2019 Volume 18 Number 1

To Our Readers, Colleagues, and Friends,

After a hiatus of about three years, we are extremely pleased to share with you this Special Issue of the revived Delaware Review of Latin American Studies in its new Public Knowledge Project (PKP)-Open Journal Systems (OJS) platform and with its own unique logo designed by Maestro Antonio Martorell which he based on Joaquín Torres-García's América invertida (1943), also known as the "Upside Down Map".

Thanks to the support of the University of Delaware Library, Museums & Press and the Center for Global and Area Studies (CGAS) we dedicate this Special Issue of DeRLAS to the founders Norman Schwartz (1932- 2017) and América Martínez Cruzado (retired), who in 1999, and with Susan Austin Alchon, conceived this publication as an online, free-access, high quality and interdisciplinary academic journal.

With this Special Issue, we hope to continue to meet the objectives proposed by professors Schwartz and Martínez: to publish high-level academic papers about different aspects: society, culture, literature and history– of the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking world, particularly Latin America (see SUBMISSIONS for more information).

DeRLAS embraces the University of Delaware's "commitment to cultivate learning, develop knowledge and foster the free exchange of ideas." We also support CGAS's mission to "promote research that increases global awareness and foster an interconnected academic community."

We are proud and confident that DeRLAS will continue to serve as an intellectual platform for authors and readers around the globe. We are also eager to continue to share the diversity that constitutes the field of Latin American Studies.

We extend an enthusiastic invitation to future collaborators whose texts (articles or reviews of books or films) deal with cultural, historical, literary and social Latin American issues. We encourage interested parties to familiarize themselves with the process of sending us their writings (see SUBMISSIONS).

We are grateful to the peer reviewers and the members of the Board of Editors for their constructive comments when evaluating the texts that comprise the present publication in homage to América Martínez and Norman Schwartz, pioneers of online intellectual collaboration in three languages.

Elizabeth --Liza-- Grandia and John Hawkins paired to give a worthy tribute to the late Norman Schwartz, while Carla Guerrón Montero, in a summarized historical profile of DeRLAS, dedicates deserving praises to América Martínez.

Without having made any public announcement, but rather by personal requests, we were honored with the contributions from the following colleagues, whose submissions were peer-reviewed and to whom we offer our sincere thanks:

Rosa Perelmuter is Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she teaches literature and culture of the colonial period. She is known for her publications (several articles and two books) dedicated to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, as well as essays ranging from Christopher Columbus and Bernardo de Balbuena to Manuel Puig. Before her next book --about the Azkenazi Hebrew community in Cuba, to which she belonged until she was thirteen years old-- gets published, Professor Perelmuter has shared with us her inquiries about the presence of Don Quixote in America.

The poet and novelist Daniel Torres, a specialist in colonial studies, gives us the article based on the paper he read in Seville in October of 2017, about the possible tensions that existed between two of the most famous Mexican writers of the 17^th century: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora.

Eve Buckley, Associate Professor at the University of Delaware, whose book Technocrats and the Politics of Drought and Development in Twentieth-Century Brazil (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) was awarded the 2018 Humanities Book Prize, presents a review of Mikael Wolf's book on water policy, agriculture and the damage caused to the environment in the name of development.

Professor, archivist, bibliographer and researcher Alejandro González Acosta reviews the first novel (La estirpe de Babel, 2016) by author Ángel Esteban, Professor at the University of Granada, whose innumerable books have been published under the Cátedra, Espasa Calpe, Pegasus, Peter Lang and Verbum labels, among others.

Gladys Ilarregui,poet, researcher, Associate Professor at the University of Delaware, has won such prestigious poetry awards as the Borges International Award, the Arthur P. Whitaker Prize, Federico García Lorca. Here, in her capacity as a specialist in Colonial Studies, she presents her review of Rocío Quispe-Agnoli's book, Nobles de papel, dedicated to the Inca descendants and their quest to legitimize their nobility.

We hope that the present set of articles and reviews will be pleasing and informative to our readers and, in turn, will serve as a motivation for those who wish to send us their original and unpublished writings for future volumes of DeRLAS.

We appreciate our readers' interest in DeRLAS and encourage them to share our journal website with their friends, relatives and colleagues. We assure our readers that their name and email address will not be used for other purposes.

Cordially,

Asima F.X. Saad Maura, Editor