Professor Vilma Santiago-Irizarry retired on July 1, 2024, thirty years to the day of when she arrived in Ithaca and joined the Department of Anthropology as the first joint tenure track appointment between a department and the Latino/a Studies Program (LSP).
Beyond her scholarship on identity construction processes in the United States and curricular contributions to the department in linguistic anthropology, the anthropology of law, and ethnographic field methods, she directed her institutional efforts toward building up Latine Studies as a valid academic field and intellectual project locally, nationally, and internationally: She twice served as LSP Director and, at different points in time, presided the Association for Latina/o and Latinx Anthropologists (ALLA) , a Section of the American Anthropological Association (AAA); the Latino Studies Section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA); and the Puerto Rican Studies Association (PRSA), for which she organized and hosted its 2006 Biennial Conference at Cornell, the first PRSA gathering at an ivy league institution. As a member of the AAA Section Assembly, she was a member of the Working Group on Governance that restructured the organization; as AAA Section Assembly Convenor, she served on the AAA Executive Board and, among other projects, worked on the current AAA Principles of Professional Responsibility.
Throughout these professional endeavors, her students have remained Prof. Santiago-Irizarry’s core focus and concern. It is they that she will best remember and is most proud of as, to her mind, they best validate her thirty years in academia. Prof. Santiago-Irizarry has always considered anthropology her profession and academia simply the stage on which she plies it. Thus, while retired from academia, she remains a working anthropologist (and nonpracticing attorney).
The Department of Anthropology would like to thank Professor Vilma Santiago-Irizarry for her outstanding contributions to the Department of Anthropology and many other areas of Cornell. We are thankful for her many years of service and dedication.
