Historians and other social scientists, art scholars, and foreign affairs and development experts from all over the world presented papers during the First Philippine-Latin American Studies Conference held on December 15 to 17, 2008.
Organized by the City of Manila and the Philippine Academic Consortium for Latin American Studies (PACLAS), the conference was hosted by UP, through the UP Diliman Department of History, and Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila (PLM). PACLAS is chaired by UP’s Dr. Ferdinand C. Llanes.
The papers covered a wide range of topics under the theme “The Philippines and Latin America: Past, Present, and Future.” At PLM, they included the Philippines as the Latin American country of Southeast Asia, the Galleon Trade, migration, the trans-Pacific trade, Philippine-Latin American relations, and development trends. At UP, papers were presented on architecture and urban life, regional economic and security issues, discourses on narrative representation and consumption, and intersection in the arts.
UP’s Prof. Patrick Flores discusses the social world of Fernando Amorsolo
during a session moderated by UP’s Prof. Gerardo Lucena.
Vice President for Public Affairs Dr. Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo, who has been teaching graduate courses in Latin American fiction since the early 1990s, felt that the conference was long overdue. In her message at the conference’s closing, she highlighted the similarities between the Philippines and Latin America that go deeper than “similar names, familiar music, and the temperament inclined to the romantic and the flamboyant.”
“It is when I read the literature of Latin America that I feel most deeply the ties that bind us,” she said. “In the words of your great poets and novelists, I find echoes of our own predicaments and our own aspirations, sometimes imagined in the same manner, sometimes expressed in the same tone.”
The participants of the conference came from the PACLAS member institutions, Mexico’s Universidad Iberoamericana, Benemerita and Universidad Autonoma de Puebla, Mexico; USA’s Oberlin College and University of California-Berkeley; Bolivia’s Centro Vicente Cañas; Colombia’s Universidad EAFIT; Spain’s Universidad de las Palmas de Gran Canaria; South Korea’s Hankuk University of Foreign Studies; Instituto Brasileiro de Relacoes Internacionais; Universidad Catolica de Chile; National University of Ireland, Maynooth; University of Vienna; University of Queensland; the International Federation for the Study of Latin America and the Caribbean, Scalabrini Migration Center, the Intramuros Administration (IA), and the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA). PACLAS consists of Ateneo de Manila University, De La Salle University, the Foreign Service Institute, the Philippine Institute for Development Studies, University of Asia and the Pacific, University of the East, UP, and University of Santo Tomas. The Office of Sen. Edgardo Angara, the DFA, the Government Service Insurance System, the IA, the National Historical Institute, the National Museum, Vargas Museum, and the Manila Hotel sponsored the conference.
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