Activities & Initiatives

2022–23 Activities

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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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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).