As I begin my term as President of the Latin American Studies Association, I do so with gratitude and a strong sense of responsibility. Serving as Vice President and President-elect for the past year gave me the opportunity to see LASA in many ways: as an intellectual community, a professional association, a network sustained by volunteer work, and an institution whose decisions affect scholars, students, artists, and practitioners across the Americas and beyond. I am grateful to Max Cameron for his leadership and for the collegiality of our transition, and I am delighted to welcome Paola Cortés-Rocca as LASA’s new Vice President. I look forward to working with them, the Executive Council, our committees, sections, staff, and members.
Representation, in my view, is first and foremost a form of service. It requires listening across differences, creating conditions for meaningful participation, and taking responsibility for turning collective commitments into institutional practices. LASA’s strength lies in its pluralism: its many countries, languages, disciplines, generations, institutions, and intellectual traditions. Yet pluralism does not reproduce itself automatically. It must be cultivated through decisions about who is invited, whose work is recognized, what kinds of knowledge are valued, and how resources and responsibilities are distributed.
From Commitments to Participation
Over the past year, one of my priorities was to broaden participation in the preparation of LASA2027 and in the Association’s committees and awards. The small group of program co-chairs was complemented by an expanded committee designed to bring together different regions, disciplines, languages, and institutional locations, including both the social sciences and the humanities. Sections were consulted from the beginning about track chairs and other issues, and volunteer recruitment sought to widen the range of people involved in the Association’s academic life.
In total, 165 LASA colleagues were invited to serve according to inclusive criteria that considered country, language, institutional base, ethnicity, gender, and disciplinary background. This collective effort included 99 track chairs from different regions and fields, as well as 59 volunteers serving on award committees. For the Ford-LASA initiative, 137 projects were considered by a seven-member review committee using a new evaluation format intended to strengthen diversity among disciplines, teams, and reviewers. These numbers matter not because participation can be reduced to a count, but because they show what becomes possible when service is understood as a shared practice rather than the work of a small circle.
I want to thank every colleague who accepted an invitation, reviewed a proposal, coordinated a track, helped shape a thematic area, or contributed behind the scenes. We have also begun developing two communicational programs called “LASA Agradece,” an initiative to make visible the work of volunteers, and “LASA Honra,” a series of recorded conversations recognizing members whose intellectual and institutional contributions have helped build our community. An association is not sustained only by its most visible events; it is sustained by accumulated acts of generosity, judgment, mentorship, and care.
Accessibility, Resources, and Institutional Partnerships
Participation also depends on material conditions. For that reason, we worked to expand resources beyond the income generated through membership and congress registration. An additional $40,000 was secured for travel grants, and a reform was advanced to redirect unused travel-grant balances toward Ford-LASA projects rather than allowing those resources to remain unallocated.
Partnerships with IDRC and CLACSO are beginning to be planned to support the participation of an Indigenous scholar in work on knowledge translation, while an invited panel created opportunities to bring additional Indigenous colleagues into the Congress. Conversations are also underway with the Government of Mexico City regarding student support, and with other public, philanthropic, and international partners concerning sponsorships and access. Some of these initiatives have been completed; others remain in development. I mention both because transparency requires us to distinguish achievements from work still in progress.
Our collaboration with UNAM is central to the preparation of LASA2027. Its contribution is expected to include rooms, equipment, connectivity, additional staffing, and support for the welcoming reception. We are also exploring partnerships that can reduce hotel and local transportation costs and strengthen the cultural and social dimensions of the meeting. These efforts are guided by a simple principle: hosting a congress in Latin America should expand—not narrow—the possibilities for participation by students, colleagues from under-resourced institutions, and historically underrepresented communities.
An Association that Learns and Plans Collectively
LASA must respond to immediate challenges while also creating space to think about its future. During the past year, the site committee developed a participatory evaluation process, conducted visits in Chile and Mexico City, and produced an assessment format that can be used in future deliberations. In parallel, the Strategic Planning Commission reviewed 49 proposals and selected the firm Síntese to facilitate a participatory planning process. That process began during LASA2026 in Paris and is intended to improve our knowledge of the perspectives held by different constituencies within the Association.
Strategic planning should not be a technical exercise conducted at a distance from members. It should allow us to ask difficult questions together. How can LASA remain financially sustainable while preserving accessibility? How can its governance combine the continuity and expertise of a professional secretariat with strong academic leadership and meaningful member participation? How do we support scholarship in contexts of institutional austerity, political hostility, and unequal access to research funding? How can sections, committees, students, and members working outside well-resourced universities have a greater voice in setting priorities?
Professional Development and Belonging
We have also begun testing new forms of professional development that can serve members while diversifying LASA’s resources. A pilot program was designed around courses and workshops on strategic political communication, academic networks in the digital era, network analysis, artificial intelligence and qualitative methods, digital ethnography, decision-making methods, financial inclusion and management, archives, knowledge translation, and academic well-being. The aim is not to redefine LASA as a training provider, but to use the Association’s extraordinary intellectual resources to create intergenerational exchange, strengthen professional capacities, and generate new forms of belonging between congresses.
