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​How much is my registration fee?

Please see the extensive information on the website under fee structure.

What does my fee cover?

The fee to participate in the Tepoztlán Institute covers an intensive week of workshops, presentations, performances, and other activities, seven days of housing and meals (breakfast and lunch, as well as a dinner on the opening night and at the cabaret), translations of most common readings, simultaneous translation, and logistics coordination. We are an all-volunteer force—all of the co-directors and collective members work for free, all year long. We constantly seek institutional memberships to keep participant costs low. For the rest, we need your registration fees

Can I get a fee reduction?

The Institute is committed to helping Latin America-based scholars and activists and U.S.-based activists to participate in the week-long programming, so these applicants are encouraged to note fee reduction requests in the relevant place on the application. Please explain the circumstances that require you to request a fee reduction. After the application is accepted, please direct questions to tepoinstitute@gmail.com. We will do all we can to determine a fee that is attentive and responsive to your financial circumstances. There are no fee reductions for partial attendance or for arranging independent housing. All accepted participants must attend the full week of the Institute's activities, without exceptions.

Can I get a travel grant?

Latin America-based participants may request travel grants. Please do so in the indicated place on your application. You must request these grants in the application as we allocate our monies then; no request after the admission phase can be granted. Please calculate your costs and request a specific amount based on the cheapest reasonable travel options available to you (e.g., no taxis from DF to Tepo, please!).

How do I pay?

Go to the how to pay page for more details and for credit card forms. You can pay with a credit card or by check. By check: Mail a check made out to Lewis & Clark College for the registration fee to Lisa Wilson/Tepoztlán Institute, Lewis & Clark College, MSC 63, 615 S Palatine Hill Road, Portland, Oregon 97219, USA. All fees must be received NO LATER THAN the established day in the Tepoztlán Institute's calendar. Please plan ahead!

What if I don’t have a credit card or checks?

Please give cash to a friend or colleague with checks or a credit card and have them send payment on your behalf.

What if I need time to work out my payment?

Please email tepoinstitute@gmail.com in advance, before the established date for payment, to let us know if you need to work out your form of payment. We can accept late payments up to a certain point, but only if arranged in advance.

LOGISTICS

How do I get to Tepoztlán?

Please see While in Tepoztlán.

What are the different modes of participation?

Institute participants have two options for participation. Every participant serves as a respondent, facilitator, and/or interlocutor, 1-3 times during the Institute week. Some serve in those capacities only, and do not submit a paper (Category A). Some submit a paper to be scheduled into a programmed session, where commentators will offer brief responses and the group as a whole will discuss it (Category B).

  • A – No paper.  A participant in this category, in honorable Institute tradition, posts no paper but simply makes herself available as dominatrix (moderator), commentator, and full session discussant.  This is a perfectly respected, productive, highly enjoyable way to participate in the Institute.  We need just over half the participants to opt for this category.
  • B – Paper programmed into a scheduled session.  This participant will also dominatrix and/or comment.  ​

Where can I find the theory readings?

The theory readings will be made available to participants in a Dropbox folder. Make sure you have an account (www.dropbox.com)! If you have problems accessing the readings, please email us at tepoinstitute@gmail.com.

What are the guidelines for papers?

25 pages or less, notation style of your choice. Saved as Word or PDF files, carefully labeled with “Author(s) last name(s) + Tepo16.” In the actual text, please begin with your title, name and affiliation, contact information and an informal, short preface connecting your piece explicitly to the conference theme and one or more of the shared theory readings.
Please include a short (2-3 sentence) explanation of what type of work it is (an article, chapter, work in progress, and so forth) to orient the reader.

Where are the participant papers, and when and where should I send my paper?

In a Dropbox folder. Papers are due by May 23, and you will receive access information by email ahead of the April 23 deadline for uploading abstracts. If it is after April 23 and you have not received that information, please email tepoinstitute@gmail.com and we will resend. Only admitted participants have access to the papers, and participants are asked to use the papers uploaded there as works in progress, not to be circulated or cited without permission from the author.

How should I format my paper for the Dropbox folder?

Word or pdf files. 25-page limit (double-spaced). Citations and notes in the style of your choice. Label your document with the author(s)’s last name + Tepo16. Examples: YoungTepo16.pdf, PeñaNietoTepo16.docx, ShakiraTepo16.pdf (for people who go by one name and have hips that don’t lie. If you have two documents, use last name plus an identifying word. Examples: BriggsEmpireTepo16.pdf, BriggsImágenesTepo16.pdf). In the actual text, please begin with your title, name and affiliation, contact information and an informal, short preface connecting your piece explicitly to the conference theme and one or more of the shared theory readings. Please include a short (2-3 sentence) explanation of what type of work it is (an article, chapter, work in progress, and so forth) to orient the reader.

Is there a page limit?

Oh yes! No more than 25 pages. If your submission is longer than 25 double-spaced pages, we will ask you to reduce it to the allowed length.

SUBSTANCE

Should I read everything beforehand?

