What follows are some reflections derived from my remarks at the panel on LASA at 60, convened during the May 2026 Congress of the Association in Paris.
When American elites came to the conclusion in the post WWII era that it was their mission to organize the international system as global hegemon, they began to invest in developing US expertise on various parts of the world. This gave rise to a dramatic expansion of area studies, and by the 1960s Latin American Studies was present on a growing number of campuses across the country, populated in part by an emerging generation of faculty with deep knowledge and appreciation of the region. In 1966, a group of these faculty convened the first LASA Conference. LASA became a critical referent for that cohort of US Latin Americanists, and soon their epistemic community expanded to incorporate Latin American intellectual networks, as well as initially a few and eventually many Europeans.
Latin American Studies and LASA, like analogous area studies communities that expanded thanks to government and philanthropic largesse during the post-WWII and particularly post-Sputnik eras, catalyzed cross disciplinary collaborations and training at US universities. Area studies were pioneering spaces in that they brought together in shared conversation scholars with common substantive interests – in this instance, the past and present of the peoples and cultures of Latin America and the Caribbean –drawing on diverse disciplinary foundations, spanning the social sciences and humanities. Area studies helped to deparochialize the disciplines in US universities, in ways that meaningfully enriched international and comparative studies. Toward the end of the 20th century, influenced by the example of area studies centers, analogous programs sprung up at campuses across the country in such cross-disciplinary fields as environmental studies, international migration, or race and ethnicity. For universities, area studies were seen as the model for bringing together under one umbrella multiple perspectives on common problems.
For its part, Latin American Studies, and LASA as its flagship professional association, had several characteristics that set the field apart from other area studies communities in US academia. The most important, I think, was its North-South character. Recall that LASA’s establishment roughly coincided with the 1967 founding of CLACSO, the Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales, so there was already emerging a regional agenda in the social sciences in Latin America, and a sense of region-ness, more so than was the case for example in Africa or different sub-regions in Asia around which area studies programs came into being. And some of the Latin American intellects of that period – CLACSO’s founding generation --were highly influential for the Americans who conjured up and consolidated LASA. More than a few of those Latin Americans found themselves during the 60s and 70s in exile at US universities, but even before then key social scientists from Latin America had been fundamental to the intellectual development of the US-based scholars who catalyzed LASA’s creation.
Another distinctive feature of Latin American Studies in the US was its leftward lean and critical stance vis a vis US Cold War foreign policy, contrasting most notably with Soviet and East European area studies, which closely adhered to Washington’s foreign policy orthodoxy. In part this progressive bent among Latin Americanists was a consequence of political and intellectual dynamics in the region: the Cuban Revolution catalyzed enthusiasm among scholars during the early years of Latin American Studies expansion and then, during the 1980s, the Central American conflicts rekindled hopes for social change and greater autonomy from the United States. On the conceptual side, that leftward lean was strongly influenced by dependency theory, at the outset, and over time by engagement with scholarship on new social movements, subaltern cultural identities, human rights, and other currents associated with emancipatory politics.
That critical lean both occasioned and reinforced profound skepticism of US policy in the region. Washington’s support for Latin American military dictatorships, sabotage of leftist or even mildly reformist governments in the region, and advocacy for multi-national corporations perceived by critical scholars as looting Latin America’s economies were the focus of countless publications, conference panels, and university course syllabi.
Partly as a result, enthusiasm for Latin American Studies waned among stakeholders in government and to some extent philanthropic foundations as well; funding for the enterprise began to decline by the 1980s, and diminished support became still more evident with the end of the Cold War and elite assumptions that there had emerged a unipolar system in which the US already knew what it needed to know. Having happily achieved the End of History, in the famous formulation of Francis Fukuyama, American elites were less motivated to invest in area studies knowledge that had seemed essential to engaging hearts and minds around the world when the direction of that world was contested and in doubt.
But by then the faculty who had risen through the ranks had consolidated their status at universities and colleges throughout the country, had campus units in place to support Latin America-focused research and training, and boasted strong institutions like LASA that ensured continued opportunities for scholars despite diminished interest from government and foundations. The investments of the cold war decades proved very sticky, fortunately: Once area studies centers were in place, institutional inertia would sustain them for a good many years. It would only be after the turn of the century that the shortage of resources and the conventional wisdom of the post-Cold War era would noticeably erode the institutional underpinnings of area studies on US campuses.
