08/28/2026
🌿🛢️ How did oil become part of the way we imagine, produce, and consume the world around us?
Join us for a fascinating talk by Prof. Emily Hind exploring the relationship between plants, oil, film, and consumption in two Mexican works from the 1930s.
“Plants on Oil: The Process Story in Petróleo ¡la sangre del mundo! (1936) and the Consumption Model in Los millones de Chaflán (1938)”
🗓️ Friday, September 18
🕑 2:00 to 4:00 p.m.
📍VC101
How did we come to saturate our plants with myriad forms of oil? This talk looks at a documentary from 1936, produced for Mexican audiences by foreign oil companies, with photography by Gabriel Figueroa, which aims to court favor for oil culture—or, better put—plants on oil culture. After all, humans cannot live on oil alone; we must have plants. To understand the elisions in the process story of oil extraction, the talk also examines the feature film “Los millones de Chaflán”(1938), which invites the audience to laugh at the bumpkin or jay role and to suppose that even rural rubes embrace the logic of combining plants and oil. As we examine the curtailed logic in these parallel process narratives and consumption proposals, we will consider how the ideas are foundational.
Emily Hind is a Professor of Spanish at the University of Florida, where she was voted Professor of the Year four times by graduate students in the Hispanic literature program. Hind’s “Dude Lit” (2019) received honorable mention for Best Book in the Humanities 2019 from the Mexico Section of the Latin American Studies Association. She translated “Macholiteratura” (2025). Her third book of interviews (2020) gathers 22 conversations with writers and editors of children’s and young adult literature in Mexico. She is currently working on a book for Vanderbilt University Press, “Plants on Oil in Mexican Texts”, 1936–2021.
We hope you can join us for this thought-provoking exploration of oil, plants, cinema, and Mexican cultural history!
