Demographic changes challenge the cultural narrative about what it means to grow up in and to live in the South. UNC Charlotte’s Center for the Study of the New South looks at these changes in “Growing Up Southern,” a series of 2016-17 events that kicks off with “Puerto Rican Southern Belle: From Harlemworld to Disney World to Mississippi.”
Simone Delerme, the McMullan Assistant Professor of Southern Studies and assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Mississippi, will be the featured speaker for this event, scheduled for Wednesday, Oct. 5, at the Levine Museum of the New South.
Doors will open at 5:30 p.m., and the program will begin at 6 p.m. The event is open to the public without charge, but registration is requested; attendees may tour the museum’s groundbreaking exhibit “¡NUEVOlution! Latinos and the New South” during the evening.
The Oct. 5 talk is part of a "cross-center initiative" between the UNC Charlotte College of Liberal Arts & Sciences’ Center for the Study of the New South and the University of Mississippi's Center for the Study of Southern Culture to explore the role of Latinos in the South. Both centers are hosting events during Hispanic Heritage Month and beyond.
Delerme, who spent her childhood in a Puerto Rican-concentrated area of Harlem, New York, developed an interest in Latin American and Caribbean studies while studying in Havana, Cuba, and on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Shortly after, she began comparative ethnographic fieldwork among Puerto Rican migrants in Delaware and New York. She joined the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at Ole Miss in the fall of 2013. Her research specialization is the anthropology of the contemporary United States, and her latest ethnographic research project examines Latino migration to Memphis, Tennessee, and North Mississippi.