While elite disillusion with the area studies enterprise tended to foster disinterest and underinvestment in the sector beginning in the late 20th century, neglect was not accompanied by institutional efforts to constrain research, teaching, or debate. In contrast, at this writing, in 2026, amidst a dramatic process of autocratization in the United States, this may be changing, as emphasized in the agenda that the organizers of this LASA Congress articulated for this panel. Already, in states such as Florida and Texas controlled by aggressive Republican authorities, universities are being attacked for the ideas expressed by their faculty and students, and disfavored curricula and research are being suppressed by state legislatures and compliant university administrators.
So far, area studies programs in the US have suffered direct takeovers by reactionary authorities only in the case of Middle East Studies, where curtailment of academic freedom and government intervention in program governance at some of the world’s leading universities is a harbinger of potentially wider repression to come. Indeed, we may well see analogous assaults on Latin American Studies as powerholders crack down on scholarly criticism of Washington’s actions relating to Latin America. Reports emerged in May 2026, for example, that more than 100 nonprofits, labor groups, advocacy organizations and activist collectives across the U.S. were being investigated by the US Department of Justice in connection with their putative support of the Cuban government and the Communist Party of Cuba. In July 2020, the State Department published an extraordinary 100 page document outlining the supposed threat to American interests posed by the Cuban government and its international and domestic enablers, listing and condemning multiple US civil society organizations that it labeled as treasonous collaborators with Havana’s efforts to destroy the United States. Scholars were not specifically targeted, but the foundation is in place for direct assaults on independent analysts of Cuban affairs.
It does not require a great stretch of the imagination to envision analogous repercussions for scholarly questioning of such phenomena as US military kidnappings of disfavored heads of state or extra-judicial assassinations of putative drug traffickers, or the dismantling of independent academic institutions by Latin American autocrats allied with the United States. Just as when they take place in Argentina or El Salvador, Nicaragua or Cuba, LASA needs to be prepared to speak out and denounce government surveillance of academic activities, restrictions on academic freedom, and persecution of intellectuals and knowledge institutions, when they arise in the United States itself. There is no shortage of alarm bells to alert us to the likelihood that such repression can be anticipated as features of today’s descent into a Trump-era version of McCarthyism in the US.
Government intrusions in the academic arena are typical features of the kinds of authoritarian politics that have swept much of the world in recent years: George Orwell understood, as do figures such as Javier Milei, Victor Orban, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump, that a reactionary politics based on contempt for pluralism and for human beings different from oneself thrives on ignorance. That is one reason that authoritarian leaders and their foot soldiers wage war on universities and other spaces for critical thinking. It is why they suppress the generation and public circulation of data on which scholarship and democratic debate depend, and it is why they seek to attack and undermine initiatives that by definition entail broader inclusion in knowledge networks of historically marginalized voices.
In this context, institutions such as LASA must be part of broader efforts to highlight the value of informed thinking and its potential to make for better lives, and to intervene in support of the targets of state repression of academic inquiry. It is a role the Association has taken in the past: today’s Central American landscape of academics in exile from authoritarian rule evokes memories of that which plagued the region during the conflicts of the 1980s, as well as South American scholars during the period of military rule. LASA responded then, and it is important that it do so now.
Our defense of universities and independent thinking need not be cast strictly in terms of advancing a social justice agenda. Indeed, while in recent decades LASA’s mission, and that of Latin American area studies as a field, has increasingly been framed as a matter of social justice, in my view this has been an intellectual and strategic mistake. It has diminished the field’s relevance for many intellectually serious scholars whose knowledge is central to understanding critical challenges facing societies in the present as well as the past but who do not self-identify as social justice activists. If area studies are to have a meaningful voice in debates about complex matters that will determine the future quality of life in Latin America and beyond—issues like climate change and adaptation, demographic change and population movements, or infrastructural transformations and technological change—their conversations need to encompass areas of expertise and specialist networks that do not define themselves in activist terms.
Indeed, for our members and campus centers to succeed in the uphill battle for internal and external resources to support Latin American Studies programs, they will need to demonstrate engagement with researchers beyond activist communities. Confronting hostility from autocratic political leaders and a general public increasingly disillusioned with higher education and academic discourse, Latin American Studies should reassert its fundamental commitment to advance spaces that convene diverse currents of knowledge that share a commitment to intellectual integrity, rigorous analysis, and open debate freed of ideological, political, or disciplinary constraints. If we can do that, we may manage to survive and even prosper in a higher education landscape that reasserts universities’ vital role in shaping free and well-functioning societies.
Here as well, LASA’s fundamentally North-South identity can serve as a critical strength in a quest to restore faith in collaborative academic work as a vital underpinning of healthy and democratic public sphere. Those who would choose to suppress independent intellectual work at US universities are also those who are hostile to international dialogue and cooperation. By embodying such independence and dialogue LASA can provide a tangible example of the sort of world we should aim to be constructing.