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Hildegardo Córdova Aguilar

The 1999 Enlaces Award

The Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers is pleased to make the first Enlaces Honors Award to Professor Hildegardo Córdova Aguilar of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. The Enlaces ("connections") Award is given periodically to a geographer from Latin America in recognition of contributions toward improving relationships between geographers throughout the Americas.

Hildegardo was born in 1946 in the small, isolated, western Andean town of Frías in Piura. He has progressed from that beginning to become the most prominent geographer in Peru, and possibly in all of South America. He received the Bachiller degree in 1969 from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima. With a very competitive grant from the Latin American Scholarship program for American Universities, Hildegardo went to the University of Texas, where he completed a Master's Thesis in geography with Donald Brand in 1969 on "The Agriculture of the Andean Countries of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru." Later, he continued graduate study at the University of Wisconsin, where he earned a Ph.D. in 1982 with a dissertation on the negative economic impact of a road from the coast to Frías. This was the first Ph.D. in geography ever awarded a Peruvian.

Hildegardo has published numerous monographs and articles on a wide variety of topics, including subsistence agriculture and agricultural development; soils and transportation in relation to development; rural to urban migration; the cities of Lima, Piura, Callao, and Catamarca; the ecology and economy of goats; conservation and quality of life; river basin management; Geographic Information Systems; ecosystem deterioration and restoration; centralism versus regionalism; spatial patterns and perception; geographical methodology and concepts, and the development of geography in Peru.

Much of this work is based on original field research in Peru, and Hildegardo has been instrumental in introducing North American and European ideas, concepts, and techniques to Peruvian geography. Hoping to contribute to Peru's many needs, he has focused on applied geography. He has been instrumental in developing an applied geography program at Universidad Católica and in making geography a professional degree program in Peru. He founded and directs the Peruvian geographical journal Espacio y Desarrollo and he edits the Revista Geográica of the Pan American Institute of Geography and History (PAIGH), our primary international journal of Latin American geography.

Hildegardo's stature was recognized in 1999 by a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship to study the development [end p. 169] of medium-sized cities in Peru. He is only the fourth geographer from Latin America to receive a Guggenheim in the 75 years of such awards. The others are Levi Marrero (Cuba), Ernesto Guhl (Colombia), and Alfredo Clemente Bolsi (Argentina). Hildegardo was also honored with a postdoctoral Fulbright Scholarship to the University of Vermont.

Hildegardo has contributed in many ways to improving relationships between geographers in the Americas. He has done this by frequent participation in CLAG, AAG, and international conferences; by reporting on North American geography in Espacio y Desarrollo and in other Latin American media; by organizing international geography congresses in Lima and the CLAG meeting in Arequipa in 1997; by participation with his students and colleagues with foreign geographers in international research projects; by his visits to geography programs throughout the Americas, as well as in Europe; through his administrative roles in the Sociedad Geográfica de Lima, PAIGH, and CLAG; and by his continuing personal interaction and communication with both Latin and North American geographers.

For these reasons, Hildegardo Córdova clearly merits the Enlaces Award. It is with great pride that I present this award from CLAG to my former student.

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William M. Denevan