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In January, CLAS welcomed its alum Mark Kendall (M.A. 2009), filmmaker and producer of La Camioneta: The Journey of One American School Bus. The documentary tells the story of buses which leave the United States on a south-bound migration to Guatemala, where they are repaired, repainted, and resurrected as the brightly colored camionetas, and carry many Guatemalans to work each day.

CLAS organized a number of activities around Kendall’s visit to Vanderbilt. He presented the film at the January 29 International Lens screening and led a discussion with the audience following the showing. Vanderbilt students in film studies and LAS also had the chance to meet and talk to Kendall at a brown bag lunch. Assistant Director for Outreach Claire González arranged for the Belcourt Theater to host a showing for area high school students. Another screening, at Conexión America’s new home, Casa Azafrán on Nolensville Road, gave another opportunity for members of the Nashville community to see the film. Conexión Américas promotes the social, economic, and civic integration of Latino families in Middle Tennessee.

CLAS supported production of the film and more recently has been working closely with Kendall to develop curriculum materials on the film that can be used in K–12 classrooms. These materials were presented to teachers at the professional development workshop on January 31. Educators attending the workshop had the opportunity to interact with Kendall and CLAS Director Ted Fischer as well as joining in a discussion about modern Guatemala.

Dr. Brent Savoie is a physician and legal scholar with more than a decade of experience working with rural health programs and conducting health and human rights research in Guatemala. Brent is the president of the Inter-American Health Alliance (IAHA); in this role he has helped develop a successful partnership with CLAS, collaborating on programs in Guatemala. He is the co-founder of Primeros Pasos, a rural health program in the Department of Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, that provides medical care, dental care, and health education services.

Brent is a graduate from Vanderbilt University (A&S ’01) and Vanderbilt University Medical School (’09). He was awarded the Jefferson Scholars Graduate Fellowship in Law to study health and human rights law, and graduated from University of Virginia School of Law in 2007. His research focuses on the intersection of health and human rights law and intellectual property law. He has conducted research on the impact of international intellectual property provisions in the Central America Free Trade Agreement on access to medicines in Central America. He currently practices medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland.

Associate Professor of Luso-Brazilian Literature Emanuelle Oliveira-Monte studies Afro-Brazilian literature, race relations, the relationship between literature and politics, and popular culture. She teaches Portuguese language and literature courses, as well as seminars on Brazilian cinema and popular Brazilian culture. Originally from Rio de Janeiro, Oliveira did her doctoral study at UCLA and has been at Vanderbilt since 2002. Since then she and other Portuguese faculty have worked closely with CLAS to build Vanderbilt’s Portuguese program into one of the top in the nation.

Oliveira’s first book, Writing Identity: The Politics of Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Literature (2007, Purdue), examines the intricate connections between literary production and political action by focusing on the Brazilian black movement and the literature of a São Paulo-based group of Afro-Brazilian writers, the Quilombhoje. Her current research project explores the representations of race vis á vis crime and violence in Brazilian literature and cinema, and will serve as the basis of her upcoming book, The Color of Crime: Representations of Race and Delinquency in Contemporary Brazilian Literature and Cinema.

Oliveira works closely with CLAS to put together events at Vanderbilt on Brazil, including a conference on human rights in Brazil in 2010, a film festival with director Beto Brant in 2012, and lectures by Eduardo de Assis Duarte and Conceição Evaristo this past fall.

Oliveira sits on the editorial boards for the Afro-Hispanic Review, Chasqui, and Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World. She is a member of the Luso-Brazilian section of the Modern Language Association and was the treasurer of the Brazilian section of the Latin American Studies Association. Professor Oliveira is a current member and former executive member of Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA).

Among her other publications are several articles: “An Ethic of Esthetic: Racial Representations in Brazilian Cinema Today” in Vanderbilt E-Journal of Luso-Hispanic Studies, “Revisitando o Cânone Brasileiro: Autores Negros Contemporâneos e Sua Re-interpretação Crítica da Poesia Negra no Modernismo” in Ethnos Brasil, and “O Gosto Amargo da Festa–Literatura e Momento Político no Brasil: 1960/1990” in Luso-Brazilian Review.

