BY MEGAN RABY At the end of 1960, near Cienfuegos, Cuba, on the Soledad estate of a US-owned sugar company, the American Director and Cuban staff of Harvard’s Atkins Institution began packing up their scientific equipment. The Cuban Revolution had caught up with them. Director Ian Duncan Clement, … [Read more...]
Faculty Spotlight: Jason Borge
BY SUSANNA SHARPE In his new book, Tropical Riffs: Latin America and the Politics of Jazz (Duke, 2018), Jason Borge uses jazz as a way to interrogate the complex intersections of North and South, race and class, cultural identity, and even politics and foreign policy. The very earliest seeds … [Read more...]
Faculty Spotlight: Kelly S. McDonough
BY SUSANNA SHARPE There is a term in the Nahuatl language that means learned person, sage, or knowledge keeper: itxtlamati (plural, ixtlamatinih), a compound of the words meaning face and to know. The concept of knowledge gleaned from experience is central in the work of Kelly S. McDonough, … [Read more...]
Alumni Spotlight: A Language Is Not a Widget
BY JOSEPH M. PIERCE It has been five years since I completed a PhD in Spanish American Literature, and seven since completing the MA in Latin American Studies at LLILAS. A lot has changed in the past decade. But change is always a matter of perspective. I was recently at LLILAS for a conference … [Read more...]
Four Centuries of Rare Documents Will Be Digitized in Partnership with Puebla Archive
BY SUSANNA SHARPE August 8, 2018, was an auspicious day for students of Mexican history. An agreement signed between LLILAS Benson and the Tribunal Superior de Justicia del Estado de Puebla marks the official start of a project to digitize a large collection of archival materials from the Fondo … [Read more...]
“To die little by little”: Disappearance and Ambiguous Loss in the Lives of Activist Mothers in Contemporary Mexico
Leer en español. BY MORAVIA DE LA O Margarita1 has spent the last nine years looking for her son, Mauricio. She keeps a manila folder with photos and articles about his case that she brings when I interview her in June 2017. In one of the photos that she shows me, a young man in glasses is … [Read more...]
María Luisa Puga: A Life in Diaries
BY JOSÉ MONTELONGO Deciding how to end a novel is the author’s privilege. To write novels for a living is a volatile career choice, at least when it comes to paying rent, but the destiny and shape of your characters is not volatile at all, it’s your prerogative—you are the one choosing when and … [Read more...]
Eduardo Lalo: Words in Austin
Even before the devastation of Hurricane Maria, contemporary Puerto Rico was confronting unprecedented challenges. A spiraling debt crisis, record-breaking population exodus to the mainland, and draconian cuts to public services and education led to mass protests in the streets, higher taxes, … [Read more...]
A Different Kind of Border Wall
BY LYNDA M. GONZALEZ Six grandchildren. Six different breakfasts. Every morning, 69-year-old Teresa de Lozoya cooks what she can manage from food bank supplies and leftovers from church meal programs: a bowl of ramen noodle soup, hot dogs scrambled with eggs, reheated plain hamburgers. Her … [Read more...]
Living in a Material World: Art and Otherworldly Understanding in Colonial Latin America
BY BRITTANY ERWIN It was a bustling scene. Excited crowds of people had gathered along the processional route in the city center, which had been elaborately decorated for the occasion. Dressed in their finest wares, a group of civic officials and the religious elite solemnly proceeded along a … [Read more...]
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