Irene de Amaral (Rhode Island College)
This session aims to contribute to the discussion of performing arts in the context of Spanish and Portuguese speaking immigrant communities in North America during the 20th and 21st centuries. Live performances on the stage and performance mediated through technology and screens highlights a proactive approach to reinforce community leadership and the maintenance of cultural and linguistic values, as well as affective ties among the artist(s) and their public. The invitation to dialogue in a roundtable format will focus on sharing lines of research around the mapping of physical or virtual spaces of cultural activity, alongside the systematization of creative formats. This proposal engages in a historical review of community cultural projects from the first half of the twentieth century to the present day, aiming to register and record in the archival sense, for future memory, community cultural presences that have been significant for the affirmation of the voices of immigrant peoples. We welcome papers that address multiple performing forms of entertainment or cultural reflection developed in the shared spaces of community interaction.