An analyst from the National Security Archive and scholars from Duke and New York universities take part in the Bates College symposium Latin American Revolutions in afternoon and evening sessions on Wednesday and Thursday, March 9 and 10.

Hosted by the Latin American studies faculty, with support from the Mellon Innovation Fund, the symposium is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact 207-786-8295.

Sibylle Fischer, associate professor and chair of the Spanish and Portuguese department at New York University, offers the lecture Haiti and the Revolutions in Spanish America at 4:15 p.m. Wednesday, March 9, in Room 204, Carnegie Science Hall, 44 Campus Ave.

At 7:30 p.m. that day, Jocelyn Olcott, associate professor of history at Duke University, gives a talk titled Soldiers, Suffragists and Sex Radicals: Women, Gender and the Mexican Revolution, also in Carnegie 204.

Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive who directs the archive’s Cuba and Chile Documentation Projects, presents the lecture The Cuban Revolution: 50 Years of Bedeviling U.S. Foreign Policy at 4:15 p.m. Thursday, March 10, in the Keck Classroom (G52) in Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk).

Concluding the symposium is a roundtable discussion with the three guest speakers on the theme Latin America’s Many Revolutions at 7:30 p.m. that day, also in the Keck Classroom.

Fischer’s scholarship covers, among other areas, Caribbean and Latin American literatures in Spanish, Portuguese and French; 19th-century culture and politics; the intersections of literature, dictatorship and philosophy; and the Black Atlantic.

Olcott researches the feminist history of modern Mexico. Her first book, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Duke University Press, 2005) explores questions of gender and citizenship in the 1930s. She is also a co-editor of “Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico” (Duke University Press, 2006).

Olcott is working on two book-length projects: a history of the 1975 UN International Women’s Year Conference in Mexico City, under contract with Oxford University Press; and a biography of the activist and folksinger Concha Michel. She is also developing a long-term project on the labor, political and conceptual history of motherhood in 20th-century Mexico.

The National Security Archive is an independent, nongovernmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University. Kornbluh was co-director of the Iran-Contra documentation project and director of the archive’s project on U.S. policy toward Nicaragua. Through the 1990s, he taught at Columbia University as an adjunct assistant professor of international and public affairs.

He is the author, editor or co-editor of several National Security Archive books, including Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba (The New Press, 1998) and The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (The New Press, 2004), which the Los Angeles Times selected as a “best book of the year.”

Kornbluh’s articles have been published in Foreign Policy, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and many other journals and newspapers. He has appeared on national broadcasts including 60 Minutes, The Charlie Rose Show, Nightline, All Things Considered and Fresh Air with Terry Gross. He has also worked on and appeared in numerous documentary films, including the Oscar-winning Panama Deception.

Readers: Please note that the schedule and location for Global Lens film screenings have changed: The Saturday screenings have been moved to Mondays at 6 p.m., and the new location for all screenings is the Ronj, the student-run coffeehouse at 32 Frye St.

The Global Lens series of films from around the world continues at Bates with Becloud by Mexican director Alejandro Gerber Bicecci, showing at 8 p.m. Friday, Sept. 24, and 6 p.m. Monday, Sept. 27, at the Ronj, Bates’ student-run coffeehouse, 32 Frye St.

Hosted by the Bates College Museum of Art, the series continues on Fridays and Saturdays throughout the fall. Admission is $5. Becloud is in Spanish with English subtitles (111 min.). For more information, please contact 207-786-6135 or this olinarts@bates.edu.

Set in 1960s Mexico, Bicecci’s film depicts a tangled neighborhood tale filled with an enthralling mix of history, memory and atonement, creating an unexpected parable of modern Mexico itself.

A trucker and his neighbors Felipe and Andres share a defining incident from their childhood, linking the destinies of their entire neighborhood to an infant found by the trucker and his companion in a dry lake bed years earlier.

