Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies | College of Liberal Arts
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Activities & Initiatives

College of Liberal Arts

Brunias, Abraham. "Danse de nègres à Saint-Domingue." In Saint-Domingue à la veille de la révolution / by Albert Savine. Paris: Louis Michaud, 1911.

 

Established at UT Austin in 2015, the Black Diaspora Archive (BDA) is a collaborative project between Black Studies, LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections, UT Libraries, and the Office of the President. The BDA exists to collect, preserve, and make accessible collections created by and about Black communities from across the Americas and the Caribbean. Archiving Black América is a new LLILAS Benson initiative to acknowledge and redress the anti-blackness of the archive. It will amplify the work of the BDA and promote and support both new and extensive ongoing work across our campus dedicated to registering and documenting Black lives.

 

  • Call for Proposals: LLILAS Affiliated Faculty, Spring 2024

    The LLILAS Benson Archiving Black América Initiative is currently seeking proposals for public programming on topics focused on Afro-Latin America for spring 2024. Funding support of up to $1,000 is avaiable for each project. We expect to fund five projects.

    Deadline: January 19, 2024

    We welcome proposals from LLILAS affiliated faculty members across all disciplines and for events in all formats, including but not limited to conferences, workshops, talks, and collaborations with visiting scholars. These awards are intended to complement funding from other sources of support.

    The proposed initiative and the use of our funds must be completed by March 30, 2024, when the funds expire. Award funding will not roll over if the event is canceled.

    Please use this Qualtrics link to submit your proposal by January 19, 2024https://utexas.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_eEUk7nVDwpMA6gu 

    We will make decisions and inform awardees shortly after the Jan. 19, 2024, deadline. For more on the Archiving Black América Initiative, click here: Archiving Black América.

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Past Initiatives

2022–2023

ABA Summer 2023 Travel Award Recipients Announced


LLILAS Benson is pleased to announce the 2023 recipients of the Archiving Black América Summer Travel Award. The award provides UT Austin graduate students engaged in research on Black communities in Latin America and the Caribbean with up to $1000 in funding to assist with research-related travel.

College of Liberal Arts

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Diego Alves, PhD Student, Spanish & Portuguese

My ABA fieldwork project will pursue collections of public archives, collectives, and institutions that promote the safeguarding and exhibition of images, materials, monuments as well as works of art in which the struggles of favela dwellers against state terrorism are represented.

College of Liberal Arts

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Ana Carolina Assumpção, PhD Student, Latin American Studies (LLILAS)

My PhD project focuses on race and feminist geopolitical studies, specifically community collectives and Black women’s organizations in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas and how they resist the state’s anti-blackness policies. During summer 2023, I will interview Black women leaders and document their work in Complexo do Alemão and Penha, a chain of urban slums on the north side of Rio de Janeiro. 

College of Liberal Arts

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Mariana Escalona, PhD Student, Latin American Studies (LLILAS)

My research addresses key questions on the reconstruction of the narrative about the life of enslaved African women in the Antillean Caribbean during the colonial period. I am interested in focusing on the enslaver–enslaved relationship record in archives and the legal framework in which they coexisted as the central axis for interpreting everyday life. In my work, I explore the intersection of labor, race, social class, state power, violence, and oppression in the construction of the imaginaries of citizenship. 

College of Liberal Arts

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Sophia Monegro, PhD Candidate, African & African Diaspora Studies

My work revives Black women’s organic intellectualism from the shadows of the first European colony in the Americas. Using literary methods, I read the subtexts of archival documents to trace Black women’s intellectual contributions to Caribbean radicalism from Spanish colonial slavery in Santo Domingo to the Dominican Republic and Haiti in the nineteenth century. Working across transatlantic national archives and preserving crumbling archives for rural churches in the Dominican Republic, my scholarship and archival praxis transform archival fragments into abundant digital platforms and narrative histories. 

College of Liberal Arts

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Keturah Nichols, PhD Student, Spanish & Portuguese

My work largely centers on literary texts written by Black femme and women authors that discuss trauma, disability, and the afterlives of slavery in Dominican, Haitian, and Dominican and Haitian diasporas. Through archival fieldwork, I will supplement my literary analysis to highlight the type of counter-archival work these writers undertake. 

College of Liberal Arts

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Diego de Jesus Santos, PhD Student, Spanish & Portuguese

My project will map environmental racism in the region of Recôncavo da Bahia, Brazil. Maps produced by my research will locate the practice of environmental racism by identifying the areas most affected by industrial and mining activities as well as individuals and social organizations that work to protect the Paraguaçu River in the Iguape Bay region. My study thinks of the river as a methodology for a geohistory written in the course of its waters. Only a riverine epistemology can measure and challenge the state of death imposed by the neo-capitalist devastation in Brazilian traditional communities.

