Latin American History Graduate Student Conference
Overt and Discreet Violence: Ruptures and
Continuities in Latin America and the Caribbean
Columbia University
March 5 & 6, 2010
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
“São Paulo Cause and its Martyrs: the Constitutionalist Revolution of 1932, Mourning, and Regionalism (1932-1957)”
The Constitutionalist Revolution of 1932 in Brazil became a disputed subject in national memory. It erupted as a reaction of the liberal elite of São Paulo and other regions against the centralization process and authoritarian drive of the Provisory Government in power since 1930. At the very beginning, the political struggle emerged as demonstrations and meetings organized by the constitutionalists and their political opponents, the São Paulo Revolutionary League, in the city of São Paulo and the interior of the State. Despite the Provisory Government attempt to control political opposition by calling elections for a Constitutional Assembly in 1933, the political struggle transformed into a civil war on the 9th of July. Throughout the civil war, the elite form São Paulo was able to mobilize 60.000 volunteers organized in patriotic battalions and as backup. This mobilization was regarded as an expression of regional unit and political commitment to Brazilian democracy while the Provisory Government saw the constitutionalist movement as counter-revolutionary and a path to sectionalism. The civil war lasted for three months leaving more than 600 dead and countless injured. São Paulo and its allies were defeated and surrendered opening a political moment when mourning and regional pride were stressed to secure political bonds. This paper aims to analyze the civic rituals organized by volunteers and the State in order to perpetuate the memory of the Constitutionalist Revolution as the commitment of São Paulo to democracy and regional autonomy. These rituals have taken place every 9th of July in cemeteries and around public monuments dedicated to the dead since 1932. Between 1932 and 1957, the civic rituals recreated political bonds in accordance with the particular image of history that emphasizes the hegemony of São Paulo in Brazil.
Columbia University
“The ‘Greenwashing’ of Oil Palm: Biofuels, Violence, and Land Displacement in Colombia”
This paper links the recent rise of violence and land displacement throughout Colombia with the state-supported cultivation of a particular biofuel, African Palm Oil. Supported since the early 2000s by state policies that encourage and provide incentives for the production of palm oil, illegal paramilitary organizations have terrorized and displaced predominantly Afro-Colombian and indigenous populations in their quest for territorial control and financial investment. Based upon news reports, official documents, human rights reports, and published interviews with Colombian and international activists, this paper argues that an examination of biofuels is useful for understanding the way in which they conveniently provide a solution for a variety of US foreign policy goals in the region, such as the War on Drugs, energy independence, and the War on Terrorism. Moreover, the drive for biofuels in Colombia is just one part of the new “Green Revolution” in Latin America, which seeks investment in renewable and alternative forms of energy, and is part of a larger humanitarian “green” mission tied to growing awareness of climate change. In this paper, I will also examine how diverse social movements in Colombia use the term “greenwashing” to counter the image of environmentally and socially sustainable biofuel production.
University of Delaware
“Black Fenianism: Afro-Caribbean Interest in Violence in Ireland 1916-1923”
In post World War One Harlem, Afro-Caribbean immigrants, somewhat surprised by the intolerance they faced in the U.S, began to take an interest in politics and in overcoming the prejudice faced by black Americans. Meanwhile Irish nationalists, seeking to raise money and support for the independence movement in Ireland, spread their propaganda around the streets of New York. Many black activists who were born in the Caribbean, such as Marcus Garvey, Cyril Briggs and Claude McKay, became very interested in the Irish War of Independence. Some, like Garvey, applauded the willingness of the Irish to confront the British government in a military campaign, viewing it as a template which black people could follow in overthrowing British colonial rule in the Caribbean and Africa. Others, such as Cyril Briggs, saw the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a secret society sworn to armed resistance against Britain, as an ideal model for those who wished to defend black interests in the United States. Afro-Caribbean writers were also fascinated by the willingness of the Irish to endure violence, or even to inflict it upon themselves, for the advancement of their cause. This paper will explore the extent to which Afro-Caribbean immigrants living in the United States believed Irish nationalists were justified in using violence to achieve independence. It will also ask how willing these writers and activists were to copy the example of Irish nationalists and use violence to advance their own particular causes. It will ask why Afro-Caribbean commentators were interested in Ireland in particular, and whether the fact that they, like the Irish, were subjects of the British crown played a role in this interest. Finally the paper will examine how these commentators were also interested in non-violent tactics adopted by Irish nationalists and whether they saw these methods as effective alternatives to violence in light of their own campaigns.
Northwestern University
“Idealizing Mexico in Times of Emotional Crisis: The Home-place as a Coping Mechanism for Mexican Immigrants in Chicago”
Mexican immigrants in Chicago often resort to an idealized memory of their "home back in Mexico" when being confronted with an emotional crisis. In particular, immigrants use these "memories of home" as a mechanism to cope with traumatic and stressful events associated with life in the U.S. This paper analyzes how this coping mechanism demarcates two culturally distinct emotional landscapes--one before and one after migration. Furthermore, I argue that these coping mechanisms are particularly important among undocumented immigrants. Studying how idealized memories of home become a coping mechanism for immigrants helps scholars understand first, the situational specificity of trauma-coping tactics for this population and second, the emotional violence of migration as it relates to acculturation and adaptability.
This paper is based on ongoing ethnographic research about stress, trauma, and acculturation among Mexican immigrants in Chicago. For this paper I will focus on ten two-hour interviews I conducted over the summer of 2009. The interviews included a structured component to obtain reports on self-perceived discrimination, symptoms of depression, the presence of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), relative socioeconomic status, and demographic information. In addition, participants were prompted to share personal narratives around the issues discussed. Preliminary results indicate correspondence between the kinds of stress and how a utopic home image is constructed. For example, one interlocutor stated that he plans to go back to Mexico because he feels he has more emotional depth and freedom there. This man also stated that he feels alienated from his U.S.-born children and imagined his hometown in Mexico as a place where his brother can walk his daughter by the hand to school. Through ethnographic examples, this papers explores the complexities and implications of these narratives as they relate to stress, trauma, and emotional violence.
Yale University
“Shaving Heads and Preserving the Nation: Building Consensus through Police Violence in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico”
In the summer of 1969, police in the Mexican town of San Miguel de Allende began shaving the heads of long-haired males, foreign and Mexican alike. Although foreign victims of this campaign attempted to use diplomatic channels to rally support against these police officers, they found that the incident – which was emblematic of the increasingly repressive tactics of the Mexican government – became a source of local pride. Not only did the episode become fodder for local humorists, it also inspired numerous foreigners to send letters praising San Miguel’s officials for their strict policies against long-haired youth and expressing frustration with their own governments for not doing the same. This paper explores the growing preoccupation with the potentially negative effects of the foreign presence on San Miguel’s youth, and by extension, the future of the Mexican nation. By 1969, as the head-shaving incident demonstrates, government officials across Mexico turned to the containment of foreign bodies in an attempt to preserve the future of the nation. They believed that traditional Mexican values – an amorphous set of principles that ultimately can be understood as patriarchal order and authority – were under assault. Scapegoating foreigners for Mexico’s problems, however, was not a viable long-term solution. In San Miguel, where the economy increasingly relied on foreign residents and tourists, local Mexican elites had to develop a more nuanced relationship with foreigners. Through public spectacles like head-shavings, they simultaneously allowed Mexicans to vent their frustrations with the inundation of foreigners in San Miguel, reinforced patriarchal notions about appropriate gender roles, established a hierarchy between desirable and undesirable foreign influences, and protected their economic interests.
