vistasteresa lozano long institute of latin american studies . the university of texas at austin . 2013

From the Director

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the second edition of Vistas, our annual newsletter for alumni and other supporters of LLILAS. It is an exciting time for LLILAS and the Benson Collection. This year we welcomed acclaimed Colombian opera singer Mar-tha Senn to Austin and held the Lozano Long Conference on the subject of race in the Americas. We have begun to raise funds for

a new student scholarship to honor former ILAS director William Glade, who helped guide a generation of our students during his tenure. Dr. Glade will be at our second annual alumni reunion. Please mark Friday, April 26, on your calen-dar for this event. Former Benson librarian Ann Hartness, featured in this issue, has created a permanent fund for Brazilian acquisitions. We are delighted to honor their contributions to this institute. Last year we raised support for graduate students through the Anne Dibble Scholarship, thanks to the wonderful generosity of our alumni. We are happy to report that we’ve met our goal and awarded the first Anne Dibble Scholarship to first-year master’s student Joseph Woodard. Joseph is focusing his studies on U.S.–Latin American relations and politics, with a special emphasis on Brazil. Thank you for your support of students like Joseph. We hope you’ll stay connected with us by visiting us on campus, sponsoring an internship at your organization for a LLILAS student, attending a LLILAS alumni happy hour, or joining our alumni Facebook and LinkedIn groups. Our doors are always open to you.

Saludos cordiales,

DirectorTeresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies and the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection

2012–2013 alumni steering committee

Joe Garvey 1998

Sean Hale 2000

Robert T. Huesca 1988

Sara (Segrest) Kennedy 1969

Sandra M. Wegmann 2006

Liz Wiley 1989

Luis F. A. Zapata 1994

Vistas EditorMayra Marquez

Cover photo by Itzel Martínez Itzel studied abroad in Guatemala last summer, where she took this photo of a girl in Cañón del Río Dulce transporting her wares to market. During her time there, Itzel interned at a public school and volunteered at Casa de Luis de Lión, a community center, where she learned the history of Guatemala, including the Guerra Civil (Civil War), which occurred from 1960 to 1996. She visited small pueblos and heard accounts of the war’s undeniable impact on the indigenous population and country as a whole. Itzel is majoring in Mexican American Studies and Radio-Television-Film at UT.

www.utexas.edu/cola/insts/llilas

What led you to study at LLiLAS?The short answer is: the 1998 arrest in London of former Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet. The story fascinated me. It had been unthinkable that he could be held accountable for the human rights abuses of the Dirty War, but there he was, facing possible extradition to Spain on human rights charges! When it happened, I was a high school Spanish teacher. The first thing that I did in response was to redesign parts of my courses for that year so that we could dis-cuss Pinochet and human rights trials. The second thing (more or less) was to decide to go to graduate school. I wanted to learn more about the Spanish case against Pinochet and study everything that went into it and evolved from it. I had a vague notion at that time that I might be able to work in similar efforts for accountability.

What are your most memorable LLiLAS experiences?I was immediately, and remain, very impressed by my classmates. They came from all over the Americas and they were (and are) very bright and deeply commit-ted scholars, activists, artists, educators, journalists, policy makers, and the like. Some then (and now many more) were wonderful partners and parents, too.

how did studying at LLiLAS contribute to your career choices and path after graduation?What I did not know when I started LLILAS is that I would find an affinity for the discipline of history. I actually became a bit stubborn about it. I remember hear-ing a few very good suggestions that—if

ann schneider

I wanted to work on human rights—I take a look at law school or public policy or journalism, but I only seriously entertained the idea of becoming a historian. It was the graduate seminars in history that did it, especially those taught by Seth Garfield, Mark Lawrence, and Susan Deans-Smith. I also had no idea that LLILAS would point me toward Brazil, a turn that made all the difference. I went on to complete a doctorate in history at the University of Chi-cago. During my fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro, I stumbled upon one very critical “finding” that had nothing to do with my research project but everything to do with my life since that moment. He is now my husband and a doting dad to our two little ones.