College of Liberal Arts

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Pedro Valdez-Castro, MA Student, Latin American Studies (LLILAS)

My research explores the subjective and cultural motives of Afro-Caribbean (specifically, Dominican and Haitian) migration through the U.S.–Mexican border. I seek to understand how in transnationalized and deprived communities in these countries, people build migration projects as a means to meet social expectations, gain symbolic capital, and increase social prestige. I am also interested in how these migration projects evolved during transit due to co-production of transit experiences and (racial, gender, class, and nationality) identities. 

College of Liberal Arts

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Piero Visconte, PhD Student, Spanish & Portuguese

My current research focuses on the interface of morphology, syntax, phonetics, and phonology applied to the sociocultural context of the Afro-Latino Vernaculars of the Americas (ALVAs)—the languages that developed in Latin America as a result of the contact of African languages, Spanish, and Portuguese in colonial times. It combines linguistic, sociohistorical, legal, and anthropological insights to cast light on the nature and origins of these contact varieties. My dissertation explores creole studies from an interdisciplinary perspective, advancing our knowledge of the subject by offering a cohesive approach to provide new theoretical insights into language contact, language acquisition, and language change. 

LLILAS Benson Archiving Black América–Black Diaspora Archive Acquisitions Grant


The ABA-BDA Acquisitions Grant provides UT Austin and Huston-Tillotson University community members engaged in research and/or community development work with supplemental funding to support travel that develops archival collections documenting Black life in the Americas. Collection materials acquired or created using ABA-BDA funds can include, but are not limited to: artworks (unframed, on paper), catalogs, artist books, newspapers, journals, magazines, print media, independently or locally published written work, photographs, historical documents, oral histories, and recorded performances. Please note that all recorded interviews and/or performances must be accompanied by written transcripts and participant agreement documentation.

Meet the 2023 Archive Acquisitions Grantees

College of Liberal Arts

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Thaís Barbosa, PhD student, Spanish & Portuguese: The initiative of a LLILAS Benson Archiving Black América/ Black Diaspora Archive pre-acquisitions award ABA/BDA offers a unique opportunity to facilitate access to the work of the humanitarian and popular photographer Valda Nogueira (1985–2019). She documented the lifeways of traditional Brazilian communities, and her photos denounce land conflicts, and environmental racism, while constituting a poetic visual homage to the beauty and ancestral knowledge of these communities.

College of Liberal Arts

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Ana Luiza Biazeto, LLILAS PhD student: My project aims to register the daily life of family members of Black women imprisoned in the Santana Women's Penitentiary (São Paulo - BR). I intend to document invisible Black lives in Brazil, one of the countries that not only incarcerates the most women in the world, but also has a prison population composed of 65% black women.

 

 

College of Liberal Arts

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Camille Constance Carr, LLILAS master's student: My work centers the intellectual and cultural accomplishments of Black Colombian women in the Colombian Pacific. I turn to the production of viche, an ancestral drink made from sugarcane, as a site of analysis for intellectual tradition and knowledge production. To bring legibility to the practice of making viche, I intend to conduct an oral history project documenting the life histories of Black Colombian women in the Valle del Cauca department of Colombia.

2023 ABA–LLILAS Benson Digital Scholarship Fellows/Interns
 

Through this LLILAS Benson Digital Scholarship Office collaboration with Archiving Black América, fellows and interns pursue research or teaching interests in the area of the Black Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean using the Benson's digital holdings.

Meet the 2023 Recipients

College of Liberal Arts

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Ethen S. Peña has an MA in history from Texas State University. He currently holds a visiting assistant professorship of history at Huston-Tillotson University. His work explores the relationship between labor, belonging, and identity in the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands. For his fellowship, Peña will be mapping out the relationships formed by Gloria Anzaldúa and myriad radical feminists of color through the process of creating the seminal edited anthologies This Bridge Called My Back, Haciendo Caras, and This Bridge We Call Home. By mapping out how and when these relationships formed, we can visualize feminist modes of relationship as/in process. 

