Wilfredo Burgos-Matos
Statement
I have been a member of LASA since 2015, when I attended my first conference in Puerto Rico. At the time, as a very young scholar in training, I was not a presenter but did attend to grasp a better sense of how intellectually engaging my life in academia would be. Since that very first moment, I got together with a diverse group of graduate students and junior scholars from all over the world who instilled in me a drive for being passionate about my topics of study.
In light of how historical and central is the ongoing presence of students, graduate or undergraduate, in the formation and sustainability of LASA, I envision working hand in hand with the Executive Council to make sure that the democratization of Latin American knowledges are always appreciated when they come from students whose backgrounds, such as mine, have been shaped by multiple experiences of displacement, homophobia, transphobia, racism, colorism, ableism, colonization, and so on.
I seek to create spaces where a sense of commonality is shaped via strong mentorships for topics that have been consistently overlooked in the most traditional academic sense of Latin American Studies. To do so, I have already started paving the way for us from a leadership position within the organization as the Student Representative of the LASA Latinx Studies Section during 2019-2020. This year, I organized the first workshop solely for graduate students of the field of Latinx Studies, “The State of Mentorship in Latinx Studies: A Workshop for Graduate Students,” that will take place in Guadalajara and that will be mentored by two senior scholars in the multiple disciplines that comprise the field (Carlos U. Decena and Nicole Guidotti-Hernández). A rich group of advanced graduate students, the majority of color, will take up space to delve deeper into the constant negotiations that they have endured to navigate their respective institutions with topics that cover spirituality, black Garifuna women and migration, raciolinguistics, and sci-fi literature. While doing so, they will workshop parts of their dissertation projects and will engage in fruitful conversations that will definitely expand their approaches to newer horizons.
As a member of the EC I will make sure that our work as graduate students is appreciated in the strengthening of the broad scope of Latin American Studies. To materialize this, I will gracefully serve as a bridge between the EC and the thousands of graduate and undergraduate students that are members of the association. While making sure that our voices are heard consistently, I will foster the creation of the community I have found within LASA via more workshops and efforts that could materialize in the form of roundtables to put our efforts at the center stage in the making of a stronger LASA. While developing these encounters, I would also like to blur in a conscious way the hierarchies that most of the times have been put between us and the higher ranks of the organization to make sure that collegiality is at the epicenter of knowledge production. We are as much scholars in training as we are the colleagues of a magnificent number of accomplished academics that have served as mentors throughout the years and with whom we have a chance to meet and engage in conversations with every year during our annual conferences. Therefore, my role in the EC, as a queer person of color, will portray that not only as a voice of my student colleagues but also as a presence that breaks the patriarchal, white and heteronormative ways of leadership that we so wishfully deserve to overcome.