Contributed by Yvonne White

Jessica Turner is from Payson, Utah, and is a captain in the United States Army. She is fulfilling her dream of becoming a Latin American Foreign Area Officer (FAO) and came to Vanderbilt in January 2013 as part of the military’s FAO training program. Jessica spent the past year living in Panama, working at the U.S. Embassy and traveling throughout Central and South America as well as the Caribbean. She previously lived in Argentina, where her love for Latin America began. She is particularly interested in La Guerra Sucia and the military’s involvement.

In February 2013, in honor of Black History Month, CLAS offered a series of events around the documentary Maestra. Catherine Murphy, director and producer, visited Vanderbilt February 18–21. The documentary, which premiered in the U.S. in 2011, tells the story of the Cuban Literacy Campaign of 1961, when 250,000 volunteers taught 700,000 people to read and write in one year. The campaign is thought by many to have been one of the most successful literacy campaigns to date and a pinnacle moment in the history of the Americas.

Activities that week included an International Lens film screening on February 19, followed by a discussion with Murphy, a K–12 teacher workshop, and two lunch discussion panels. Following the visit to Vanderbilt, Murphy traveled to Tuskegee with CLAS faculty and staff where CLAS and Tuskegee offered a film screening and teacher workshop. The events were sponsored by CLAS, Vanderbilt’s Film Studies Program, Women’s and Gender Studies, the Robert Penn Warren Center, and Peabody International Education Affairs.

The Summer in Brazil intensive academic program is organized by Vanderbilt, Tulane, and Emory universities with the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP). The program offers immersion in the Portuguese language as well as coursework on Brazilian culture and a number of excursions.

In summer 2013, the program will be held from June 15–July 26. Both graduate and undergraduate students are eligible to attend. The program qualifies as a FLAS-approved program with 140 contact hours of language instruction.

A unique element of the Américas Award is the emphasis placed on potential for classroom use. This year’s program featured a professional development workshop for educators at Busboys & Poets, coordinated by Tulane and Vanderbilt with Teaching for Change, Henry Holt and Company, and the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Teachers heard presentations by 2012 award winners Monica Brown, Julie Paschkis, and Margarita Engle, as well as strategies for incorporating Latino children’s literature in the classroom from experienced facilitators. Vanderbilt sponsored one media specialist, Connie Sharp, from Metro Nashville Public Schools to attend both the awards ceremony and teacher workshop; she is currently creating curriculum with CLAS staff around the books featured in the award.

On January 28, Lance Ingwersen (Ph.D. student in history) gave a brown bag lunch talk on “Associative Life, Urban Citizenship, and Democratic Practice in the Mexican Capital, 1867–1920.”

On Monday, February 25, Chris Boyer (associate professor of history and Latin American and Latino studies, University of Illinois at Chicago), will visit Vanderbilt. Professor Boyer’s scholarship is located at the crossroads of the social and environmental history of modern Mexico. His brown bag lunch talk is entitled “Land, Water, and Forests: The Environment and Mexican History.” Professor Boyer will also give a public lecture at 4:10 p.m. on “Political Landscapes: Forests and Social Contention in Twentieth-Century Mexico.”

Dr. Morgan arrives in Nashville after a decade at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In addition to his work in gastroenterology, he served as director of the UNC Center for Latino Health (CELAH) 2007–2011 and director of the UNC Program in Nicaragua. With grant funding, CELAH was created to address language barriers to care for the rapidly growing Spanish-speaking community in the Southeastern U.S. CELAH has developed an innovative model for culture and language concordance in the provision of clinical care for the Hispanic population. It includes features of patient navigation and medical home, which reaches to the sub-specialties. The infrastructure has provided a natural platform for research and teaching initiatives. CELAH now offers rotations and practicums for students and trainees, which are formal electives (in Spanish) within the Schools of Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy, and Public Health. It also has become a network for bringing together Hispanic faculty in the health sciences.

