Tag: Latin America

Vargas Llosa to Speak at St. Louis University!

~ Clarissa ~ 5 Comments

You probably think we have all just fallen off our pumpkin carts here, in St. Louis Metro area, right? Well, think again. Our cultural life is rich and vigorous. Next Monday, for example, Mario Vargas Llosa, the recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature, the greatest Peruvian writer and my favorite living Latin American writer (and he’s just one person, too), will be speaking at St. Louis University:

Noted author Mario Vargas Llosa will receive the 2011 Saint Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates at a special event from 5:30-6:45 p.m. Monday, Nov. 14, in the Anheuser-Busch Auditorium at SLU’s John Cook School of Business, 3674 Lindell Blvd. A book signing with the author begins at 4:30 p.m., followed by the presentation of the award and a conversation with Vargas Llosa led by Olga Arbeláez, Ph.D., professor of Spanish in the University’s department of modern and classical languages.

To say that I’m excited is an understatement of the month.

If you haven’t read anything by Vargas Llosa, please, please do. He is really amazing. Garcia Marquez doesn’t deserve to bring him his slippers (in my highly subjective opinion). The writer’s books are all translated into English.

You can start with his early work Cubs. It’s short and much easier to read than the writer’s longer novels. And, of course, Vargas Llosa’s great novel The War of the End of the World is highly recommended. People often disagree but I think this novel is his masterpiece. For the romantically minded, Vargas Llosa’s attempt at a non misogynist Latin American novel about love, The Bad Girl, might be of interest.

If you follow the links I provided, you will see that Vargas Llosa’s books can be acquired very cheaply.

My sincere gratitude goes to Nancy P, a long-time reader of this blog who informed me of this important event.

I’m Haunted by Mexicans

~ Clarissa ~ 26 Comments

Whenever my students are writing about Cubans, Uruguayans, Spaniards, Dominicans, Argentinians, Venezuelans, Colombians, etc., I always know that by the end of the essay, all these people will be mysteriously transformed into Mexicans. Often, I read statements like, “Jose Marti was an important Cuban thinker and the fighter for Cuban Independence. He loved his country of Mexico and worked hard to make it independent from Spain.”

The culmination of this trend was achieved in the passage I read today: “Jose Enrique Rodo, a thinker and educator from Uruguay, hated the United States and Mexico. Mexico was part of the United States, which is why he hated it. As a Mexican, he hated his own nation and wrote critically about it.”

Is there a way I can politely bring to my students’ attention the Earth-shattering news that not all Spanish-speakers are Mexican?