The editorial agenda of LASA Forum has likewise been organized around conversations that connect the Association’s institutional work with the intellectual challenges of the present: researching in times of collapse, democratic innovation in representation and participation, and the care society. These themes create a bridge between the work already undertaken and the questions that will animate LASA2027. LASA Forum is also being renewed by incorporating ReVista’s editorial expertise to offer a platform for disseminating these issues, grounded in applied and situated knowledge.
Academic Freedom and the Public Value of Knowledge
These institutional efforts unfold at a time when universities, research centers, public cultures, and democratic institutions face deep pressures. Academic freedom is threatened not only by direct censorship or persecution, but also by the dismantling of institutions, the precarization of scholarly work, restrictions on mobility, attacks on gender and diversity programs, and the erosion of the public legitimacy of knowledge. LASA must continue to respond to urgent cases, but it must also help build the networks, documentation, and collective capacities that make sustained defense possible.
An agreement in the form of a Memorandum of Understanding with CLAA is one modest contribution to that task. So too is the work of our Commission on Academic Freedom and Human Rights and the willingness of sections and members to bring concerns to the Association. Our voice is strongest when it is careful, informed, timely, and connected to those most directly affected. Defending academic freedom is inseparable from defending the possibility of critical inquiry, public debate, and democratic life.
LASA2027 in Mexico City
Our next Congress will take place in Mexico City from June 16 to 20, 2027, under the title “Navigating the Collapse: Re-inventing Politics, Caring for the Commons.” The title originates from a difficult diagnosis. Over the past decade, we have witnessed democratic deterioration, attacks on rights and the rule of law, armed conflicts, environmental emergencies, widening inequality, rapid technological transformation, and a profound reconfiguration of the global order. Yet the Congress is not an invitation to make collapse the only protagonist of our analysis.
Alongside regression, we see emerging political experiences, new coalitions and geopolitical arrangements, democratic innovations, movements for fiscal and social justice, transnational forms of mobilization, new cultural and intellectual practices, and projects organized around care. The Congress therefore asks how we can analyze the storms of the present without erasing future horizons. To navigate collapse is to recognize the forces that produce destruction while identifying the practices, institutions, and ideas that may carry us toward different destinations.
Two premises guide this conversation. Without political mediation, conflict cannot be processed in a civilized and democratic way. Without care for what we hold in common, the tragedy of the commons ceases to be an abstract warning and becomes a lived reality. These premises invite dialogue across fields that are too often separated: geopolitics and everyday life; state transformation and intimate relations; technology and culture; democratic institutions and social mobilization; rights and material infrastructures of care.
Four new thematic areas will give greater focus to these debates. “Latin America in the Reordering of the World” examines geopolitical, financial, technological, and military transformations and asks whether the region can pursue more autonomous and diversified forms of international engagement. “Representation, Participation, and Activisms in Times of Collapse” approaches democracy as a contested field, analyzing authoritarian appropriation, conservative and anti-rights mobilization, democratic resistance, and political innovation. “Caring for the Commons in Contexts of Dismantling” places care at the center of changing relations between state and society, including state withdrawal, criminal governance, public provision, community responses, and the unequal distribution of protection and abandonment. “Digital Revolution, Knowledge, and Culture in Times of Polycrisis” explores how artificial intelligence and digital technologies are transforming knowledge production, pedagogy, archives, artistic practice, subjectivity, and the ecology of knowledge.
A Congress Rooted in Latin America
These areas complement LASA’s established tracks and reinforce our commitment to an intellectually ambitious Congress that welcomes the social sciences, the humanities, interdisciplinary research, artistic practices, and diverse forms of knowledge. Mexico City offers a particularly rich setting for this encounter. It is a city shaped by layered histories, intense inequality, cultural invention, political experimentation, social movements, and global connections. Meeting there allows us to situate debates about transformation within Latin America and the Caribbean while welcoming colleagues from across the world.
LASA2027 will be held exclusively in person. Within that format, our planning focuses on access, hospitality, and the conditions that make meaningful exchange possible. We want the Congress to create room not only for formal panels, but also for the conversations, collaborations, and encounters through which an association becomes a community. To advance these goals, we created a program called “Angel Congress”. The program provides a platform through which young people can connect with older adults and people with disabilities, helping them navigate access to the Congress at UNAM’s Graduate Studies Unit more comfortably and easily. If you would benefit from an “angel” to help you become familiar with the Congress venue and its organization, please do not hesitate to make use of this support program.
A Shared Horizon
The year ahead will require hard work and, inevitably, difficult choices. LASA faces financial, organizational, political, and intellectual challenges that cannot be solved by a presidency, an Executive Council, or a secretariat acting alone. They require a culture of participation in which disagreement is possible without losing sight of shared responsibilities.
My commitment as President is to strengthen that culture: to make our processes more participatory and transparent, to expand opportunities for those who have historically had less access, to defend academic freedom, to support intellectual pluralism, and to care for the institutional commons that previous generations built and that future generations will inherit. I invite you to take part through sections and committees, proposals and conversations, by mentoring newer colleagues, by sharing concerns, and by helping us imagine what LASA can become.
I begin this term with confidence not because the path is simple, but because our Association contains an extraordinary reserve of knowledge, experience, creativity, and solidarity. In uncertain times, that collective capacity is among our most valuable resources. Let us use it to navigate the present, re-invent politics, and care for what we share.