Notes From the Editors

Returning to Nashville, TN for the first time since 2005, the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies convened our Sixty-Fifth Annual Meeting on the lovely campus of Vanderbilt University 8–10 March 2018. Hosted by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the conference presented an abundance of opportunities to explore diverse themes. Program chairs Amy Borja (University of Dallas) and Lily Balloffet (Western Carolina University) put together panels in the areas of Literature & Humanities and History & Social Sciences, respectively; Jürgen Buchenau (University of North Carolina Charlotte) and Gregory S. Crider (Winthrop University) organized local arrangements. Following the SECOLAS Awards Banquet in the Student Life Center Ballroom, Dr. Jonathan Brown (University of Texas Austin) reflected on topics central to his wide-ranging and distinguished scholarship in Latin American history, including the main points of his most recent book, Cuba’s Revolutionary World.

As this volume is the first published with our new partner, the University of North Carolina Press, The Latin Americanist enters a new period in its history. The transition should have limited impact on how readers access the journal and how authors submit manuscripts, but we anticipate that the new partnership will create new opportunities to enhance the TLA profile and expand readership. The journal will now be included in Project MUSE, an online database of peer-reviewed academic journals and books. The editorial leadership team is also considering new formats for special issues as well as discipline-specific and interdisciplinary literature reviews. We also look forward to ongoing collaboration with the SECOLAS podcast, Historias, which frequently includes interviews with TLA authors and other Latin Americanists from diverse disciplines. As always, the editors welcome new ideas and suggestions.

This volume features some of the best papers from the conference in article format. Twelve of the 148 presenters at the conference submitted revised papers of their papers for publication. Following editorial and peer review and another round of revisions, the seven articles published in this issue represent a range of disciplines in both the humanities and social sciences.

We are happy to present these articles, and we are grateful for the help provided in this endeavor by our graduate assistant, Leah Walton, who did particularly great work in helping us through the transition to our new publishing platform, Submittable. We are also grateful for the support from John McLeod, Director of the Office of Scholarly Publishing Services and Sam Dalzell, Journals and OSPS Coordinator, both with UNC Press. Finally, we very much appreciate the help of Dr. Louis A. Perez, Jr., J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of History at UNC-Chapel Hill and Director of the Institute for the Study of the Americas, in facilitating the new partnership with UNC Press.

UNC Charlotte, Winthrop University, and Wingate University, the three SECOLAS host institutions, offer significant financial and institutional support for the publication and success of this journal. In particular, we offer our gratitude to Dr. Nancy Gutierrez, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UNC Charlotte; to Dr. Adrienne McCormick, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Ellison Capers Palmer, Jr. Professorship of History at Winthrop; and to Dr. Helen Tate, Provost at Wingate University, for their continuing encouragement of both The Latin Americanist and SECOLAS.