The UCLA Department of Spanish and Portuguese is sad to announce the passing of Emeritus Professor Carlos Peregrín Otero. Professor Otero was born in Lourenzá (Galicia) Spain on May 18, 1930 and died on April 25, 2024 in Seattle, Washington. He was a world-renowned linguist, literary scholar, and political activist. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California Berkeley in 1960 with a dissertation titled La poesía de Luis Cernuda. Professor Otero taught for many years in our Department, and was instrumental in the development of Spanish, Portuguese and Romance linguistics studies at UCLA and world-wide. Otero was an influential generative grammarian, and his extensive list of contributions includes the well-known eight-volume edited collection Noam Chomsky: Critical Assessments, which is widely recognized as the most complete evaluation of the multiple aspects of Chomsky’s writings. Carlos Otero’s death represents an enormous loss for his colleagues in the Department, for the UCLA community, and for Linguistics.
