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Center for Latin American Studies

To be eligible for honors work, students must have a cumulative grade-point average of 3.25 or higher and an average of 3.5 or higher in Latin American studies courses. Students are admitted to the Center's honors program by recommendation of a faculty adviser and permission of the director. Students must complete a capstone project. Departmental honors also are awarded to those students maintaining a grade-point average of 3.5 in the major and who complete the requirements for the School of Arts and Sciences honors program with work on Latin America. Interested students are encouraged to apply to the Center toward the end of their junior year. Contact the Center Director for further information.

Spring 2026 Competition

Sandra Acocal	Conduct research at the University of Murcia, Spain.
Florencia Bertinotti	Conduct archival work in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Leonardo Calzada	Will attend the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting to present his most recent dissertation chapter.
María Chacón	Taking a specialized course in literary analysis software.
Gloria D'Alessio	Intensive Guna (Dulegaya) language training program in the Guna Yala Comarca of Panama.
Jamie Gagliano	Four-week return trip between May and June 2026 to complete archival work and conduct follow-up interviews across study sites.
Javier González	Conduct oral history interviews with people who were actively involved in horse racing between the 1950s and 1980s.
Fernando Letelier	Conduct research at the Central Bank of Chile.
Ana Llurba	Fieldwork in Buenos Aires and Córdoba (Argentina).
Mildred López	Travel to Sechura in Piura, Peru to conduct field work for the third chapter of her dissertation.
Javiera Madrid-Salazar	Archival research on geological technical cooperation agreements with Chile in the UN and in the National Archives.
Daniela Mosquera-Camacho	Archival research at the Archivo General de la Nación in Bogotá, Colombia.
Raquel Padilla	Exploratory visit to the area to the neighborhoods of Condesa and Roma in Mexico City.
Yareimy Patrocinio	Study abroad course about the historical colonial context of Puerto Rico and its impact on contemporary inequalities.
Zuleima Vázquez-Carrillo	Preliminary fieldwork in Puerto Rico towards her dissertation research.
Tamara Velásquez	Fieldwork in Mexico City during the summer.

Spring 2025 Competition

Gloria D'Alessio	I will conduct preliminary fieldwork for my Ph.D. dissertation at the UN migrants campsite in the Darien jungle, Panama, and will continue the exploration I started on the Colombian side of the border.
Nathan Darmiento	Research trip to Mexico's Archivo General de la Nación to explore archival material on President Luis Echeverría (1970-1976)
Leonardo Calzada	Connecting communities with forest monitoring
Jeffrey Aizprua	Travel to Ecuador to contact participants to provide them with information about my research project to gauge their interest and willingness to participate as research subjects.
Javiera Madrid-Salazar	I will conduct preliminary fieldwork for my dissertation project, which focuses on the historical development of the geosciences in Chile and its implications for the expansion of mining frontiers in Chile and Latin America.
Santos Rivera-Cardona	Conducting semi-structured and unstructured interviews with experts, political actors and citizens in Puerto Rico.
Laurian Rosa Rosa	Visit the National Archive in Philadelphia to access the records related to the Roosevelt Roads Naval Base, which were included under the 10th Naval.
Javiera Barrientos	Visit the National Archive, the National Library and the Biblioteca del Convento de Santo Domingo in Lima, Peru.
Nia Cambridge	Project Title: Hurricane Riskscapes and Post/disaster futures in the Caribbean.
Sandra Acocal	I focus on working on the Indian nobility of central Mexico in the 16th century, specifically the Indian nobility of Tlaxcala.
Maria Cecilia Chacon Rendon	Collect missing publications of the column Callejón Oscuro (1936-1937) and bibliographic materials on the newspaper La Calle and Bolivian political journalism.
Alejandra Lopez-Oliveros	My research investigates the collaborative roles of women photographers, designers, editors, and publishers in the creation of contemporary photobooks in Latin America.
Ana Llurba	Gastronarratives and Postnatural Entanglements of Meat and Soy in Contemporary Argentine Literature and Art.

