Latin American and Latino Studies

My warm congratulations to Latin American and Latinx Studies at UIC for becoming a department and for celebrating a half century of presence in Chicago, the United States and the world.  Happy cincuenta!  I apologize for not attending in person but I am thrilled to send this short reflection.

Since its inception in 1974, LALS has been shaped and reshaped by numerous Directors, faculty members, instructors, staff members, and generations of undergrad students, majors and minors, and Master’s students.  It is a multilayered scholarly and political project whose vision has shifted throughout the years and in its five decades of life, yet one that remains steadfast and consistent in the production of knowledge that elevates U.S. Latinx and Latin America to communities worthy of being present as agents of history, culture, the arts, political and social movements.  LALS has strived to offer an alternative vision of U.S. history that is decolonial in the ways that it claims our humanity and that allows students to insert themselves in that very history we strive to deconstruct.

LALS will always have a special place in my heart.  It offered me the institutional space for legitimizing Latinx Studies as a field at a time when it was still fragile and uneven.  The fact that the Latino Studies Journal began in LALS in 2003 reveals the sense of possibility and of institutional building at the time.  I also fondly remember the Lectures in the Community sponsored by LALS at the time, a model for public humanities that allowed us to engage Latinx Chicago as partners in dialogue, rather than as academics teaching those outside the academy.  Marta Ayala was a key figure in making the Lectures in the Community events such special sites for mutual exchange of ideas in the public sphere.  The book series Latinos in Chicago and the Midwest with University of Illinois Press also began in LALS and by now is a well-established series.  As Director of LALS, I will always cherish the important role that we played in providing our students the tools for understanding their own lives within the longer colonial stories of U.S. Latinx and Latin America.  I still stay in touch with some of those undergraduates I met in the early 2000s, and I have no doubt that they continue to make a difference in the world.

That LALS has become a Department at the same time as it is celebrating its half a century could be a felicitous synchronicity (to use Julio Cortázar’s words), but it is also testifies to the profoundly serious commitment of so many individuals who have inhabited the unit.  To Jonathan Inda, mi agradecimiento for making this long-awaited vision a reality through your administrative leadership.  To all colleagues and students, may your commitment and work continue to nurture this vital space for reclaiming ourselves as agents of history, culture and the arts, and for the legacies we leave for future generations. May the intellectual community of LALS continue to embrace change while maintaining the political activism that informed its emergence fifty years ago.  Let us never be content with the status quo and let us continue to think critically, question hierarchies, and write and dialogue with each other toward a vision of justice for all U.S. Latinx and Latin Americans.

Frances R. Aparicio

Professor Emerita

Northwestern University

August 25, 2024

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Our focuses

Transnationalism ÷ Migration ÷ Asylum ÷ Deportation ÷ Remittances

Chicana/Latina Feminist Thought ÷ Latina Popular Feminism(s) ÷ Latinx Soundscapes ÷ Intersectionality ÷ Precarity

Gender  ÷ Women of Color Feminisms ÷ Latinx Youth Studies ÷ Education

Violence ÷ Displacement ÷ Criminal Governance

Poetry ÷ Poetic Writing ÷ Creative Human Expression

Latinx Health ÷ Sexuality ÷ Gender Equality

Political thought ÷ Diaspora ÷ Youth Political Engagement ÷ Democratization

Critical Thought ÷ Democracy ÷ The State ÷ Rhetorical Practices ÷ Indigeneity ÷ Environment ÷ Disaster Theory

Colonialism/Postcolonialism ÷ Native Methods ÷ Aztec Culture ÷ Nahuatl