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 (this information is distributed in the conference program in advance):
  • If you are 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.
  • If you are 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 the readers.
  • If you are 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 ithese are essays by participants—to consider. Make the comments generative for the group discussion.

Do I have to read all the theory articles?

Yes. These texts set the tone for the entire conference and our exploration of the theme. What separates Tepoz from other conferences is the spirit of collective and collaborative thinking that characterizes the panels. You will want to have read the theory articles in order to engage with some of the most interesting transnational thinkers.

Who attends this event?

Junior and senior faculty, activists and artists, and advanced graduate students from Latin America, North America, and Europe who come from various fields, including history, literature, area studies, anthropology, gender studies, and performance studies.

Since it was conceived in 2003, the two chief goals of this conference have been, first, to encourage real exchange scholars in Latin America and the United States—typically a very fraught relationship; and, second, to dispense with the professional politicking that reduces so many conferences to livestock shows. Instead, we have deliberately avoided inviting people who seem to be looking for a chance to show off or perform eminence in favor of people interested in having a series of intellectually satisfying, mostly bilingual, democratic seminars for grown-ups who miss being in a peer classroom.

Several points follow from this:
*You should not feel pressure to present your own work.  
*There will be no featured speakers or VIPS.
*Everyone is encouraged to make an ass of him/herself at the annual cabaret and dance party on Saturday night.

Will you have the readings there or should I bring them with me?

We will have a library of hardcopy and electronic versions of all participant papers and theory readings at the conference, but you can also download them to your computer and/or tablets and save some time.

What does a day at the Tepoztlán Institute look like?

Something like kuduro meets electro-cumbia – lively and danceable. 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 (anad 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.

Who organizes this event?

The conference is organized by an international collective divided into equipos and led by a rotating core of Co-Directors.
The conference was founded by Pamela Voekel and Elliott Young in 2003. From the Ethos statement:

Since it was conceived in 2003, the two chief goals of this conference have been, first, to encourage real exchange scholars in Latin America and the United States—typically a very fraught relationship; and, second, to dispense with the professional politicking that reduces so many conferences to livestock shows. Instead, we have deliberately avoided inviting people who seem to be looking for a chance to show off or perform eminence in favor of people interested in having a series of intellectually satisfying, mostly bilingual, democratic seminars for grown-ups who miss being in a peer classroom.

Several points follow from this:
*You should not feel pressure to present your own work.  
*There will be no featured speakers or VIPS.
*Everyone is encouraged to make an ass of him/herself at the annual cabaret and dance party on Saturday night.

Does my work have to be transnational?

Yes, your work has to be transnational in some way, either explicitly or informed by transnational thinking. Commitment to transnational scholarship is at the heart of the Institute.

From the Mission Statement:
Our contemporary world makes increasingly visible that the modern nation is both an ideological and historical construct. The rise of international economic and political blocs like Mercosur, CARICOM, and the Free Trade Area of the Americas; the constraints imposed on individual nations by international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the World Trade Organization; and the United States’s pre-emptive military interventions against sovereign nations: all of these have forced historians to consider the centrality of transnationalism to the history of the modern nation state. Scholars of transnational phenomena foreground the circulation of people, culture, and capital operating on registers both greater and smaller than the nation state. Much of the recent debate around "globalization" views it as a new phenomenon, but the origins of this global order stretch back at least to the nineteenth century, and arguably to the sixteenth-century emergence of global capitalism. This institute will grapple with the roots of the new global order through the collaborative creation of transnational histories of the Americas.  

Students in graduate programs mostly continue to receive country- and region-specific training and don't have adequate exposure to transnational history. Added to these impediments, North and Latin American scholarly communities have few opportunities for dialogue, and the rhythm of work at international conferences does not make for fruitful dialogue.   This Institute will facilitate an intensive dialogue between North American and Latin American graduate students and junior and senior faculty members.

Do I have to be a historian to attend?

No. Participants come from a number of disciplines. One need not be a historian to apply. In fact, the collective is composed of scholars of History, English, Spanish and Portuguese Literature, American Studies, Latino Studies, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Performance Studies, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, and Comparative Literature. The transnational and transdisciplinary collaborations—and all other things trans- —that develop in the course of the conference challenge the historical roots of globalization.  

Is there Internet there?

The main conference center has reliable WIFI internet, and the houses and posadas where you stay also have access.

CHILDCARE/PARTNERS

Can I bring a partner, companion, or kids?

Absolutely. Tepoz is a great place to bring a partner, companion, or kids. Childcare is provided for the dependent kids during the hours of the seminar, either at a local language school or at the conference site for kids under 3.5 years. 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. Check the website for more information about the kids camp and about childcare more generally. Please be in touch now if you have particular concerns about your kids in Tepoztlán.

CABARET

What is the cabaret?

If past years are an indication, many of you are closet (or out) performers. Tepoz gives you a chance to shine at our now legendary cabaret as well as to put the fun back into learning. (Humor can be a powerful pedagogical tool!) Music and dancing follow the performances that various houses organize as a group. So bring dance music, wigs, and any props that will fit in an overhead bin.