New professors Gabriela Martinez, Tania Triana, and Cecilia Enjuto Rangel bring new perspectives—and complementary strengths—to students in Latin American Studies

“Collaboration across languages and across national traditions was extremely helpful to my development as a scholar,” said Tania Triana, one of three new faculty hires in the program. “I wanted to be in a place that prioritized that kind of collaboration.”

Along with Triana, the UO welcomed Gabriela Martinez and Cecilia Enjuto Rangel. While the three women work in different departments and have diverse research goals, they all contribute to the UO’s growing Latin American Studies program, and each was drawn here by the unique freedom and emphasis on collaboration that the UO provides.

For Gabriela Martinez in the School of Journalism, this freedom means balancing a theoretical framework of international communications and political economy with her work as a documentarian. “I want to keep the creative part of me alive,” she said. Martinez recently completed a new documentary on public health issues in Guatemala and feels combining this work with her role as a professor can have great results in the classroom.

Originally from Peru, Martinez received her Ph.D. from the UO in 2005. She’s interested in the study of media in Latin America, particularly in how Latin Americans are adopting technologies to develop their relations and affirm their nationalities and identities. “There are groups that are attempting to resist [cultural imperialism] by using technology to build their own traditions, their own oralities.”

Martinez is looking forward to the ways in which she can contribute to both the School of Journalism and the College of Arts and Sciences: “The group of people [in Latin American Studies] is really wonderful and stimulating.”

Tania Triana, whose appointment is in the Department of Romance Languages, has found that her departmental colleagues are also working within many different national literatures and cultural traditions. That’s precisely what makes the UO feel like home.

Triana earned her Ph.D. in world literature at UC San Diego, which was academically exciting for many of the same reasons she finds the environment at the UO exciting. At UCSD, interdisciplinary work allowed her to broaden her work in the literatures of the Americas to include the African diaspora, a field that seeks to draw connections between various cultures and historical interactions, and "understand the ways that cultural influences move back and forth.”

Some of Triana’s current research is focused on the narratives of racialization in the Americas—for example, why Caribbean immigrants from Puerto Rico are considered Puerto Rican in their home country but, upon coming to the U.S., are identified as black.

Cecilia Enjuto Rangel, also an assistant professor of Spanish who completed her Ph.D. at Yale University, was drawn to the UO by the job’s focus on Transatlantic Studies. “That was just exactly what I wanted,” she said. “The idea [in Transatlantic Studies] is that you can’t study Latin American and Spanish literatures as if they are not reading or reacting to one other.” Her recent research explores the connections between poetry and modern cities, and how “after World Wars I and II [poets in both Europe and Latin America] reacted to a city in ruins.”

As a teacher, Enjuto Rangel actively promotes foreign study for students at the UO. As an undergraduate at the University of Puerto Rico, she spent a formative year studying in Paris. “That had been my dream, so I worked for it. For years, I saved. I worked as a reporter. And it was worth it. It changed, completely, my perspective.” So now she’s serving on a foreign study committee in order to help students find their own ways abroad, perhaps through UO programs in Queretaro or Madrid.

Educational enrichment activities are a priority for the others as well: Triana is hoping that travel restrictions will have loosened enough for her to lead a field trip to Cuba in the near future; Professor Martinez is helping coordinate the university’s first annual Latin American film festival. “Academia should come down from this ivory tower and be in touch with the community,” says Martinez, who hopes to incorporate Eugene’s Latin American population into the university learning experience.

Building connections with the community, bridges between disciplines, and opportunities for their students, these three new faculty members are clearly invigorating Latin American Studies on the UO campus. And they seem to be enjoying what Eugene has to offer them as well—namely, their students.

Both Triana and Enjuto Rangel noted, with appreciation, how hard many of their students work for their opportunities to learn. “A degree isn’t something that just happens to them,” said Triana, “a degree is something that they’re earning.”

—AP