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Abstract: A global pandemic, terrifying and unpredictable weather, ongoing political and economic turmoil, too much suffering and grief in the face of death. These past few years have felt apocalyptic for so many. Although we often take the Apocalypse to mean the end of the world, we are not the first generation (nor are we likely to be the last), to wonder, is this it? From Guadalupe in Los Angeles to cries of "apocalyptic devastation" in the wake of Hurricane María, in this talk, we examine a few case studies of Latina/o/x literary responses to environmental catastrophe, and we consider what these literary responses tell us about the Book of Revelation and five hundred years of living with the Apocalypse in the Americas.
About: Jacqueline M. Hidalgo is Professor of Latina/o/x Studies and Religion as well as Director of the Oakley Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences at Williams College, where she has previously served as chair of Religion; chair of Latina/o Studies; and associate dean for Institutional Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. A past president of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States (ACHTUS) as well as the New England/Eastern Canada Region of the Society of Biblical Literature, she is the author of Latina/o/x Studies and Biblical Studies in Brill Research Perspectives in Biblical Interpretation 3.4 (2020), as well as Revelation in Aztlán: Scriptures, Utopias, and the Chicano Movement (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). With Efraín Agosto, she also co-edited the collection of essays Latinxs, the Bible, and Migration (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). She is a student of scriptures as human social phenomena with particular interests in how and why certain Latina/o/x communities make, contest, and refashion their own scriptures. As a consequence, she examines the intersections of scriptures, apocalypticism, utopianism, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, class, and religion relationally in the U.S. and in relationship to deep histories in the Americas and the ancient Mediterranean.
