Note from the Editor

The Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies convened virtually 15–18 April 2021 for our Sixty-Eighth Annual Meeting. The conference featured forty-seven panels on a wide variety of topics. Program chairs Eunice Rojas (Furman University) and Colin Snider (University of Texas, Tyler) handled the essential tasks of putting panels together in the areas of Literature & Cultural Studies and History & Social Sciences, respectively. Monica Rankin (University of Texas at Dallas), Jürgen Buchenau (University of North Carolina Charlotte), Steven Hyland (Wingate University) and Gregory Crider (Winthrop University) organized arrangements for the online convention.

As the COVID-10 pandemic prevented us from holding our usual inperson conference, the local arrangements team took advantage of online opportunity to meet and hold our academic sessions. While we missed our traditional banquet and networking events, we benefited from many outstanding panels and diverse global participation. Susanny Acosta, Rossmery Palacio, Julia Poppell, and Paul Telljohann (all of UNC Charlotte) served as SECOLAS Zoom moderators who expertly facilitated individual sessions and calmed presenters’ nerves along the way. Critical assistance in making the conference a success came from the Maestro Meetings team of Mili Cabrera, John Meyers, and Lazaros Amanatidis as well as from our collaborators at UNC Press, John McLeod and Dylan Stroupe.

Now beginning our fourth year of collaboration with the University of North Carolina Press, our readership and exposure have grown significantly with inclusion in Project MUSE, an online database of peer- reviewed academic journals and books. We also continue to highlight our ongoing collaboration with the SECOLAS podcast, Historias, which frequently includes interviews with TLA authors and other Latin Americanists from diverse disciplines. As always, the journal editors welcome new ideas and suggestions.

This volume features some of the best papers from the conference in article format. Fourteen of the 192 presenters at the conference submitted revised manuscripts of their papers for publication. Following editorial and peer review and another round of revisions, the eight articles published in this issue represent a range of disciplines in both the humanities and social sciences. In presenting these articles, we appreciate the help by our graduate assistant, Susanny Acosta.

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. Takita Sumter, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Ellison Capers Palmer, Jr. Professorship of History at Winthrop; and to Dr. Jeff Frederick, Provost at Wingate University, for their continuing encouragement of both The Latin Americanist and SECOLAS.