Price Lecture: Leadership Institute for Indigenous and Afro-descendent Women from Latin America

Every year, the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Arizona hosts two highly select groups of Indigenous and Afro-descendent women between the ages of 18 and 24 from different Latin American countries for the Study of the United States Institute (SUSI), funded by the US Department of State. In this talk, the director of the Institute, Dr. Marcela Vásquez-León, will reflect on her decade long experience mentoring these students. She will focus on how the program is a transformational site in which the participants envision and build a sense of intersectional feminism along the lines of what feminist Lelia Gonzalez has called amefricanidade (amefricanity), creating networks of solidarity that go beyond the program. At the same time, challenges and contradictions arise given the ways in which the institute itself is situated in the larger geopolitics of U.S./Latin American relations.