Notre Dame University
“Pedro Vique y Manrique: Empire, Punishment, and the Sea in the Spanish Dependencies, 1570-1600”
When Francis Drake and his men captured Cartagena de Indias in 1586, they disrupted the flow of gold between the Spanish colonies and the metropole and terrorized the inhabitants of the town. For the English, it formed part of the great mythos surrounding Francis Drake; for the Spanish Crown, this event was a great embarrassment and a fiscal calamity. These are established parts of the colonial narrative, but far from the full story.
Pedro Vique y Manrique, the Captain of the galley fleet charged with protecting the coasts of Tierra Firme, suffered the royal ire and was brought to trial following the sacking of Cartagena. His job was not a glamorous one; the galleys were the purgatory of the Spanish world, inhabited by some of its roughest elements. Alongside Old Christian Spanish convicts were numerous racial minorities (Moors and Gypsies!) of the Spanish peninsula and slaves from Africa, all condemned to row away their sins at the oar. A few sailors steered the ship and a handful of soldiers kept order and provided firepower should the galleys ever engage Protestant pirates in battle.
As the proceedings of the trial unfolded, it became clear that Vique’s management of sailors, soldiers, slaves, and convicts, even prior to the Drakian debacle, had left much to be desired. Had he really let soldiers terrorize the coastal villages and convicts run free? The process of Vique’s trial demonstrated the distinct manners in which agents and subjects of the state experienced violence in relationship to royal power. The glimpse into colonial life afforded to us by this criminal trial offer a valuable insight into how a variety of constituents of the Iberian Atlantic expected the state to regulate, mediate, and punish transgression.
“Violence on the Derrick Floor: Social Control, Labor Culture and Land Displacement in the Oil Fields of Veracruz, Mexico”
During the 1910s and 1920s, the Mexican government put in place a series of policies that favored foreign investment for the exploitation of oil in the northeast of Mexico. These policies allowed American, British and Dutch companies to acquire large territories in northern Veracruz to extract and refine petroleum. In some instances, these acquisitions took place through agreements among local officials, company representatives and old inhabitants. Other times, however, the companies made use of coercive tactics to force owners to sell or lease against their will.
This paper explores the ways in which the official policies put in place by the Mexican government resulted in a violent interaction between oil companies and Veracruzan people. Through primary source material, I will explore the different tactics that foreign companies employed to acquire Mexican lands and how local landowners and peasants resisted those strategies.
State University of New York at Stony Brook
“What Comes After Violence: Violence, the Politics of Memory , and the Construction of Two New Museums in Latin America”
Focusing on the construction of two new Latin American museums, the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile, and the Museum of Memory in Lima, Peru, this presentation seeks to analyze how the debates around these two emerging spaces of official commemoration address the idea of violence, its political and cultural meanings, and its place within legitimized regimes. In a first stage I will present the case of the soon-to-be-opened Chilean museum: mounted to commemorate the victims of the state repression during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) this initiative seems to represent the final attempt to install a negotiated and convenient truth in which the problem of state violence is subsumed under the idea of socially shared responsibilities. The second case study will be the recently submitted Peruvian project, conceived to remember those who died and suffered during the conflict among Shining Path, the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, and the government (1980-2000); following the acrimonious debate kindled by the news, this section will try to identify the multiple representations and definitions of violence brought into play by the actors involved in the public discussion. By means of interviews, newspaper articles, official documents, and individual and collective blogs, and taking into account both social representations and individual memories, this presentation (a sort of real-time report of an ongoing process) will analyze how the discourses on violence can veil and unveil the always complex relationship between history and politics in the midst of these efforts to monumentalize official truths.
University of Wisconsin -Madison
“Contentious Memories: The Battle over ‘Los Penales’ (1986) in Peru”
The civil conflict that plagued Peru in the late twentieth century (1980-2000) represents a marked anomaly among its geographical neighbors. Unlike elsewhere in Latin America where state-sponsored violence typically dwarfed abuses committed by left-wing guerrilla groups, the revolutionary insurgent forces in Peru, known as the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso), were responsible for over half the body count. Atrocities committed by Sendero and by the State rivaled one another in a seemingly endless spiral. The anomaly of Sendero’s blood-drenched tactics placed Peru’s legal and non-Senderista Left in a unique and precarious position, despite the Left’s relative strength in the early to mid 1980s. The proposed paper dissects one key human rights case that took place at the zenith of the legal Left’s electoral power: the June 1986 prison massacres in El Frontón and Lurigancho, commonly referred to as “los penales”. After Shining Path prisoners simultaneously rioted in an attempt to publicly embarrass the new APRA (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana/American Popular Revolutionary Alliance) government led by a young Alan García, the García government opted to send multiple branches of the military to quell the prisoners, leading to one of the most massive human rights massacres of the entire war that left over two hundred prisoners dead. This massacre brought the war, formerly relegated to the marginalized highlands, home to coastal Lima, the center of power; created an irreparable fissure between the populist APRA party and the United Left; and fed growing strains within the Left’s own coalition. The legal Left’s reaction and memories surrounding this case highlight its complex internal divisions grounded in ideology and personalistic power politics, which were profoundly exacerbated by the political violence of the 1980s.
Anthropology The New School for Social Research
“The Gendering of Violence: Women as the preferred site of intervention in contemporary Guatemala”
Since the end of Guatemala’s thirty-six year long civil war, the United Nations and international NGOs such as Amnesty International have noted an alarming increase of violence against women, including but limited to rape, murder (termed “femicide”), and domestic violence. What becomes apparent in reading these reports is not only a sense of the proliferation of violence, but also of a shift in the ways in which global norms of the right to freedom from harm for women are theorized specifically as women’s rights as human rights. Meaning, attention to violence against women as a gendered problem is gaining international traction, often in connection with diagnosing failed states or the need for military intervention, with the US involvement in Afghanistan serving as the strongest example.
Rape and other forms of violence against women in Guatemala have come to be represented by international NGOs in terms of epidemic pathology: proliferating, life-threatening, and without history. Such language sits in tension with the acknowledgement of conditions of the post-war environment, but attempts made to link them often demonstrate a very simplistic causality, through the continuity of “cultural” attitudes (such as “machismo”) or practices learned by Guatemalan men in continual warfare, for example. These explanations negate the historical particularities of the country in which interventions are made. This paper seeks to address the ways in which the representation of certain forms of violence as categorically about women plays out within the context of post-conflict Guatemala. I also argue that, in the Guatemalan case, humanitarian and human rights intervention cannot be understood in this context without looking to histories of US imperialism in the region and the interests of security and development.
