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Orlando Lara is a 2025-2026 Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. As a scholar, Orlando melds legal and political anthropology , medical anthropology , and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from UC Irvine (2025) and an MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell (2011). Grounded in the Rio Grande V alley and Houston, Orlando Lara’s current work focuses on the growth of new forms of identity precarity through the interrogation and denial of core state identity documents such as US birth certificates and passports.
Bureaucratic Coyotaje, Narrative Fugitivity, and the Liminality of Belonging
Invited Speaker: Orlando Lara
When: Monday, September 28, 2:30PM-4:30PM
Where: CCP Anthroplogy Reading Room (AAPB 230)
Since the mid-2000s, the US Department of State has systematically denied US passports to tens of thousands of Mexican Americans on the grounds that their births may have been fraudulently registered by midwives or home birth attendants. In the past two decades, this bureaucratic suspicion has focused especially on the Southeast region of Texas. Using a “suspected birth
attendant” list first created in the mid-1990s by the Nationality and Immigration Service (INS), federal and state officials have “flagged” a growing number of US birth certificates registered between the mid-20th century and the early 2000s, producing a new category of precarious citizen, the native-born “citizen-in-question.” The legal and procedural shifts that have made these acts of securitization possible presage the more recent efforts to reconfigure birthright citizenship through executive action.
In this talk, Dr. Orlando Lara places the practices that federal and state officials have criminalized in the context of rapidly shifting biometric regimes within a larger trajectory of “bureaucratic coyotaje,” processes that marginalized and often colonized communities use to carve channels of mobility and belonging through unequal bureaucratic regimes. Focusing on the challenges of self-narration that people encounter when they must navigate complex or dual birth registration histories, Dr. Lara’s presentation challenges the often taken-for-granted binaries of citizenship/non citizenship, legality/illegality , and speech/silence that often animate discussions of “legal status” and political subject formation.
William I.S. Mazzarella writes and teaches on the political anthropology of mass publicity, critical theory, affect and aesthetics, psychoanalysis, ritual and performance, and the occult shadow of the modern. His books include Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary® India (Duke, 2003), Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity. (Duke, 2013), The Mana of Mass Society (Chicago, 2017), and, with Eric Santner and Aaron Schuster, Sovereignty, Inc: Three Inquiries in Politics and Enjgyment (Chicago, 2020). He is also the co-editor, with Raminder Kaur, of Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction (Indiana, 2009), and the editor of K D Katrak: Collected Poems (Poetrywala, 2016). His article 'The Anthropology of Populism: Beyond the Liberal Settlement' appears in the 2019 issue of Annual Review of Anthropology.
Magnetized: A Chronicle of Ethnographic Enchantment
Invited Speaker: William Mazzarella
When: Monday, November 2, 2:00PM-4:00PM
Where: CCP Anthroplogy Reading Room (AAPB 230)
Once upon a time I met a magician undone by their own magic. The meeting itself was brief and, I felt at the time, disappointing. Still, something about it got stuck in me.
This talk is a reflection on the experience of carrying the enigma of an ethnographic encounter for close to three decades, on the form of writing that it would eventually demand, and most generally, on the promise and peril of magnetizing powers.