News - Latin American & LatinX Studies

June 2022.

The Library of Congress American Folklife Center has selected a Wichita State project focusing on the social, cultural and food based LatinX celebrations in Dodge City, Liberal and Garden City, Kansas. Rocio del Aguila is the project director. Other contributors include Enrique Navarro, also of Spanish, and Jay Price, of History.

June 2022.

Dinorah Azpuru published an analysis article in the Washington Post about the Summit of the Americas and the opinion of citizens of the Western Hemisphere about the United States.

March 2022.

The digital exhibit Somos de Wichita has been awarded an honorable mention for Best Public Project by LASA's Archives, Libraries and Digital Scholarship Section.

February 2022.

Edil Torres Rivera has been elected to serve as the American Counseling Association’s president-elect beginning July 1, 2022. He is the first Latinx male and the first Puerto Rican to be ACA president.

September 2021.

Edil Torres Rivera gave a talk on how decolonization and critical counciousness can inform curriculum. His presentation was part of WSU´s Psychology Department Colloquium Series.

July 2021.

Dinorah Azpuru was invited as the keynote speaker to three virtual events in Venezuela, Guatemala and Germany. 

June 2021.

Spanish students and faculty have been engaging with Spanish-speaking patients and their family members, interpreters, and health care providers to discuss and document challenges in healthcare for Spanish speakers.

August 2020.

As part of the Perspectives on the Pandemic Series, Dinorah Azpuru will present on the effects of COVID-19 on politics, and more concretely on how, in certain countries, it has impacted democracy in a negative way.

August 2020.

Jay Price of History and Enrique Navarro of Spanish, along with undergraduate and graduate students, are collecting family photos to document Wichita’s Latino history. A selection of those photographs can be seen in this virtual exhibit.

June 2020.

Edil Torres Rivera gave a speech to graduate students at the University Carlos Albizu in Puerto Rico. The talk was about reviewing different indigenous and decolonizing research approaches to create critical researchers.

June 2020.

Edil Torres Rivera published a co-edited book on liberation psychology, a discipline that uses psychological approaches to understand and address oppression among individuals and groups.

June 2020.

Dinorah Azpuru was one of four panelists in a digital program in one of Mexico's most prominent news outlets, Aristegui Noticias. It is widely transmitted to Spanish speaking countries.

May 2020.

Rocío del Águila received WSU's Young Faculty Risk Taker Award, which acknowledges experiments outside the norm in teaching, research and service.

May 2020.

SPAN 300, one of the classes in the Certificate, will become a zero-cost textbook class thanks to a WSU grant awarded to Enrique Navarro.

April 2020. 

Dinorah Azpuru was featured in the Fairmount College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Spring 2020 Newsletter. The article highlights her collaborations with The Washington Post and El País, a Spanish newspaper that also circulates widely in Latin America.

February 2020.

Rocío del Águila and Enrique Navarro discussed their documentary film "Cocin(ando) Wichita" at the Ad Astra Film Studies Conference. This conference features regional and local documentary films.

December 2019.

Noell Birondo received the American Philosophical Association (APA) Essay Prize in Latin American Thought for his paper “The Virtues of Mestizaje: Lessons from Las Casas on Aztec Human Sacrifice.”

October 2019.

The documentary “Cocin(ando) Wichita,” which examines immigration and food in Wichita’s Hispanic community, premiered at Tallgrass Film Festival. Made possible by a grant awarded by Kansas Humanities, the film was produced and directed by Rocio del Aguila. Enrique Navarro served as the co-producer and creative director. Several Spanish graduate and undergraduate students collaborated in the screenplay and captions.

September 2019.

Crystal Dozier was featured in the Fairmount College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Fall 2019 Newsletter. In the article she talks about how foodways and cooking technologies are filled with cultural meaning.

April 2019.

Rocío del Águila received WSU's Phenomenal Women Award, which recognizes women for their accomplishments and contributions to our community through their scholarship, activism and commitment to excellence.

April 2019.

Honors student Sierra Bauman presented her research on the history of philosophy and the concept of “lo Mexicano” at the Moral and Political Philosophy at the Border Conference, at the University of Texas at El Paso. Bauman’s project grew out of a honors course taught by Noell Birondo on the Invention of Latin America.

March 2019.

Graduate student Jenny Masias presented her research project “The Immigrants Who Built Kansas: One Spike at a Time” in the annual statewide KBOR Capitol Graduate Research Summit (CGRS) event at the Capitol. Masias’ project grew out of a graduate course taught by Enrique Navarro on Latinos in the US and the Midwest.