Professor Lillian Gorman is now a triple award winner for her first book Zones of Encuentro: Language and Identities in Northern New Mexico, collecting two early 2026 prizes after a 2025 New Mexico Book Award.
Gorman, Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and Director of the Spanish as a Heritage Language Program, published Zones of Encuentro with the Ohio State University Press Global Latin/o Américas series in October 2024.
In January, Gorman received notification of the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education’s Book Award in the Mid-Career scholar category. In February, the Latinx Studies Section of the Latin American Studies Association announced Gorman as the winner of the Book Award in the Humanities category.
The two new awards follow the October announcement of Gorman receiving the New Mexico Book Award in the Multicultural category and being named a finalist in the categories of First Book and BIPOC Author or Subject.
“I’m honored for the awards and I’m proud for where each of these awards come from,” Gorman said. “They speak to different areas the book is being read and recognized.”
Zones of Encuentro builds on work Gorman began in her dissertation, studying Spanish-speaking and bilingual communities in northern New Mexico, where her family is from.
“There wasn’t a lot of research on northern New Mexico that really teased out the heterogeneity of Latino identity,” she said.
The book is an in-depth look at the cultural and linguistic interactions between two distinct Latina/o/x communities in the region: Nuevomexicanos, families with historic roots in the region, and first-generation Mexicano immigrants. Nuevomexicanos have historically spoken Traditional New Mexican Spanish, while the recent immigrants tend to speak Mexican Spanish.
Gorman examined the everyday lived language experiences and ethnolinguistic identities of Mexicanos and Nuevomexicanos together, specifically through the case of mixed Mexicano-Nuevomexicano families. The book analyzed the language ideologies, identity formations, and language practices in relation to the complex encounters between the Mexicano-Nuevomexicano families.
Gorman says the New Mexico Book Award was the best she could have received because New Mexico is the first place she wanted the book to be recognized.
The American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education was an entirely different audience for the book. “It’s speaking to how these issues of language and identity connect to broader issues of Latinos and higher education. I’m glad the association saw the importance of the book,” Gorman said.
In the Humanities category, the jury for the Latinx Studies Section award wrote that Gorman’s book is “an original and vital contribution to the field.”
“This book makes a timely and conceptually innovative contribution to Latinx Studies by introducing ‘zones of encuentro’ as a framework for understanding intra-Latinx tensions and solidarities,” wrote the jury. “Its interdisciplinary and transparent design—combining interviews, pláticas, and linguistic ethnography, with appendices featuring bilingual guides and supporting tables and figures—provides a rigorous and accessible model for sustaining its central arguments.”
The American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education award will be presented the last weekend of March.
Also, the AAHHE’s Book Award in the Senior Scholar Category will be presented to fellow University of Arizona faculty member Nolan Cabrera, Professor of Educational Policy Studies and Practice, for his book Banned! The Fight For Mexican American Studies in the Streets and the Courts, written with Robert S. Chang, Professor of Law and Sylvia Mendez Presidential Chair for Civil Rights at UC Irvine.