Gabriela Gonzalez
Sociology State University of New York at Stony Brook
"Treatment of the ‘subversive’ in the context of authoritarian regimes in Latin America: an analysis of symbolic and physical power and violence”
This article examines the complex process of social classification and labeling as it operates both through discourse and through practices. Particularly, it focuses on the genesis and evolution of the words “subversive” and “seditious” to classify certain sectors of society and justify their persecution in the context of the military dictatorships of three Latin American countries (Chile, Argentina and Uruguay). A “culture of fear” impregnated deep into the social tissue of the countries of the region as a consequence of many years of violation and subjugation of the most basic human rights on the part of the authoritarian regimes. By drawing on rich empirical data, this paper seeks to understand the manifold relations of power which shape the social body, and their embedment in a specific system of truth. It analyses both mechanisms of symbolic and physical violence during this period. The first section of the paper focuses primarily on recovering the official voice expressed in propaganda and military speeches and the mechanisms by which the idea of “the subversive” emerged and progressively gained power to include vaster sectors of the population. The second section of the paper deepens further into the mechanism under study by reconstructing the counter-narratives of individuals that were persecuted, imprisoned or exiled. These voices are recovered by the usage of primary sources of information collected during the year 2008. This section also focuses on discipline and punishment within the penitentiary system, and the strategies of adaptation and resistance that were deployed by its victims.
Georgetown University
“Christian Hebrews and Chinese Indians? Racial Categorization and the Chinese and Crypto-Jewish Trade Diasporas in the Spanish Empire” [working title]
During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, two “foreign” trade networks, the Portuguese crypto-Jewish and Fujian Chinese diasporas, operated in the Spanish Empire with varying degrees of acceptance. Although each group primarily settled in and traded on opposite sides of the Spanish New World—the Fujianese in Manila and the crypto-Jews increasingly in New Spain—they operated within the same viceroyalty, and were subject to many of the same policies, laws, and attitudes. While tolerated as necessary for trade, both groups, for different reasons, fell outside the theoretical triple-echelon society of New Spain divided by race and united by common religion. Without the protections given to their Spanish counterparts, they experienced repeated periods of violence when authorities considered their presence a threat to the empire in terms of geopolitics and trade. Due to their precarious legal status, the trade diasporas developed similar internal organizations and practices to gain wealth and minimize vulnerability. Therefore, this essay compares the trading roles, settlement patterns, and religious standing of crypto-Jews and the Fujian Chinese to understand how the governing and religious authorities utilized the casta system to marginalize the diasporic networks, as individuals and as a whole, in times of perceived threat. Despite these disadvantages, both groups became prosperous by trading silks, textiles and luxury items for silver, operating in the interstice created by contradictory economic and religious policies. Living in this liminal space, however, made it difficult to gain both economic and ecclesiastical toleration. In short, this paper endeavors to show how viceregal policy in New Spain and her “colony”, the Philippines, helped mold and perpetuate both diaspora groups, and thus facilitated and legitimated Spaniards’ actions against them when they were considered a political, economic, or religious menace.
“Mexican State formation and the Diaspora: The Case of Pachucos in Mexico City”
Pachucos were Mexican-American youth living in the southwest United States and along the border. They wore zoot suits and spoke caló, a hybrid of English and Spanish. After the Los Angeles Zoot Suit Riots of June 1943, a heated debate over pachucos took place in the Mexico City press. Two prevailing views of pachucos emerged: on the one hand, critics depicted pachucos as non-Mexican and criminal; on the other hand, supporters embraced pachucos as true descendents of Mexicans, victims of US racism, and worthy of support from the Mexican government. Five months after the riots, Germán Valdés a young comedian from Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, took the stage as Tin Tan, a young pachuco. It was not long before Tin Tan’s public persona took off, as Valdés performed in character on the radio, in high-profile clubs, and in countless films. But not all Mexicans celebrated his language or stylish zoot suit. José Vasconcelos, a key figure in the promotion of Mexican mestizaje, as well as film critics, citizens, and intellectuals demanded that Tin Tan be censored. This paper explores the use of criminality to label and make pachucos familiar to Mexican audiences. Moreover, it conceptualizes the exclusion of pachucos from Mexicaness as a form of violence.
New School for Social Research
“Caudillos, Bandidos, and Guerrilleros: Tropes of nomadic violence and state-formation in Latin America”
This paper attempts to draw on the theme of banditry as a trope; that is, as a figurative form of speech that flags the state’s efforts to “make sense” out of illegible forms of decentered violence, vaguely located in the margins of the nation and only discovered through their more palpable expressions of defiance to the liberal rule of law. The paper treats “the bandit” as the pillar for a triad of limit-concepts – bandit / caudillo / guerrillero – which together convey the image of a "constitutive outside" for the emergence/consolidation/transformation of national polities.
First, I refer to Hobsbawm’s notion of the “social bandit” as the opening act for contemporary investigations and debates on banditry. Then, I draw on non-conventional perspectives on the topic, namely those of Latin American literary criticism and Deleuze and Guattari’s treatment of the “nomadic war machine”, to tackle the trajectories of "the bandit" as the suppressed and violent origin of the nation. Next, I tackle different instances where the trope of banditry meets both the historical caudillo and contemporary guerrilla fighter, highlighting the dynamic implications of these encounters. Following and partly contesting Carl Schmitt's intuitions on "the political", what I attempt to explore is the inextricable political aspects of the links between a transhistorical trope of banditry with both the characterization of the 19th century caudillo – and its social constituency – and that of the guerrillero as the postwar revolutionary partisan.
Latin American Studies University of California Los Angeles
“The Violence of Displacement: Rural Migrants and Visiones in Cali, Colombia”
What happens to a person’s beliefs when they are displaced from the countryside and forced to move to a big city? I attempt to answer this question in the context of the massive displacement of people that has been occurring in Colombia for many years, with particular attention to the last twenty years (approximately 3 million people and counting). I use oral histories and secondary sources to analyze the outcomes of these migrations in the city of Santiago de Cali, a major recipient of the displaced population of Colombia.
“Beliefs” specifically refer to myths/legends known as visiones. These are the supernatural visions that are common throughout Colombia, but are especially prevalent in areas less densely populated such as the countryside. “Displacement” can be forced, economic, due to natural disaster, or for general concerns of safety. The vast majority of participants I interviewed were forced (by threats or actual violence) from their homes and I have documented their stories. The “countryside” refers to the small towns and villages where most displaced people hail from. They have left behind property and a subsistence lifestyle for a drastically different set of circumstances in the city. Most of the participants in my research are from the Southwestern corner of Colombia (the departamentos of Putumayo, Nariño, Cauca, and Valle del Cauca).
The “city,” Santiago de Cali, has a population of 2.5 million inhabitants and it is estimated that 1/3 of the city’s inhabitants reside in Distrito Aguablanca, a marginalized district where a large population of displaced people is rapidly growing. This study has two intentions: 1) to draw attention to the plight of displaced people in Colombia and the reasons behind their displacement and 2) to explore how globalization, technological advances in communication, and multiple types of violence have transformed perceptions of the supernatural.
Department of Anthropology City University of New York
“Frontier violence and indigenous survival: Knowledge and strategies on Colombia's Llanos frontier”
In the 1960's and 1970's, renewed colonization of the Llanos region of Colombia brought escalated violence to the closely related Guahibo and Cuiva peoples. This violence was exposed by two episodes of dramatic that became internationally known. The first was the December 1967 massacre of sixteen Cuivas at La Rubiera Ranch near the Venezuelan border. The perpetrators’ forthright admission of a horrifying ambush, and their professed ignorance of both the evil and the criminality of their actions provoked widespread shock and exposed the violence of racism. In 1970, the military cracked down on a brief armed rebellion by members of a Guahibo agricultural cooperative in Planas. A national controversy emerged over charges of extrajudicial killings, torture, and corrupt use of power by the VII Brigade of the Colombian Army. All these events took place on a resource frontier affected by cattle and oil interests, the Colombian military, and U.S. counterinsurgency trainers. They occurred under the watch of American missionaries, local clergy, and national politics, and precipitated controversies in the profession of anthropology as well as the Inter-American Court on Human Rights.
