CLAH L <scp>ecture</scp> : A R <scp>oad</scp> L <scp>ess</scp> T <scp>ravelled</scp> : <i>Making Room for Broad Intellectual Collaboration in Our Scholarship and Mentoring in</i> Latin American History

Abstract This essay is a lightly edited version of a speech I gave at the annual reception of the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH) at the American Historical Association meetings in New York City in January 2025. It was written as a keynote address connected with my acceptance of CLAH’s Distinguished Service Award for 2024. I focus here on what have been the two most critical and intertwined commitments of my roughly five-decade career as a historian of Mexico and Latin America: broad intellectual collaboration across disciplines, academic generations, and national boundaries, and a two-way notion of mentoring. Apart from my own monographic research, these commitments have played out in an array of editorial arenas—academic journals, multi-authored collections, a massive country-level compendium of documents, and a long-running book series—that have remained integral to my intellectual growth and figured importantly in the mentoring of my doctoral students and their mentoring of me. My career trajectory in this regard may well have been a road less travelled and one certainly not for everyone; still, there is a case to be made for giving greater emphasis to broader collaborative strategies of research and dissemination in our work as scholars and teachers of Latin America’s past.