Dear LACIS Community,
Welcome to the beginning of the 2025-2026 Academic year! We hope you had a lovely summer that included time for adventure and relaxation. We are excited to see you at one of the gatherings or events that we’ve planned for this fall. If you haven’t checked up on our speaker line-up for the fall, I encourage you to look at our LACIS Lunchtime Lecture events. As you’ll see, we are spotlighting the fantastic research of many of our affiliate faculty and graduate students. We thank those of you who will be sharing your work with us this fall! We also have several invited speakers, including Mexican Novelist Brenda Navarro, the Oaxacan urban and political art collective Lapiztola, and Professor Américo Mendoza-Mori, whose research focuses on Quechua languages and literatures, Latinx and Latin American cultures, and Indigenous systems of knowledge.
We are also honored to spotlight the work of our Fall 2025 Tinker Visiting Professor, Dr. Orlando Deavila. Professor Deavila is joining us from the International Institute of Caribbean Studies at the Universidad de Cartagena in Colombia. This semester, he is teaching History 500: The History of Caribbean Tourism and will be sharing his research on social and urban history. We encourage you to join us for Professor Deavila’s lunchtime lecture on Tuesday, November 4th from 12-1 pm, entitled “Race and Space in the Making of the Latin American City during the Twentieth Century,” which will consider the making of Cartagena into an international tourist hub, and the industry’s impact on the lives of Black residents in the city. In addition to joining us for this talk, we also encourage you to reach out to Professor Deavila to welcome him and say hello, especially if his expertise and interests connect with things you are working on. His email address is deavilapertu@wisc.edu.
Before I conclude, I want to provide an update on our Title VI federal funding, which historically has supported instruction in Yucatec Maya and Ecuadorian Quechua. As many may know, the Department of Education did not release the 4th-year funding for our current Title VI grant, preventing us from continuing FLAS fellowships or classes in these indigenous languages this year. It is also unclear whether a new grant cycle will be announced or what it might entail. We fully acknowledge the impact this loss of funding has on LACIS students, instructors, and staff. Although we lack funds to replace the 4th-year support, the LACIS team is dedicated to finding innovative ways to assist our students and faculty, and to continue offering instruction in regional indigenous languages. We also remain committed to supporting graduate research through conference and research grants, as well as our Tinker-Nave summer fieldwork competition. Additionally, our engagement with the Wisconsin community through K-12 outreach, library collaborations, and community activities continues to be a positive and vital part of the center’s campus presence.
If you have ideas that could strengthen any of these goals and initiatives, please feel free to contact me at smckinnon@wisc.edu or reach out to LACIS Associate Director, Dr. Adriana Angel, at aangel4@wisc.edu. We welcome all ideas to support the instruction of Latin American indigenous languages at UW-Madison, outreach efforts, and faculty and graduate research in the region.
Thank you for reading this message. I will be back in touch again this fall with our 2024-2025 annual report, highlighting LACIS’s impact on campus and in the Wisconsin community last year.
Sincerely,
Sara McKinnon
Director, Latin American, Caribbean, & Iberian Studies