Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies 
We are glad to announce the winners of the 2021 Nancy M. Farriss Graduate Student Paper Award
Yasmin Mertehikian (Sociology):
The Place of Non-heterosexual Women in Sexual and Reproductive Public Health Policies in the City of Buenos Aires
Marco Avilés (Romance Languages)
Tan lejos y tan cerca. Ideas sobre el mestizaje en dos textos de José Maria Arguedas y Nicolás Guillén
Bio:
Yasmín Mertehikian
PhD student, Sociology Department
Yasmín Mertehikian is a third-year PhD student in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she also holds an MA in Sociology. Before coming to Penn, she did an MA in Social Sciences at Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento and a BA in Sociology at Universidad de Buenos Aires, both in Argentina. Mertehikian has been studying the social determinants of fertility in Argentina from a gender perspective. Specifically, she has been analyzing how individual and household characteristics influence women’s decisions on fertility, and how provincial characteristics and regional inequalities affect them. Her dissertation proposal will analyze women’s status in Latin America in terms of access to the labor market, educational attainment, and fertility.
Marco Avilés
Ph.D. Candidate, Hispanic Studies
Caperton Graduate Fellow 2019-2020, Fontaine Fellowship Recipient
Marco Avilés is a Quechua-Peruvian writer. He was born in the Andean city of Abancay, then migrated to Lima with his family at the start of Peru's civil war. He holds a BA in Communications from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos. A career journalist who has chronicled stories from across Peru and Latin America, his recent work focuses on exploring relationships between indigenous, mestizo, and white identities. He is the author of three books, including De donde venimos los cholos, which in 2016 was listed by the New York Times as one of the ten best books published in Spanish. His current research is focused on the dynamic relationships between identity, race, and ethnicity in contemporary Latin America, and how they are expressed in literature. Marco has lived in the US since 2014, along with his wife and a Peruvian hairless dog.