Spring 2024 Competition

Anderson de Andrade	Received funds for preliminary ethnographic research at the Annunciation House in El Paso, Texas - a non-profit offering shelter to refugees and migrants - through participation in their volunteer program.
Tamara Velasquez Leiferman	Received funds to cover costs related to fieldwork in Mexico City this summer.
Diana Iturralde	With this summer research grant, Iturralde will travel to Lima, Peru, to conduct field and archival research for my dissertation "Chasing the Amazon: Visual Representations of Andean Amazonia from the Nineteenth Century to the Present." While in this city, Iturralde will visit cultural and research centers, museums, galleries, and artists’ studios, allowing me to write two of the four chapters in my project.
Jian Ren	Received funds to conduct research trip to Brazil and Argentina for collecting locally published Chinese-language newspapers in the 1980s and conducting oral interviews with business and migrant leaders who received Chinese visitors in the 1980s.
Gabriela Duncan	Received funds for a Spring Study Abroad opportunity in St. Lucia with the focus of the course being public management, especially within the non-profit sector in the Caribbean.
Nathan Darmiento	Darmiento will be using the grant money to conduct exploratory research in Mexico City, Oaxaca, Chiapas (National Library, General Archive of the Nation, University of the South - Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Benito Juárez Autonomous University of Oaxaca).
Leonardo Calzada	Received funds to travel to the INEGI microdata laboratory to consult the agrarian and ejido census for the years 2007 and 2022. This information will be used as explanatory variables for the construction of a cellular automata model to generate scenarios of forest change to 2030 in the Calakmul Sian Ka'an corridor, Mexico.
Sandra Acocal	Received funds to participate in Nahuatl language course in summer, and archival work in Arvhivo General de Indias, Sevilla, Spain, autumn 2024.
Gloria D'Alessio	D’Alessio will be using the funds to conduct preliminary fieldwork for a thesis proposal on the migration corridor in the Darien Gap between Colombia and Panama. Specifically, in the city of Necoclí, on the Colombian side of the corridor, to analyze the local economies and local lives transformation after the increase of migration flow in the last years.
Clive Echague	Received funds to support exploratory fieldwork in border cities of northern Chile
Daniela Mosquera	Received the grant to conduct fieldwork during July and August of 2024 in the Caribbean Northwest of Colombia, focusing on the notions of campesinos and campesinas regarding property, and the socio-environmental conflicts tied to this notion in the region.
Javier González	Received funds to embark on a two-month research trip to Bogotá, Colombia, to conduct archival work at the historical archives of the Sociedad de Mejoras y Ornato de Bogotá, the Archive of Bogotá, and the National Library. His objective is to explore materials that document specific relationships between people and animals in the city during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This will include investigating the establishment and development of public policies, animal protection societies, zoological gardens, bullrings, horse courses, dog tracks, and game hunting.
Nia Cambridge	Research for dissertation proposal on climate change strategy and post-disaster futures in the Anglophone Caribbean. This summer Cambridge will be conducting document analysis and interviews with key informants.
Dalia Grinan	Will be using the grant to conduct research in Cuba.
Laurien Rosa Rosa	Received funds to conduct preliminary fieldwork in Puerto Rico. Research includes conducting interviews with community members claiming lands back from the U.S. Army and visit the General Archive and the Puerto Rican Collection at the University of Puerto Rico to understand the context in which expropriations of these communities were made in the 1940s.
Mildred Lopez Escudero	Received funds to interview storytellers for dissertation entitle: "Performance and Public Engagement for Environmental Justice: Storytelling and Community Theatre in Latin America (Peru, Chile)
Javiera Barrientos	Received funds to research the Colonial Liturgical Manuscript MHN 3-38169 acquired by the Museo Histórico Nacional of Chile in 1911

