Papers by Eric Chavez
APA STUDIES | HISPANIC/LATINO ISSUES IN PHILOSOPHY, 2022
Ricardo Flores Magón is undoubtedly one of the most contested figures in the history of the Mexic... more Ricardo Flores Magón is undoubtedly one of the most contested figures in the history of the Mexican Revolution. Scholars, such as John Mason Hart categorize the Flores Magón brothers as intellectual precursors to the Mexican Revolution. Other scholars such as Juan Gomez-Quiñones deem the Magonistas as “sembradores;” as sowers of seeds, not just for the Mexican Revolution, but given the transnational persecution and character of the Magonistas, they were also precursors to the Chicano Movement that happened in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet other scholars like Mitchell Cowen Verter and Colin M. MacLachlan place greater emphasis on the European anarchist influence upon the principles of the Magonistas and their political movement, the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM). What is troubling is that neither the historiography nor the historical memory produced by this literature gives any serious consideration to the indigenous influences and indigenous presence within the Flore Magón brothers and the PLM. This revolutionary movement's indigenous influence and presence have been neglected and posited within a European paradigm of anarchy. The PLM’s ideology has incredible emancipatory potential, even for today’s social justice crusaders, but this negligence of its indigenous affinities creates a kind of epistemic injustice against indigenous groups while simultaneously reifying a Eurocentric perspective. Any attempts at decolonization without critically examining our indigenous past, as well as our indigenous present, will undoubtedly revert to a colonizing project. This seems troubling because indigenous people have always been systematically erased from our common knowledge of history. Yet, when indigeneity is mentioned in most history books, it remains as a mere backdrop and a counterpoint for a Eurocentric master narrative of order and progress.
Anecdote on El Paso/Juarez border life.
Jose Vasconcelos is a pre-revolutionary-intellectual pioneer, a philosopher of aesthetics and Mex... more Jose Vasconcelos is a pre-revolutionary-intellectual pioneer, a philosopher of aesthetics and Mexican spiritual beauty, and an advocate for post-revolutionary public education in Mexico.
The contemplation of life, the act of philosophy, the quest, the love and obsession, for understa... more The contemplation of life, the act of philosophy, the quest, the love and obsession, for understanding has done just that: Under-stand. A positing beneath the I; whatever phenomenon appears to us, we automatically place into a category or an imperative that needs to become over-come, at best; and, at worst, simply nominally represented.
MA Thesis by Eric Chavez
Art is one of the most universal and oldest human activities; it is a human impulse rather than a... more Art is one of the most universal and oldest human activities; it is a human impulse rather than a skill. The invention of art and language occurred about 30,000 to 70,000 years ago. This “cognitive revolution”, going from homo sapiens to homo sapien sapiens, gave us the imaginative powers of language and art. No society as far as we know of thus far has been able to live without some form of art. Yet its exact definition is hard to jot down, much less explain. Art’s constant movement, transformations, its disappearances/reappearances, and even its proclaimed “death” throughout history has always challenged the theorists’ and aesthetes’ attempts to capture art’s essence. But art, at is most basic and cruel form, is still just a human expression upon a surface- any surface; a Lebenswelt captured in a Leinwand , that materializes such abstract human expressions into non-superficial and substantive narratives. With graffiti for example, which will be the main focus of this study, both the message and the surface that graffito is painted upon happen to be non-superficial and highly consequential, since graffiti’s own narrative rests upon the socio-political narrative of contemporary property relations and a capitalist mode of production.
Thus, all art forms, especially graffiti art, which is always at risk of being “buffed” by anti-graffiti state programs, are infinitely fleeting and in a state of becoming rather than in a state of being. Therefore, graffiti art must be seen as an open and never totalized process. This infinitely fleeting constitution of graffiti will enable us to understand the movement, separation, and distance necessary for a socially conscious critique of the subject-centered framework of Idealist aesthetics and Positivist epistemology. This critical (dis)stance will further enable a path to initiate my own theory of graffiti as a socially conscious moment in the lived-city.
Conference Presentations by Eric Chavez
This essay traces the evolution of vandalism and trespassing laws in El Paso, Texas from 1945 to ... more This essay traces the evolution of vandalism and trespassing laws in El Paso, Texas from 1945 to 1990 in order to understand how notions of private property, identity, and citizenship were imagined, codified, and then reified by local law enforcement and political structures.
Drafts by Eric Chavez
Since the Scientific Revolution, Western science has donned a disguise of “objectivity”, which se... more Since the Scientific Revolution, Western science has donned a disguise of “objectivity”, which serves to artificially distance itself from any subjective biases or from any social preoccupations. That is, science is science. The social is something else entirely. However, many recent scholars in the philosophy of science have begun to emphasize the role of socio-political issues within the field of scientific rationality, and have begun to question the infallibility of objectivity . A (re)evolution of science and a genuine return to nature is urgent to avoid catastrophe.
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Papers by Eric Chavez
MA Thesis by Eric Chavez
Thus, all art forms, especially graffiti art, which is always at risk of being “buffed” by anti-graffiti state programs, are infinitely fleeting and in a state of becoming rather than in a state of being. Therefore, graffiti art must be seen as an open and never totalized process. This infinitely fleeting constitution of graffiti will enable us to understand the movement, separation, and distance necessary for a socially conscious critique of the subject-centered framework of Idealist aesthetics and Positivist epistemology. This critical (dis)stance will further enable a path to initiate my own theory of graffiti as a socially conscious moment in the lived-city.
Conference Presentations by Eric Chavez
Drafts by Eric Chavez
Thus, all art forms, especially graffiti art, which is always at risk of being “buffed” by anti-graffiti state programs, are infinitely fleeting and in a state of becoming rather than in a state of being. Therefore, graffiti art must be seen as an open and never totalized process. This infinitely fleeting constitution of graffiti will enable us to understand the movement, separation, and distance necessary for a socially conscious critique of the subject-centered framework of Idealist aesthetics and Positivist epistemology. This critical (dis)stance will further enable a path to initiate my own theory of graffiti as a socially conscious moment in the lived-city.