The David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS) at Harvard Looks to New Models of Operating in Spanish-Speaking Latin America

Over the past two decades, regional offices with dedicated in-country staff have served as a cornerstone of DRCLAS’ approach to bridging Latin America, the Caribbean, and Harvard, helping to bring faculty and students to the region and creating networks among academics to facilitate collaborative research efforts. 

However, as the University navigates financial challenges, uncertainty, and reduced expenditures, we need to make strategic, structural, and sustainable decisions that enable us to maintain core aspects of our mission in the near and long term. Although DRCLAS remains fully committed to the region, we must consider new models of operation while still focusing on relevant and meaningful engagement. 

We now have technology that allows us to be more connected across countries and even pursue some of our work remotely. Interest from faculty and students in engagement with Latin America and the Caribbean remains as strong as ever; last year, more than a thousand Harvard faculty and students travelled to 38 countries in the region on sponsored travel, with the top five countries being Brazil, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, and Argentina. We maintain a DRCLAS office in São Paulo, Brazil, which continues to offer academic opportunities for Harvard faculty and students in Latin America. Finally, we have a robust network of partners across the region willing to engage with us as we usher in a new era of deepening relationships and driving impactful collaboration. New technologies, backed by the strength of our community’s interest and our deep relationships in the region, provide us the opportunity to pursue a new model—one that ensures quality engagement without relying on the more cost-intensive approach of maintaining multiple regional offices.

As such, DRCLAS will end its office lease in Mexico City, Mexico in September, and the Mexico staff will transition to remote work at that time. 

We have also made the difficult and painful decision to close our Santiago, Chile office at the end of 2025. Going forward, we will focus on the following in Chile: 

• Expanding our collaborative research efforts to include other universities. Currently, DRCLAS has a partnership with the Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, which provides funding to local faculty who partner with a Harvard researcher to advance their efforts. We hope to expand this model and pursue a Chile Innovation Fund, akin to our Mexico Innovation Fund or the collaborative research work the University has supported in partnership with the Lemann Foundation in Brazil. These efforts have had a long history of producing impactful research in many disciplines, and Chile has a robust and sophisticated network of universities who could be great allies in this effort.
• Continuing to promote our visiting scholars’ program in collaboration with the Luksic Foundation. Every year, a Chilean researcher joins an interdisciplinary cohort of academics from around Latin America to spend a semester at Harvard, nurturing relationships and deepening their work.
• Increasing Chilean representation on our Advisory Board, in order to identify new ways in which we can advance knowledge and contribute to addressing Chile’s most pressing challenges and opportunities. 

We are incredibly proud of and grateful for the work our Chile Office has done over the past two decades. Our staff have poured their heart and soul into advancing our mission. Thousands of students have had a transformative educational experience in Chile, and our faculty have been able to work with outstanding academics to advance research and teaching on Harvard’s campus. At critical times, our Chile Office has also engaged Harvard in debates with real-world impact for Chileans: constitutional reform efforts, natural disaster recovery, women’s equality, child development, and the democratization of science, among other issues. 

We look forward to continuing to deepen our relationships across Chile and Spanish-speaking Latin America and the Caribbean to identify new paths forward in the advancement of research and engagement in this rich and important region of the world.