XIV SALSA Biennial Conference 2023

Conference Venue

Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Leticia, Amazonas

The main locale of the Conference will be the Amazonia campus of Universidad Nacional de Colombia (UNAL)  in Leticia, a cozy and beautiful campus, with a total area of about 15 hectares.

For the meeting, we will use four classrooms with capacity for 20, two classrooms with capacity for 35, one classroom with capacity for 60, and one maloca (“Casa Hija”) with a long history of hosting more than a hundred dancers, singers, and spectators simultaneously. All these spaces (including the maloca) are equipped with audiovisual equipment and software.

There are ample and comfortable spaces for registration, welcoming reception, coffee break chats, book tables and poster display. The campus design allows for accessibility for persons with limitations in mobility. We can offer childcare in alliance with Colegio Selvalegre, a private school founded in 1999 by a group of biologists, artists and anthropologists.Children can be tended during the day and take part in recreational, cultural, and artistic activities, led by its multilingual and intercultural staff.

The conference will meet all the standards of SALSA Conferences and does not entail any major logistical difficulties or financial drawbacks for participants to attend. We have the capacity to receive well over 200 participants; the city of Leticia and neighboring Tabatinga have plenty of hotels and restaurants, and the Amazonia campus is a beautiful venue surrounded by forest, with the necessary infrastructure for such an event. A comparison of air fares from cities in Europe or the US to major South American destinations such as Lima or Sao Paulo reveals that fares to Leticia are approximately the same, and, in some instances, even lower.

The organization and delivery of this SALSA conference in this Amazonian triple frontier city will contribute to capacity-building among local associations and organizations—many of them indigenous—who will provide food and drinks, conference ‘swag’ (mochila bags and presents for participants), and tourism services in the form of bird observation treks, visits to indigenous museums, maloca visits, and other tours and activities. The location also makes another commitment of ours particularly viable: we will ensure that local indigenous intellectuals, scholars, and students are encouraged and enabled to contribute and to benefit from the conference.