In 2011, Dr. Morgan was presented with the Ohtli Award on behalf of CELAH, the highest honor from the government of Mexico, for innovations in health care in the service of the North Carolina Hispanic-Latino population. Past Ohtli Award winners include: Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, and President of the United Farm Workers Arturo Rodriguez.

Dr. Morgan has been anchored in Central America since his service as a Peace Corps engineer in Honduras, where he worked on rural electrification projects with the municipios. While at UNC, he established collaborations in gastrointestinal disease and cancer epidemiology in Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, with funding from the NIH, the Gates Foundation, and other sectors. In Honduras, the initiatives are partnered with the Ministry of Health in the Copán region, and in western Nicaragua, with the National Autonomous University (UNAN) in León. The epidemiology initiatives have spawned a variety of education offerings, including clinical, research, and practicum electives in medicine, nursing, and public health. He is hoping to restart the summer field epidemiology elective for health sciences graduate students in the Mosquitia region of Nicaragua, a partnership with UNAN.

Dr. Doug Morgan attended Dartmouth College and received his medical degree from Case Western Reserve University. He completed his postgraduate training in internal medicine and gastroenterology at the University of California, San Francisco, with a master’s degree in public health in epidemiology at the University of California, Berkeley.

A Peace Corps adage: volunteers returning from Asia speak of mysticism; those from Africa are smiling; while those returning from Latin America converse about revolution and politics and change. Así es.

Our outreach program also includes close partnerships with the Nashville Public Library,   the Nashville Symphony, among others. This spring, we are working with the Frist to organize lectures and other events around their upcoming Exploring Art of the Ancient Americas exhibit. We collaborate closely with Cheekwood to develop educational programs around their annual Día de los Muertos festival. And this fall will see the premier of a major new puppet show we developed with the Nashville Public Library over the past couple of years.

We are grateful to those of you who give generously of your time to help support these outreach efforts, and want to remind you of their importance. We annually reach thousands of students and teachers and the general public with our off-campus outreach programs, helping spread the knowledge that we work so hard on-campus to develop.

In addition to these undergraduate students, 11 professional students in Owen’s Project Pyramid course will spend their break in Guatemala to help develop business and marketing plans for the Mani+ nutritional program and to work with staff at the Moore Center for Pediatric Surgery. Nineteen graduate students in medicine, nursing, and the Spanish department will go to Nicaragua with the Nicaragua Global Health course taught by Dr. Nick Desai and Dr. Lindy Fenalson. During the trip, students will engage patients and providers in mutual education and outreach, and participate in journal clubs, Spanish education modules, triage, and clinical care.

In November, Bart Victor (Owen Graduate School of Management), Peter Martin (School of Medicine), and CLAS Director Ted Fischer travelled to Bogotá to meet with Universidad de los Andes officials to explore areas of mutual interest. Vanderbilt’s ties to los Andes currently include the Institute for Coffee Studies and LAPOP, which recently received a grant from USAID to continue its research with the Colombian university. While there, Vanderbilt faculty signed a memorandum of understanding with los Andes, which will enable the two institutions to explore further areas of cooperation.

For the second half of October, a colorful altar adorned with yellow and orange flowers, photographs, incense, food, and perhaps most memorably, sugar skulls, greeted everyone who passed through the main stairwell of Buttrick Hall.  CLAS staff and graduate students constructed the altar for the annual Día de los Muertos Festival, held at Cheekwood on October 27. Each year, CLAS partners with Cheekwood to develop and provide educational activities and crafts at the festival for children and adults, and distributes a pamphlet on the customs of the celebration in Latin America. CLAS also works with Cheekwood to offer a teacher workshop each fall on some aspect of the Día de los Muertos tradition. This year the focus was on monarch butterflies as symbols of the cyclical nature of life and their annual migration from North America to Mexico.

