In This Issue

On my 21st birthday as I sat in the family kitchen wolfing down breakfast before preparing for the daily commute to college my mother asked, "so you are 21, do you feel any different?" My answer then was no. I tend, people close to me have told me—including my mother—not to dwell on moments of importance. That was the case that February 9, when I was not thinking of turning 21, but only about what I had to do that day on campus. With this issue, the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies turns 20 a symbolic milestone of its own and I thought I would break with my propensity to blow past important dates to reflect on what that means. Helping shepherd a small academic journal through these 20 years of tumult in financing higher education has been challenging. That we are still here is a testament to the faith my colleague, Chuck Tatum, then Dean of the College of Humanities, had in this project throughout his long tenure as Dean. We thank him and his successors, Mary Wildner-Bassett and AP Durand for their continued support.

This publication has survived and thrived during these difficult times because of the dedication of those who have given generously of their time to make it happen. This includes the generations of graduate students who have helped with proofreading and other tasks. Without Susan, Shalisa and Kalen, Nuria and Agustín, Pedro and Eva, Daniel, María and Joaquín and Ben, all of whom have had important editorial responsibilities, this project would have been impossible to continue, and I am forever in your debt.

Most of all, we here at the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies thank all of those who have shared the expansive vision of the humanities and Hispanism that lets our journal and other similar outlets for scholarship continue. As humanists, after all, we are simultaneously keepers of a long tradition of intellectual inquiry and innovators at the same time—always respective of the boundaries of intellectual inquiry in our field but committed to pushing against those same boundaries regardless of the centrifugal and centripetal movements of our discipline.

All of us who have worked on this project here in Tucson and elsewhere thank you for your willingness to roll up your sleeves and lend a hand, and for your wonderfully rich contributions that fill the pages of this publication.

This issue is one more indication of our joint commitment. The seven essays that we are publishing in volume 20 run the gamut of subject areas and critical approaches that have always characterized the content of these pages. We continue to publish timely interviews with writers and artists and always welcome suggestions for the pedagogical perspectives we have published in these pages from the start. These represent, for us, a vital connection between our research and our efforts in the classroom. Nothing today is more important in assuring that we contribute to a nuanced and vigorous intellectual debate about the importance of what we do as teacher-scholars.

The special section for this issue contributes richly to this. Affect theory in its various forms and interactions has become an important component of the current critical landscape. The essays we offer in this section, edited by Professor Vinodh Venkatesh, offer a valuable collection of contributions that explore affect theory and how it might fruitfully help see issues in the Hispanic archive in new and exciting ways.

Most of all, I want to individually thank all of those with whom I have had the opportunity to interact in working on the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies. They have afforded me the opportunity to grow intellectually in ways that I could not have imagined at the start of this project.

I hope the next 20 years are equally eventful!