New Orleans Book Festival Features Yuri Herrera and Gabriela Alemán in an Unprecedented Spanish-Language Session

The 2024 New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University took place March 14-16 on Tulane’s uptown campus and hosted the session “Latin Americans in New Orleans in the 19th and 20th Centuries | Una conversación, en español, entre Yuri Herrera y Gabriela Alemán” sponsored by the Stone Center for Latin American Studies.  

The event gathered over eighty students, faculty, and community members in a session that was the first one in the history of the New Orleans Book Festival to be held in Spanish.  

The conversation between Mexican writer Yuri Herrera and Ecuadorian writer Gabriela Alemán focused on their fictionalized accounts of Mexican president Benito Juárez and Ecuadorian painter George Febres, particularly their time in New Orleans. The authors dicssed the inspriration, research, and writing processes that guided their treatment of these figures.  You can watch a full recording of the session below. 

This event is among the robust slate of projects and events to celebrate our growth over the past century. 2024 marks one hundred years of research and teaching in the field of Latin American Studies at Tulane University. To celebrate this milestone, the Stone Center will launch The LAST 100. We have digitized, assembled, and created documentation of this history with a particular focus starting in the 1940s with the creation of the academic programs on Latin America. The resulting website and digital collection will be publicly released over the summer.