Entering any variant of TeX mode runs the hooks
text-mode-hook and tex-mode-hook. Then it runs either
plain-tex-mode-hook, latex-mode-hook, or
slitex-mode-hook, whichever is appropriate. Starting the
TeX shell runs the hook tex-shell-hook. See Hooks.
The commands M-x iso-iso2tex, M-x iso-tex2iso, M-x iso-iso2gtex and M-x iso-gtex2iso can be used to convert between Latin-1 encoded files and TeX-encoded equivalents.
For managing all kinds of references for LaTeX, you can use RefTeX. see Top.