Tag: Latin American Studies Association
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Black Feminist Epistemologies: Learning with Sueli Carneiro
BEING A GRADUATE STUDENT is not easy, especially in a prestigious program such as the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. In spring 2023, the authors, along with fellow Brazilian students, were talking about the challenges with Dr. Christen Smith, our adviser, and she said, “I…
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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 quantities. It is no secret that chocolate is…
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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 from Montelongo’s conversation with the famous poet, priest, and…
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“We Will All Look Like This Someday”: Santa Muerte in Mexico City
BY KATHRYN McDONALD Over the past decade, La Santa Muerte, an unofficial Mexican skeletal saint, has prompted the curiosity of journalists, law enforcement, and popular culture in the United States and Mexico. The dramatic cover of journalist Michael Deibert’s book, In the Shadow of Saint Death: The Gulf Cartel and the Price of America’s…
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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 always see eye to eye…
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Derechos en Crisis: A Conference at the Frontier of Activism and Scholarship
BY RUTH ELIZABETH VELÁSQUEZ ESTRADA We became conscious of the right to have rights and of the right to belong to an organized community only when millions of people had lost their rights, and could no longer recuperate them. —Agustín Estrada Negrete, political asylee and immigrant rights activist For seven years, the annual Lozano…
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Archiving Human Rights Documentation: The Promise of the Post-Custodial Approach in Latin America
BY THERESA E. POLK Guatemala’s internal armed conflict was brutal by all accounts, and justice for human rights violations has been notoriously difficult to attain in its wake. Yet there have also been some critical milestones, including convictions in 2010 for the forced disappearance of labor and student leader Edgar Fernando García, in 2011 for…
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Transitory Ghosts: Haitians and Dominico-Haitians in Santo Domingo
STUDENT RESEARCH: CITIZENSHIP AND LIMBO IN THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC BY JOSÉ RUBIO-ZEPEDA “I’m a nobody in my own country.” These are the words spoken by Juliana Deguis Pierre, a Dominican woman who made national headlines in the Dominican Republic after being denied Dominican citizenship despite having been born in the country. Deguis and other plaintiffs sued…
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Unsettling Ideas about Africa and Blackness: Contemplating Race and Belonging in the Dominican Republic
STUDENT RESEARCH: CITIZENSHIP AND LIMBO IN THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC BY JHEISON ROMAIN As I neared the end of my field research in the Dominican Republic, while in a batey[1] in the north of the country, I had a conversation with a 28-year-old black man who was born and raised in the Dominican Republic by Haitian parents.…
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Faculty Profiles
BY SUSANNA SHARPE Sarah Lopez Migration and home, history and the built environment. The work of Sarah Lopez sits at the confluence of these themes. An assistant professor in the School of Architecture, Lopez studies cultural landscapes, exploring how the history of the built environment also tells the stories of people and their movements across…
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The Canary in the Mine: Anti-Black Violence and the Paradox of Brazilian Democracy
BY CHRISTEN A. SMITH The Brazilian political crisis of 2016 has sent shockwaves through the nation. Brazil’s first female president, Dilma Rousseff, has been accused of corruption and is facing impeachment proceedings. Millions of Brazilians have demonstrated in the streets against the government, and millions have demonstrated against impeachment, contending that the plot to remove…
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Struggles and Obstacles in Indigenous Women’s Fight for Justice in Guatemala
BY IRMA ALICIA VELÁSQUEZ NIMATUJ Transitional justice refers to measures both judicial and non-judicial that are intended to redress large-scale human rights abuses. In this article, I focus on two recent cases of transitional justice in Guatemala. The first is the 2013 trial against General and Former President Efraín Ríos Montt and General Mauricio Rodríguez…
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LLILAS Benson and the Repatriation of Indigenous Cultural Patrimony of Mexico
BY KELLY McDONOUGH One of the main attractions among the rare books and manuscripts at the Benson Latin American Collection is a group of late-sixteenth-century manuscripts and maps known as the Relaciones Geográficas (or RGs for short). As described in the Benson’s web portal to the RGs, these manuscripts are responses to a fifty-question survey…