The day at Cheekwood was a brilliant celebration of Mexican and Latin American culture complete with art, music, dancing, and food. Dozens of vendors lined the outdoor space, while high school students crafted sidewalk chalk murals and a mariachi band entertained. Although it was remarkably cold, over 3,000 people attended. There were many activities inside the Botanic Hall, where the heart of the celebration, the altars, were displayed. Families and groups throughout the community, including Vanderbilt’s Center for Latin American Studies and Katharine Donato’s Contemporary Mexican Society class, set up vibrant and unique altars as tributes to those who have passed away. Dance troupes and musical performers serenaded the full auditorium as everyone enjoyed traditional Mexican cuisine. New at the festival this year was the Monarch Butterfly Room, designed by area teachers after they attended the CLAS teacher workshop. In this room, festival participants learned about the species’ migration to Mexico and helped recreate the habitat by crafting their own butterflies.

CLAS invited Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst for the National Security Archive, to Vanderbilt in November to discuss his work declassifying government documents. His area of focus is Latin America with a special emphasis on Chile and Cuba.

Kornbluh delivered a public lecture to a full house, “Saving the World from Armageddon: The Secret Diplomacy of the Cuban Missile Crisis.” He discussed the incorrect lessons learned from the crisis due to the secrecy of the Kennedy administration. According to Kornbluh, Kennedy was not a “resolute” president, but he was a “resolution” president.

LAS graduate students had the chance to sit down and talk to Kornbluh about his career in an informal meeting. Paula Covington and Bill Fowler invited him to speak in LAS 290 (Research Methods), where he discussed his work in obtaining declassified documents about Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, American citizens killed by the Chilean government during the 1973 Chilean coup. He also taught the students how to search for declassified documents in the National Security Archive and other government databases.

In October, CLAS hosted the annual meeting of the executive committee of the Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs (CLASP). Eleven representatives from Centers for Latin American Studies across the country traveled to Vanderbilt for the two-day meeting. The committee discussed the launch of the organization’s commissioned paper series, collaborative initiatives for outreach, and strategies for less and least commonly taught language programs.

Paula Covington gave a tour of Vanderbilt library to the visitors, who were impressed by the Stage and Screen exhibit. The group got a taste of the Nashville music scene on Friday night and enjoyed Southern food at Rotier’s. Avery Dickins de Girón, chair of the Language Committee, hosted the group. Pictured in the photo (left to right) are Avery Dickins de Girón (Vanderbilt), Matt Van Hoose (Indiana), Valerie McGinley Marshall (Tulane), Elizabeth Sáenz Ackerman (Stanford), Vince Gawronski (Birmingham Southern), Elizabeth Mahan (Connecticut), Julie Walsh (Georgetown), Natalie Arsenault (Texas-Austin), David Arrianza (UCLA), Amanda Wolfe (New Mexico), Paul Duncan (Georgia), and Liesl Picard (FIU).

Vanderbilt was well represented at the Gilberto Gil concert on November 5 presented by the Schermerhorn Symphony Center. Gil is an acclaimed Brazilian singer, songwriter, activist, and one of the founders of Brazil’s Tropicalia movement. From 2003–2008, he served as Brazil’s minister of culture. Marcio Bahia (Department of Spanish and Portuguese) worked with Schermerhorn to bring more than 70 students and faculty to the concert and arranged for students to go backstage afterwards to meet the artist.

CLAS, Sister Cities, and Midtown Wine hosted a wine tasting on February 7, featuring wines from Argentina and Chile. Phil Rasico (Department of Spanish and Portuguese), Pablo Piccolo of Catena Wines, and Larry Soble of Global Vineyard Importers spoke on Argentine wines and winemaking. The event was last held in 2009, the year that Mendoza, Argentina’s Mayor Víctor Fayad and Nashville Mayor Karl Dean signed an official document making Nashville and Mendoza sister cities. Mendoza is home to over 1,000 wineries and is one of Argentina’s most important wine-producing regions, accounting for more than two-thirds of the country’s production.

Midtown Wine donated wine for the event, and food was provided by Sister Cities and CLAS. The Sister Cities organization promotes peace through mutual understanding, respect, and cooperation one person and one community at a time. The group coordinates exchanges for high school and college students between Nashville and Mendoza; students from Belmont University traveled to study and work with business school students at the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo in 2012.

