Ilan Stavans has been called “the czar of Latino culture in the United States” by the New York Times and “Latin America’s liveliest and boldest critic and most innovative cultural enthusiast,” by the Washington Post.
Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College and the recipient of numerous honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Latino Literature Prize, the Antonia Pantoja Award, Chile's Presidential Medal, and the Rubén Darío Distinction. He earned an Emmy nomination as host of the PBS show La Plaza: Conversations with Ilan Stavans
As a descendant of Eastern European Jews who settled in Mexico, Stavans grew up in a multilingual environment. His decade-long study of Spanglish, the hybrid tongue spoken by millions of Latinos in the United States, led to the 2003 publication of his controversial book, Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language (2003), which has been at the heart of a heated debate in the Hispanic world… MORE
EN MI OPINIÓN
April 2007
Something new and exciting is happening! After long decades of neglect, Latinos are finally becoming a serious topic in scholarship. In the last twenty years the number of monographs, symposia, institutes, and courses taught in high school as well as undergraduate and graduate levels has grown exponentially. The news isn’t only about quantity but about quality. Unquestionably, the academic and intellectual explorations we’re witnessing are… MORE
SALUDOS
From Ilan Stavans, Advisory Editor
After years of devoting my attention to the study of Latinos in the United States, there’s a single Spanish word that keeps coming to my mind: encuentro. At various levels, from politics to music, from cuisine to sports, Hispanic culture in general is the result of a series of serendipitous encounters that have taken place over more than five hundred years. Prior to 1492, the three major Western religions… MORE