This special issue of the Community College Humanities Review contains articles generated by National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institutes, held over several years. The institutes provided opportunities for academics from a variety of humanities disciplines and types of institutions to interact over an extended period of common study of topics associated with the encounters of European and indigenous cultures in the New World. The papers included are: (1) "Gender Relations and Political Legitimacy: Replacing Patrilineal with Ancestral Inheritance of Power in Ancient Mayan Society" (Lowell S. Gustafson); (2) "The Making of the Face and Heart: Notes on an Aztec Metaphor" (Paul Aviles); (3) "Image as Text in Post-Contact Mexican Books and Artifacts of Indigenous Origin" (George L. Scheper); (4) "Constructing Nature and Ordering Space/Spain and Mexico" (Mary Ruth Donnelly); (5) "Kiva in the Cloister" (Felix Heap); (6) "La Llorana: the Weeping Woman" (RoseAnna Mueller); (7) "The Liminal Space of Desire in the New Poetry of Alma Luz Villanueva" (Cesar A. Gonzalez-T.); (8) "Writing Shalako: The Anthropologist as Tourist, from Cushing to the Tedlocks" (Ron Denson); and (9)"Seriously Funny Native American Authors" Jacqulyn Kilpatrick. (NB)