The five interviews that make up The (Latin) American Scene offer to readers, however inadvertently, an especially timely if stark occasion for reflection on the current state and uncertain future of the field of Latin-Americanist criticism and humanistic scholarship in the North American university and public sphere.

Convened and guided with great acumen and rhetorical skill by Fernando Gómez Herrero, they were initially recorded between twenty and twenty-five years ago. In the course of conversations with Gómez Herrero, Walter Mignolo, Rolena Adorno, José Rabasa, John Beverley and Roberto González Echevarría, then all senior, well-established academics and by now all well into retirement age—if in many instances still active scholars—reflect back on the state of the field dating from a point in time as early as three decades before that.

Meanwhile, however, as this is being written (ca. February 2025) the United States and with it the world are witnessing what will surely be remembered as one of the most signal and disastrous turning points in its modern, twenty-first-century history: Donald Trump's return to head a state over which he now makes good to exercise almost unlimited control. Whatever the particulars of the new, far-right, quite arguably neofascist, ethno-supremacist polity that now consolidates itself, joining similarly autocratic if nominally “democratic” regimes across the globe, from Italy to Argentina to India and from the Philippines to Hungary to Russia, the effect here is to cast an unaccustomed and lurid light over a subset of academic and intellectual life whose very chronological double remove suddenly makes it seem weirdly even more particular and remote: speaking from a generation ago at a point in the United States and global history when, whatever its own catastrophic and dystopian aspects, our contemporary civilizational collapse (surely the term is justified) would have been scarcely imaginable, the informants responding to Gómez Herrero's adroit and always provocative questions and prompts—often as illuminating and compelling as the words they elicit if not at times a good deal more so—reflect back in turn on a still earlier, preceding generation.

The Training of González Echevarría.

FGH: What would you like to remember about your training years (BA University of South Florida (1964), MA Indiana University (1966), PhD Yale (1970)?

RGE: I have very pleasant memories of professors who were key in my training. At the University of South Florida, these professors did not produce a big written work, but they were great teachers. I am thinking of Edward McClean, Charles Micareli, Adrian Cherry and others in French and Italian. At Indiana, I had the good fortune of being a student of Miguel Enguíanos, a brilliant and warm professor from Valencia with whom I would spend hours talking in his office when I was twenty years old, which is when I started graduate school. Octavio Corbalán, a subtle Argentinian from Tucumán was also there. He wrote about “postmodernismo,” because that is how it was called [already in the 1960s]. and he taught me a lot of things about writing style. I was lucky because that was a moment of growth in the department. Américo Castro passed through to give a talk. Ana María Matute gave a course about fiction-writing. I studied with her. Antonio Ferres, Ignacio Aldecoa, Rosario Castellanos, etc. Lots of writers went through the department and I learned a lot from them. I learned a lot from a Mexican professor, Ortigoza by name, who gave very detailed courses on the Golden Age [period] and from Quentin Hope, a professor of XVII French theater. Prof. Houston who gave an excellent seminar on Proust. When I arrived at Yale, it was the beginning of the boom of structuralism. I was student of Hispanists such as [the Spaniard] Manuel Durán, who was my dissertation advisor, the Cuban José Arrom, the Colombian Gustavo Correa and others who were visiting professors. [I studied] in French with Jacques Ehrmann, who sadly died very young. He was one among those who gave entrance to structuralism in the U.S. via Yale and the journal Yale French Studies that published a very important issue at that time. Because I have always been between Spanish, French and Italian, it was also the Italian professor John Freccero. At some point, Paul de Man arrived. I attended the classes of Harold Bloom.

The Professional History of Rolena Adorno.

FGH: What would you like to recall in relation to your training (BA U of Iowa, Spanish, 1964; MA privatim Yale U, 1966; PhD Cornell U, Spanish Literature [sic], 1974)?

RA: I think that the undergraduate experience was really key in my case because I came from a nonacademic family, no one having gone to the university before. And, for me, to discover the humanities, and the study of the Spanish language and literature, although I came to it late, was the most important educational experience I had. What was attractive to me about it was that it was so different from my own cultural background. I had that interest in something that was very different from that which I had known and from which I had come. What sealed that interest for me, although I was trained to be a secondary school teacher and did teach one year, in fact one year after I graduated from college, was the opportunity to have a Fulbright scholarship to Spain. That changed what was already a serious interest, not quite on the spot but over the course of that year in Madrid, into a lifelong commitment and a lifelong passion that I didn't yet know how to give shape to because I married right after that Fulbright year and took over the raising of my husband's four daughters and couldn't yet quite see myself going through graduate school. But I did. It was a natural consequence with very much the support of my family and my husband, David [Adorno] and the girls. The very remarkable master's degree from Yale, is simply the last degree because one has to have a Yale graduate degree in order to be a member of the Yale permanent faculty. So, this in privatim degree is in fact a ceremonial one that means that I teach at Yale as a member of the permanent faculty. My PhD years at Cornell were wildly different than [anything] I had thought they might have been. Simply because I started out looking to study something that I knew something about, which was the theater of Golden-Age Spain as is called, the comedia del Siglo de Oro, and in the course of centering on that historical period the advice given to me was to take a course in the colonial area.