Founded in 1940 and renamed in 2000 in honor of Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long, whose endowment supports the Institute's scholarly and student-funding mission, LLILAS is among the oldest Latin American Studies centers in the United States, and one of the most comprehensive. LLILAS is recognized as a premier center for Latin American Studies, distinguished by its integration of research, teaching, outreach, and public programming — and by its standing as one of just five university programs nationally, alongside Columbia, Stanford, Chicago, and Wisconsin, recognized through the Tinker Foundation's endowed professorship.

LLILAS operates through a dual structure that integrates academic and resource functions.

Academic Unit

LLILAS offers an undergraduate major in Latin American Studies and three graduate options: a stand-alone MA, a dual MA combining Latin American Studies with any of ten professional degrees at UT Austin — including Law, Journalism, Information Studies, Business, Communication Studies, Community and Regional Planning, Global Policy Studies, Public Affairs, Radio-Television-Film, and Social Work — and a PhD for students pursuing interdisciplinary expertise on Latin America. The graduate program admits approximately 10–15 students per year, each supported through a competitive funding package combining fellowships, teaching assistantships, and grant- and endowment-funded awards such as the E.D. Farmer Fellowship.

More than 180 LLILAS-affiliated faculty teach across 40 departments and 13 colleges and schools, offering an average of 120 Latin American Studies courses each semester in fields as varied as Literature, History, Political Science, Sociology, Anthropology, Geography, Public Affairs, Law, Architecture, Education, and Journalism. This faculty community includes 101 Mexicanists, 43 Brazilianists, 13 Mesoamericanists, and 32 Caribbeanists, with some faculty claiming more than one region, reflecting the breadth of the Institute's regional coverage. LLILAS has developed a system of shared faculty hires with academic departments, holding formal appointments at LLILAS, extending the Institute's reach. The Institute leads the Indigenous Languages Initiative (ILI), currently offering coursework in K'iche' (Maya).

Resource Center

As a resource and research center, LLILAS funds faculty and student research, supports thematic working groups, and fosters public engagement across Texas, the U.S., and Latin America. The Institute is home to the Mexico Center (est. 1980) and the Brazil Center (est. 1995), and supports the Argentine Studies Program, the Caribbean Studies Initiative, and the Maya Studies Initiative. LLILAS also hosts distinguished Latin American visiting professors annually through endowments and grants, such as the Edward Larocque Tinker Chair in Latin American Studies.

LLILAS's institutional reach extends well beyond campus: the Institute maintains 29 formal exchange agreements with Latin American universities and draws on Texas Global's more than 60 approved programs across 12 Latin American countries. These global and interdisciplinary linkages support current dual-degree partnerships with professional schools including the LBJ School of Public Affairs, the School of Law, and the Moody College of Communication, and extend to standing collaborations with units such as Dell Medical School's Global Health Division.

For research and digital scholarship, students and faculty draw on the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection (BLAC), a unit of UT Libraries and the second-largest research collection of its kind in the United States after the Library of Congress. BLAC's physical holdings total over 1.5 million books, periodicals, pamphlets, and microforms, alongside thousands of linear feet of manuscripts, maps, and rare materials that include some of the first books published in the Americas.

Since 2011, a formal LLILAS Benson partnership, jointly led by the directors of LLILAS and BLAC, has integrated these collections directly into LLILAS's academic programs, building a joint research and teaching-driven digital scholarship program. Together, LLILAS and BLAC provide students and faculty with an essential library resource for coursework, thesis research, and dissertation work, reinforcing LLILAS's standing as a hub for both traditional area-studies scholarship and emerging digital humanities methods.

The LLILAS Benson partnership is also the home of AILLA, the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America, a digital archive of recordings and texts in a wide range of genres that includes a wealth of language documentation materials. LLILAS Benson's online magazine, Portal, publishes the work of faculty, students, staff, and invited authors on a wide variety of topics relating to Latin America.

LLILAS is located in Sid Richardson Hall, on the eastern edge of The University of Texas at Austin campus. Additional information is available through the LLILAS website.