Happy Birthday, Hispania!

Welcome to Hispania’s 100th year of publication! We anticipate a celebration that looks forward to the journal’s future as well as provides an opportunity to reflect back on Hispania’s long and distinguished record of scholarly publication. Hispania is the flagship journal of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP). The journal’s founding Editor-in-Chief, Aurelio M. Espinosa (Stanford), summarized the journal’s original charge as “the betterment of the teaching of Spanish in our schools and colleges” (qtd. in Walsh 822). By 1944, Portuguese was added to the mission of the AATSP and the journal broadened its scope. Since its inception, Hispania has evolved. Its content and format have transformed to serve the AATSP’s membership along with the scholarly and pedagogical community at large. Over the years, Hispania has emerged as a leading research journal in our discipline.

In addition to Hispania’s regularly published quarterly issues, the AATSP’s Board of Directors approved the publication of an extra issue of Hispania in 2017 (100.5). Hispania’s special centenary issue forms part of a larger celebration of the centennial of the AATSP. Since the association was founded on the cusp of 2017 and 2018, this affords us two years of celebration, remembrance, and appreciation of two pillars in our professional lives—both Hispania and the AATSP.

Hispania’s jubilee issue is intended to provide readers of the journal with curated essays that contain both a succinct historical perspective and a forward-thinking vision of the future of a particular segment of our field such as online language learning, transnational literature, translation studies, curriculum, second and third language acquisition, heritage learners, Spanglish, Chicano literature, and the digital humanities, among others. The extra issue will address matters that are of utmost importance as Hispania enters its second century of publication. To that end, consistent with Hispania’s broad scope, Guest Editor, Frank Nuessel (University of Louisville) and I have co-edited essays and rejoinders in a wide variety of areas. Hispania’s Editorial Board members and our many anonymous peer reviewers also assisted in developing the special issue. The entire centenary volume will be available in December 2017.

Beginning in July 2017 and coinciding with the AATSP’s 99th Annual Conference in Chicago, Illinois, Hispania’s birthday party will begin. We will pre-release some featured essays from the centenary issue as well as host special sessions in Chicago to mark the journal’s jubilee. Our celebration will continue through 2018. The AATSP will hold its 100th Annual Conference in Salamanca, Spain on June 25–28, 2018.

To help us launch Hispania’s anniversary year, I invited esteemed colleague and AATSP member Dr. Eduardo Lolo (see bio below) to publish his engaging address from the General Opening Session of the 98th Annual Conference of the AATSP in Miami, Florida. His plenary reminds us of the special place and space that both Cuban and Cuban-American literature and culture occupy in local, global, and universal letters.