The Latino Studies Program (LSP) at Cornell is welcoming two prominent guest speakers in October and is celebrating Latino Heritage Month with its annual Unity Dinner.

• Tuesday, Oct. 26, Albert Camarillo, director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University, will speak at 5 p.m. in 122 Rockefeller Hall. Camarillo's lecture, titled "Reflections on the Development of Latino Studies," is free and open to the public.
• Friday, Oct. 29, Suzanne Oboler will address the Seventh Annual Unity Dinner at 5:30 p.m. on the third floor of Noyes Center on West Campus. Oboler, associate professor of ethnic studies and American studies at Brown University, will deliver a talk titled "Confronting Differences in the Latino/a Struggle for Unity." Entertainment will be provided by the Sabor Latino Dance Ensemble and Teatrotaller. Tickets for the event, which is open to the public, are $5 and can be purchased from the LSP office in 434 Rockefeller Hall.

The arrival of Camarillo and Oboler initiates a yearlong series of campus events that will address the development of Latino Studies and its role in the university, said Pedro Cab‡n, director of the LSP at Cornell.

"Professor Camarillo is a pre-eminent scholar of Mexican-American history who has been a major intellectual force for the development of Latino studies in the United States," said Cab‡n. "Professor Suzanne Oboler, a highly respected scholar, has made important contributions to the theoretical discourse on the construction of national identities and ethnic labels."

In addition to their lectures, Oboler and Camarillo will meet with students and faculty to share their experiences in promoting Latino studies in the academy.

Oboler is the author of Ethnic Label, Latino Lives: Identity and the Politics of (Re)presentation of the United States (University of Minnesota Press, 1995) and has written numerous articles on the Latino/a experience in the United States.

Camarillo has published six books and more than a dozen articles dealing with the experience of Mexican-Americans and other racial and immigrant groups in American cities: Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios (Harvard University Press, 1979) is now in its sixth printing; Chicanos in California: A History of Mexican Americans is now in its fourth printing. His research and writing awards include a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship.

For more information, contact Marti Dense at the LSP office, (607) 255-3197.