On the basis of archival research, this paper traces the events involved, with an emphasis on the forms of knowledge which make frontier violence possible, and on the survival strategies pursued by indigenous peoples. It considers the schemes of categorization by which those strategies are interpreted by anthropologists, missionaries, government officials, and settlers. Finally, it explores the grim interplay of this knowledge with state power and the intercommunal violence that was expressed in this region through the literal hunting of Indians. In particular, this period marks the beginning of a long effort to dismantle discourses that either naturalized massacres of Indians or placed them on a path towards inevitable assimilation within the dominant society.
Yale University
“Institutionalizing the Republic: Law Enforcement Reforms in Rio de Janeiro, 19071930”
This presentation will analyze police reforms in Rio de Janeiro during the Old Republic, 1889-1930. It focuses on the creation of the Civil Guard in 1902 as a vital instrument in the nation-building project to modernize Brazil and to cater to the commercial needs of the agro-export sector of the economy. This nation-building objective targeted Rio de Janeiro, then the Federal Capital, as the threshold of Brazilian civilization and modernized its port for foreign commerce. The city shed its colonial remnants as architects and statesmen opened new avenues, destroyed tenements, and sanitized its streets to eliminate at once recurring epidemics of yellow fever and smallpox among other infectious disease that plagued the population. Reforming Rio de Janeiro’s police became an integral aspect of modernizing the Federal Capital. Analyzing police reforms in Rio de Janeiro at this historical juncture offers an instance to examine when the state seeks a “monopoly on violence” and an opportunity to discuss violence in a broader context of maintaining social order that looks for continuity and “unremarked violence in everyday life” rather than violence as social eruptions. The Civil Guard emerged during the urbanization of the Federal District as an effort by the national government to maintain a direct line of control into the everyday behavior and sociability of the population. It was also created to resolve conflicts of authority of enforcing the law between the two branches of the city’s police: the Civil and Military Police. Those conflicts however persisted and played an important role in determining law enforcement on the streets.
Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs Princeton University
“A Short Account of the Legacy of de las Casas: Contemporary Perspectives on Violence Against Indigenous Peoples”
The 16th century Dominican bishop Fray Bartolomé de las Casas documented the brutal violence the Spanish committed against Taino and Carib people in his book, “A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies.” His written denunciations and high-profile debates with Juan Gines de Sepulveda prompted reforms in Spanish colonial system and helped pioneer international human rights law. Indigenous protestors were killed in conflicts with government officials in Pando, Bolivia in 2008 and Bagua, Peru in 2009. The reactions to these and other recent incidents of violence against indigenous peoples bears a striking resemblance to the perspective of de las Casas in their shared emphasis on external perpetrators, international audiences, ethnic categorization, explicit accounts of violence, economic motivations, and moral argumentation.
State violence against indigenous peoples continued through independence and to the present day, but how these abuses are framed has evolved significantly. Following independence, violence was often viewed through the lenses of civil war, revolution, internal political repression, class struggle, and others, depending on the context and historical era. Overtly and subtly, however, the prevailing vision of systematic violence have come full circle, returning to the methods and historical narrative of de las Casas.
This paper has three parts: First, it analyzes the frameworks for viewing systematic violence against indigenous groups in Latin America from the colonial era, using historical documents, contemporary accounts, media reports, and other sources. Second, it draws the comparison between current perspectives and that of de las Casas, outlining factors that precipitated the change: including the end of the Cold War, increased United States economic involvement, information technology, as well as the electoral success of indigenous presidents and political movements. Third, it explores whether this comparison is justified and its implications for indigenous politics, human rights advocates, US policy, and other regional actors.
Brandeis University
“Re-Writing the State: Negotiating Power and Violence in the Tri-Border Region”
“They didn’t catch you today, señora?” one woman asks another in the street of a barrio one chilly winter morning. The first one is an established journalist, living in the Argentine town of Puerto Iguazú, bordering Brazil and Paraguay; the second is a Paraguayan peasant, who illegally crosses the Paraná River to sell cheaper fruits and vegetables on the Argentine side. Neither of them thinks petty food smuggling is contraband. In the impoverished border area the definitions of ‘crime’ are intertwined with a long history of peripherality, frontier wars and state violence, which in the eyes of the local communities justify the means of everyday survival, even when they are against the law.
This paper aims at examining how journalists, working in Puerto Iguazú, experience and articulate border violence. In the national and international media the region, known as Triple Frontera (Triple Frontier), has been portrayed as a frontera caliente (hot border): a haven for drug-smuggling and human-trafficking, inhabited by legally ambiguous residents, balancing on the unstable boundary between the formal and the illicit economies. However, local journalists, engaged in some casual illegal activities themselves, yet often experiencing threats of physical violence for publishing stories about widespread government corruption and massive trafficking, deny the characterization of the area as “evil”. Why do they -being both everyday actors and cultural producers -challenge these representations of the border as an allegedly lawless frontier? Working in the territorial and institutional gaps of the state(s), how do they employ their lived experiences to negotiate the often violent tension between the state and its borders? Analyzing how the narratives of violence are challenged at the territorial margins of the state, this paper will contribute to broader academic discussions on governmentality, power, violence, and agency.
Harvard University
“Exclusionary Violence and Community Rupture: The Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas During and After the Argentine Dirty War”
Leaders of the Argentine “Dirty War” (1976-1983) employed the fear and disorientation induced by an estimated 30,000 forced disappearances to liquidate civil society and establish an atomized and reactionary sociopolitical order. To maintain a sense of normalcy amid this unyielding violence, Argentines developed carefully honed capacities for filtering the dangerous and potentially subversive out of their visual environments, a process of state-facilitated self-blinding that trauma scholar Diana Taylor terms “percepticide” (Disappearing Acts, 123). Like others across Dirty War-era Argentina, the Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas (DAIA, Argentina’s principal Jewish political institution) sought normalcy, in its case centered on a close working relationship with the government. Yet Jews were disappearing at a rate at least eight times higher than their share of the population, and many relatives of desaparecidos were coming to DAIA for help. In order to facilitate cooperation with an anti-Semitic regime while claiming fidelity to its core mission to protect the Argentine Jewish community, DAIA committed itself to a campaign of institutional percepticide, blinding itself to Jewish suffering by systematically downplaying the extent of Jewish disappearance, questioning the “Jewishness” of desaparecidos, and denying assistance to their relatives.
In my paper, I argue that DAIA’s behavior excluded Jewish desaparecidos and their relatives from the mainstream Jewish community at a moment of unimaginable vulnerability. I frame DAIA’s acts of percepticide as both a response to and a promulgation of state efforts to use violence to structure sight selectively and thus to minimize challenges to existing power structures. Compounded by more than two decades of denial and misrepresentation, the impact of this campaign illustrates the ways in which massive state violence can facilitate a process of values renormalization that implicates actors across civil society in community dissolution and continues to undermine attempts to create a culture of respect for human rights. Carwil James.
