While Mexico as an area of research specialty has often been associated with universities in Texas and California, Tulane’s connections to Mexico have a long and rich tradition.
The study of Mexico at Tulane has been shaped by both broader institutional priorities and Mexico’s sociopolitical history. A grant from the Carnegie Corporation in 1947 designated Tulane’s regional specialization in Latin America as “Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.”
The 1960s-70s
The fields of Art History, Anthropology, and History were some of the earliest strengths in the Latin American Studies program, particularly in pre-Colombian and colonial Mexico. This was complemented by a series of cultural events that involved community members and partners outside of Tulane including the Mexican Consulate of New Orleans.
In Anthropology, Tulane had already developed a strong academic agenda in the region via the continuous work of the Middle American Research Institute (M.A.R.I.), which benefitted from the arrival of Robert Wauchope in the mid-1940s. His work included the Handbook of Middle American Indians, a sixteen-volume compendium on Mesoamerica that was field-defining for future work on the region. Wauchope and M.A.R.I.’s efforts led to the consolidation of the Yucatán as a main area of interest for anthropologists, archaeologists, and linguists at Tulane.
One of the longest trajectories of intellectual strength in Mexican Studies at Tulane exists in the Department of Art History. This began with Donald Robertson who was hired in 1957, and followed by Mary Elizabeth (Betsy) Smith, who came in 1987. Robertson marked the beginning of a line of professors who specialized in Mexican manuscript studies. This position later became the endowed Martha and Donald Robertson Chair in Latin American Art History, which would be occupied by Elizabeth Hill Boone (1994 to 2021) and Barbara E. Mundy (2021– ). Listen to the clip below as Boone describes the common research interests of her predecessors.
In the Summers of 1975 and 1976, Robertson offered an NEH-funded Seminar on Pre-Colombian and Colonial Latin American Art, which facilitated an opportunity for students to visit Mexico City and Oaxaca to view pre-Colombian sites and art collections. As Robertson told students, “If you study art, you should look at the art.”1
Beyond Art History, two key hires in 1969, Richard Greenleaf and Victoria Bricker, would significantly shape the program in Latin American Studies. Greenleaf, who became director of the Center for Latin American Studies the following year, developed work on colonial Mexico in the History department, added a regular sequence of courses on Mexico that he taught yearly, and advised a significant number of graduate dissertations. Bricker, hired into Anthropology, expanded Tulane’s existing strength in Mayan languages that began with Mayan linguist Alfredo Barrera Vásquez, who joined the faculty as Visiting Associate Professor in 1949-50. In 1975, the appointment of Colin M. MacLachlan added to Mexico’s centrality in history; although hired as a Brazilianist, MacLachlan was, at heart, a historian of modern Mexico.
The 1970s witnessed an increase in Mexican cultural programming with a variety of partners. In March 1977, Tulane co-sponsored a Music of Colonial Mexico performance at Newman High School with the Loyola Department of Music. Additionally, two lectures and a concert by Mexican pianists Francisco and Manuel Monzón were co-organized by the Center for Latin American Studies, Loyola, and the Mexican Consulate.2
Fall 1977 brought a film series on “New Cinema from Mexico” in collaboration with the Film Buffs Institute at Loyola, Películas Mexicanas, S.A., and Mexico’s Banco Cinematográfico, which showed new films like La pasión según Berenice (Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, 1976) and De todos modos Juan te llamas (Marcela Fernández Violante, 1976). A hybrid lecture and performance event, “Three Indian Dances of Mexico” by Fernando Horcasitas (UNAM) occurred in the Rogers Memorial Chapel in October 1977.
