2024 Distinguished Alumni Lecture

Please join us in honoring the 2024 UCLA Spanish & Portuguese Distinguished Alumni Lecture Award recipient Dr. Roberto Cantú, Professor Emeritus at California State University, Los Angeles.

The 2024 Distinguished Alumni Lecture topic is “Alfredo Véa’s Gods Go Begging: The War Novel as a Work of Art”. Gods Go Begging consists of fourteen chapters arranged according to temporal and global displacements, framed within the years 1996 (San Francisco, California); 1967-1973 (Vietnam-Hong Kong); 1978 (Alexandria, Louisiana); and back to 1996 (San Francisco). The novel traced as a circle, thus as the World–opens with a crime in a San Francisco hill, investigated by Chicano defense attorney Jesse Pasadoble, followed by flashbacks to Vietnam, and to vivid descriptions of a quintessential battle on a hill near the Laotian border. War trauma thus surges as the novel’s central theme, with an extended subtext laced and blended according to a calendar of seasons (Winter, Spring), and to ancient Greek myths and drama (Persephone, Aristophanes).

The UCLA Spanish & Portuguese Department will host the Distinguished Alumni lecture on Wednesday, February 7, 2024 at 4:30 PM at the UCLA Faculty Club. The lecture will be held in the Hacienda Room.