What are you doing in your professional life?In broad strokes, I have come full circle

and am now a practitioner in the field of accountability for human rights viola-tions, although not in a way that I could imagine—or that even existed—when Pinochet was arrested. I work as a histo-rian of Latin America in a relatively new (and small) unit of the federal govern-ment, the Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. My work assists in the investigation and prosecution in U.S. district and immigration courts of indi-viduals implicated in torture, extrajudicial killing, and other human rights violations that occurred in Latin America. Much has happened to counter impunity in Latin America and elsewhere in the years since that dramatic arrest in London in 1998; this work is a part of it.

historian, Latin America and human rights U.S. Government; LLiLAS mA, 2002

For Travis Knoll, the path to Latin American Studies at LLILAS started as a high school exchange student in Argentina. During his senior year, Travis studied at the Colegio Nacional de La Plata, a prestigious high school where young activ-ists were often kidnapped and disappeared during the military dictatorship. While abroad, Travis asked the faculty at the school for a list of Argentinian literature translated into English. The list he received contained twenty books and all twenty could be found at the Benson Latin American Collection. “They told me that it’s the largest library in the world of Latin American literature. That was the moment that I thought, if I’m going to UT, I better study Latin America,” he said.

Travis returned to Texas and enrolled at UT but was determined to get back to Argentina. He not only made it back there, participating in UT’s study abroad program in Córdoba, but also spent a semester in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, where he studied Portuguese and interned with the mayor’s office of Belo Horizonte. He also worked with the Centro Cultural São Bernardo, which was created to help strengthen the identities of marginalized communities in the region through art and literature. At the foundation, he wrote an article about historical memory in the region. “There were residents who were being removed from a village and we interviewed about 100 community leaders. We came to the conclusion that there wasn’t enough psychological help for residents living there. It was my first article in Portuguese and it was a great experience,” Travis said of his internship. Back at LLILAS, Travis took courses from Profs. Virginia Garrard-Burnett and Henry Dietz. Dr. Garrard-Burnett’s class led Travis to a thesis proposal on histori-

cal memory in Argentina, which he researched while studying in Córdoba. Although he spent a significant amount of time abroad, Travis also has been involved in the UT and Austin communities. He has worked with the Texas Civil Rights Project on prisoners’ rights issues and has written for the Daily Texan. As far as next steps, Travis has applied to graduate programs at UT and at Brazilian universities in São Paulo and Belo Horizonte. “I am optimistic. The old knock against area studies doesn’t apply to me. It is a concrete course of study. If you choose relevant topics, you can apply it to business, academic, government, or nonprofit settings. If you think that you can’t get a job with area studies, you aren’t being creative enough.”

Travis Knoll

LLILAS has led me to seek

opportunities to get hands-on

experience and research abroad.

This department promotes

academic diversity and exchange.—trAviS knoLL

BA candidate,LLiLAS and Plan i

travis hiking in the mountains near cuesta Blanca in córdoba

Please describe your background.I was born in Mexico to a Mexican father and an American mother and came to the United States when I was seventeen years old. I am a psychologist by training, but since the 1990s my work has been more ethnographic and community based. I use a variety of media, such as books, docu-mentary films, and photographic exhibits to explore topics that are of interest to me. What have been your areas of research during your time here?Although I have a long-standing interest in the topic of immigration, in 2004 I did a thirty-minute documentary film based on man-in-the-street interviews in Mexico City about Mexican views regarding the immigration phenomenon. My next major project in Mexico was a feature-length documentary film, ¡Ya Basta!, exploring the wave of kidnappings in Mexico, the reasons behind it, and citizen response to it. Between 2008 and 2011, I researched my forthcoming book, The Fight to Save Juárez: Life in the Heart of Mexico’s Drug War (University of Texas Press, April 2013). I made many visits to Juárez (the book covers 2008–2010, three of the city’s most violent years) where I interviewed people from many different perspectives, including parents whose children had been victims of violence, priests working

in marginalized communities, the mayor during that period, human rights activists, teachers, journalists, and people related to the Juárez Cartel, among oth-ers. The four main characters in the book are the then mayor, José Reyes Ferriz; Gustavo de la Rosa Hickerson, a human rights activist; Raymundo, a Juárez journalist; and “Elena,” whose partner was a mid-level Juárez Cartel operative (he was assassinated in 2009).

What are you currently working on?I am currently working on an article about Mexico’s social fabric inter-ventions in violent communities. I am also

Professor, Dept. of educational Psychology University of texas at Austin

r i c a r d o a i n s l i e

working on a feature-length documentary film about the experience of war.

What role has the Benson collection played in your research and teaching?The Benson Collection has been a terrific and indispensable resource to my work. I have spent many hours in the library looking at archived issues of border (and, especially, Ciudad Juárez) newspapers, for example.