Bicecci, a prolific producer of documentaries and short films, graduated cum laude from the Film Training Center in Mexico City and has received numerous grants and fellowships for filmmaking and screenwriting. Made in 2009, Becloud is his first feature film. His documentary Morada won the Golden Mikeldi at the Bilbao International Film Festival and is screened worldwide.

The Global Film Initiative produces the series in an effort to promote cross-cultural understanding through the medium of cinema by showing little-known, skillfully made independent films to American audiences. The initiative believes that “a powerful, authentic narrative can foster trust and respect between disparate cultures and mitigate the social and psychological impact of cultural prejudice.”

Here’s the remainder of the 2010 Global Lens schedule at Bates:

Gods (2008): Peruvian director Josue Mendez focuses on the soon-to-be wife of a wealthy industrialist who is eager to shed her working-class background for the opulence of her fiance’s elite lifestyle, but instead finds the ironic contrasts of fate and ambition (Oct. 1 and 4).

Masquerades (2008): This heartfelt comedy starring and directed and co-written by Lyes Salem centers around a gardener in a dusty Algerian village who dreams of improving his family’s fortune and marrying off his narcoleptic sister to a “real gentleman” — but she has other plans (Oct. 8 and 11).

Leo’s Room (2009): Director Enrique Buchichio’s film is a coming-of-age story set in the heart of Montevideo, Uruguay, about an affable but secretly troubled young man who is forced by a chance reunion with a classmate to consider the true meaning of his reclusive lifestyle (Oct. 15 and 18).

My Tehran For Sale (2009): Iranian director Granaz Moussavi depicts a terminally ill actress fighting for political asylum, and waiting to clear Australian immigration, as she recounts to an unsympathetic official her attempts to live, work and love in Tehran’s thriving yet turbulent arts subculture. (Oct. 29 and Nov. 1)

Ocean of an Old Man (2008): Set in the devastating aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Indian director Rajesh Shera’s feature debut portrays an elderly British schoolteacher coming to grips with his own loss as he searches for missing students on the remote Indian islands of Andaman and Nicobar. (Nov. 5 and 8).

Ordinary People (2009): Serbian director Vladimir Perisic tells the story of a young soldier who, one quiet afternoon during an unspecified conflict in the Balkans, is forced to come to a painful reconciliation with his own actions after following orders to execute civilians (Nov. 12 and 15).

The Shaft (2008): Director Zhang Chi’s wise and poetic debut comprises three intertwined stories about a father, son and daughter fighting to hold onto hope and family as they face the harsh realities of life in a poor Chinese mining town. (Dec. 3 and 6).

Shirley Adams (2009): In this deeply affecting portrait of ordinary courage in present-day South Africa by director Oliver Hermanus, a single mother struggles to care for her paraplegic teenage son in a depressed district on the outskirts of Cape Town (Dec. 10 and 13).

Seniors Erica Montgomery and Sara Tichenor spent the summer of 1995 analyzing the structural geology and aqueous geochemistry of the ground water aquifers in Zimapán, Mexico. They were working under the direction of Lois Ongley, a professor of geology at Bates, Aurora Armienta (National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico), Alison Lathrop (Millersville University, Pa.) and Helen Mango (Castleton State College, Vt.).

The drinking water in Zimapán has an average arsenic concentration of 0.3 mg/L. The World Health Organization drinking water standard is 0.05 mg/L. The residents of Zimapán are beginning to show ill health effects of chronic arsenic poisoning which include skin cancer and kidney and liver disease. Montgomery and Tichenor are trying to determine the source of the arsenic and the pathway by which it enters the groundwater supply.

Montgomery made a geologic map of the area of El Muhi, near the public water supply well with the highest concentration of arsenic (1.1 mg/L). Tichenor was part of a team that sought out sources of drinking water (wells and springs) to analyze the water chemistry. A significant result of this work is that the municipal authorities have closed the El Muhi well and opened another, the San Pedro Profundo, whose water has much less arsenic (0.006 mg/L).

Montgomery, a resident of Lancaster, Pa., plans to become a secondary school teacher after graduation. Tichenor, from Washington, D.C., is planning a career in geochemistry.