Mario Valero
Graduate Student
I received a B.A. in Economics from the Universidad de Carabobo (Venezuela) and a M.A. in Visual Arts at SUNY Fashion Institute of Technology with a thesis titled “The Evolution of Latin American Art: Early Perceptions and its Place in the Contemporary Art Market.” I also have an M.A. and M.Phil. from Columbia University. Interests: 19th- and 20th-century Latin American cultural production, literary and aesthetic theory and criticism, Latin American modern art, and melancholia in literature and the visual arts.
My thesis, "El mestizo en el imaginario latinoamericano de la modernización (1880-1930)," questions the commonplaces about the racial figure of the mestizo (a byproduct of miscegenation) in the period of modernization in Latin America, a time in which this term became crucial in cultural and political debates. My research analyses the displacements, migrations and transformations of the mestizo throughout diverse discourses as an identity-building figure used to conform racial categories, cultural products and objects of scientific research. In a continuous process of convenient inclusions and exclusions the mestizo circumscribed nationalities, cultural areas, and projects for education or political action, creating common networks of national and regional imaginaries. By questioning the process of naturalization undergone by this term, the entire conceptual apparatus set forth by modernization in Latin America will show the ambiguities that even nowadays are a constant source of intellectual debate in the field of Latin American cultural studies.
Publications: "El legado de Saturno en la obra de José Antonio Ramos Sucre." Valencia: Dirección de Publicaciones del Rectorado de la Universidad de Carabobo, 1997.
Papers and presentations: "Tres Tristes Tigres como proyecto fallido de un anti-lenguaje,” NYU-Columbia Graduate Student Conference, Columbia University, 2003; “La construcción del narrador en las autobiografías de Mariano Picón Salas,” NYU-Columbia Graduate Student Conference, Columbia University, 2004; “La burocracia imperial y la violencia local en El Carnero de Juan Rodríguez Freile”, SUNY Stony Brook, 2005; “Celebrating the 400th anniversary of the publication of Don Quixote.” Television interview. Instituto Cervantes and HITN New York, May 13, 2005; “Don Quixote on Fashion: the Role of Dressing and Undressing in Don Quixote,” Fashion Institute of Technology and Instituto Cervantes of New York, October 6, 2005.
mv169@columbia.edu
(212) 854-5815
(212) 854-5322