What has been the most unexpected or seren-dipitous thing that has happened to you in your career?Discovering the power of documentary film and ethnographic, narrative-based research.

dr. ainslie and Juárez journalist researching violence

how would you describe your experience working as a librarian at the Benson?My experience working at the Benson was very enjoyable. It was never dull, because no two days were ever alike, and I felt fortunate that I liked my work so much. I spent five years as a cataloger and found work that many might think would be boring to be very rewarding, because I was participating in the effort to make all kinds of materials avail-able to the library’s clientele. In 1975 I became the Benson’s Public Services Librarian and later its Head Librarian. I found that interacting with students, faculty, and the many visiting scholars, and facili-tating their access to the treasures of the library, to be the most rewarding work of all. A wonderful personal benefit was the opportunity to learn a lot about many aspects of Latin America that I was unfamiliar with, and also to learn more about U.S. Latinos, since the Benson includes a major collection of Mexican American/U.S. Latino material. Along the way I also became the library’s bibliographer for Brazil, selecting the books that we bought through book dealers, and also making annual acquisition trips to Brazil.

What are some memorable moments from your travels to Latin America?For the last twenty years of my career I traveled to Brazil every year for about five weeks to acquire publications. I always visited São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Brasília, and sometimes other cities. During those visits I had a lot of contact with UT alumni (often LLILAS grads), former visiting professors, and others with ties to UT. During one of my visits, a LLILAS alumnus from Rio told me that some of the happiest hours of his life had been spent at a table in the Benson Collection. One of the most unusual visits that I made on an acquisition trip was to the Cemité-rio dos Protestantes of São Paulo, where many foreigners active in Brazil in the nine-teenth century and later were buried. It published Cemitério dos Protestantes, repouso de ilustres with information about the individuals buried there, which I wanted for the Benson. The only place to obtain it was at the cemetery office. The day that I went there was rainy and foggy, and the old trees among the worn tombstones were dripping and seemed to be weeping. It’s a scene I’ve never forgotten. After my return to Austin, a note about my trip from Dr. William Glade, director of ILAS at the time, commended me for “leaving no stone unturned” in my efforts to get books for the Benson!

What are your plans now?I’m working on the continuation of a book describing current reference works (1999–2012) about Brazil to be published in Brasília this year by a publisher specializing in material related to books and libraries. The first edition, Brasil: Obras de referência, 1965–1998 came out in 1999. I’m also planning trips to Brazil (where one of my sons lives), Alaska, and Italy this year.

AnnHartnesshead Librarian, retired 2008Benson Latin American collection

In 2003, the Brazilian government decorated Ann Hartness as a Commander of its prestigious National Order of the Southern Cross. It is the highest decoration awarded to foreigners in Brazil.

L L I L A S I N B R A z I L

THe sTaTe oF HiGHer edUcaTion in THe aMericasJUNE 5, 2013 As part of its efforts to increase academic engagement with Brazil, LLILAS

will host a series of talks in Brasília on June 5, 2013. The event, The State of

Higher Education in the Americas, will feature keynote addresses by Bill Pow-

ers, President of UT Austin, and Brazilian counterparts. It will culminate with

the signing of an agreement with Ciências sem Fronteiras (Science without

Borders), the Brazilian government’s new student exchange initiative. All of

the proceedings will be webcast. We invite LLILAS alumni and supporters to

attend the event if they are in Brazil. Please contact Gail Sanders, Develop-

ment Office Coordinator, at <g.sanders@austin.utexas.edu> for more details.

The William Glade Fund will provide

funds to cover tuition, fees, books,

research, and/or internship opportuni-

ties for LLILAS graduate students. Our

goal is to raise $50,000, which will be

matched by Joe and Teresa Lozano Long

for a total of $100,000 to support incom-

ing and current graduate students. Dr.

announcing the william glade fund

Glade was a director of the Institute

of Latin American Studies for over a

decade and a top researcher in econom-

ics. Honor Dr. William Glade by contrib-

uting to the fund today. To make a gift,

please contact Celeste Mendoza, LLILAS

Associate Director for Development,

at <c.mendoza@austin.utexas.edu>.

L L I L A STeresa lozano lonG insTiTUTe oF laTin aMerican sTUdies2300 Red river st, stop D0800Austin, Texas 78712-1428

The LLILAS Alumni Reunion will take

place on the afternoon of Friday, April 26,

at LLILAS and the Benson. Join us for a

“back to school” mock class with a LLILAS

professor and a networking event with alumni

and students followed by dinner with former

classmates. RSVP for these events to Mayra

Marquez at <mayra.marquez@utexas.edu>.

Join us for the second annual llilas alumni reunion, april 26, 2013

w w w . u t e x a s . e d u / c o l a / i n s t s / l l i l a s

t h e u n i v e r s i t y o f t e x a s a t a u s t i n