Summer Study Programs and Other Exchanges
These summer programs began in the mid-1970s with Cordell Hull Foundation funds that brought teachers and Tulane students to Mexico. This began a long tradition that included summer abroad for both undergraduate and graduate students, which started at the Instituto Politécnico Nacional (Mexican National Polytechnic Institute), later moving to the Universidad Iberoamericana. Greenleaf occasionally offered graduate research seminars on topics like the Porfiriato. In the 1990s, Tulane organized two summer study sessions with a general program of 12 courses for undergraduates and a six-week cultural immersion program for K-12 teachers in Mexico City until 1997. These programs moved from Mexico City to Guadalajara, Jalisco at the University of Guadalajara in 1999 and ran through 2010, after which they were discontinued.
Listen below to Stone Center Assistant Director Jimmy Huck who discusses his experience as Director of the Mexico Study Abroad programs both in the 1990s as a graduate student and when he returned to the Stone Center in 2001.
The 1980s
This decade witnessed an uptick in programming aimed at the Greater New Orleans trade and investment community about business and the economy in Mexico culminating as the New Orleans’ World’s Fair approached in 1984.
One such event, “The United States and Mexico: Forecast for the 1980s,” was held December 10-11, 1981, and co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies, the Port of New Orleans, the Council of the Americas, the International Trade Mart, and the U.S. Department of Commerce. The conference, which focused on trade and investment, energy, and immigration, sought to educate “businessmen, bankers, investors, and international traders” on issues relevant to Mexico and U.S. business and political relations in the coming decade.
After Mexico defaulted on their foreign debt and spiraled into a peso crisis in 1982, the Center for Latin American Studies co-sponsored a conference on “Mexico: The Prognosis for Economic Recovery” at the International Trade Mart in November 1983 where Dr. Greenleaf gave the keynote address entitled, “The Current Crisis in Mexico.”3 This is one of many examples of the interconnectedness of sociopolitical and economic climate with Tulane’s Mexico-related programming.
In the Fall of 1987, the Center – by now, the Roger Thayer Stone Center for Latin American Studies – engaged in a semester of programming on The Mexican Recovery, 1982-1987, funded by the Mellon Foundation and the Pan American Life Insurance Endowment. This included a student/faculty interdisciplinary seminar, “Crisis in Mexico, 1969-1987,” with a number of invited lectures by Eric N. Baklanoff, John M. Bruton (American Chamber of Commerce of Mexico), Juan Ramos Gurrola, Nancy Westfall de Gurrola (Universidad Iberoamericana), and Constantino Urcuyo. The semester culminated in the meeting of the U.S. Council of The Mexico-US Business Committee where Tulanians heard talks on the importance of the private sector in Mexico’s recovery.
This successful series was followed up in 1989 with another student-faculty interdisciplinary seminar with invited lectures on the political economy in Mexico.4 The Center then co-sponsored a trade and investment conference at the World Trade Center in New Orleans in November 1989.
The Revitalization of Mexican Studies
In 1990, as part of Tulane’s Strategic Planning Program, the Latin American Studies program received increased funding from the university for additional faculty that could help in the process of institutionalizing Mexican Studies. This allowed the Center to hire two specialists on Mexico, Carol Zabin (Economics) and Roderic Ai Camp (Political Science), who joined the faculty in Fall 1991. These hires intended to establish research and training programs on modern Mexico.
Around the same time, in June 1991, Tulane’s president Eamon Kelly along with Richard Greenleaf signed a draft agreement with the Mexican Secretary of Education (SEP) that would bring junior faculty from Mexican universities for training at Tulane. Their goal was to bring over 500 students in a ten-year period.
Listen as Jimmy Huck describes his experience studying alongside the Mexicans that the SEP program brought to Tulane and his reflection on the legacies of graduates like Susana Preciado Jiménez (Universidad de Colima) and Víctor M. González Esparza (Universidad de Aguascalientes).5
A result of the aforementioned SEP initiative and the hire of Roderic Camp was the Program in Mexican Policy Studies (1992). This multi-faceted program of research, workshops, conferences, and seminars was co-funded by a grant from the Tinker Foundation and matching funds from Tulane’s Strategic Enhancement Plan. Tinker funded summer field research in Mexico and conferences like “The Regional Impact of NAFTA in the XXI Century: The Mexican Perspective” (March 1993). The Mexican Polling Project was a key piece of Mexican Policy Studies. Tulane was the only U.S. university given access to 15 years of computerized Gallup polls on Mexico, containing data about politics, values, and other demographics.
