Juan Poblete

Statement

I am a Chilean-American who has lived for more than thirty years in the United States, while doing research in and on Latin/o America. I write in both English and Spanish for journals across the world. My intellectual efforts as a Latin Americanist have always attempted to think national and transnational cultural and political formation processes from a critical non-nationalistic and non-globalistic viewpoint. My work participates in an effort to rethink Latin/o American Studies in a global framework. That is to say, capable of encompassing Latin America and the USA from interdisciplinary angles, which can do justice to the new complex cultural, social and political developments of a globalized Latin/o America. I use a transnational orientation as a lens to de-nationalize the nation as a natural container of the social and interrogate its homogenizing premises and dynamics, while I see the nation and its politics as a reminder of the real-life thickness and value (constraints, possibilities, and frameworks) defining, structurally, our lives. That is the intellectual and epistemological basis of my interest in being LASA Treasurer and joining the organization's Executive Council. I hope I can help, in a critical post-Covid moment, with the task of thinking the best organizational and professional practices to connect those two dimensions of the Latin/o American world, promoting de-racialized epistemologies and social justice. I am far from being a financial analyst but I can learn and contribute on the job. Before leaving Chile, I was a bookstore owner for five years. I have been co-provost and then provost of one of the colleges my institution is divided into, for a total of nine years with full academic, staff, administration, and financial responsibilities; and, also, Co-PI in significant, multi-year grants from the Ford and the Mellon Foundations. Since 2013, I have been, first, a member and, then co-chair and co-principal investigator of the Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) Task Force, which has worked successfully to strengthen underrepresented undergraduate students' performance, graduation, and retention at UCSC. UCSC, now a federally recognized HSI, has three current five-year HSI Department of Education-funded grants totaling more than nine million dollars. Two additional, 3 million-five year each, grants have just been awarded to our team and campus: the GANAS Career Pathways grant and the GANAS Graduate education grant, both starting in 2021. This 15 million dollars and complex organizational effort —to support the education of underrepresented groups in California and contribute to an equity-minded University of California system— has been both a labor of love and a truly demanding challenge. Each one of the grants has hired an Administrative Director as well as a number of other positions. We meet in different committees at least once every week on average, all year long (through the summer and through sabbaticals as well). In addition to being co-chair, for the last five years I have been the lead for WORD (a summer, reading for writing seminar taught for five years across California to hundreds of students). Overall, this has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my career, a combined service and research activity that is the basis for my co-authored chapter "Becoming a Racially Just Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI): A Case Study of the University of California, Santa Cruz". I mention all of this simply to say: I have the commitment, the energy, and the experience to serve LASA as its Treasurer and as a member of its Executive Council, in its pursuit of effective and empowered professional opportunities for all its members and social justice in the broader worlds we not only inhabit but belong to.