Association for Spanish and Portuguese Mormon Studies

The inaugural meeting of the Association of Spanish and Portuguese Mormon Studies was held May 24th, 2007, in Salt Lake City, Utah, during the annual conference of the Mormon History Association. Fourteen people participated in person or via teleconference.

The following are the draft minutes of the meeting. Any suggested additions or corrections may be sent to Stirling Adams at sadams@byu.edu.

Resolutions

1. Association Membership. Interested persons may join the Association by entering their email address at the www.aspms.org. Persons without internet access can join by providing contact information to the Association secretary/director. In the absence of a formal secretary at this time, Stirling offers to collect member’s contact info and create a mailing list.

2. Association Meetings. The Association will hold regular membership meetings to discuss tactics for achieving the Association’s objectives. The Association will determine how to best facilitate participation by members located in Latin America. Meetings could be held in Latin America occasionally, and in a meeting, wherever located, the Association can make use of web-conference, teleconference, and web-chat capabilities.
In order to take advantage of people who may be traveling from Latin America to the next LDS General Conference, the next meeting is tentatively scheduled to occur in Salt Lake City on the Thursday prior to the next General Conference. This depends on someone (probably located in Utah) to organize the meeting. No person was identified as the meeting organizer.

3. www.aspms.org. The Association will use a multilingual www.aspms.org to regularly distribute news, articles, or other information relevant to Spanish and Portuguese Mormon studies. The web site is set up so that information can be posted in Spanish, Portuguese, and English (to change the site language, click on the desired language link).
To establish the web site in people’s minds as a continuing source for information, the Association has an objective of posting content (a review of book or article, a news item, an article, etc.) at least once a month.

The Association will also evaluate whether a multilanguage wiki site would be helpful as a location that members (or others) could use as a public database for sharing information. The wiki site is wikimormon.org/es/ (Spanish version), wikimormon.org/pt (Portuguese version), and wikimormon.org/en (English version).

4. Volunteers for preparing web site content. Several people agreed to contribute regularly (once every few months?) by preparing a communication to the www.aspms.org site.
Other Association members are also invited to participate. It would be best if someone organizes the site’s communications by establishing a schedule that can be followed by the various people who will participte.

5. Awards. As a means of encouraging contributions to Spanish and Portuguese Mormon studies, the association would plan to offer the following awards during the next year:
• A cash award for a translation of an important work of Mormon studies to or from Spanish or Portuguese.
• A cash award for contributing and important work of Spanish and Portuguese Mormon studies during the year.
• The association would also consider creating non-cash awards to recognize other contributions to Spanish and Portuguese Mormon studies.
The first year’s cash awards are funded by an anonymous donor and are anticipated to be at least $300 each.

6. Objectives. The association’s objectives are to:
• Encourage contributions by Spanish and Portuguese speakers to Mormon Studies–in part by providing forums where such works can be easily reviewed or published.
• Encourage scholars to examine Mormonism among Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries and individuals.
• Encourage translations into Spanish and Portuguese of significant works of Mormon Studies currently available only in English.
• Create a sense of community among interested scholars and among Span./Port. speaking Mormons that transcends geography (where an Argentine has a place to learn from his Mexican sisters and both can share their experience with someone in the U.S.).
• Identify existing Spanish/Portuguese Mormon studies (history, sociology/ anthropology, theology, etc.), and improve the ability to share these with Spanish & Portuguese speakers.

7. Association-sponsored Conference. The Association has an objective of sponsoring a conference where participants would present original works in Spanish and Portuguese Mormon studies. Also, the Association will consider whether it can co-sponsor panels at existing conference such as the Mormon History Association conference.
Dave Knowlton suggested that an Association conference could be held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Latin American Association for the Study of Religion (“ALER”). David has previously put together a panel on Mormonism for the 2006 ALER meetings in Sao Paulo. The 2008 ALER conference will be in Bogota in the late summer. Association members should consider this meeting, and the following 2009 meeting to be held [place not yet determined].
Dave suggested that one or two panels of presentations would be useful, and that it would be important to convince other Association members and other persons interested in Mormon studies (such as church employees in the research department that focus on Latin America). This would help ALER participants to value addressing Mormons Studies during the conference.
Arturo de Hoyos volunteered to identify low-cost meeting places and housing if a conference were to be help in Mexico.

8. Administrative officers and a student director. No officers were elected (perhaps because time for the meeting was running out by the time this issue was raised). That will be something to consider for the next meeting or, if needed, earlier via email.
Mark Grover agreed to explore obtaining a student intern who could possibly act as the Association’s director, coordinating (and writing) the periodic communications, sending invitations, organizing a meeting, etc.

9. No dues or fund raising now. There was very cordial disagreement during the meeting over whether there was a need to raise funds through voluntary dues (or otherwise) to cover administrative costs or other expenses. To minimize the time required for administrative tasks during the first year of the Association, no membership dues were assessed, and members are encouraged, where feasible, to use their own resources in order to accomplish association objectives (in making phone calls, creating a web site, etc.).
During the first year, Stirling volunteered to fund any extraordinary costs the association agreed to incur to achieve specific objectives. After a year the association will reevaluate the need for raising funds.
Thanks to Kent Larsen for creating and hosting the multilanguage blog site (www.aspms.org), and to Stirling Adams for creating and hosting the multilanguage wiki site (wikimormon.org/).