Artists Hector Soldo and Jacqueline Gonzalez Wooton will be partnering with anthropologists from the University of Mississippi and the University of Memphis to host the four free workshops, which will introduce audiences to the diverse art of the Latin community in Mississippi.
Participants will have the opportunity to create unique pieces of folk art while learning about the archival materials that document social and cultural life for early migrants. Additionally, the audience will have a chance to discuss the contemporary experiences of Latinos based on oral history interviews and ethnographic fieldwork conducted by anthropologists Simone Delerme and Michael Perez. The audience will learn about how Latinos are being incorporated into social and cultural life in Mississippi, the challenges articulated by oral history narrators from a 2020 collection on Latinos in Oxford, and the strategies for preserving elements of Latin American and Caribbean culture in their Mississippi communities. These workshops are part of a larger initiative to create an oral history archive at the University of Mississippi that features Latin artists from the region.