This September, the Northeast Popular/American Culture Association announced that Diversión had won the Peter C. Rollins Book Prize for 2018.
Also this month, the Canadian Association for American Studies named Diversión the winner of the 2017 Robert K. Martin Prize for Best Book in the field. The prize citation reads:
Our Prize Committee was very impressed by your fascinating, lively, and wide-reaching study of the cultural effect of ludic sociability in the Cuban American community. Committee members valued the breadth of your archive; moreover, they appreciated how your conceptualization of diversión offers a new way of understanding the importance of humor in working through ideas of exile, diaspora, whiteness, class, and identity. In the words of one reader, “Laguna’s exploration of Cuban comedy conveys the specificity and richness of its subject at the same time as it theorizes humor more broadly, in relation to nostalgia[,] pleasure… and performance. In other words, Laguna’s reader is rewarded with a laser-sharp focus upon a significant topic and a model of reading humor across an archive of objects and media.”
Congratulations, Prof. Laguna! We are so grateful for your contributions.