Dispatches from the Latin American Studies Association International Congress in Peru

By Kerry Webb, Senior Editor

Acquisitions areas: Latin American and Pre-Columbian studies, Latin American history, Latino/a studies

Series: Border Hispanisms, Historia USA, Inter America

Recently, my colleague Inés ter Horst and I attended the 2017 Latin American Studies Association meeting in Lima, Peru. We quickly got into the swim of things with a walk along the famed Malencón, situated on the edge of cliffs overlooking beautiful views of the beaches of Lima and the Pacific Ocean, and a lunch of some delicious ceviche. To set up our book exhibit, after lunch we made our way to Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, the site for most of the panels at the conference and which was also celebrating its 100th anniversary.

Despite the hustle and bustle of the city, it was hard not to be constantly reminded of the deep and rich history of Lima and Peru, from the archaeological sites of many little-known, pre-Incan civilizations to Lima’s unique history as a colonial stronghold of the Spanish Empire in South America. In fact, there was an Incan site right on the edge of campus and adjacent to the book exhibit hall. When I asked one of our authors who was from Lima what it was, he said that it was one of the Incan roads that was part of a massive transportation network that stretched the length of the Incan Empire at it’s height, from Colombia all the way down to Chile and Argentina.

It was the perfect place to showcase our books, including several recent additions to the list that are focused on Peruvian and Andean studies such as The Peculiar Revolution: Rethinking the Peruvian Experiment Under Military Rule, Kevin Young’s Blood of the Earth: Resource Nationalism, Revolution, and Empire in Boliva, and Gary Urton’s Inka History in Knots: Reading Khipus as Primary Sources. We were also happy to learn that three of our recent books won major awards at LASA: Barbara Mundy’s The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, The Life of Mexico City won the Bryce-Wood award and Mark Christensen’s book The Teabo Manuscript: Mayan Christian Copybooks, Chilam Balams, and Native Text Production in Yucatan won the Mexico section’s award, while Inez Hernandez-Avila and Norma Cantú’s anthology of Tejana cultural production Entre Guadalupe Y Malinche: Tejanas in Literature and Art won the prize for the Latino studies section, further highlighting published work from other important parts of our publishing lists for LASA.

This conference is always a special opportunity to meet with current and potential authors, and we were especially pleased to be one of the US presses that were able to showcase our books and meet with authors, many of whom reside outside of the States, at a conference that, more than ever, has a truly international flavor.

www.utexaspress.com

Barbara Mundy wins the 2016 LASA Colonial Book Prize

Barbara Mundy’s The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City has been awarded the 2016 Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Colonial Book Prize! Read what the prize committee has to say about Professor Mundy's work below.

The University of Texas Press salutes the Latin American Studies Association for 50 years of fostering intellectual discussion, research, and teaching on Latin America, the Caribbean, and its people throughout the Americas.

We invite attendees to stop by our booth at the 2016 annual meeting for our newest titles, to pick up a subject catalog, and for an exclusive LASA offer. Stay tuned to this blog for author guest posts, including Nicholas Kawa on his new book Amazonia in the Anthropocene: People, Soils, Plants, Forests.

LASA Colonial Book Prize Announcement

The winner of this year's prize from the LASA Colonial Section awarded to the best book in

More info

Colonial Studies is:

Barbara Mundy, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015.

Mundy has written a gorgeously illustrated book drawing on her training as an art historian, referencing as well architectural and urban history, and pre-Hispanic and colonial Spanish American history and narrative. Using the city as an organizing metaphor, she ‘reads’ a range of texts including maps, sculpture, architecture, indigenous language manuscripts, Spanish language chronicles and sermons…and even contemporary Mexico City subway maps.

Eschewing rupture (such as pre/post periodizations) for continuities, Mundy links pre-Hispanic Tenochtitlan and colonial Mexico City in compelling and nuanced ways. Her deft employment of theory (DeCerteau and Lefebvre, primarily) informs but never overwhelms her reading as she roots Mexica elite and commoner, preConquest and colonial agency in the performances of the city over time. Through her analysis, Mundy makes sculpture, imagery, and architecture move to dynamically represent the transformations of the city, marking the Mexica but also recalling the radical changes that have occurred. The committee found her central argument that indigenous peoples played a key role in shaping the post-conquest city in ways that scholars have overlooked to be quite persuasive.

Mundy's discussion of environmental issues (water), translation and nomenclature, and migration history will make her book significant for those outside the field of colonial studies. Common threads with her earlier work are the close attention to place-names as signifiers of rich cultural and historical meaning, recognition of collaborations between indigenous and European actors, and the wonderfully close readings of glyphs and maps, but this book represents a huge new project that draws on but in no way repeats that previous work.

By inviting her reader to "swim" through space, representation, and events, Mundy convinces us of the presence of an indigenous city into the colonial period and beyond through the intersections of water, markets, and indigenous leadership.

The Committee:

Chair, Mónica Díaz, Dept. of Hispanic Studies and History, University of Kentucky
Rachel O’Toole, Dept. of History, University of California, Irvine
Karen Stolley, Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese, Emory University

www.utexaspress.com