Born and raised in Chile, Sebastián López Vergara traversed the continent for his education and career as researcher and instructor in the field of Latinx and Indigenous Diaspora Studies. He came to our department under the IDEA Fellows program, a new Stony Brook initiative from the Office of the Provost designed to hire, engage, and mentor Inclusion, Diversity, Equity & Access (IDEA). The program brought this 2023 a total of eight fellows to our campus for two-year post docs with faculty positions at the lecturer level, and the option, after successful completion of the program, of staying as tenure-track assistant professors.
Sebastián holds a BA in English Literature and Linguistics from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and an MA and PhD from the University of Washington at Seattle in Comparative Literature, Cinema and Media. He has extensive experience in teaching and community outreach, and this fall 2023 he is offering a class in Spanish (SPN 415/510 Hispanic Cultures in Contact) centered on contemporary issues of land exploitation, Indigenous and feminist politics, racial oppression and justice, and colonial dispossession, as well as on different historical projects of social liberation from Mexico to Patagonia.
As a way of welcoming Sebastián to our academic community and getting to know him better, we engaged in a conversation on the train about his personal and academic background, his first impressions of New York and his plans for the following semesters.
PF: Sebastián, welcome to Stony Brook! The department is extremely glad and honored to have you in our team. I hope you had an uneventful moving experience from Seattle to New York. Since you have lived most of your life next to the Pacific Ocean, in Chile and Washington, any thoughts about your first encounters with the Atlantic and the New York area?
SLV: Thank you so much for the welcome! It’s been so good to be here these weeks, getting to know my colleagues, graduate and undergraduate students. They all have been so warm and genuinely friendly. It is indeed my first sustained encounter with the Atlantic. I always thought of New York as the northernmost Caribbean island with its rich and complex history of the Black diaspora. Being here, I’m starting to learn that it is that and also the histories of the Shinnecock as well as so many other diasporic/migrant communities, particularly these days, from Latin America, West Africa, and Asia. It is incredible to see that in the urban space where it materializes as a global and local experience.
PF: Can you tell us more about your academic background and previous community engagement?
SLV: My undergraduate education was in “letters” (Letras), in English, and that training taught me the centrality of language in all the operations of life. Not so much that language “creates” realities, but that it is indissoluble from the multiple and conflicting realities we socially create. But I felt uneasy with the “English” part of “letters,” having studied in Chile. And I’d say that this academic uneasiness became more noticeable after I read Edward Said’s Orientalism for an undergraduate literary theory class and, at the same time, a renewed cycle of Mapuche protests against state violence and for territorial autonomy in the late 2000s, early 2010s emerged in Chile. My graduate education, I am starting to realize, was my attempt to understand that. I studied Comparative Literature at the University of Washington, Seattle, where I had excellent mentors who trained me in the fields of Indigenous studies, critical theory, and Latin American cultural studies.
And, while I was writing the dissertation, I had the opportunity to be part of University Beyond Bars, an organization that offered post-secondary education to the incarcerated in the Washington State Reformatory in Monroe. With a good friend, I co-taught Spanish language and Latin American history and it was a really important pedagogical experience to facilitate the completion of incarcerated students’ associates’s degrees in such adverse conditions.
PF:. You recently defended your dissertation in Seattle, can you summarize the main ideas and research involved in that work?
SLV: My dissertation is titled “Archives of Post-Occupation: Indigenous Peoples and the Biopolitics of Modern Chile,” and studies discourses on Indigenous recognition and erasure in modern Chile as they relate to the histories of the Mapuche and Selk’nam peoples throughout the twentieth century. I close-read photographic collections, poetry, political theory, and testimonials, and propose three main points. The first one is to understand that the Chilean state used a range of colonial strategies of recognition and elimination that are seldom thought to work together in current scholarship to occupy Mapuche and Selk’nam territories. Second, to grasp that Mapuche and Selk’nam political traditions used the very same discourses on recognition and elimination to propose anticolonial strategies. The last point is to think that dispossession is organized by paradoxical relations of power. That is to say, the discourses that shape dispossession, as much as they support the violent displacement and oppression of Indigenous peoples, also function as levers for Indigenous anticolonial projects. Broadly speaking, I propose an approach to understanding shifting forms of power between the state and Indigenous peoples in twentieth-century Latin America.
