Founded in 1964, CLAS grew alongside Pitt's expanding international mission, connecting students, faculty, and communities with Latin America and the Caribbean. Over the decades, it has built a model around interdisciplinary scholarship, language study, research, and direct engagement with the region, one that today extends to its diverse diasporic communities as well.
In the early 1970s, a small group of Pitt undergraduates traveled to Guarne, Colombia, as part of a new kind of academic experience: a semester-long interdisciplinary seminar at Pitt, followed by weeks of fieldwork abroad. This unique program became the Undergraduate Seminar and Field Trip Program, which, more than fifty years later, has sent over 600 students to 14 countries.
Today, students in the program begin with a seminar at Pitt, where they study the country and communities they will visit and develop their own research questions, before traveling to conduct fieldwork and engage directly with local scholars, organizations, and communities. This year's program took students to San José and Heredia, Costa Rica, where they researched topics ranging from perceptions of democratic effectiveness and barriers to healthcare access to environmental responsibility and support services for the elderly. The next program heads to Santarém, Brazil, extending the Center's ties to the Amazon. The trip also fulfills the undergraduate certificate’s study-abroad requirement, integrating field research directly into the students’ academic experience.
The same commitment to multidisciplinarity shapes CLAS today. More than 130 affiliated faculty across 25 departments and 11 professional schools give students paths into the region through the humanities, social sciences, business, law, engineering, and other fields. Supporting their research is the Eduardo Lozano Latin American Collection, one of the country's premier collections in the field, with more than 416,000 titles and particular depth in Cuban, Bolivian, and Brazilian materials.
Students can carry that interdisciplinary approach into their own degrees. For Hispanic and Latino students, CLAS can also provide opportunities to explore their heritage and deepen connections to the languages, histories, and communities they study, both in Pittsburgh and across Latin America and the Caribbean. At the undergraduate level, the Certificate in Latin American Studies combines cross-disciplinary coursework with the development of proficiency in Spanish, Portuguese, Quechua, or Haitian Creole, experiential learning in the region, and a digital portfolio that brings those experiences together. Students looking for a more flexible option can pursue a Related Concentration in Latin American Studies. At the graduate level, students integrate regional and language expertise with their master's or doctoral training through the Graduate Certificate in Latin American Studies. The Center's Latin American Social and Public Policy Program provides another pathway, connecting Latin American expertise with research and professional training in areas such as public health, education, environmental policy, and economic development.
This interdisciplinary approach is now extending into new territory. The Amazonian Studies Program brings together historians, environmental scientists, public health researchers, and scholars from other fields who treat the Amazon as more than an ecological region, where questions of migration and human rights sit alongside climate and biodiversity. Afro-Latin American and Afro-Latinx Studies has grown into an equally central priority, advanced through the University Consortium on Afro-Latin American Studies, a network of institutions building scholarship on race, memory, and inclusion across the Americas.
In Brazil, CLAS now anchors a partnership with the Quilombo of Bracuí in Rio de Janeiro, a public history initiative with more than two decades of work in the community. Through the Passados Presentes project, community members help shape research on slavery, memory, Black cultural heritage, land rights, and reparations—work that contributed to the community’s official quilombo recognition. In 2026, the partnership received Pitt’s Partnership of Distinction Award for its sustained reciprocity and community impact.
That collaborative spirit extends across the region. This year, CLAS and the Ford Institute for Human Security began work in Rio de Janeiro studying online violence against women in politics, sending Pitt graduate students to work alongside Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro and the NGO Mulheres Negras Decidem, or Black Women Decide.
But CLAS's deepest, widest-reaching engagement happens closer to home. During the 2025–2026 academic year alone, the Center engaged more than 1,600 participants through more than 20 cultural programs, workshops, school visits, and community partnerships. Hands-on programs such as What's in a Name andBorder to Border, alongside workshops on alebrijes, papel picado, ojo de dios, and cartoneras, gave students and community members ways to explore identity, language, history, and culture. CLAS also worked with schools throughout Western Pennsylvania, bringing school groups to campus for experiences designed to introduce them to Latin America and the Caribbean while also exposing them to the opportunities available through higher education.
CLAS also partners with organizations including Mexico Lindo Mercado y Galería de Artesanías, the PA Migrant Education Program, museums, cultural institutions, and Latin American community organizations throughout the Pittsburgh region. These collaborations support public programming that brings hundreds of community members together. Each year, that work culminates in the Latin American & Caribbean Festival, first held in 1979 and still bringing the wider Pittsburgh community together through music, food, art, and education.
For students pursuing careers where regional expertise and international experience are valuable, these opportunities also extend beyond the classroom. Through the Community Internship Program and International Career Toolkit Series, they connect with mentors and employers in government, law, business, education, and other internationally focused fields, applying their language skills, regional knowledge, and firsthand experience to their professional development.
Sixty years in, CLAS is still answering the question it was founded to answer: what does it take to understand a region as complex as Latin America and the Caribbean? So far, the answer has stayed the same. It takes more than one department, one classroom, or one trip. It takes people from different fields and backgrounds working together, and it takes treating communities, at home and abroad, as partners in that work rather than simply an audience.
About the author
Luis G. Van Fossen Bravo is Associate Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, where he has worked since 2000. His work focuses on academic programming, international partnerships, and engagement with Latin America and the Caribbean. He is completing an Ed.D. in Higher Education Management.