This turn toward the study of modern Mexico gestures toward a key moment of economic and political transformation in Mexico, which was poised to enter NAFTA in 1994. Participants in the Program in Mexican Policy Studies speculated on how the trade agreement would affect Mexico’s political sphere and reflected on critical questions about Mexico’s recovering economy.
In November 1994, the Latin and American Students Association organized The Future of Political Opposition in Mexico, including representatives from the PAD and the PRD, the oppositional political parties to the PRI, which held office from 1929-2000. Tinker funding allowed Tulane to continue organizing timely events like Report Card on Zedillo, the first 12 months in April 1996, which brought together historians, political scientists, and sociologists to comment on Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo’s first year in office.
Following up on the success of the SEP program, Dean James McFarland, John Trapani (Freeman School of Business and founder of the Goldring Institute of International Business), and Mauricio González (Freeman School of Business, current executive director of the Goldring Institute, and former Dean of Business at the Instituto Tecnológico y Estudios Superiores de Monterrey) jointly built an interdisciplinary PhD program in Business Studies at Monterrey Tech (ITESM) in Mexico. This scope gradually expanded to offer Executive MBA programs for Mexican business executives at ITESM, and later for PEMEX (Mexico’s state-owned petroleum company) employees in Campeche, given Louisiana’s interest in developing strategic relationships with oil production in the Yucatán.
The Shift toward Cultural Studies
Like academia at large, the study of Mexico at Tulane in the mid-to-late 1990s and 2000s began to incorporate popular culture into research, teaching, and cultural events. Ana M. López organized the 1994 “Nobody’s Women” film series that showcased cinema by Mexican women filmmakers, ranging from Adela Sequeyro to Marcela Fernández Violante to Dana Rotberg, who presented Ángel de fuego at Canal Place Cinemas. In 1999, López organized the visit of iconic Mexican film historian, Aurelio de los Reyes, who spoke on the intersection of cinema and nation in works by Emilio Fernández and Julio Bracho.
The 2000s featured a series of events that reflected this shift toward the contemporary and the cultural. Mexican author Jorge Volpi gave a lecture, “En busca de Klingsor y la incertidumbre moral de la ciencia,” in March 2000. Robert McKee Irwin organized a conference for the Centenary of the Famous 41 in November 2001, focusing on issues of sexuality and social control in Latin America, with keynote speakers Sylvia Molloy and Carlos Monsiváis.6 Other events hearkened back to the Center’s initial strengths in Colonial Mexico, like the March 2001 conference on “Mexico’s Transformative Church: Colonial Piety, Pogroms, and Politics.”
Acclaimed Mexican novelist Yuri Herrera joined the faculty of Spanish and Portuguese in 2011, cementing Tulane’s forte in Mexican cultural production. His most recent novel, La estación del pantano (2022), innovatively recreates Mexican-president-to-be Benito Juárez’s exile in nineteenth-century New Orleans. Herrera discussed this work at the first-ever panel conducted in Spanish at Tulane’s 2024 Book Fest alongside Stone Center alum, Gabriela Alemán.
The Future of Mexican Studies
This story concludes with two of Tulane’s current Mexicanists, Yuri Herrera and Jimmy Huck, reflecting on where Mexican studies is going in the next 100 years.
Herrera and Huck share the hope that the field will center questions of Indigeneity in Mexico, an area that Tulanians are particularly poised to approach, given our long history with Mayan languages training. It is difficult to say what the future holds, but the Stone Center’s foundations in Mexican art history, literature, culture, and policy make it well-equipped to chart new paths of the 21st century.
Text and Images: Olivia Cosentino
Zemurray-Stone Postdoctoral Fellow
May 2024