Latin@ studies abroad: Making the transnational international
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Latin@ st udie s a b ro a d: M a k i ng the transnational international
Jennifer A. R eimer American Culture and Literature Department, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey.
Latino Studies (2016) 14, 258–264. doi:10.1057/lst.2016.7
Open any menu in a restaurant in a large city in Turkey. You will find Turkish specialties, salads, pizzas and burgers – the usual array of restaurant food. But there is one section that you can find on every menu: fajitalar. Fajitalar was my first encounter with the migration of Latin@ culture to Turkey and its influence on Turkish culture. Fajita, the Spanish word for a dish of grilled meat and vegetables accompanied by tortillas and very popular in North American cuisine, became attached to the Turkish suffix for certain plural nouns: -lar. Thus, fajitalar as an interlingual combination of American Spanish and Turkish represents how global circulations of culture are not only unidirectional processes of importing cultural artifacts (such as food, music and clothing). Instead, fajitalar shows us how Latin@ culture also influences and changes the culture(s) it encounters globally. As a result of encounters such as these, I have come to see the limitations of the dominant theories of movement in Latin@ studies within the North American academy. In this essay, I reflect on my lived experience teaching Latin@ studies in Turkey to identify the challenges and opportunities of internationalizing Latin@ studies. I argue that US-based Latin@ studies is often unaware of Latin@ studies being performed at international institutions, with the exception of well-known © 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1476-3435 Latino Studies www.palgrave-journals.com/lst/
Vol. 14, 2, 258–264
Latin@ studies abroad
universities in Spain, Mexico and South America. Few or poorly disseminated networks exist to connect instructors and students of Latin@ studies in North America with instructors and students internationally, particularly those that would connect North American scholars and students to centers of Latin@ studies research outside of Latin America or Spain. These gaps in the field ignore the positive and productive collaborations that could result from internationalizing Latin@ studies. My own lived experience living in Turkey, where I teach Latin@ studies at one of Turkey’s premier private research universities within the Department of American Culture and Literature, has changed how I understand and participate in Latin@ studies as a field. The response from most of my North American colleagues regarding teaching Latin@ studies in Turkey has been incredulity. I am constantly asked, “But can you really teach that there?” Or, “they have that there?” Intelligent, well-meaning people from North America’s top-ranking universities continue to show ignorance and surprise that such programs exist or that anyone would willingly choose an internationally based career over a more traditional tenure-track position in a good North American university. Indeed, I had little to no understanding of American studies as a global fie
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