Unearthing a hidden history

Afro-Latino Institute leads rediscovery of an international literary legacy

By Julio Urdaneta
Adelante Staff Writer

DAVID SERBER/Adelante Marvin Lewis established the country’s first institute dedicated to the literature of the African diaspora in Latin America. Despite the his international leadership, it is now threatened by a lack of financial support.

Marvin Lewis took shelter from the hardships of growing up poor in Virginia by reading. He would read Westerns, books about the southwestern part of the United States and Mexico with all those Hispanic names, cactuses, bullfights and beautiful señoritas enhanced by his imaginative nature. Fascinated by this romantic universe, he began to wonder what was going on in this world, far away from his boundaries.
“When I went to college in Baltimore, most people in my class were doing things like sociology, social work…things that were expected for black people at that particular time, in the sixties,” says Lewis. “So I decided that I was going to do something different: study Spanish.”
Lewis became interested in Afro-Hispanic literature while writing his dissertation at the University of Washington in Seattle. He noticed the way blacks were represented in the fiction of many Hispanic writers: as cowardly, ill-intentioned and lazy. He was determined to discover another version of Afro-Latino history.
That whole process of discovery led him to establish the first institute in the United States dedicated to the literature of the African diaspora in Latin America in 1996. Lewis’ dream resulted in a nationally acclaimed Afro-Romance Institute for Languages and Literatures; the first academic journal dedicated to that study, PALARA; and a series of conferences and meetings that bring together leading writers and scholars in that field.
Unfortunately, Lewis’ creation now faces possible extinction. Faculty members’ high profiles and MU’s limited financial support have provoked a hemorrhage of talents, and positions remain unfilled.
In the beginning, it was easy to get the best scholar in the field because no other universities were interested in this area, says Mary Jo Muratore, who, as former chairwoman of the Romance Language Department, helped to found the institute. But now that the literatures of the African Diaspora in Latin America are a trendy topic, the institute is hard pressed to compete, says Muratore.
“The salaries aren’t as good. The conditions aren’t as good. Every university can outbid us,” she said.
First, they lost their specialist in Afro-Hispanic film to a university in Hawaii and then their Afro-Portuguese specialist to Vanderbilt.
“The problem is that they were so good that they were quickly head-hunted by other universities with a lot more money,” says Muratore. “Many of the others are in the process of being recruited away because this field is so hot.”
She’s not optimistic about what lies ahead for the institute. Unless the current funding situation changes, she predicts that in five years the institute might not even exist.
“This university has spent very few resources in the institute,” says Muratore. It was only after three years that MU granted $10,000 a year. Before that, it received leftover funds from the Romance Language Department. It was also given general faculty positions, which the department chose to convert to institute positions.
Current chairwoman Carol Lazzaro-Weis has been a supporter of the institute since long before she arrived to teach at MU last year. In fact, the institute’s presence here was one of the factors in her decision to come.
She remembers receiving a recruitment flyer at the time of the institute’s inception in 1997, when she was teaching at Southern University in Baton Rouge.
“Imagine how pleased I was to see that somebody initiated a place of study for writers of African descent in the diaspora,” she says. “And this was exciting, because this is something that doesn’t take place on a lot of campuses.”
Despite funding constraints, Lazzaro-Weis has high hopes for the future. She’s committed to a minimum of maintaining the institute at its current size, and perhaps even to grow.
Lazzaro-Weis plans to enhance the department by incorporating the African component throughout the program. “We have to make sure that all the courses that we have in the Spanish, Portuguese and French languages incorporate Afro-descendant writers and questions of race,” she says. She is optimistic about the future of the institute because of the many young scholars who are willing and able to contribute to this effort.
In spite of its financial crisis, the Afro-Romance Institute remains a leader in its field. Shortly after it was established, the institute began to bring scholars to Columbia for seminars and conferences. It also hosted two consecutive annual six-week seminars that drew specialists from across the United States to discuss Afro-Hispanic authors, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Together with ALARA, the Afro-Latin American Research Association, the institute kicked off a series of biannual international meetings in 1997 in key places of African heritage in Latin America, such as Salvador de Bahía, Brazil; Santo Domingo; Port-au-Prince and Panama City. This year’s conference will be held in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Back home, the faculty members are at work trying to inspire change in the field of Romance Language studies.
Literature has entered a sort of intellectual crisis, says Michael Ugarte, associate chairman of the Romance Language department and a member of the institute. Academic leaders are realizing that the old standards, or canon, of Spanish literature — Cervantes, Lope de Vega, García Lorca, to name a few — are over-studied and limited in their reflection of Hispanic heritage.
“We are questioning our own premises in the study of literature,” he said. “That’s why we are looking beyond the boundaries of western literature, working with indigenous literature, African literature. And the Afro-Romance Institute is a leader in that field.”
The African piece of Hispanic heritage is essential to understanding the culture as a whole, says Molly Olsen, also an institute scholar who specializes in colonial and Caribbean literature.
“If you don’t understand anything about Africa, you will not understand the Caribbean mosaic,” she explains. “It is important to give voice to the 60, 70 percent of the population of the Caribbean basin and their cultural expressions in literature.”
Scholars around the country praise the institute’s academic efforts. Antonio Tillis, an assistant professor at Purdue University, says that the institute is important for its academic focus on exposing the literary community to the works of writers who have been largely ignored in their own countries and in international circles.
“Due to the efforts of the institute,” Tillis says, “writers such as Juan Tomás Avila and Donato N’Dongo of Equatorial Guinea, Quince Duncan of Costa Rica, Manuel Zapata Olivella of Colombia are gaining visibility and acceptance as major contributors of Spanish American letters.”