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Enabling Difficult Conversations: Transborder Nahualismos
November 12, 2025 | 5:30–7:00 PM | Contemplative Sciences Center
The Enabling Difficult Conversations series is designed to bring artists, scholars, and the public into conversation around urgent and often challenging issues. Hosted by the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, the series creates open, inclusive spaces where diverse perspectives can be heard, examined, and respected.
On November 12, the series continues with a special screening of Transborder Nahualismos and related short films by UVA faculty artist and filmmaker Federico Cuatlacuatl. Commissioned by the College of Arts & Sciences’ Global Spanish, this new work combines transborder—movement across cultural and political boundaries—with nahualismos, drawn from Mesoamerican Indigenous traditions of the nahual, a shapeshifting spiritual counterpart tied to identity and ancestry. Together, the title reflects both the literal experiences of migration and the deeper cultural and spiritual transformations that occur in border spaces.
Cuatlacuatl’s experimental films use Indigenous storytelling, visual sovereignty, and the realities of migration to confront questions of belonging, displacement, and cultural survival. His work invites audiences to reflect on how art can spark dialogue about sovereignty and memory—subjects that are deeply personal yet globally resonant.
Following the screening, a panel of artists and scholars will guide a conversation about how Indigenous and transnational voices use art as resistance, healing, and truth-telling. Rather than offering easy answers, this event uses art as inspiration to “enable” conversations that are often difficult: conversations about colonial legacies, the politics of borders, and what it means to belong in contested cultural and national spaces.
This program is part of Global Week at UVA, a celebration of international perspectives and cross-cultural dialogue across Grounds. Transborder Nahualismos will also be featured at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts as part of the Pocahontas Reframed Film Festival on November 22, 2025, further extending its reach beyond Grounds.