During her year as a Townsend Fellow, Estelle Tarica, Assistant Professor in Spanish and Portuguese, will work on a project entitled "Intimate Indigenismo: Reading Against the Grain of Mestizaje in Mexico and the Andes." Within the indigenista narrative tradition in twentiethcentury Spanish America, Professor Tarica studies a group of authors who in her view constitute a sub-genre of indigenismo that she calls “intimate”: they break with many of the narrative conventions of the more typical indigenista novel by adopting the perspective of a narrator whose knowledge and experience of indigenous culture derive from inter-ethnic, cross-class affective relations. But by their very exceptionalism, Professor Tarica argues, they illuminate serious issues in Latin American literary and cultural studies and in modern discourse about “the Indian” in Spanish America.