College of Liberal Arts

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Isaiah Frost Rivera (he/they) is a Staten Island-born and -raised scholar, maker, and blackqueer digital speculator pursuing their PhD in African and African Diaspora Studies at UT Austin. They hold a BA from CUNY Brooklyn College in English with a double minor in LGBTQ Studies and Puerto Rican & Latino Studies, along with an MA in Regional Studies (Latin America & the Caribbean) from Columbia University, and an MA in English from Lehigh University. Research interests include queer Afro-Latinx/Caribbean political formations, alternative archives in the digital age, and the intersections between metamodern horror and retributive justice. For this fellowship, they will locate and close-read multimodal artifacts dispersed across the Benson’s digital resources to assemble an archival lineage of black diasporic fugitivity and freedom that may also function as a public-facing educational resource for digital humanities scholars exploring the pedagogical uses of online search tools.

Application Details

Eligibility:
Open to all UT Austin and Huston-Tillotson University faculty, staff, and students conducting research or engaged in community building work with Black populations in the Americas.
Award:
Two awards will be made in 2023. Applicants may request up to $3,000 to support travel related to the preservation and/or acquisition of collection materials that will enhance the Black Diaspora Archive at UT Austin.
To Apply:
Applications must include:
(1) Resume/CV
(2) A narrative of no more than one page in length describing research/work and its significance, proposed contribution to BDA collections, and methodology for collection acquisition
(3) A budget detailing how funds will be used
Application materials can be emailed to Rachel E. Winston at rwinston@austin.utexas.edu with ABABDA Application in the subject line.

Timeline:
Deadline: Friday, January 13, 2023 
Notification of award will be issued in February 2023, for research/work to take place between May and August 1, 2023. Collection materials must be deposited in the Black Diaspora Archive no later than October 1, 2023.

Questions about LLILAS Benson Archiving Black América may be directed to Dr. Lorraine Leu, lorraine.leu@austin.utexas.edu.
Questions about the BDA Collections Fellowship may be directed to Rachel E. Winston rwinston@austin.utexas.edu, with ABABDA in the subject line.

Photo: Historical marker at Mt. Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church, Matagorda County, Texas. Courtesy Rachel E. Winston.

About the Black Diaspora Archive
College of Liberal Arts

Student Fellowships, Research and Acquisitions Awards, 2023

College of Liberal Arts

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  • Summer 2023 Travel Award Recipients

    The 2023 Archiving Black América Summer Travel Award provided UT Austin graduate students engaged in research on Black communities in Latin America and the Caribbean with up to $1000 in funding to assist with research-related travel. The following students received the 2023 award.

    Diego Alves, PhD Student, Spanish & Portuguese: My ABA fieldwork project will pursue collections of public archives, collectives, and institutions that promote the safeguarding and exhibition of images, materials, monuments as well as works of art in which the struggles of favela dwellers against state terrorism are represented.

    Ana Carolina Assumpção, PhD Student, Latin American Studies (LLILAS): My PhD project focuses on race and feminist geopolitical studies, specifically community collectives and Black women’s organizations in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas and how they resist the state’s anti-blackness policies. During summer 2023, I will interview Black women leaders and document their work in Complexo do Alemão and Penha, a chain of urban slums on the north side of Rio de Janeiro. 

    Mariana Escalona, PhD Student, Latin American Studies (LLILAS): My research addresses key questions on the reconstruction of the narrative about the life of enslaved African women in the Antillean Caribbean during the colonial period. I am interested in focusing on the enslaver–enslaved relationship record in archives and the legal framework in which they coexisted as the central axis for interpreting everyday life. In my work, I explore the intersection of labor, race, social class, state power, violence, and oppression in the construction of the imaginaries of citizenship. 

    Sophia Monegro, PhD Candidate, African & African Diaspora Studies: My work revives Black women’s organic intellectualism from the shadows of the first European colony in the Americas. Using literary methods, I read the subtexts of archival documents to trace Black women’s intellectual contributions to Caribbean radicalism from Spanish colonial slavery in Santo Domingo to the Dominican Republic and Haiti in the nineteenth century. Working across transatlantic national archives and preserving crumbling archives for rural churches in the Dominican Republic, my scholarship and archival praxis transform archival fragments into abundant digital platforms and narrative histories. 

    Keturah Nichols, PhD Student, Spanish & Portuguese: My work largely centers on literary texts written by Black femme and women authors that discuss trauma, disability, and the afterlives of slavery in Dominican, Haitian, and Dominican and Haitian diasporas. Through archival fieldwork, I will supplement my literary analysis to highlight the type of counter-archival work these writers undertake. 