CLAS has partnered with Nashville’s Frist Center for the Visual Arts to organize lectures, gallery talks, teacher workshops, and a dinner in conjunction with the exhibit Exploring Art of the Ancient Americas: The John Bourne Collection. The exhibit opens at the Frist on March 1 and will be on display until June 23, 2013. The Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery will display pieces from its pre-Columbian collection in the two large cases in the main atrium of Cohen Hall for the duration of the exhibit.

The exhibit features 125 pre-Columbian artworks representing more than 2,500 years of creativity in Mexico, Central America, and Andean South America from 1200 BCE to 1520 CE. The collection highlights fundamental principles of ancient American societies, including the shamanic foundation of rulership in Mesoamerica, Costa Rica, and Panama, and the cosmic principles embodied by gold and silver in Colombia. Other artworks, from elaborate musical instruments to portrayals of dancers, highlight the performative nature of politics and religion as a key to social, political, and ideological beliefs. Featured works include Mother and Child (100 BCE–200 CE), Human Effigy Pendant (400–1500 CE), and Llama Effigy (1000–1470 CE).

Area teachers will have the opportunity to attend two professional development workshops organized by CLAS and the Frist on the exhibit and led by Annabeth Headrick, associate professor of art history at the University of Denver.  On March 26, staff from CLAS and the Frist will lead a virtual class for the Educational Media Program at MTSU for local high school students.

Arthur Demarest (Department of Anthropology) will give a public lecture, “The Mysteries of the Ancient Maya Civilization and the Apogee of Art in the Americas,” on Thursday, March 28, at 6:30 p.m. at the Frist. Annabeth Headrick, associate professor of art history at University of Denver will give another public talk on April 11: “Dressing the Part: Ritual Costume in the Mesoamerican World,” also at 6:30 p.m. at the Frist. John Janusek (Department of Anthropology) and Iyaxel Cojtí (Department of Anthropology) will lead gallery talks as part of the Frist’s Connecting Disciplines series on Saturday, March 16, and Saturday, April 20.

In addition, CLAS and the Frist have planned a ticketed dinner, “Exploring the Food of the Ancient Americas: Five-Course Tasting Menu” on March 20. Dinner guests will be treated to a private viewing of the exhibition accompanied by a talk by CLAS Director Ted Fischer, a five-course tasting menu based on ancient American foods, and a talk by Mareike Sattler (Department of Anthropology) on the historical and social significance of the foods and drinks in each course.

All lectures and workshops will be held at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, 919 Broadway, Nashville, TN, 37203. More information on the events can be found at fristcenter.org or vanderbilt.edu/clas.

On December 1, 2012, the Latin American Opinion Project released the AmericasBarometer 2012 survey data. The fifth round of AmericasBarometer tackles the tremendous gaps in opportunities experienced by and resources available to the region’s citizens. The data, collected in the majority of countries with smart phones, includes 41,632 interviews collected from 26 countries in the Americas. The information, which in the past has been free of charge to other researchers, is now available online to the public for free at vanderbilt.edu/lapop/free-access.php.

In early 2013, the Insights series, which provides an analysis of key data gathered by the AmericasBarometer, will resume; anyone can sign up to receive these insights by sending an email to insight@mail.americasbarometer.org. LAPOP recently received an important grant from USAID to continue its collaborative research with the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, as well as another substantial grant from USAID in support of the AmericasBarometer and special studies focused on crime and violence in the region.

The Aurora Flight Sciences unmanned aerial vehicle will be integrated into a larger system that combines the flying device that can fit into a backpack with a software system that can discern an optimal flight pattern and transform the resulting data into three-dimensional maps. The project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between Vanderbilt archaeologistSteven Wernke and engineering professor Julie A. Adams.

They call it SUAVe – for Semi-autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. It was partially financed by an Interdisciplinary Discovery Grant from Vanderbilt.