The Center for Regional Studies (CRS) recently welcomed a new director. Damián Vergara Wilson holds a Ph.D. in Spanish & Portuguese and Hispanic Linguistics from The University of New Mexico.
“I have had the honor of directing the Spanish as a Heritage Language program in our department since 2009 and we have done many amazing things. Our Spanish as a Heritage Language (SHL) program is a maintenance and revitalization effort that sends our students the message that the way our communities speak should be valued and preserved. What your grandparents say is correct,” Vergara Wilson said.
The SHL program has had a national influence on the field overall, partially through scholarship that Vergara Wilson has published on SHL. Because of this, he’s been invited to give keynote talks for various organizations and will deliver a plenary for the fifth International Conference on Heritage/Community Languages hosted by the National Heritage Language Resource Center in Los Angeles this coming February.
The sociolinguistic research that has informed his studies on SHL has also led to other interesting opportunities, such as serving as an expert witness on languages in both federal and district courts.
He’s written many articles and has written one book as solo author and co-authored another on the field of SHL with others, which came out in 2024. Since 2020, Vergara Wilson has been the associate editor of the Spanish as a Heritage Language Journal.
Perhaps most notably is recent media coverage on his research and effort to preserve a unique dialect of Spanish that is only found in New Mexico.
Vergara Wilson says his past work experience will impact how he hopes to lead the center. The mission of the CRS is to promote efforts to generate and retrieve knowledge about different aspects of communities in New Mexico and the Southwest.
“We do this by supporting research, educational efforts, internships, and other efforts that focus on local communities,” said Vergara Wilson. “We take a broad view and support a spectrum of work that may focus on things such as environmental issues, archival work, investigations into our history, questions about language and indigenous educational efforts. We even support artistic endeavors that coincide with our mission. One of the cornerstones of our mission is to showcase the work we do through public presentations and through our website.”
One of his biggest hopes as director is to create a new initiative that involves undergraduate students in research efforts with faculty mentors. “We are excellent at funding graduate students and faculty but need to expend our efforts to get undergraduates excited about the research we do at UNM through hands-on opportunities,” Vergara Wilson said.
He also hopes to expand the educational efforts to include maintenance and revitalization of our New Mexican Spanish varieties. He aims to build a publicly available resource that will model the way New Mexicans speak through transcribed video recordings of narratives in Spanish and include curricular materials that draw on these.
Finally, he would like to continue to support efforts at creating educational materials for Indigenous communities through supporting the Native Curriculum Partnership, which will hold a workshop this fall with local high school teachers and students. “Our amazing documentary filmmaker, Arcie Chapa, is creating documentary films on Native education and artists that can serve as the basis for curriculum,” Vergara Wilson said.
These documentaries will be available for in person and online viewings along with other documentaries that Chapa has done for CRS, such as her recent work, Acequias: The Legacy Lives On.”
Stay tuned to the CRS website for upcoming presentations on funded scholarship and other events.