Columbia University
“The Choice of a Violent Life: A Cuban Revolutionary Goes to the Spanish Civil War”
A member of the Cuban “Generation of the Thirties,” Pablo de la Torriente Brau chose a life of political violence. Though he and his wife Teresa Casuso came from elite backgrounds, they gave up the comforts of a quiet and sheltered life to engage actively in the struggle against Cuban dictator Gerardo Machado. They fought, lived in hiding, and mourned the killings of close friends. Torriente went to the hospital with a severe head wound, to jail with his fellow revolutionaries, and into exile in New York City with Teté, as Casuso was known. There, husband and wife resumed a more peaceful life for a time. It was not long, however, before Torriente decided to leave for Spain to take part in the Spanish Civil War: “To see a people in combat. To meet heroes. To hear the thundering of the cannon and feel the breeze of shrapnel. To contemplate fires and executions. To be close to the great silent whirlpool of death.”1 He voyaged across the Atlantic Ocean and reentered a life of violence, writing and fighting on behalf of the Spanish Republic.
This exploratory paper—based on preliminary research for my dissertation on the Cuban Generation of the Thirties in the Spanish Civil War—engages with social movement studies and work on contentious politics. It explores the role of violence in the lives of Torriente and Casuso, and raises questions about the historical significance of the choice of a violent life.
Emory University
“Empowering politics: crime, justice, and strategies of authority in the early stages of state formation in Argentina (1820)”
This paper utilizes a military conspiracy that took place in the so-called “anarchy” of 1820 in Buenos Aires to understand crime, the administration of justice, and the participation of the militias in Argentina’s political future. My intention is to show how the judicial system was utilized as a tool for the acquisition of authority by those who were behind the struggle for state formation after the independence. The conspiracy of 1820 served as a case study for grasping the main conflicts and concerns that surrounded the municipal and regional branches of government -the Junta de Representantes, the Cabildo, the army, and judicial institutions, in the quest for state organization, and how their struggle for power unfolded and affected Buenos Aires’ political life. The conspiracy, fomented by the Cabildo and performed by the civic militias, was controlled after four days of conflict and almost four hundred deaths. What started, then, was a manipulation of judicial laws to punish the accused of organizing and participating in the movement. Of sixty-six individuals charged, two were chosen to be executed and serve as an example to future insurgency. No law upheld these sentences. The historiography has evidenced the discrepancy between theory and practice that defined colonial and early modern Latin America justice. I argue that this discrepancy, rather than being arbitrary, was utilized as an instrument to violently control political dissension and to enforce authority when Argentina’s future was being defined.
Anthropology New York University
“Si No Hay Solución, No Hay Inti Raymi: Making Violence Visible in Cuzco, Peru”
On June 21, 2009, a group of campesinos from Peru’s Sicuani region came to the Plaza de Armas in Cuzco to protest the government’s privatization of water. Calling their undertaking the “Marcha de los Qanchis a la Ciudad de Cuzco,” they carried banners with anti-governmental slogans and chanted their displeasure with the government. On the surface, the protest was not only nonviolent but almost mundane; the plaza was nearly empty, and the protestors never deviated from their orderly march around the square. Taken in the context of the other events occurring in Cuzco, however, the protest can be seen as window into (and commentary on) the pervasive violence of cultural appropriation that campesinos experience daily. The protest occurred three days before Inti Raymi, an invented Inca “tradition” that began in 1944 and now serves as a tourist magnet. Like the protest, Inti Raymi includes a procession into the plaza, chanted rhymes, and evocations of indigenous sovereignty. The depiction of indigeneity in the festival, however, focuses not on contemporary political rights but rather on an idealized, remote Inca civilization. In tracing the ways that the protest echoes the symbolic vocabulary of Inti Raymi and yet explicitly repudiates its message, I argue that the protest serves not only as an effort to secure rights but also to point to ways in which the festival (and, by extension, the government) has shorn indigeneity of its potentially lucrative cultural capital. By echoing Inti Raymi but explicitly rejecting stereotypically “indigenous” elements of the ceremony (symbols like llamas, Incas, and the Quechua language), the protestors repudiate the notion of a temporally remote indigeneity and suggest a reframing of the current political debate, articulating their concerns as economic rather than cultural and making visible Inti Raymi’s ties to the continued legacy of colonial violence.
There is a common understanding that when certain type of body (a raped, mutilated corpse of a poor, brown woman or a decapitated male cadaver) is found in a Mexican border city, the police will not earnestly investigate the crime. Much of the media, activist, and academic attention surrounding the Juarez murders as well as drug-related violence on the US/ Mexico border focuses upon the shocking nature of the crimes and the unfathomable impunity of the killers. Based upon ethnographic research, this paper suggests that such crimes and their surrounding impunity are consistent with the way that border residents believe power to work in their cities. I seek to explain the ways in which global and local level-dynamics converge in Mexican border cities to make it possible for markings on a corpse to be read by the local media to suggest the victim's culpability or by the local police to indicate that it may not be in their best interest to investigate the crimes. I demonstrate how local understandings of these corpses are informed by both border residents’ fear and respect for drug cartels as well as racializing and sexualizing ideologies pertaining to migrants from southern Mexican states.
Anthropology Johns Hopkins University
“Display and Discretion: Transformations of Paramilitary Violence in the Everyday Life of a Colombian Region”
In the last two decades, paramilitary groups have achieved military control over several regions in Colombia after locally defeating the guerrillas and making alliances with the State armed forces. Even after their supposed demobilization –which in some cases was more like a rearrangement–, the paramilitary forces have continued to control portions of the territory through violent means. This paper, based on ethnographic fieldwork and oral history recollections, shows how in the period 1990-2005 paramilitary violence in in the Colombian region of Urabá went from privileging the display of punishment to enforcing the subtlety of discipline, marking the minds and bodies of those subjected to its control. I argue that the shift from the most public and conspicuous acts of violence –massacres, public threats, and calculated displays of force– to the predominance of a more concealed and circumscribed violence –selective and discreet murders, hidden disposal of the bodies, communication through rumors– was part of a strategy to keep the region economically functional while maintaining control over its population. In addition to showing these transformations (some of them analogous to those described by Michel Foucault for the Western prison system), the paper describes the ways in which the paramilitary efforts to establish a justice administration system and to shape social life according to a specific set of values and beliefs have been contested by some sectors of the population, therefore establishing limits to the disciplinary power of the paramilitary groups. In this way, the presentation aims to contribute to the understanding of the local dynamics of everyday violence in the contemporary Colombian context.
“Racism and Revolutionary Violence in the Mexican Border Town of Cananea, 18991920”
Yale Cananea, Sonora is best known for a bloody 1906 strike organized by Mexican workers in the U.S.-owned copper mines. Although the strikers’ demands were specific and local, many historians have lauded Cananea as the “cradle of the Mexican Revolution” and cited the strike as evidence of Mexican workers’ xenophobic animosity for U.S. capitalists. My paper offers an alternative history of conflict in Porfirian and Revolutionary Cananea, focusing on unremarked violence rather than the famous strike and emphasizing not labor radicalism but racism. Using a transnational perspective, I trace intersections between U.S. and Mexican ideas about race and stress the significance of Cananea’s large population of Chinese migrants. I draw on previously unconsidered documents from state and judicial archives in Hermosillo, U.S. state department post files in Washington, and company archives in Cananea and Tucson.
