EACH FALL, the publication of Portal magazine affords us an opportunity to showcase LLILAS and the Benson, both as two separate units and as a rich and symbiotic partnership.
In these pages, you will read articles by Latin Americanist students, faculty, and visiting professors—a snapshot of the breadth and depth of the research and scholarship percolating in our scholarly community. You will learn about some of the latest acquisitions of the Benson Latin American Collection—literary archives of César Vallejo and Augusto Roa Bastos, two giants in Latin American letters. We also showcase a related exhibition on Latin America’s vanguardistas, on view in the Benson throughout the fall.
In this issue, you will meet three stellar Tinker Visiting Professors, whose work is represented in two self-authored articles (Víctor Zúñiga and Beatriz Jaguaribe) and one profile contributed by doctoral students (Ana Carolina Assumpção and Ana Luiza Biazeto on Sueli Carneiro).
We are proud to include an article by Camille Carr, a recently graduated LLILAS master’s student who researched the culture surrounding viche, a distilled liquor produced by Black communities, and especially Black women, in the Colombian Pacific Coast. Carr organized an exhibition at the Benson of materials related to viche that she acquired during her research.
The annual Lozano Long Conference, held in April 2024, was a unique opportunity for Indigenous intellectuals and artists from all over the Americas to gather and focus on questions of Indigeneity and sexuality. The event included a range of offerings, from academic papers to provocative performances. These are explored in a thoughtful piece by History doctoral student María José Pérez Sián.
The inclusion of a poem by María Gómez de León, a master’s in fine arts student Michener Center for Writers, echoes the theme of migration in synchronicity with other material in the issue. It also calls attention to LLILAS and the Benson’s continued collaboration with creative writers in Spanish and English. This theme is important in our continued work with Pido la Palabra, a grant-funded project that brings bilingual creative writing classes to incarcerated students in Central Texas; the classes are taught by UT professors and grad students, but everyone involved ends up learning deep lessons about the importance of free creative expression. This project, supported by the Mellon Foundation, benefits from close collaboration with faculty and students in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. It is about to enter its third and final year.
Two additional contributions round out this issue: The inaugural Faulkner lecture featured a fascinating conversation between Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and former Minister of Economy of Argentina Martín Guzmán, highlights of which are summarized in these pages. Finally, the President’s Initiative for Global Learning, through Texas Global, enabled an interdisciplinary group of students and faculty to travel to Mexico and Colombia in the spring to observe migration of monarch butterflies, and of people, in the context of a changing climate.
Last year’s edition of Portal featured an interview with the celebrated Nicaraguan poet, author and political dissident Gioconda Belli, who was exiled from Nicaragua in 2023 and stripped of her citizenship. The interview was published in celebration of the Benson’s acquisition of Belli’s literary archive, and ahead of her much-anticipated visit to the collection. In March 2024, over 200 guests gathered for Belli’s public talk, during which she described how perilously close she came to losing the archive that represented her life’s work.
At a private viewing in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Reading Room, the author and her daughter wiped away tears upon seeing her photos, writings, and memorabilia, safe at last.
In moments such as these, we appreciate the opportunities for exchange both intellectual and affective that live in and outside of these walls, opportunities built upon a shared past of many decades. We hope that in these pages you will find something that ignites such a spark in you, as well.
Saludos cordiales,
Adela Pineda Franco, Director, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies
Melissa Guy, Director, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection
