Academic Conferences
Mexican history professor Emilio Kourí and founding member of the PRD, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas.
Land, Politics, and Revolution: A Conference in Honor of Friedrich Katz September 28 - September 29, 2007
To celebrate the eightieth birthday of Professor Friedrich Katz, the University of Chicago organized an international conference in his honor. Leading historians of nineteenth and twentieth-century Mexico came from around the world to discuss the comparative and transnational history of Mexico during the formative years of the modern nation (1880 to 1940, roughly). The aim of the conference was to produce a book of exceptional interest not only to historians of Mexico, but also to social scientists, students, and the reading public. Essays addressed a broad range of issues, including the social roots of Mexican nationalism and internationalism, the transformation of the Mexico-U.S. boundary into a distinctive borderland, and the history of rural immigration from Mexico to the United States.
A Chicago professor since 1971, Katz is among the most eminent historians of modern Mexico working in the United States today. In 1988, he received the Orden del Águila Azteca, the highest honor Mexico can bestow on a foreign national. In 2004, Mexican president Vicente Fox inaugurated the Katz Center for Mexican Studies at the University of Chicago, which is already widely recognized as a vibrant center of international intellectual discussion on Mexican culture, history, and politics.
Click here to learn more about Professor Katz's work.
"Land, Politics, and Revolution" was organized by Emilio Kourí, Department of History at University of Chicago. Major funding for the conference was generously provided by the Tinker Visiting Professor Endowment at the University of Chicago Center for Latin American Studies. Additional financial support is provided by the Katz Center for Mexican Studies, the Department of History, and the Norman Wait Harris Fund of the Center for International Studies.
Comunidad e Historia en México/Community and History in Mexico
May 28, 2005
Una discusión sobre el lugar de las comunidades campesinas en la historia de México: la historia de las comunidades, las ideas acerca de la comunidad y la historia de las ideas acerca de la comunidad en la historiografía, en el discurso político y en el orden jurídico.
A panel discussion on peasant communities in Mexican history: the history of these communities, ideas surrounding the definition of community, and the image of community within historiographical, political, and legal frameworks.
Participantes/Participants:
Antonio Azuela, UNAM
Fernando Escalante, Tinker Visiting Professor of History, University of Chicago
Friedrich Katz, University of Chicago
Emilio Kourí, University of Chicago
Claudio Lomnitz, New School University
Mauricio Tenorio, University of Texas, Austin (currently at the University of Chicago)
Juan Pedro Viqueira, El Colegio de México
Public Lecture Series: NAFTA and Mexico: Ten Years Later
December 3, 2004: Carlos Salinas de Gortari
Carlos Salinas de Gortari is a Mexican economist and politician affiliated with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Educated at Harvard, Salinas served as president of Mexico from 1988 to 1994. Salinas' administration launched significant reforms in elections law and land property legislation, reversed the nationalization of Mexico's banks and held an instrumental role in the passage of NAFTA.
January 13, 2005: Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas
Son of former Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas, and a founding member of Mexico's Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD), Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas has served in the national senate, and as governor of his home state of Michoacán (1980-1986). A founding member of Mexico's Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD), he was the PRD candidate for president in 1994, and served as mayor of Mexico City from 1997 until 1999. Today, Cárdenas remains a senior member of the PRD, and is considered the 'moral leader' of the party.
Listen to this event: http://chiasmos.uchicago.edu/events/cardenas.shtml
February 4, 2005: John Coatsworth
John Coatsworth is the Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. Before his appointment at Columbia, Coatsworth was a professor of Latin American History at Harvard University, and The University of Chicago. The author of three books and numerous scholarly articles on Latin American economic and international history, he was elected President of the American Historical Association for 1995. He also serves on the Council on Foreign Relations, and as a member of the Executive Committee of the Center for International Affairs.
February 23, 2005: Armando Bartra
Armando Bartra is a scholar, peasant activist, and the founder and director of Mexico's Institúto Maya. He is an editorial board member of Cuadernos Agrarios and Chiapas and a frequent contributor to Luna Córnea, Memoria and La Jornada. He is author and co-author of numerous works including Guerrero Bronco: Campesinos, Cuidadanos y Guerrilleros en la Costa Grande (1996) and Crónicas del sur: utopías campesinas en Guerrero (2000).
Consolidating Democracy in Mexico
April 23, 2004
The turn of the century brought about unprecedented events and marked a critical turning point in Mexico's political history. Today, as a working electoral democracy, Mexico faces the continuing challenge of redefining the political system as a whole. For this conference, Mexico's leading policy makers, civil society practitioners, and academic researchers joined university students and leading members of the Hispanic community in the Midwest region for a discussion of the challenges of institutional reform, party politics, and the involvement of civil society in Mexico's political process.
Participants included the Minister of Government Santiago Creel Miranda; Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, three-time presidential candidate and founding member of a leading opposition party; José Woldenberg, former president of the Federal Electoral Institute; Beatriz Paredes, former leader of the House of Representatives; Enrique Semo, Mexico City's Secretary of Culture; Marie Claire Acosta, former Secretary of State for Human Rights; and Carmen Aristegui, a top Mexican radio news anchor and political journalist, among others.
Keynote Speakers:
Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas
Son of former Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas, and a founding member of Mexico's Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD), Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas has served in the national senate, and as governor of his home state of Michoacán (1980-1986). A founding member of Mexico's Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD), he was the PRD candidate for president in 1994, and served as mayor of Mexico City from 1997 until 1999. Today, Cárdenas remains a senior member of the PRD, and is considered the 'moral leader' of the party.