Spring 2023 Competition

Kiran Baldeo	Seeking to become proficient in the Spanish language.
Leonardo Calzada	Local perspectives on the values, visions, and meanings of forest and their effect on the implementation of Sembrando Vida
Rosa Emilia Cordero Cruz	Enslaved women of Puerto Rico's Arecibo District
Laura Carolina De Moya-Guerra	Archival research in Archivo General de la Nación in Bogotá
Clive Echaqüe	Exploratory fieldwork in border-town Colchane in Northern Chile
Javier González Cortés	Exploratory research in Bogotá (Archive of Bogotá, General Archive of the Nation, National Library, Library of Congress)
Alexander Liebman	Oral histories on race, ethnicity, and territorial processes among campesino groups in the norte del Cauca, Colombia
Daniela Mosquera	Ethnographic fieldwork about resource extraction and energy commodification for the Energy Transition in Colombia
Lorena Avila Jaimes	Latino until Proven Innocent: Navigating the Crimmigration nexus in the U.S.

Spring 2022 Competition

Joshua Anthony, History	Nahuatl annals to explore how elite kinship networks met the challenge of Spanish rule.
Kiran Baldeo, History	Reconstructing the lives of orphaned children in the indentured labor system in South America.
Rosa Cordero, History	Rural, Black, and working-class intimacies, kinship, and personhood during late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Puerto Rico.
Laura De Moya-Guerra, History	The study of Chinese immigrants in Colombia
Melissa Gasparotto, SCI	How current and historical practices of linguists impact the development of Latin American language technologies.
Javier Gonzalez, History	The contemporary practice of animal specimen collecting with origins in the late eighteenth century in Colombia.
Dalia Grinan, History	How enslaved and free black Caribbean women mobilized knowledge to navigate the intersections of enslavement/freedoms(s), imperial powers, Atlantic crossings, and ever mutating ideas around race, color, and gender in the nineteenth century.
Jennifer Markovits, SpanPort	Understanding the main characteristics of Aymara as a heritage language to improve the current Aymara language programs in elementary and secondary education, and extending this work on the relationship between language and social justice beyond Chile
Emma Osle, Art History	“Finding Las Madres: Maternity and Latinx Art:” Will analyze motherhood in the visual arts through a Latinx framework.
Alan Palacios-Clas, Comp Lit	Studying the Quechua language(s) and Andean cultures
Ariela Parisi, SpanPort	Black Brazilian Cinema in relation to human rights in the works of film directors Adirley Queirós and Diego Paulino.
Ryan Pinchot, SpanPort	How do filmmaking processes practiced by Amazonian Indigenous filmmaking collectives reflect, construct and transform assemblages of human/non-human alliance.

Spring 2021 Competition

Laura Carolina De Moya-Guerra, History	Received funds to aid in the translation of documents produced by Chinese immigrants in Colombia thus, making them accessible for her dissertation.
Jennifer Markovits, Spanish and Portuguese	Received funds in order to attend the Bilingual Aymara-Spanish oral tradition workshop in the north of Chile.
Leonardo Calzada, Geography	Received funds to support travel and living during fieldwork in Quintana Roo, Mexico.
Jamie Gagliano, Geography	Received funds to aid in a remote participatory mapping project of eucalyptus plantations in Paraguay and to be able to attend Guarani classes in preparation for preliminary doctoral fieldwork.
Joyce Lu, Anthropology	Received funds to help defray the costs of preliminary fieldwork and K’iche’ Maya language study for her dissertation project on antimicrobial resistance and stewardship in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala.
Raul Rodriguez-Arancibia, Anthropology	Received funds for three months of fieldwork research to document, ethnographically and historically, the Iquique, Chile, free-trade zone (ZOFRI).
Celso A Mendoza, History	Received funds for archival dissertation research in Mexico City in order to investigate documents written by a scribe, author of two Nahuatl annals.
Monica Mogollon Plazas, Economics	Received funds to aid in primary data processing, construction of database links with public administrative sources, and conducting data analysis for the project: Public Universities and technical education in Colombia.
Andres Manuel Felipe Gonzalez-Saiz, Anthropology	Received funds to support follow-up interviews in Colombia with former participants in order to fill up the gaps in collected data.
Katia Yoza, Spanish	Received funds for fieldwork in two Peruvian Amazonian cities to study the interaction and political impact of murals of Amazonarte, which represent indigenous cosmologies, and to conduct interviews with indigenous and non-indigenous people of the area.