PF: Your research and fascinating reflection on anticolonial projects immediately open a wider conversation about cultures and politics. I see in that dynamic of power that you describe a crucial political strategy since the colonial period, when natives would use Castilian laws and texts to defend their rights and recompose their traditions.
SLV: Exactly! For example, the political and spatial negotiations of the Mapuche with the Spanish crown in the Parliament of Quilin in 1641 articulate the contemporary Mapuche autonomist political project of recovery of Mapuche ancestral territories, Wallmapu, against ongoing Chilean state occupation of Mapuche lands. Similarly, in the Bolivian Andes, the movimiento de apoderados generales, an Indigenous movement that sought to defend communal lands (the ayllu) in the late 1800s, found in the declassification of colonial land titles from the archives a tool to stop land dispossession in oligarchic Bolivia.
PF: We are currently at a very exciting moment at Stony Brook for the development of Indigenous Studies, how do you see the future of that field?
SLV:The future looks really promising. I could just mention, for example, how the current dialogues between Native American studies and Latin American Indigenous studies are very fruitful in developing a hemispheric understanding of Indigenous politics and culture and colonialism. That means being very attentive to particular histories, intellectual and political traditions while, simultaneously, understanding those formations relationally without abstracting their differences. In fact, I think the fields are very intentional in learning from the histories and “methods” of Indigenous politics and activism since these have always been in dialogue across geographies. I’d also say that a really important development is taking place through this dialogue, which is to think of Indigenous forced migration and diaspora as a structuring reality across contemporary Indigenous societies. I think this last point is extremely important since it underscores how the shared experiences of Indigenous migration across the hemisphere are shaping emerging understandings of Indigeneity and strategies to contend with state and economic structures driving the forced displacement of different communities. Or, to put it simply, I think the question that is making the field of Indigenous studies so productive is to understand how the multiple histories of Indigenous politics have strived to create truly democratic societies. And that’s a very pressing question in today’s political climate.
PF: Considering those migrations and diasporas that have changed the human landscape of the Americas and are currently re-shaping our societies here in New York, how do you see your research and teaching in relation to inclusion, diversity, equity and access, which are the keywords and core values of the IDEA fellows program?
SLV: I think being now in a Hispanic Languages and Literature department is extremely advantageous to address those core values. With the student body changing the university, I think HLL has a very important role in attending to the questions that Latinx, Indigenous, Afro-Latinx, and other minoritized students (both graduate and undergraduate) have about the field, the knowledges they’re learning, and the university itself. I think that listening to those questions, about the changing character and patterns of migration, as well as the social, cultural, and political relations that shape displacements and many other issues will not only reveal to students “alternative histories” and “knowledges” that were previously considered as “differences to be suppressed” or “peripheries” and not as core forms of knowing. But also, and I think this is very important, focusing on these questions brings the possibility of unsettling categories that were thought to be self-evident in the field and that still organize it. In other words, I think that it is the kinds of questions that students are posing around access, linguistic/cultural diversity, and inclusion and equity that actualize the role of education at the university level.
I also think that the emerging institutional ties between different departments at Stony Brook to support the creation of a Native American and Indigenous Studies minor and program are extremely important, and I’m more than happy to support that effort. I think it’s instances like this that take up the spirit of land acknowledgments (that we all reckon with Indigenous presence and tenure of the land) with concrete institutional practices that start undoing histories of dispossession and inequalities.
PF: Indeed, this scenario of interdepartmental collaboration and institutional support is already creating new conversations on campus and the community. It seems that we have an exciting road ahead!
