Award-winning Author Kicks Off UA’s Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies Minor With Lecture

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – Historian and award-winning author Dr. Ann Twinam will present “Purchasing Whiteness: Pardos, Mulattoes and the Quest for Social Mobility in the Spanish Indies” on Thursday, Oct. 1 at the first lecture of The University of Alabama’s new Latin American, Caribbean and Latino studies minor.

The lecture will be at 7 p.m. in room 205 of Gorgas Library on the UA campus. It is free and open to the public.

Twinam, a professor history at the University of Texas at Austin, will discuss the Spanish-American colonial “casta” system, a hierarchical arrangement of classification by race. Specifically, she will address the “gracias al sacar,” a decree that allowed mixed-race groups to obtain white status and therefore be absolved of tax and tribute requirements. This flexibility of racial constructs in the Spanish Americas represents a marked difference between Anglo and Latin American treatments of race.

Twinam is the author of “Miners, Merchants, and Farmers in Colonial Colombia” (1982) and of “Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America” (1999). The latter book won the Thomas F. McGann Prize and was runner-up for the Bolton Prize.

Her honors include the University of Texas at Austin Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award and the University of Cincinnati George Rieveschl Jr. Award for Excellence in Scholarly Works.

The Latin American, Caribbean and Latino studies minor at UA was established in response to strong student and job market interest in the field. The minor dovetails with UA’s longtime Alabama-Cuba Initiative and UA’s new Center for Cuba Collaboration and Scholarship, established in February.

The minor is multi-faceted and offers an intense exploration of people and nations with ties to the United States. It includes classes in American studies, anthropology, biological sciences, economics, English, gender and race studies, history, modern languages and political science.

Twenty-four full-time UA faculty members are affiliated with the minor, which takes a holistic and integrated approach to the region.

The Latin American, Caribbean and Latino studies minor is part of  UA’s College of Arts and Sciences, UA’s largest division and the largest liberal arts college in the state. Students from the College have won numerous national awards including Rhodes Scholarships, Truman Scholarships and Goldwater Scholarships.