Viviana Díaz Balsera Professor of Spanish University of Miami Rachel A. May Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Studies University of South Florida La Florida: Five Hundred Years of Hispanic Presence	‌
	Wednesday 12-3-14 8:00 PM Books & Books Public Invited Directions... Click here to watch the event via Livestream

Commemorating Juan Ponce de León's landfall on the Atlantic coast of Florida, this ambitious volume explores five centuries of Hispanic presence on the New World peninsula, reflecting on the breadth and depth of encounters between the different lands and cultures. The volume brings together contributions by prominent scholars from various academic disciplines who participated in one of three conferences supported by the Florida Humanities Council in 2012 to commemorate this momentous occasion for the state of Florida. The first of these conferences was presented by the University of Miami Center for the Humanities. The contributors, leading experts in a range of fields, begin with an examination of the first and second Spanish periods. This was a time when La Florida was an elusive possession that the Spaniards were never able to completely secure; but Spanish influence would nonetheless leave an indelible mark on the land. In the second half of this volume, the essays highlight the Hispanic cultural legacy, politics, and history of modern Florida and expand on Florida's role as a modern transatlantic crossroad. Melding history, literature, anthropology, music, culture, and sociology, La Florida is a unique presentation of the Hispanic roots that run deep in Florida's past and present and will assuredly shape its future.

“A splendid, highly readable collection that reflects substantial new research and findings on Hispanic influence in Florida” — Ralph Lee Woodward, author of Central America: A Nation Divided

Viviana Díaz Balsera teaches and researches in the fields of Spanish Golden Age and Spanish American Colonial Studies, with emphasis on Mexico. Her areas of interest are cultural translations, memory, writing and performance in the New World contact zone, and the constitution of colonial subjectivities. She is the author of Calderón y las quimeras de la Culpa (1997) and The Pyramid under the Cross (2005).

Rachel A. May is the Director of the Institute for the Study of Latin America and the Caribbean at the University of South Florida, and the author of Terror in the Countryside (2001).