The Center for Latin American Studies congratulates Laura De Moya-Guerra, PhD candidate in History at Rutgers University, on being awarded a Vanderbilt University Library Travel Grant. This competitive award supports scholars whose research will benefit from the unique archival collections at Vanderbilt’s Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries.
De Moya-Guerra’s project, titled “Performing Diplomacy: Colombian Culture in China during the Early Cold War, 1950–1960,” explores how artists, dancers, athletes, and intellectuals served as unofficial diplomats in forging connections between Colombia and China before the formal establishment of diplomatic relations in 1980. Her research focuses in particular on Manuel and Delia Zapata Olivella, whose literary and performance work helped project Colombia’s image abroad through culture and art.
With the support of the Vanderbilt Library Travel Grant, De Moya-Guerra will travel to Nashville in June 2026 to consult the Manuel Zapata Olivella Papers and Delia Zapata Olivella Papers. These archives include travel notes, writings, and photographs from the siblings’ tours in China during the 1950s, materials that will contribute to De Moya-Guerra’s dissertation chapter on cultural diplomacy and Cold War global exchanges.
Her dissertation, "The Chinese and the Making of Modern Colombia, 1903–1980,” examines how Chinese migration shaped Colombia’s racial and national imaginaries across the twentieth century.