In Cananea, U.S. and Mexican leaders cooperated to construct a racially divided town where U.S. citizens and elite Mexicans were considered “whiter” than, and therefore superior to, lower class Mexicans and Chinese. Mexican workers contested this assumption by striking, but they also redeployed elements of this racist ideology to target the “non-white” Chinese. Anti-Chinese sentiment intensified during the 1907 recession (after the failed 1906 strike) and again during the height of revolutionary fighting, from 1913 to 1915. Local politicians accused the Chinese of uncivilized customs and unhygienic practices, and mobs of ordinary Mexicans attacked Chinese merchants.
The Chinese fought racism tenaciously, organizing mutual aid societies, filing formal protests, and petitioning U.S. and Chinese diplomats for assistance, but theirs was a losing battle. In 1920, Revolutionary Governor Adolfo de la Huerta oversaw the expulsion of most of Cananea’s Chinese residents, prefiguring the large-scale expulsion of the Chinese from Sonora in 1931. As we reflect on the Revolution’s centennial, Cananea offers a troubling example of exclusionary violence.
University of Notre Dame
“The Massacre of the Fifty-two Jesuits and its Aftermath in the Brazilian Mission”
In 1568 Inácio de Azevedo, S.J. petitioned Pope Pius V and King Sebastian I to support the largest Jesuit missionary effort of the sixteenth century, and also the most catastrophic. Azevedo called upon seventy-two Jesuits he selected from the various provinces throughout Portugal, Rome, Valencia, Castile, and Toledo, which was the largest single contingent of Jesuits to be sent to one location. On July 15, 1570 the French Huguenots, led by Corsair Jacques Sourie, hijacked the Santiago and killed Inácio de Azevedo and his thirty-nine Jesuit companions near the Canary Island of Palma. One year later in 1571, the second ship under Azevedo’s command suffered the same misfortune. The story repeated itself as Corsair John Capdeville killed another group of twelve Jesuits led by their new leader, Pero Dias. The accounts by the one Jesuit survivor of the 1570 voyage and Pero Dias’ letter about the ill-fated journey of the forty will be analyzed, as well as the poems and plays by José de Anchieta, S.J., which commemorated the fifty-two Jesuits in Brazil.
This event proved to be a crucial turning point in how the Jesuits conceptualized their Brazilian mission. This event shows the ways in which the greatest early modern Catholic concern made its way to the New World and became interpreted to fit a new audience. As ideas traveled between Europe and Latin America, Protestantism became a force to contend with in Brazil, especially with the imminent threat of the French traders.
The Jesuits wished to sow the seeds of the Catholic faith in the Americas to reinforce the battle against Protestantism, but also to align the neophytes with the Portuguese crown, its objectives and their Christian way of life. The plays of José de Anchieta and the cults that emerged throughout Brazil a short time after the incident gave an external structure to the anti-Protestant campaign in Brazil and fostered popular piety in the colony.
Columbia University
“Double Helix and Double Jeopardy: An Examination of the Recent Immigration Legislation Regarding the Criminalization of Immigrant Communities and DNA Collections for Bio-Surveillance”
It is estimated that under the Immigration laws, over 378,000 immigrants are detained annually. The detainees are housed in facilities ranging from federal prisons to local jails, to facilities owned and operated by private prison companies. However, the growth in the number of imprisoned among the foreign-born does not represent a spike in crime rates among these groups, but shifts in federal immigration legislation. Beyond the politically and economically pragmatic reasons often offered as legitimating for the draconian measures that are being offered as reasoning to regulate both legal and illegal immigration, lays a multitude of social and cultural concerns, premises, and constructions, which motivates and shapes both official and popular responses to the increasingly visible presence of non-citizen immigrants. Dominant moral and cultural anxieties expressed and invigorated by prevailing narratives and images about immigrants can thus be seen as both supports and sources for the practices and policies of states.
In this paper, I intend to explore the significant developments in recent immigration legislation regarding the increasing criminalization of immigrants. In particular, I intend to examine the legislations regarding the collection of DNA from both undocumented and documented immigrants. I intend to scrutinize the California state laws that force all arrestees, including individuals suspected of being ‘illegal’ to allow the State of California to take a DNA sample, and include the resulting profile in the federal DNA databank (CODIS). I will then examine the manner in which the consequence of this legislation imposes a magnification of the current racial disparities in our criminal justice system as more and more people of color's DNA profiles are included in databases that make them potential suspects whenever DNA is recovered from a crime scene.
UCSD
“Made to Be Undocumented: Making Sense of Contradiction in the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986”
My paper investigates the enforcement, implementation, and community responses to the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 along the Tijuana-San Diego border. Existing scholarship on IRCA has focused on the law’s myriad contradictions and paradoxes; between amnesty and enforcement, policy objectives and outcomes, and between the institutions of citizenship and the abjection of alienage. Drawing from ethnographic and cultural studies methodologies, as well as from a number of archival sources, I argue that this extant scholarship has largely failed to account for the many ways in which the law’s mandates—namely amnesty or legalization and increased border enforcement—blurred with, overlapped, and at times even bled into one another. Despite the law’s promise to vigorously and uniformly enforce immigration laws while safeguarding the rights and dignity of citizens and aliens, this paper suggests these lines were often easier to draw on paper than to enforce in the field. In fact, not only were the imperatives of amnesty and enforcement often indistinguishable from one another, at times even the very meanings of the terms were up for debate. In contrast to the “immigration paradox” which has framed scholarly discussions of IRCA and its effects, the examples explored in this essay point to a complexity and ambiguity in the interpretation and enforcement of immigration law often missed in the lens of contradiction and paradox which take for granted the boundedness and impermeability of its units of analysis. The essay concludes by suggesting how cultural production—in this case the border-crossing ballads of norteño icons Los Tigres del Norte—might help scholars move beyond these binary modes of interpretation and provide a conceptual vocabulary better capable of explaining the demands of life across national borders.
“Bandits, Spies, Mercenaries or Traitors: The Counter-guerrilla of Manuel Domínguez and the Mexican American War (1847-1848)”
In the midst of the war between the United States and Mexico (1846-1848) a group of Mexicans from the state of Puebla began to work for the American army as spies, couriers and fighters. The group operated under the leadership of Puebla’s famous robber Manuel Domínguez, “El Chato,” and consisted of about 200 men most of whom were also former bandits. Given the collaborationist nature of Domínguez’s counter-guerrilla it comes as no surprise that the band made it into Mexican historical memory simply as criminals and traitors, unnatural Mexicans who betrayed their homeland in its darkest hour.
In spite of the fact that the counter-guerrilla was a bandits’ organization, their actions only minimally resemble Eric Hobsbawm’s classic “social banditry.” But Domínguez’s group does not to fit neatly into the alternative model of individualistic, profit-driven brigands either. Regardless of their differences, these conceptualizations of banditry coincide in denying it a political role. I argue, however, that the decision of the individuals involved to participate in the war enrolling in Domínguez’s band can be seen as a political act in the following ways: first, because it was anchored in a desire to exercise power to influence their lives and the lives of others; second, because it was an act of public vengeance; and third because it was an act of protest. Based on new archival research, this paper offers a fresh look at the fascinating and seldom told story of Domínguez’s counter-guerrilla, one that challenges the traditional condemnatory view and brings forth its political dimension.
