Dear Fashion Thinkers,
If you follow me on Instagram, you may have noticed that I spent a large portion of the summer back in New York. It was the first time I spent more than 10 days in the City after I left in 2017 to pursue my Ph.D.
Being back arose in me so many feelings and ideas that I ended up—for better or for worse—entering a bit of an existential crisis. For the past month or so, I’ve been questioning so many of the decisions I’ve made in the past couple of years. And I’ve been struggling to figure out what is it, exactly, that I want to do with my life.
Not that I need to know it right now. Nor that we can’t change our minds at different points in life.
But being back in New York, (sort of) living what used to be my life there, made me realize that some of my emotional struggles of the past year may have been rooted not just in the exhaustion resulting from being overworked and overstressed, but likely also because I lost sight of my guiding light in life.
If you follow me on Instagram, you may have an idea of what this guiding light is—or was, at least, when I entered my Ph.D. program.
In the caption of my latest Instagram Reel, I wrote that having spent so much time inside museums and surrounded by objects over the summer reminded me exactly of why I decided to pursue the Ph.D. Simple as it was—to become a curator of the (decorative) arts and design of the Americas—I seem to have forgotten the answer to that question in the past 4–5 years, as I built a more traditional academic career.
Not that I don’t love teaching—because I do. Nor that I can’t decide to take my career in a different direction at a certain moment of my life.
But being back in New York and, more importantly, having the honor and pleasure to participate in the CCL/Mellon Seminar in Curatorial Practice made me realize that becoming a curator is still one of my main objectives for my professional life. Perhaps that’s why I chose to sidestep from my usual Instagram content on fashion studies to share a bit about how New York, its museums, and its people have impacted my life so strongly—even though it turned out that most of you weren’t all that interested in reading much about it.
If you follow me on Instagram, then, you may have seen a bit of all of these reflections take shape in some form over the summer. You may have also noticed that, at some point during this time, I switched back to trying to post bilingually, however cumbersome that might be.
But what you probably haven’t seen (yet) over there are the new ideas that these reflections have sparked for my intellectual production broadly speaking.
I think it’s pretty evident by now that I’m a big fan of making (scholarly) knowledge as openly accessible as possible—and this must include opening spaces for multilingual conversations, especially when it comes to Latin America. This is why I have insisted so much on writing bilingually (in Spanish and English), not only for my academic publications, but also in this newsletter and on Instagram.
Both this newsletter and my activity on social media are also part of an attempt to become a “public-facing intellectual,” following the example of some of my mentors, like Dr. Valerie Steele and Kimberly Jenkins, and other scholars I deeply admire, such as Dr. Jonathan M. Square. And I have a feeling that being a public-facing scholar is in great part what appeals so much to me about the job of a curator—but that’s the subject of another talk.
But I’ve also come to realize that it is impossible to become a public-facing intellectual if I don’t actually share my research and thoughts publicly. Or more specifically: if I don’t use the outlets I’ve created for that purpose with enough frequency.
Which is why I’ve decided to make a few changes to this newsletter and its “sister” version in Spanish:
First, I’ve decided to create a separate publication for the English newsletter to make it more manageable for everyone. It just doesn’t seem to have much sense having to send two versions of the same ideas to exactly the same people on the same day.
Having two separate newsletters might also mean that the conversation can go on different directions, especially because I really do want to read your thoughts and reflections and hopefully at some point start writing in response to them.
Third, I am scaling back to one publication per month, mostly because in the next few months I need to focus on my teaching and finishing my dissertation, which I’m aiming to defend in the spring.
And finally, I’m bringing in a couple of new sections that were quite successful in some of my previous projects: a monthly roundup of readings, learning resources, and actual “news,” and a sort of “object of the month” based on my doctoral research and teaching.
I hope that you’re still in for the ride, even with these new changes. And I hope that this new structure helps us all to think more thoroughly through—and one day understand better—Latin American fashion in and beyond Abya Yala.
Thank you, thank you for reading, and until a new issue of Thinking Through Latinx Fashion!
Abrazos,
—L.