I concentrated in LAILS because I wanted to learn about culture, politics, and literature in both Latinx USA and Latin America. Specifically, I wanted to understand how Latin America contextualized how Latinxs in the US came to be. What happened in Latin American countries that led to Latinx diasporas? What common themes and genres were writers in Latin America and in the US writing about? I'm now in the American Studies doctoral program at NYU and LAILS was foundational to my interest in transnational contexts. More importantly, LAILS taught me how to engage with the work of scholars outside the US and how to identify long, historical threads that continue to link Latinxs in the US with Latin America.