Latin American Studies in the Twenty-first Century

Creating spaces within our institutions that will allow scholar-activists to work in ways that are consistent with progressive educational and social ideals requires, initially, a nucleus of faculty members who share perceptions about the field. Many young Latin Americanists in the late 1960s and early 1970s had developed the critical dependency perspective that made such cross-disciplinary cooperation possible. By the end of the century, the growing dissatisfaction with neoliberal solutions to the problems of the region had produced a new generation of academics who wanted to combine their teaching and research with involvement and the development of perspectives that would lead to meaningful social change. What is more, this was what many students were seeking. Even university administrations might look kindly upon such an enterprise if it seemed to fit into institutional requirements for service learning and community outreach. The establishment of an interdisciplinary Latin American studies program in a college or university may in many cases require a fortuitous combination of circumstances. In the contemporary university environment, support for area studies is not abundant, although late-twentieth-century foundation initiatives such as that of the Ford Foundation indicate that in some circles the idea may be coming back into fashion. However, the strength of such a program will depend on the presence of faculty experts on Latin America in various social science and humanities disciplines, a language program in Spanish and ideally Portuguese, and faculty members in these positions with a commitment to establishing and supporting such an endeavor.