Ana Celia Zentella, Lang Visiting Professor of Social Change, is a recognized leader in building appreciation for language diversity and respect for language rights. Her research shows that fluency in Spanish and English is both a product and facilitator for students who spend years living and studying on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. It is also the most visible cultural marker of the identity of students who frequently travel between San Diego and Tijuana. Interviews in Spanish and English with eighty transfronterizo college students indicate that, despite their proficient bilingualism, many struggle with language and identity conflicts. The cultural and social obstacles transfronterizos encounter in ESL programs, including criticisms of their Spanish by Mexican citizens and feelings of shame about their Spanish-accented English may undermine their avowed commitment to Spanish. Her research has led her to advocate for educational and governmental language policies in the USA and Mexico that build on the principles of anthro-political linguistics.

The thesis for this talk is borrowed from Mark Wallace's recent book, Finding God in the Singing River: Christianity, Spirit, Nature (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005). His case is that the environmental crisis today is a spiritual crisis because the continued degradation of the earth threatens the fundamental interconnections that bind human beings to one another and to all other forms of life. If the root of the environmental problem is spiritual at its core, it is also the case, ironically, that a central answer to the problem lies in a rehabilitation of the earth-friendly teachings within the theological tradition that has at times been most openly hostile to nature, namely, the Christian tradition. Religiously speaking, he suggests that hope for a renewed earth is best founded on belief in God as Earth Spirit, the benevolent, all-encompassing divine force within the universe who inhabits earth community and continually works to maintain the integrity of all forms of life. This idea of God as carnal Spirit who imbues all things is the linchpin for forging a green spirituality responsive to the environmental needs of our time. In this formulation, God is not the invisible Sky God who exists in a heavenly realm far removed from earthly concern, but the Earth God who indwells the land and flows with natural processes.

Peter Schmidt teaches U.S. literature and history and is also Chair of the Department of English Literature. The talk is drawn from his current book project, scheduled for publication in 2007: Brier-Patch: Fictions of Race and Nation in the New South, 1865-1920. Mark Twain criticized American expansionism in the Caribbean and the Pacific in the 1890s and after, which justified itself as racial uplift and the liberation of oppressed peoples into democratic modernity. He pointed out how hypocritical and contradictory such projects were, given immense racial inequality and violence at home. Twain also raged against how democratizing projects abroad were often covers for the expansionof corporate power, not democratic values. Needless, to say, Twain's comments have a disturbing relevance to current events, as is discussed at the end of the talk. Twain's opinions are also juxtaposed against a representative sampling of other writers of his time, so that you can get a sense of the wide range of opinions regarding "regime change" in the name of democracy that existed during this period.