Enlace Year in Review 2021-22

This will be a brief director’s letter, not due to an uneventful year but because I want to make a single point that may get lost in a longer exposition. Bolivar House has continued to be a thriving space as can be attested by many activities, conferences and events, international visitors and students engaged in teaching, research, and outreach to our local and larger communities. I am particularly proud of the way in which Elizabeth Sáenz-Ackermann deftly kept our course through stormy weather and the way our CLAS team, Sara, Megan, and Molly, worked tirelessly during the 2021-22 academic year with a commitment to the center that goes beyond their job description – they love Latin America and our community. From that love we have a team in place that can make beautiful things happen.Throughout the year I have been conmovido – which is not quite translatable, since it means “to be moved” but in the company of the other, given the particle “con” – by the way the individuals who make up Bolivar House, including our team, students, and visitors, are kind, patient and generous. But let us also remember that the togetherness of our physical space is only made possible by custodial staff, gardeners, food preparers, delivery persons, maintenance crews, and service workers who often go unnoticed and have made it possible to realize academic activities during COVID-19. We have survived a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, and we should remember the people who made this possible.This reflection takes me to the Americas. The counted death toll from the World Health Organization’s official figures in our hemisphere is almost three million lost lives (as of November 12, 2022): a third of the world mortality figures. The most accurate studies (for example, a Lancet study published in April 2022) tell us there are millions more unregistered deaths, since we know excess mortality is very high in places like Mexico and Brazil. Alongside the sorrow of such unimaginable loss, this is a time to also be grateful. We must thank the nurses, doctors, volunteers, healers, counselors, health professionals, and family members who cared for our sick. We must thank the epidemiologists, virologists, medical researchers, public health officials, policy makers, and even some politicians who helped put in place vaccines and non-clinical measures that prevented even more deaths. Tlazocomati, obrigado, gracias, chaltumay!The current Enlace issue, hence, attests to the resilience of our local community, and for that we express our gratitude: our librarian, Adán Griego, continued to make the digital and book materials that nurture our research and teaching accessible; we continued our Tinker Visiting Professorship and the Latin American Perspectives Lectureship and brought our first Luksic Visiting Scholars to campus; we carried out the virtual series “Conversations on Race and Ethnicity” with the Latin American Studies Association section on Ethnicity, Race, and Indigenous Peoples (ERIP) and the Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS) in preparation for our in-person conference in Mexico City; we graduated another cohort of bright and passionate M.A. students; our faculty and students organized conferences, workshops, and working groups; and we continued funding language training, internships, encounters with authors, teacher outreach programs, and field research thanks to the generosity of the Tinker Foundation, the Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho Foundation, Edward J. and Margaret S. Soares, Monica Miller Walsh and David Walsh, Ana Paula Pessoa Trejos, and the U.S. Department of Education’s Title VI National Resource Center and Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships grants.Our gratitude extends to everyone in our community of learning, and all the persons that are behind the institutions and organizations that make programming at CLAS possible.