Editor’s Preface

I am excited to share with you volume 32 of Studies in Latin American Popular Culture.

As you will see, two essays related to Brazil from volume 31 (2013) were selected to receive recognition for the Twenty-Eighth Annual Carlos and Guillermo Vigil Prize: Paul Sneed’s excellent essay on favela culture, which won first place, and Richard Gordon’s article on the website for the film Cafundó (2005), which received an honorable mention. It is a privilege to be associated with such groundbreaking research, and the Studies in Latin American Popular Culture editorial board sends a very hearty congratulations to the winners for having done such exceptional work.

I am also delighted that previous Vigil winner Cynthia Tompkins, of Arizona State University, has elected to share her new film research with us in the form of her article “El último malón de Alcides Greca: Repetición y cine de atracciones,” and esteemed Uruguayan scholar Gustavo Remedi provides insight into the “tropical” music scene in his country during the time of Uruguay’s apagón, a topic that has not been researched extensively until this date. Other essays this year include two related to sports, Ric Jensen’s “¿Muy valiente, o loco?: How ‘Los Suns’ Created a Political Controversy That Transcends Basketball” and Shawn Stein’s “Movimientos defensivos: La figura del entrenador en las parábolas futbolísticas de Juan Sasturain, Sérgio Sant’Anna y Juan Villoro.”

Professors Cacilda Rêgo of Utah State University and Carolina Rocha of Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, will be coeditors of volume 33 (2015) of SLAPC, on the counterculture developments in music, comics, popular literature, and film from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, years of intense political confrontation shaped by the Cold War. As they state in their call for papers:

A general disenchantment impacted cinematic production in the US and a new filmic genre—the road movies—captured the zeitgeist of those years by depicting characters who resisted conformism. In Latin America the death of Che Guevara marked the end of the euphoria that had swayed the Latin American Left since the triumph of the Cuban revolution in 1959. The spirit of disillusionment also touched Europe where in May and June 1968, student protests led to the biggest strike in the history of French labor. A similar concern mobilized Mexican students who protested in the Square of Three Cultures in October 1968, many of whom were massacred in an infamous event.

We look forward to what promises to be a fascinating coedited volume on this theme next year. In the meantime, happy reading!