Even during Argentina’s 2002 economic crisis, one sector of Argentine society that showed real resilience was the arts. After Tucumán native Tomás Eloy Martínez, a professor of Spanish at Rutgers, won the Spanish Alfaguara literary prize for El Vuelo de la Reina, a novel about crime and corruption, he remarked that “One of Argentina’s riches is forgotten, but it is the quality, the leadership of our culture. [In that field] we can speak as equals to the U.S. or France.”