Faculty Fellowships and Awards
USDA Kika De La Garza Science Fellowship
Mar Huertas, Department of Biology
Reimbursable travel expenses to visit multiple federal agencies and a USDA research lab.
Period of Support: Summer 2018 (paid directly to faculty member)
NEH Awards for Faculty at Hispanic-Serving Institutions
Race and the Art of Tourist Promotion in Bahia, Brazil: Crafting an Urban Landscape, 1900-1964
PI: Anadelia A. Romo
Purpose: Dr. Romo’s research explores the tangled connections between race, representation, and tourism that have shaped the structure of modern racial inequality in Brazil. Examines the reinvention of a former sugar zone in Brazil’s Northeast and probes how the promotion of tourism forged and reinforced racial stereotypes in the aftermath of abolition. To do this, Dr. Romo turns to sources neglected by historians: illustrated tourist guides for Brazil’s colonial capital of Salvador, Bahia, written from the 1920s through the 1950s. Dr. Romo shows how the budding tourism industry of this era developed a distinctive iconography that placed Afro-Bahians as central to the city’s landscape, an apparently inclusive visual culture that worked well with Brazil’s promotion of itself as a racial democracy. Yet Dr. Romo argues that the intersection of tourism and a new visual landscape of the city shaped and consolidated pernicious stereotypes of blackness and exoticized visions of African culture that continue to dominate the visual culture of the city today.