The Stone Center for Latin American Studies envisioned The LAST 100 as its contribution to the commemoration of the formal introduction of the study of Latin America and the circum-Caribbean region at Tulane that began in 1924 and became a university-wide curricular initiative in 1938. Now, one hundred years later, this centennial celebration hopes to reflect on the evolution, growth, and vibrancy of Latin American Studies at Tulane, which entailed hiring of faculty across the disciplines, forging an interdisciplinary curriculum and full range of degree programs, developing a distinguished Latin American library collection, creating community outreach and K-12 educational programming, and establishing collaborations across the Americas.
The celebration of The LAST 100 includes several events, but its enduring legacy will be the digitization and publication of historical resources that document the contributions of Tulane’s Latin Americanists to the world—their research, their publications, their teaching, their MA and PhD graduates, their leadership in area studies, and their service to the region. These are complemented by a series of narrative stories that define areas of research and scholarship where Tulane faculty and alumni have made significant and sustained contributions—Mesoamerican archaeology and history, Indigenous society and linguistics, Latin American film and cultural studies, Brazilian music, literature, and politics, and artistic production at the intersections of Indigenous and colonial society. In economics, political science, and sociology, faculty have made vital contributions to our knowledge of political institutions, economic development, social policy and change, and human ecology, first in Central America, Mexico, and Colombia, and today in research on social movements, extractivism, corruption, and inequality in Brazil and the Andean region. Tulane’s contributions, however, in comparative law, public policy and finance, urban and environmental planning, conservation biology, historic preservation, tropical ecology, epidemiology, environmental health, and tropical medicine cross every School and division at Tulane as revealed in the digital collection.
The LAST 100 also highlights documentation that illustrates the lasting impact of private and federal funding over the past one hundred years on the development of Latin American Studies. Our program, like so many others, rests on both private philanthropy and the cumulative impacts of grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, the Mellon and Tinker Foundations, as well as from federal grant programs created by the National Defense and Education Act, which produced, and continues to produce, significant funding for Latin American Studies teaching and research through Title VI.
The LAST 100 is designed to include many stories carried on through time by alumni and staff, many of whom you can hear from through their recorded testimonies. At a finer level, it is shaped by intentional and directed archival research into the records, publications, and documentary evidence of the university as well as through public media sources. The objective is to tell the story of Latin American Studies at Tulane in as full and complete a way as possible, and to make this story readily accessible and comprehensible to anyone who would have an interest in it.
Thomas F. Reese, Executive Director, 1999-
July 2024