    Diego de Jesus Santos, PhD Student, Spanish & Portuguese: My project will map environmental racism in the region of Recôncavo da Bahia, Brazil. Maps produced by my research will locate the practice of environmental racism by identifying the areas most affected by industrial and mining activities as well as individuals and social organizations that work to protect the Paraguaçu River in the Iguape Bay region. My study thinks of the river as a methodology for a geohistory written in the course of its waters. Only a riverine epistemology can measure and challenge the state of death imposed by the neo-capitalist devastation in Brazilian traditional communities.

    Pedro Valdez-Castro, MA Student, Latin American Studies (LLILAS): My research explores the subjective and cultural motives of Afro-Caribbean (specifically, Dominican and Haitian) migration through the U.S.–Mexican border. I seek to understand how in transnationalized and deprived communities in these countries, people build migration projects as a means to meet social expectations, gain symbolic capital, and increase social prestige. I am also interested in how these migration projects evolved during transit due to co-production of transit experiences and (racial, gender, class, and nationality) identities.

    Piero Visconte, PhD Student, Spanish & Portuguese: My current research focuses on the interface of morphology, syntax, phonetics, and phonology applied to the sociocultural context of the Afro-Latino Vernaculars of the Americas (ALVAs)—the languages that developed in Latin America as a result of the contact of African languages, Spanish, and Portuguese in colonial times. It combines linguistic, sociohistorical, legal, and anthropological insights to cast light on the nature and origins of these contact varieties. My dissertation explores creole studies from an interdisciplinary perspective, advancing our knowledge of the subject by offering a cohesive approach to provide new theoretical insights into language contact, language acquisition, and language change. 

  • 2023 Archiving Black América–Black Diaspora Archive Acquisitions Grant

    The 2023 LLILAS Benson ABA-BDA Acquisitions Grant provided UT Austin and Huston-Tillotson University community members engaged in research and/or community development work with supplemental funding to support travel that develops archival collections documenting Black life in the Americas. Collection materials acquired or created using ABA-BDA funds can include, but are not limited to: artworks (unframed, on paper), catalogs, artist books, newspapers, journals, magazines, print media, independently or locally published written work, photographs, historical documents, oral histories, and recorded performances. All recorded interviews and/or performances must be accompanied by written transcripts and participant agreement documentation. Meet the 2023 grantees.

    Thaís Barbosa, PhD student, Spanish & Portuguese: The initiative of a LLILAS Benson Archiving Black América/ Black Diaspora Archive pre-acquisitions award ABA/BDA offers a unique opportunity to facilitate access to the work of the humanitarian and popular photographer Valda Nogueira (1985–2019). She documented the lifeways of traditional Brazilian communities, and her photos denounce land conflicts, and environmental racism, while constituting a poetic visual homage to the beauty and ancestral knowledge of these communities.

    Ana Luiza Biazeto, LLILAS PhD student: My project aims to register the daily life of family members of Black women imprisoned in the Santana Women's Penitentiary (São Paulo - BR). I intend to document invisible Black lives in Brazil, one of the countries that not only incarcerates the most women in the world, but also has a prison population composed of 65% black women.

    Camille Constance Carr, LLILAS master's student: My work centers the intellectual and cultural accomplishments of Black Colombian women in the Colombian Pacific. I turn to the production of viche, an ancestral drink made from sugarcane, as a site of analysis for intellectual tradition and knowledge production. To bring legibility to the practice of making viche, I intend to conduct an oral history project documenting the life histories of Black Colombian women in the Valle del Cauca department of Colombia.

  • 2023 ABA–LLILAS Benson Digital Scholarship Fellows/Interns

    Through this LLILAS Benson Digital Scholarship Office collaboration with Archiving Black América, fellows and interns pursue research or teaching interests in the area of the Black Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean using the Benson's digital holdings. Meet the 2023 fellows and interns.

    Ethen S. Peña has an MA in history from Texas State University. He currently holds a visiting assistant professorship of history at Huston-Tillotson University. His work explores the relationship between labor, belonging, and identity in the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands. For his fellowship, Peña will be mapping out the relationships formed by Gloria Anzaldúa and myriad radical feminists of color through the process of creating the seminal edited anthologies This Bridge Called My Back, Haciendo Caras, and This Bridge We Call Home. By mapping out how and when these relationships formed, we can visualize feminist modes of relationship as/in process. 

