Activities & Initiatives

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, 2024: https://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.

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. 

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.

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.

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