Santiago Creel Miranda
Minister Creel Miranda, the second highest ranking politician in Mexico, is the head of the Ministry of the Interior of Mexico and a member of the conservative National Action Party (PAN). Born in Mexico City on December 11, 1954, Creel Miranda studied at the School of Law at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), and did graduate work at the University of Michigan. For the past twenty years, he has worked as an attorney for one of the most prestigious law firms in the country. He was a professor at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, where he was the director of the Bachelor's degree program in law and head of the academic department. He is a member of the Mexican Bar Association, the College of Lawyers, the Mexican Academy of Human Rights, the Association for the Unity of Our America, and the Lawyers' Committee for Human Rights.
José Woldenberg
José Woldenberg, former president of the Federal Electoral Institute, supervised national elections from 1997 until 2003. A renowned Mexican intellectual, Mr. Woldenberg is widely hailed as one of the fathers of democracy in Mexico. As a young academic, Mr. Woldenberg enrolled in the Unified Mexican Socialist Party, where he became very involved in the student movements of 1968. In 1988 he became one of the founding members of the Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD). Since 1974, he has served as a professor in the department of political and social sciences at the UNAM. From 1989 to 1994, Mr. Woldenberg served as president of the Institute for the Study of Democratic Transition. He is currently a member of the National System of Investigators. An accomplished author, Mr. Woldenberg has published numerous works, including La reforma electoral de 1996 (1997) and La construccion de la democracia (2003).
Panelists:
Marieclaire Acosta, Former Undersecretary of State for Human Rights
The former Undersecretary of State for Human Rights, Marie Claire Acosta is a courageous and internationally respected activist. A prominent figure in the promotion of human rights for over fifteen years, Ms. Acosta is a former member of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Mexican Commission on Human Rights, and the United Nations Development Programme. She also served as a seminal figure during her time as the president of the non-government Mexican Commission for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights. She is currently a visiting professor at Notre Dame University.
Carmen Arestegui, Televisa Radio News Anchor
Carmen Arestegui is one of the most prestigious news hosts in Mexico. For over a decade she has consistently presented news in a serious and objective fashion that has gained her a reputation as one of the leading journalists in the nation. She has participated as host, commentator, and correspondent for radio and television on Radio Educación, Imevisión, F.M. Globo, Stereorey, and MVS Televisión. She currently hosts the radio show Solorzano-Arestegui and Hoy por Hoy. She has received numerous national awards, including the National Journalism Award in 2001.
Jorge Chabat, CIDE
Dr. Chabat is a renowned researcher and academic at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económica, one of the most important think tanks and academic institutions in Mexico. He obtained his doctoral degree in international affairs from the University of Miami. A prominent scholar in the areas of foreign policy, drug trafficking, and national security, Dr. Chabat has participated in numerous conferences and academic forums throughout the country. He has published essays in several important magazines, including Letras Libres.
Soledad Loaeza, El Colegio de México
Currently on fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, Dr. Loaeza is a permanent faculty member in the department of Political Science at El Colegio de Mexico and the head of its International Relations Center. Her research traces the institutional development of long-standing loyal opposition that in 2000 won the presidential election over the PRI, the official party in power since 1929. Loaeza holds a PhD in political science from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris where she was appointed Alfred Grosser Chair in 1999.
Claudio Lomnitz, University of Chicago Professor of History and Anthropology
Claudio Lomnitz's research and teaching focus on the historical sociology of politics and culture in modern Mexico, with a special emphasis on the ways in which national states mediate economic modernization and capitalist development. Lomnitz's work centers primarily on the development of geographical models for understanding the relationship between cultural differentiation and political articulation in national states. This interest has led him to focus on the history of intellectuals, the cultural history of corruption, the history of political ritual and myth, and their connections to the formation of public opinion as privileged sites of mediation.
Lorenzo Meyer, Political Analyst and Historian
Dr. Lorenzo Meyer is widely recognized as the foremost historian and political analyst in Mexico. After completing his post-doctoral studies at the University of Chicago, Dr. Meyer returned to Mexico to teach at El Colegio de México. Dr. Meyer is currently an editorial columnist for the national newspaper Reforma, and hosts a political television program. Since the late '70s, Dr. Meyer has published numerous books on Mexican history, politics, and culture, among other subjects.
Beatriz Paredes, Former Speaker of the House of Representatives
Beatriz Paredes was the first woman governor of Tlaxcala, her native state (1987-1992); senator (1997-2000) and Chairman of the Managing Board of the Mexican Senate (September 1998); and federal representative (1979-1982, 1985-1986). She is considered an outstanding member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), where she has been General Secretary, among other important positions. In the Public Federal Administration, Ms. Paredes has been Vice Minister of the Interior three times. Throughout her career she has served as a member of the Mexican delegations for the UN, UNESCO, FAO, and other international organizations. Ms. Paredes served as Mexican Ambassador to Cuba from 1993 to 1994.
Jaqueline Peschard, Former Electoral Council Member
Dr. Jaqueline Peschard is currently a professor at the Insituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores in Mexico City. A prominent journalist and political analyst, Dr. Peschard served on the council of the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) for seven years, where she promoted and oversaw critical reforms that helped to ensure the transparency of the Mexican electoral system.
Enrique Semo, Minister of Culture, Mexico City
Dr. Semo is currently the Minister of Culture of Mexico City. Through his pursuits as a historian and economist, he has published dozens of books on topics such as the Mexican revolution, Mexican political parties, and the leftist opposition in the late twentieth century. He also serves as the General Director of the Institute of Culture in Mexico City. Dr. Semo is a former visiting professor at the University of Chicago.
