 ight Fulbright grantees, five OAS grantees, one COLCIENCIAS grantee, and one FANTEL grantee—all administered by LASPAU—participated in the first annual Espacio USA: Vanguardia Latina conference, held in May 2006 at the headquarters of the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, D.C. The conference brought together Latino leaders in government, business, and academia; university students; and others from Latin America and the United States for three days of presentations and panel discussions.
Issues addressed included the outlook for inter-American relations; the influence of Latin American culture in the United States, and the links between Hispanic Americans and Latin Americans.
Espacio USA was an outgrowth of Espacio, a program created by the Mexican NGO Espacio de Vinculación, A.C. (EVAC) and supported by Televisa as well as a number of Mexican and international businesses. Espacio was designed to create a dialogue between university students and academics and decision-makers in public institutions and private enterprises. It has been functioning in Mexico since 1997 and has also been initiated in other Latin American countries.
Among the presenters at Espacio USA were Secretary General of the OAS Jose Miguel Insulza and Fulbright Faculty Development Program alumnus Rafael Fernández de Castro. Fernández is chair of the Department of International Studies at the Instituto Technológico Autónomo de México and is a specialist on U.S.-Mexico relations.
Following the conference, the organizers established Red Vanguardia Latina, a network of forty students who showed exceptional leadership, creativity, proactivity, analytical capacity, and teamwork skills both prior to and during the event. The following LASPAU-administered students were included in this select group: Keila de Souza Aires (Fulbright–OAS Ecology, Brazil), Adriana de Souza Machado (Fulbright, Brazil), Aníbal Pinto Ferrada (OAS, Chile), Silvia Andrea Mestelan (Fulbright, Argentina), and Barbara Rebecca Silva Pérez (OAS, Mexico).
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