History Georgetown University
“Pending Business in Michoacán: Liberal Laws, Land Reparto, and Indigenous Communities, 1827-1902”
This paper deals with land tenure liberal reforms in nineteenth-century Mexico, particularly in the state of Michoacán (located in the central-west part of the country). Attempts to reform the corporate landholding of indigenous communities surfaced as early as 1827 in Michoacán and continued until the eve of the Mexican revolution. On the one hand, this paper argues that land reforms launched a century-long conflict between indigenous communities (for the most purépecha-speaking) and liberal authorities. While by the second part of the century (especially beginning in 1868) indigenous communities were clearly loosing ground against liberal authorities, the implementation of the reforms remained uneven and incomplete. Authorities were forced by indigenous communities’ different strategies to make concessions, qualify rigid measures, and rely on the members of the communities to push at least a partial implementation of the reforms. As a result, the conflict between authorities and indigenous communities never actually ceased. On the other hand, it is argued that conflict also emerged within indigenous communities. Land reforms triggered, reinforced, and intensified already existing local rivalries and antagonisms. Communities thus became arenas of internal conflict between different factions who fought one another to have the local control of the process of land division. Opposition or acceptance of the land reform thus depended on the outcome of these internal conflicts. All in all, liberals did not have the power to exert a definitive blow over communal landholding. Yet indigenous communities were not capable either of entirely preventing liberal programs from dismantling their corporate landholding. The first half of the twentieth century would face the consequences of this pending dispute.
History Department University of California Los Angeles
“Subversive Mothers: State Violence and Notions of Motherhood in Argentina, 19761983”
The Argentine military’s takeover of the government in 1976 began an era of state repression from which women were not exempt. Yet the dictatorship’s maternal discourse masked this violence against women. Its rhetoric aimed to combat leftist subversion by emphasizing mothers’ roles as protectors of the nuclear family. For its part, leftist groups operated within a similar patriarchal discourse, relegating women to ‘reproductive’ tasks within organizations. In response to state terror, a group of women used motherhood to denounce the military’s violence. The Madres and Abuelas of the Plaza de Mayo successfully employed the dictatorship’s rhetoric on the family to publicly demand the location of their ‘disappeared’ children. Clearly, state terror, leftist militancy, and popular response functioned within a patriarchal discourse on the family.
While scholarship on state repression, leftist militancy, and the Madres and Abuelas is extensive, comparison between the three groups’ rhetoric surrounding the family is lacking. This paper analyzes these discourses, arguing that all three employed the same patriarchal rhetoric to exert control over women, the family, and ultimately, the nation. To begin with, the military dictatorship established a paternalistic authority towards the nation with its discourse on the family; it held the concept of motherhood in high regard yet violently excluded militant women from this group. In turn, leftist groups engaged in this dialogue by implementing an organization structure that replicated the nuclear family, allowing for a continuation of patriarchal values within a Marxist framework. Finally, the Madres and Abuelas of the Plaza de Mayo framed their dissent in the Junta’s rhetoric. This permitted them to successfully maneuver their cause into the public sphere. Ultimately, this paper will illustrate how distinct ideological beliefs employed similar discourses on the patriarchal family to shape the Argentine nation.
University of California San Diego
“The Stalingrad of the Left”: Guerrillas, the Rural Poor, and the Role of Historical Memory in Tucumán, Argentina (1966-76)
Throughout the twentieth century, Western societies confronted profound dilemmas of underdeveloped regions that threatened not only their political stability, but also their very sense of themselves due to their supposed racial, cultural, and economic backwardness. For Latin America, this crisis of modernity would produce tragic consequences. With the arrival of the Cold War and national liberation movements, these peripheral regions became flash points for guerrilla warfare and state terror, and Argentina was not exceptional. By 1974, as a nation-state with pretensions to modernity slid into a seemingly inescapable chasm of paralyzing strikes, bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations, the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP) and the military competed to transform the distant poverty-stricken battleground of Tucumán into the reality of their dueling visions of social justice and order. Located in the country’s mestizo Northwest, it had attracted the attention of both the Right and the Left, who saw the province’s “rustic” sugar worker as a politically subversive criminal or an oppressed yet dormant revolutionary. The consequences of this representation were significant, as it not only produced a vicious battle between the two camps (leading to the destruction of the ERP and a coup d’etat), but, more importantly, a genocidal campaign against the Tucumanos themselves, when the thousands who perished in the province’s secret concentration camps gave Argentina its first glimpse of the “Dirty War”.
My paper will seek to address two important questions concerning Tucumán in this period: why did the ERP launch a rural campaign that quickly became “the Stalingrad of the Left” at a time when its urban guerrilla made it the most powerful and feared insurgency in Latin America during this period; and, what was the degree of popular support among sugar workers and peasants for the rural campaign itself? Was Tucumán truly the combative province that the Left had imagined it to be for the past ten years? To answer these questions, this paper will examine the formation of historical memory and representation, when Tucumán’s stark impoverishment and militant sugar unions attracted the attention of future guerrillas who would interpret a seemingly distinct Latin American ordeal as emblematic of their country’s own place in a Third World revolutionary struggle. Relying upon recently conducted interviews in the province’s countryside during the summer of 2009, as well as with former guerrillas who fought there, it will also explore the widely-accepted notion that Tucumán’s populace did not support the “terrorist” ERP because of its own identification with corporatist Peronism.
History
University of California Los Angeles
"From the Classroom to the Mountain:
Schoolteachers, State Terror and War in El Salvador, 1964-1983"
This
paper will attempt to explicate the role of state terror, social
movement organizing and vanguard leadership in the genesis of the
Central American revolutions, focusing on the case study of the men
and—mostly—women of National Association of Salvadoran Educators “June
21” (ANDES-21 de junio.) This powerful teachers union, representing
elementary, middle and secondary school teachers, with a largely female
membership, played an integral role in both the foundation and
increasing radicalization of the revolutionary social movement in El
Salvador. Whereas schoolteachers had historically played a role in
buttressing the military dictatorship and its everyday violence, they
slowly entered into the political arena during the late 1960s and early
1970s due to economic demands of the union. Though socially-situated in
a hierarchical position vis-a-vis the impoverished masses—in terms of
income, education credentials and social status—in response to the
state’s violent ressponse and murder of unionist activists, the
leadership of ANDES-21 de junio consciously allied itself with the
country’s campesinos and workers. Their recognized status and cultural
capital—and presence in poor communities as interstitial
figures—allowed ANDES members to play a central role in raising the
consciousness and organizing the masses. By the time a full-scale civil
war had begun, many former teacher union members were among the
leadership of the FMLN guerrillas using organized insurgent violence to
overthrow the US-backed military government.
University of North Carolina Wilmington
“The Role of Republican Spain and the Spanish Civil War in Reaffirming Mexican Hispano-American Identity, 1931-39”
Unlike most foreigners who volunteered for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, Latin Americans had the additional impetus of cultural and linguistic ties to Spain. Mexicans were doubly exceptional in that theirs was the only Latin American country where a revolutionary government was in power and where the long-presumed virtue of Spanish traditions within Hispano-American culture was being aggressively challenged. In the process, much of what hispanidad represented was scorned. Nonetheless, a longing to maintain a connection to the Hispanic half of their mixed heritage existed even among many Mexicans who promoted indigenismo. Spain’s transition to what was viewed from Mexico as a modern progressive republic provided that opportunity.
