St. Mary’s College of Maryland (SMCM) Associate Professor Argelia González Hurtado has co-edited "Cinematic Landscape and Emerging Identities in Contemporary Latin American Film" with colleague Maria Soledad Paz-Mackay (St. Francis Xavier University). The book, published by Lexington Books, features 11 chapters and conversations with filmmakers who use landscape to convey issues affecting diverse Latin American societies, including Indigenous groups, Afro-Latin Americans, LGBTQIA+ communities, migrants, environmentalists and women.
SMCM senior Kristen Riddleberger ’24, a double major in English and International Languages & Cultures-Spanish, helped with the formatting and proofreading of the articles and created the book’s index. Riddleberger, who plans a career in the publishing industry, was grateful for the opportunity. “Professor González Hurtado placed a lot of trust in me. I found that the most challenging aspect was preparing the index. Instead of working in collaboration with others, creating the index for the book was a task I completed on my own, which was both nerve-wracking and time intensive. However, I found the entire process extremely rewarding.” Additionally, students of Professor José Ballesteros worked together to translate one of the chapters. The students who contributed to the translation were Ben Carroll, Christopher Rand-Crawford, Daniel Andres Reina, Rony Salgado-lara, Kyra Smith, Emily Vance, Eleanor Walter and Devon Wayson.
González Hurtado and her colleague have been supported in their work by a three-year Insight Development Grant they obtained in June 2021. Over the past three years, the duo has also published two papers and a dossier in an open-access journal.
