenous, and rural women in Mexico.

Join MARI for a festive celebration where archaeology meets Mardi Gras magic! Get hands-on with interactive stations throughout the day—carve soap sculptures, solve archaeology puzzles, hunt for hidden treasures in our scavenger hunt, write your name in Maya glyphs, and paint mini artifacts in carnival colors.

Featured Events:

Current work on colonial Latin American architectural history has mined the archive to uncover the presence of often-overlooked architectural agents. They might be described in archival documents as "indio," or "mestizo" or "negro," or simply not named at all. This one-day conference brings together new scholarship that demonstrates ways of overcoming the limits of the archive, which is, by its nature, shaped by social power, imperial interests, and national histories.

Globally, large cities are facing growing water crisis driven by climate variability, rapid urbanization, aging infrastructure and weak governance. This seminar uses megacities such as Mexico City, as a case study to examine the physical, social, and institutional drivers of urban water insecurity, and public health implications of unreliable and unsafe water. Strategies for building more resilient and equitable urban water systems through integrated “One Water” approaches will also be discussed.

The Haitian Revolution was a moment of radical transformation, marked by the abolition of slavery, achieved through the actions of the enslaved themselves, and culminating in the creation of the first independent Black state in the Americas. Long treated as marginal within grand narratives of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions, this profoundly radical event has, over the past thirty years, been largely “unsilenced” by historians, thanks in part to the recovery and close reading of previously neglected sources.

Natalia Garbiras-Diaz (Harvard University)