BY SUSANNA SHARPE An image is a bridge between evoked emotion and conscious knowledge; words are cables that hold up the bridge. —Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 1987 When Chicana author, cultural theorist, and feminist Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa died in 2004, she … [Read more...]
Faculty and Staff Profiles, Fall 2017
BY SUSANNA SHARPE Pilar Zazueta In 2012, Mexico attained the dubious distinction of becoming the world’s number one consumer of soft drinks, passing previous first-place holder the United States. And although Mexico is no longer in first place (Argentina now claims that title), the increasing … [Read more...]
Cardenal in Hard Times
BY LUIS E. CÁRCAMO-HUECHANTE Leer en español It was the winter of 1979. I was already in my fourth year of high school in Valdivia, in southern Chile, when my literature teacher surprised my class by bringing in a record player. As she turned it on, a singular voice came out, with an accent … [Read more...]
Reading the First Books: Colonial Mexican Documents in the Digital Age
BY HANNAH ALPERT-ABRAMS AND MARIA VICTORIA FERNANDEZ In 1595, in Mexico City, the Jesuit priest Antonio del Rincón (1555–1601) published a grammatical description of the Nahuatl language. Though other grammars of Nahuatl existed, Rincón’s Arte mexicana was the first to describe the indigenous … [Read more...]
Love, Cacao, and Chocolate’s Mesoamerican Origins
By PILAR ZAZUETA No other Western holiday is more closely identified with chocolate than Valentine’s Day. The seasonal aisles in stores and supermarkets are filled with chocolate, and food companies spend vast sums of advertising dollars trying to persuade us to celebrate by consuming it in large … [Read more...]
Interview with Ernesto Cardenal
In spring 2016, José Montelongo, librarian at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, visited the home of Father Ernesto Cardenal in Managua, Nicaragua. The occasion was the recent acquisition of Father Cardenal's personal papers, an archive that now resides at the Benson. In these excerpts … [Read more...]
Rethinking Maya Studies: A Conversation with Ruud van Akkeren
BY SUSANNA SHARPE It is hard not to feel moved when talking to Ruud van Akkeren about his research. In such a conversation, it quickly becomes clear that Van Akkeren has his own nuanced, and possibly revolutionary, way of understanding Maya past and present in Guatemala, and that he doesn’t … [Read more...]
Architecture Through the Lens
Faculty and students at LLILAS Benson train their cameras on Latin American architectural gems old and new. Here is a sample of images from Brazil and Mexico, with more to come. … [Read more...]
García Márquez’s Pentimenti
BY JOSÉ MONTELONGO On the morning of November 24, 2014, The New York Times published the news that The University of Texas at Austin had acquired the papers of Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez. A few months earlier, Stephen Enniss, director of the university’s Harry Ransom Center, and … [Read more...]
