Join us for a talk hosted by LACS with with Lorena Ojeda-Dávila (Yale University and Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo)!
Lunch Provided!
This talk examines how the Purépecha Night of the Dead changes as a community ritual enters circuits of heritage designation, tourism, digital circulation, and transnational visual consumption. It argues that the celebration is a contested space where devotional and community, state heritage, tourist and commercial, and audiovisual and digital values intersect. Rather than treating commodification simply as the sale of culture, the proposal asks how these changes affect control over ritual time, access to communal spaces, and authority to tell the community's story. It also considers how communities respond through regulation, negotiation, and resistance, and explores the tension between lived ritual and media spectacle.
Lorena Ojeda-Dávila is a Professor and Researcher at the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolas de Hidalgo in Mexico and a Level II member of Mexico's National System of Researchers. Her research focuses on cultural heritage, social movements, and Purepecha communities, particularly Indigenous self-government, autonomy, resistance, and relationships with the state. She holds a PhD in Latin American History and Indigenous Worlds from Universidad Pablo de Olavide and an MA in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. A Fulbright-Garcia Robles scholar, she conducted postdoctoral research at UC Berkeley and held Fulbright-Garcia Robles Chairs in Mexican Studies at the University of New Mexico in 2019 and Yale University in 2025. She returned to Yale as a visiting professor in fall 2026. She has published individual and collaborative research and led funded research projects in Mexico and internationally.