Overview

The conference begins with a welcome dinner/bacchanal before participants rush back to their houses or posadas to reread theory readings for the first theory panel the following morning.

Every full day includes breakfast, one morning session, lunch, and one afternoon session. Each session lasts 2-2.5 hours. Depending on how many people wind up attending, there will be between three and four individual mesas running during each session. Each mesa will consist of two or three paper presenters; two or three assigned commentators (discussants); and a dominatrix (moderator) to introduce and keep the queue. Then everyone else with an interest in that mesa’s theme who has read the posted items for that mesa participates, usually between ten and twenty people total.

Readings will be posted in a Dropbox folder before the conference. Panelists have three to five minutes to frame their essays; discussants have seven minutes each to start the discussion off with their prepared comments (and sometimes the discussants have met beforehand informally to plan a little). Then the discussion is thrown open.

A few sessions during the week will be devoted to discussing common “big picture” readings to get a theoretical lingua franca in place for the whole conference. (In previous years, for example, we have read essays by Juan Flores, Stuart Hall, Saidiya Hartman, Julio Ramos, and Edward Said.) There will be assigned commentators and dominatrixes for these “big picture” sessions as well as the participant essay sessions.

There is one whole day off in the middle of the conference, usually Sunday, and plenty of down time in the later afternoons and evenings. Otherwise, the conference really hinges on full commitment to the sessions. Please don’t plan on drifting in and out—the effect is truly cumulative. Non-participant significant others and self-guided offspring have had a good time in the past, and can count on joining us for meals and social events. Many years we are very lucky to have yoga sessions and hikes to the Tepozteco at the end of the afternoon panel.

Language

People should feel free to speak in the language in which they feel comfortable.

If you are not bilingual, please find someone in the mesa who can help to translate quietly for you during the session.

Housing

Since there is nowhere in town big enough to house us all together, we are distributed in various sites within walking distance from one another, in groups from about six to twenty-four.

Each house has been assigned a “camp counselor” whose job it is to cultivate harmony and to oversee logistics. ALL QUESTIONS AND CONCERNS REGARDING HOUSING SHOULD FIRST BE DIRECTED TO YOUR CAMP COUNSELOR.

The camp counselor will also:
           1)  oversee the availability of, and, where possible, obtain household necessities (toilet paper!)
           2)  keep Alan Shane Dillingham, Housing Equipo Jefx, informed of early departures or housing changes.

The conference provides Wednesday night's arrival supper; breakfast every morning at one of two sites; a large Mexican comida (mid-day dinner) every day at the conference center; and a light supper Saturday night for the party and cabaret at the conference center.

Most housing sites have a kitchen or are within walking distance of one for your supper, and all are an easy walk to downtown restaurants or market stalls. 

See our travel guide for Tepoztlán restaurant recommendations.

Modes of Participation

Category A: No paper. A participant in this category, in honorable Institute tradition, posts no paper but simply is available as dominatrix (moderator) or commentator. This is a perfectly respected, productive, highly enjoyable way to participate in the Institute.

Category B: Paper programmed into a scheduled session. This participant will also dominatrix and/or comment.

Please read all of the papers for all of the sessions you plan on attending. The expectation is that you will participate actively in the discussions. This is not a conference where people perform. It is a dialogue in all senses of the word. Additionally, each panel has a set of roles that you may be asked to perform:

Dominatrix: You are in charge of keeping the discussion fair and orderly during the session. Make sure that the presenters and commentators stay within their time limits and that certain people do not dominate the session. Keep a list of people who raise their hand in the discussion. If people have not spoken in a session and they want to speak, move them to the front of the line.

Presenting a paper: Please provide a three- to five-minute description of where the project is at, how it contributes to the general conversation at the institute, and what you are looking for from readers

Commenting: Prepare a maximum of seven minutes of comments that reflect on the main aspects of the essays and raise some questions for the group—and the authors, if these are essays by participants—to consider. Make the comments generative for the group discussion.

Institute participants have 2 options for participation.

Every participant serves as respondent (commentator) and/or facilitator (dominatrix) 1-3 times during the week of the Institute.

Some serve in those capacities only, and do not submit a paper (Category A). Others submit a paper to be scheduled into a programmed session, where it will be critiqued by a commentator and discussed by the group as a whole (Category B).

Childcare & Partners

Tepoz is a great place to bring a partner, companion, or kids. Childcare / kid camp is provided for the kids during the hours of the seminar, at one of the conference housing sites. We are family friendly.

Please be sure you have included information about your kids on your application; if you need to change that, email tepoinstitute@gmail.com. Please be in touch now if you have particular concerns about your kids in Tepoztlán.

Since the early years of the Tepoztlán Institute, there has been an element of humor and play, beyond the music and dancing, during the traditional Saturday party. This non-normative playfulness began as brief theatrical sketches and has grown to be an important component of what we do as a week-long institute. Artistic engagement with the theoretical readings and the papers discussed during the institute is seen as a community-building activity that centers the embodiment of collective forms of producing, sharing and exchanging knowledge outside traditional academic formats. In past years, this activity took the form of residential groups writing and designing an original cabaret-style performance based on our theoretical readings and discussions and performing this during the conference party on Saturday night.  
 
Originally, this activity took the form of several important traditions in Mexico, honoring the location of the Institute. One of the main dramatic genres used by the Instituto was the “cabaret”—a bricolage of creative and artistic expressions, usually staged, that has been an important form of political artivism in Mexico. Indigenous historical and political performances have also taken place in Tepoztlán during the various protests (against the golf club, against the expansion of the autopista) where theatricality has been used as an effective form to voice dissent. In other words, through cabaret performance the Tepoztlán Institute is taking cues from the rich traditions of embodied practices that are locally and regionally situated in order to collectively re-imagine resistance and protest. Humor and playfulness have been key to address, confront and survive extremely difficult and oppressive experiences in Latin America, as well as in other regions and cultural traditions of the world.
 
In recent years, participants have argued for widening the scope of this activity to include other artistic and cultural traditions and to be open to other aesthetic sensibilities, including individual or group activities that participants consider to be creative, artistic, and / or freely interpretative. We encourage all participants to bring some ideas for presenting one or more themes of the conference; and to work in cooperation with one another in the fashioning of a (re)presentation that can be shared with the group on the evening of our fiesta, which celebrates our gathering with food, music, dance, and carousing.
 
Participation in the creative/ artistic event includes a wide range of possibilities, such as: performing as an actor, singer, dancer, visual artist; assisting other performers with props used during the performance; putting together and/or playing the music playlist for your group’s performance; assisting in the design of costumes or special visual or sound effects used during the performance; helping the group to find materials and props at the various local markets; assistance writing the scripts, lyrics for songs, or helping in choreographing and/or blocking scenes for  the performance; supporting performances as an enthusiastic and devoted member of the audience, etc. Each member of the group decides which of these options works best for him/her/them. Even though participation is voluntary, we would like to invite participants to support this component of the conference in a way that feels comfortable for them.
 
Acting up and out is always welcome at the Tepoztlán Institute. We especially encourage participants to do so with a sense of good faith and good will in the collective friendship and solidarity of our intellectual endeavors. Good faith and good will are critical components of this process. In the attempt to translate serious, traumatic, and often triggering historical readings and theoretical frameworks into a performance, it is likely that suggestions will be made which in one cultural context may be acceptable and in another appear insensitive and hurtful. This exercise of collective creativity requires participants to listen to each other, to have empathy, to attempt to understand the difficulty of cultural translation, and to ultimately err on the side of not causing pain to our comrades through inflexibility. We are here not simply to learn from reading and writing, but also from each other.