Indigenous Studies Speaker Series: Prof Edgar Garcia Delivers Talk on “Migrant Glyphs”
On November 13th, for the second event in the Department’s Indigenous Studies Speaker Series, Fordham English was joined by Professor Edgar Garcia (University of Chicago) for an evening talk titled “Migrant Glyphs” at Rose Hill’s Walsh Library. Garcia is a scholar of the hemispheric and indigenous cultures and languages of the Americas. He is the author of Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis, Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography and Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu. His adaptations and translations of the mid sixteenth-century Nahuatl language Cantares Mexicanos, titled Cantares, is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press. His work on the Popul Vuh, a Mayan creation narrative that includes a journey of hero twins into the Underworld where they die but are later reborn, seeks to emphasize the importance of transit and movement within pre-Columbian cultures of the Americas. This interest in migration, death, and creation also framed the topic of his talk.
Addressing the room of professors, graduate and undergraduate students, Garcia announced that rather than giving an academic lecture, he would be telling a story. He began by discussing the ancient Greek fascination with divination and signs as attempts at risk analysis in a premodern worldview governed by notions of fate. Theories of probability first developed by 17th-century French mathematician Blaise Pascal shifted questions of chance from those of destiny to numerical calculation. Garcia also noted that in the late 19th century, due to migrations of the Jewish population out of Eastern Europe, populations started being discussed as demographics, turning migration into crises of numbers and probabilities. Garcia then began to tell how his appearance on a 2018 episode of Ancient Aliens, “The Desert Codes”—in which he gives a definition of “pictograph”—led to him meeting Alfredo Figueroa, an activist for migrants and Chemehuevi elder, who dedicated the final years of his life to protecting the Blythe Intaglios in southern California. The Intaglios are a collection of images etched into the rough sands of the Colorado Desert, depicting animals and god-like figures; Figueroa believed these Aztec glyphs mark where humanity sprang from the ground and that the area is also the site of la cuna de Aztlan, the lost homeland of the Aztecs. Garcia considered the contrast between Figueroa’s understanding of this area as one of creativity and emergence in parallel with the current day migration of immigrants through these same desert areas, a journey between borders that can lead to further suffering and death.
In the next and final chapter in Garcia’s narrative of considering migration, risk, probability, and destiny, he turned to discussing the “Peace and Dignity Journey,” an indigenous ceremonial run that still occurs every four years down the western coast of the Americas. Garcia played some of his own footage of a participant, Chewy, singing traditional songs as he journeyed, his words translated as “I am here, you are here, we walk forward together.” Wrapping together the threads of his story, Garcia stated that we need to consider a poetics of migration as something other than the entwinement of fate and necessity, but is recast with room for creative potential, regaining a sense of something springing and walking forward. While answering questions, mostly from the enthusiastic undergraduate students in attendance, Garcia re-emphasized the generative power of creativity within disaster. Garcia’s talk provided ample opportunity to consider how narratives and knowledge of the past can aid us in addressing problems of the current day, as we move ever onwards through human history.