This session will be followed by an engaging discussion with a guest panel. Entry by donation courtesy of Dendy Cinemas, arrive early to get your seat!
Greg Brosnan, Jennifer Szymaszek, 2009, 2010, Documentary, Guatemala, Mexico, United States, 30min, Spanish/English with English subtitles
When the US government stormed a Kosher meat plant in the American heartland arresting nearly 400 undocumented workers, a Guatemalan village wept. The biggest immigration raid in US history severed an economic lifeline to one of the poorest corners of the Western Hemisphere while pushing an Iowa
farm town to the brink of collapse.
A powerful and topical documentary about the human cost of deportation and detention of immigrants.
Microcinema film & discussion
Join us for a film screening followed by panel discussion exploring the
themes of illegal immigration in the US and Australia. Guest speakers
will discuss the current governmetal policies on border protection and
the parallels between the Latin American migration to the US and the
arrival of illegal immingrants to Australia by boat. The discussion
will also unravel the themes explored in the film.
Panel Speakers:
Laura Vazquez Maggio
Laura Vazquez Maggio is a PhD candidate with the School of Social
Sciences at the University of New South Wales. Her past work has mostly
been interdisciplinary, spanning the fields of economics, political
economy, development and social science. This includes her Honours
thesis from UNAM in Mexico City that centred on the gender wage gap in
the maquiladora export industry. The research she conducts today is on
the migration of Mexicans to Australia understood from a class and
identity approach.
Mark Goudkamp
Mark Goudkamp is a leftwing activist who for the past decade has mainly
been campaigner with and spokesperson for the Refugee Action Coalition,
which has resisted the ayslum seeker policies of the Howard Liberal and
the Rudd/Gillard Labor governments. In 2008, he was briefly in the US,
where he took part in a rally led by 200,000 Latinos on May Day in
Chicago. For work, he teaches English as a Second Language at both a
high school and at TAFE.
Dr Cristina Rocha,
University of Western Sydney
Dr Cristina Rocha teaches at the School of Humanities and Languages and
is a member of CCR. She is the editor of the Journal of Global
Buddhism. Her research areas are: globalisation, religion,
transnationalism and cross-cultural negotiations, with a particular
interest in the cultural traffic between Japan, Brazil and Australia.
She is currently researching Brazilian migrants in Australia and
Australian followers of the Brazilian Spiritist healer John of God
(João de Deus).
Dr Fernanda Peñaloza
DPhil (Exeter, UK); MA (Exeter, UK); Licenciada (UBA, Argentina)
Lecturer in Latin American Studies, University of Sydney
Together with fellow members of SURCLA Dr Vek Lewis and Dr Verónica
Quinteros, Fernanda is working on a FARSS (Faculty of Arts Research
Support Scheme) funded research project entitled Latin American
Migration in Sydney: The Chilean Case. By combining ethnographic
interviewing, document collection, and discourse analysis, this project
seeks to uncover the wide range of meanings and uses that processes of
identity formation, differentiation, recognition and negotiation play
among members of Sydney’s Chilean community.
Chairing the discussion
Assoc. Prof. Estela Valverde
Head of Spanish and Latin American Studies, Director Higher Degree
Research, Dept of International Studies, Macquarie University. Her
multidisciplinary research has centred around the exploration of issues
related to history, memory and politics; ethnic and gender identities
and re-democratisation, human rights and transitional justice.