    Isaiah Frost Rivera (he/they) is a Staten Island-born and -raised scholar, maker, and blackqueer digital speculator pursuing their PhD in African and African Diaspora Studies at UT Austin. They hold a BA from CUNY Brooklyn College in English with a double minor in LGBTQ Studies and Puerto Rican & Latino Studies, along with an MA in Regional Studies (Latin America & the Caribbean) from Columbia University, and an MA in English from Lehigh University. Research interests include queer Afro-Latinx/Caribbean political formations, alternative archives in the digital age, and the intersections between metamodern horror and retributive justice. For this fellowship, they will locate and close-read multimodal artifacts dispersed across the Benson’s digital resources to assemble an archival lineage of black diasporic fugitivity and freedom that may also function as a public-facing educational resource for digital humanities scholars exploring the pedagogical uses of online search tools.

    Mason Thompson is a sophomore at Huston-Tillotson University majoring in History Education with a minor in African American Studies. He is currently a member and secretary of the Apple Pre-Ed African American Male Teacher Initiative at Huston-Tillotson. Mason plans on being a college professor teaching history and African American Studies. For this internship, Mason will be identifying Black Diasporic materials in the Benson Latin American Collection for research and teaching as part of the Archiving Black América Initiative.

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Mason Thompson is a sophomore at Huston-Tillotson University majoring in History Education with a minor in African American Studies. He is currently a member and secretary of the Apple Pre-Ed African American Male Teacher Initiative at Huston-Tillotson. Mason plans on being a college professor teaching history and African American Studies. For this internship, Mason will be identifying Black Diasporic materials in the Benson Latin American Collection for research and teaching as part of the Archiving Black América Initiative.

 

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Recent Highlights

 

College of Liberal Arts

Brazilian performance artist Charlene Bicalho performs "Sharp Water." Bicalho performed the piece outside LLILAS Benson on the UT campus, and led workshops and a discussion for UT students.

Fall 2023 – Charlene Bicalho Residency


Charlene Bicalho’s latest experimental performance practice emerges from her processual investigation of the embodied and performed knowledge of racialized janitorial workers in Brazilian art institutions. In this context, water becomes central to her work as the element that connects the prosaic cleaning task to a larger history of workers and their territories. In Bicalho's practice, water becomes the bond between the present and the past, the individual and the collective, the profane and the sacred dimensions of the racialized working body.  

Bicalho choreographs the everyday work gestures and finds in them evidence of collective ancestral knowledge, weaving them together with movements that could be traced, for example, to the cadenced, artful resistance of Brazilian capoeira, or yet to the balanced and joyful twirls and spins of carnival flagbearers. In an all-embracing aesthetic attitude of control, stability, composure, and dignity—which art historian Robert Ferris Thompson has simply and brilliantly called “cool” (The Aesthetic of the Cool, 1973)—Bicalho channels the spiritual, cooling, time-bending powers of water in all its physical states. Through a body that dances and rests, Bicalho opposes the capitalist control over the spaces and bodies, performing the desire for the freedom of the body as well as its transcendence. 

Text by Maysa Martins, PhD Student in Art and Art History 

College of Liberal Arts

Curator Diane Lima (l) and artist Aline Motta pose in the Benson Rare Books & Manuscripts Reading Room, flanked by Rosana Paulino's artwork. The two visited campus at the invitation of Professor Adele Nelson, Dept. of Art & Art History. 

Spring 2023: Rosana Paulino Artwork Acquisition


To commemorate the establishment of the Archiving Black América initiative, the Black Diaspora Archive has purchased three lithographs by Rosana Paulino, a leading contemporary Brazilian artist and keynote speaker at the 2020 Lozano Long Conference. The work went on public display in the Benson Latin American Collection in late January 2023. Click on this link for information and interpretive framing of the works, and a link to a podcast from the website of the Cite Black Women Collective, featuring an interview with Rosana Paulino by Lorraine Leu, along with the transcript in English. (Translated excerpts of Leu's interview with Paulino can be found in the article "Voices of Black Brazilian Feminism," published in Portal magazine, 2020).

  • Spring 2023 LBDS-ABA Internship

    Upper-division undergraduates and/or graduate students from UT Austin are eligible to apply. The intern will be exposed to digital scholarship theory and a variety of technical skills through assigned readings, workshops, and projects. Working closely with Digital Scholarship staff, the intern will design and/or implement a project based on their academic and professional interests. Apply here: https://bit.ly/3UW3p3E

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From top left: Diego Alves, Pedro Valdez-Castro, Piero Visconte, Diego de Jesus Santos, Keturah Nichols, Mariana Escalona, Sophia Monegro, Ana Carolina Assumpção, Ana Luiza Biazeto, Ethen Peña, Isaiah Frost Rivera, Mason Thompson, Camille Carr, Thaís Barbosa