Spring 2020 Competition

David Roldan Eugenio, Spanish and Portuguese	Received funds to support a research trip to Madrid to identify mass media articles, photographs, and drawings documenting Afro-Cubans' participation in circus shows and more.
Iris Cardenas, School of Social Work	Received funds for Stats software and Stata training in order to test the association between intimate partner violence and multiple partner fertility among Colombian women.
Alana Rader, Geography	Received funds to fund room and board expenses during the final phase of her dissertation fieldwork in Southern Quintana Roo and Campeche, Mexico.
Elizabeth S. Corredor, Political Science	Received funds to support her fieldwork in Colombia.
Josh Anthony, History	Received funds to support a research trip to Mexico City to conduct research in the Archivo General de la Nacion and other local archives.
Krysta Herrera, Spanish	Received funds to travel to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and conduct research to complete her dissertation.
Jian Ren, History	Received funds to support travel to Lima, Peru in order to consult the Oriental Magazine office's historical collections.
Jennifer Markovits, Spanish and Portuguese	Received funds to attend an Aymara language class in Peru.
Lisette Varon-Carvajal, History	Received funds to conduct archival research for her dissertation project in Popayan, Medellin and Bogota.
Camila Belliard-Quiroga, Women Gender and Sexuality Studies	Received funds to support dissertation fieldwork in Chile.

Arts and Sciences in Action: A Latin American View of the World

"I chose to major in Latin American Studies because as a first generation immigrant, I wanted to learn more about my birth country Colombia, the commonalities between Latin American countries, and to understand the issues that push so many of us to migrate North."

Ricardo Sánchez-Ortegon
Class of 2019

Center for Latin American Studies

Learn Promote pedagogy, research, and service in and about the broader region known as Las Américas
Develop Understand the diverse cultures and histories of the complex region
Hone Gainnew insights into Latin American culture and society, politics and economics, and environment and ecology

The Center for Latin American Studies is part of the School of Arts and Sciences

As an Latin American Studies major in the School of Arts and Sciences, you’ll have full access to a liberal arts education that spans 47 programs for undergraduates. You will acquire both the specialized knowledge of the field you choose to study in depth, and broad knowledge of the world from the renowned scholar-teachers at Rutgers. You’ll graduate ready to meet contemporary challenges in your workplace, in your hometown, and in the global community.

Visit Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences Website

Details: Category: Undergraduate

Upon completion of the program in Latin American Studies students will:

demonstrate familiarity with several of the disciplines that comprise the field of Latin American Studies, by proficiently employing different research methodologies and interdisciplinary approaches, including but not limited to anthropological, economic, environmental, geographic, historical, political, sociological, linguistic, literary, visual, cinematic, and/or performance analysis.
demonstrate substantive knowledge of the cultural concepts, historical legacies, and socio-economic processes that inform modern Latin America and its diaspora.
demonstrate an understanding of the hemispheric and global connections between Latin America, the United States, and other regions.
demonstrate an understanding of issues of social justice in Latin America and its diaspora in order to participate as informed citizens in a global society.
demonstrate the research and critical thinking skills necessary to formulate clear and persuasive written and oral arguments.
be able to carry out basic research in Spanish and/or Portuguese and to converse with native speakers.
be prepared to pursue graduate study in Latin American studies or in one of the disciplines represented in the program; and/or
be prepared to pursue professional training and careers in fields such as business, education, journalism and media, international relations, law, non-governmental work, public policy and planning, public health, and social work.

Professor Aldo A Lauria-Santiago is available in person or via zoom. Please click the link below to write me for an appointment or with any questions. Let's talk!!

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