The demographic and cultural emergence of Mexican Americans in the United States will be addressed by CU-Boulder Assistant Professor John-Michael Rivera as part of the Chancellor's Community Lecture Series on Wednesday, Feb. 5.
His talk will be from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. in the Chautauqua Community House at 900 Baseline Road in Boulder and is free and open to the public.
"Recovering the West: Mexican Americans and the Expansion of Democratic Culture" is the fifth of eight public lectures presented by University of Colorado at Boulder faculty on the theme "Healing the West: Remedy, Repair, Restoration, Mitigation."
The series is sponsored by the CU-Boulder Office of the Chancellor, the CU-Boulder Center of the American West and the Colorado Chautauqua Association.
Rivera, an assistant professor in CU-Boulder's English department, will examine more than 150 years of Mexican-American literature to find out what these cultural works can tell us about the future of American democracy.
Throughout the lecture, Rivera will present a rich selection of Mexican-American letters and cartography showing that the West is undergoing an unprecedented political and cultural transformation that will affect how we understand the region's past and future landscape. A reckoning with this inheritance of literature must play a part in any attempt at "healing the West."
He also will demonstrate that "Mexicans have been writing and representing the landscape of the West for over a century and a half, questioning what it means to be the newly constituted Mexican Americans whom Juan Seguin would so aptly define in 1849 as 'foreigners in their native land.' "
Following the Feb. 5 lecture, the series will continue from March to May on the first Wednesday of each month. For more information call the CU-Boulder Office of Community Affairs at (303) 492-7084. A complete schedule of lectures is posted at and .