Based largely on memoirs and correspondence produced by Mexican participants in the conflict, this essay argues that the defense of the Republic during the Spanish Civil War was for many Mexicans a deeply personal undertaking. For them, Franco personified a belligerent tradition and retrograde conservative values; everything post-revolutionary Mexico rejected as it decided the place of hispanismo within its own national identity. Thus by defending the Republic, many Mexicans were defending what they saw to be an integral part of their own identity both as a nation and as individuals.
This essay addresses a heretofore neglected cultural motivation for Mexican support of the Spanish Republic. In the process it raises then addresses the question of why Mexicans, emerging as they were from the violence and chaos of their own Revolution, were so quick to romanticize violence in Spain. It demonstrates the incorporation of foreign conflict and violence into an intimate national space allowing for a reaffirmation of Hispanic identity in Mexico. Finally, it suggests that this process, even in the face of Republican defeat, forged a mutually-sustaining relationship based on a shared identity
Katherine Smith
Department of World Arts and Cultures
University of Californa Los Angeles
“Gede Rising: Haiti in the Age of Vagabondaj”
This paper presents ethnographic research on the Vodou spirit Gede, the mischievous master of the cemetery crossroads and promiscuous promulgator of sexual regeneration, in light of the urbanization of Haiti. Gede is a predominately masculine spirit and this research demonstrates that in the past decade he has emerged as the most important spirit of the Vodou pantheon. This rise in popularity is linked to the urbanization of the population, specifically the burgeoning sector of unemployed and under-employed young men in the capital, Port-au-Prince. Key to understanding the position of this group is the term vagabon in Creole, or vagabond, which is bandied about in common parlance to refer to aimless young men. This paper interrogates the popularity of the term, examining both its religious and political currency in the present, tumultuous moment.
The vagabond embodies a certain historically situated and gendered chaos. He is uprooted from the countryside and the perceived norms of “tradition;” he is both destructive and highly sexualized, irreverent and menacing.
While the age of vagabondaj is marked by increasing urbanization, it is not without cultural precedent. Gede is also called a vagabon for his disregard for propriety. It is therefore significant that the increasing popularity of his annual festival and his growing presence in popular culture are concurrent with this shift in population. The evidence for this thesis consists of interviews with the spirit himself while he possesses his servateurs, interviews with urban youth and numerous ceremonies where the presence of “vagabonds” has become a challenge to the regleman or order of Vodou. Here I assert that while the “vagabond” phenomenon is understood through Gede, the explosion in this sector of the population has simultaneously effected a new image of Gede as embodiment of urbanized, ambiguous disorder.
New York University
“The Question of Consent: Fort Buchanan and the Problematic of Popular Militarism in Twentieth Century Puerto Rico”
In this paper I outline and explore the implications of one basic historical problematic in Puerto Rico. I shall account for why, despite the exclusionary character of US colonialism, there has developed a considerable degree of inclusion, participation, and identification with the US armed forces. To that end, I focus my analysis upon the historical formation and evolution of those social relationships forged between the Army Garrison Command at Fort Buchanan and the local military community of soldiers, veterans and federal employees residing on the island who utilize its services. I will provide general historical context from the initial years of Spanish rule to examine the historical forces through which Fort Buchanan developed into the key site of everyday military power in Puerto Rico. In making such arguments, I provide a long durational perspective for how the structures of everyday military consent were insinuated throughout five centuries of colonial rule.
Applying Gramscian theory on political consensus building between political elites and popular classes, I contend the answer to this historical question posed by military hegemony in Puerto Rico lies in exploring is a two-fold historical process. From the vantage of the colonized, military service in the United States armed forces afforded colonial subjects an opportunity for increased rights; upward social mobility; and the spaces through which they could exercise empowering forms of community and political agency. From the vantage of the federal government, militarization aided North American hegemony over island politics as popular classes were incorporated into a colonialist state project and were extended a stake in the mutually shared defense of the island as US citizens. As such, the aim of my dissertation is to provide a detailed historical analysis of how negotiations between citizen and state produced this "culture of consent" throughout time as well as how such practices shaped the field of social and political relations in Puerto Rico.
I will explore and discuss the intellectual stakes underlying my dissertation’s argument by integrating three distinct sets of debates in Puerto Rican historiography as they pertain to social studies on the US militarization of twentieth century Puerto Rico. Surveying the literature on antimilitarism and anticolonial resistance in the Vieques and Culebra case studies; writings detailing the coerciveness behind the "Americanization" of island life; and debates exploring tensions between cultural nationalism and US federalism on the island, I seek to address silences concerning the unrecognized materiality of everyday social relations invested in socially reproducing the ‘military’. Therefore, instead of depicting Buchanan’s military culture as imposed from the top-down, my project will portray US militarism on the island as a negotiated grassroots ideology shaped by the contradictory legacy of colonial practices which empowered a select group of citizens from a disenfranchised whole.
Fordham University
“Women as Perpetrators of Violence- Examining Peru’s Shining Path”
Lasting roughly twenty years and killing at least 69,000 thousand people, the sustained conflict between Peru's communist guerrilla group, The Shining Path, and Peru's government affected all Peruvians in one way or another. The government behaved similarly to the guerrillas, terrorizing its own citizens. Examples of the violence and human rights violations in Peru, between 1980 and 2000, include whole villages being preemptively murdered to undermine their ability to change sides, women being systematically raped, citizens jailed without due process, and others dispossessed from their rural homes and forced to migrate to urban areas. These actions, taken by the government, caused Peruvians to lose faith in its ability to act in the country's best interests. This loss of faith created additional support for the Shining Path; at times it was estimated that up to fifty percent of the population supported the Shining Path over the government.
Historically, the near constant subjugation of Peruvians has established the validity of violence is as a tool to establish worth and superiority. By joining the Shining Path even indigenous women could hold power over their lives and the lives of others as opposed to being habitual victims. In a powerless society, this was a real source of opportunity. Approximately 35% of the party's political and military leaders were women.
This paper will examine the role and depictions of women as perpetrators of violence within the Shining Path of Peru through firsthand accounts, literature, and other scholarly works. It will also provide an introduction to the conflict.
New School for Social Research
“Colombia: Under the Sign of Crisis, Violence and Law”
Colombia is a paradigmatic case for exploring the analytics of crisis as a condition, instead of crisis as a discrete rupture. The country’s history of multifarious crises has been consistently accompanied by the most dreadful and violent perpetrations. Violence in Colombia does not merely occupy a place of routine disruption, but is rather seen as a lasting condition or as a failure in the project of civilization. This paper draws a parallel between this idea of crisis as a condition—using the works of Koselleck, Canguillhem, and Becket—and two simultaneous historical trends specific to Colombia’s social disorder: First, the occurrence of violence within “the rule of law”, including the near-obsessive fervor and interest in law from both legal and illegal actors. And second, the move from La Violencia—initially a bipartisan conflict between Liberals and Conservatives—to multiple forms of violence. In order to recognize what type of compromises are made in declaring crisis—and violence—as a condition, we must draw explicit attention to what is understood by normal, abnormal, and finally normative. For the Colombian case, an understanding of the norm becomes inseparable from an understanding of a state of exception. The paper revolves around the terms of crisis as a condition and asks, does violence acquire a quality of its own, outside the action of its perpetrators, by encompassing a recurring rhythm that becomes the norm? And furthermore, how do we confront violence in our own representations? Particular reference is made to Taussig’s ethnographic work on Colombia’s “culture of terror”, as it directly speaks to the question of a politics of representation.
Department of Spanish and Portuguese New York University
“War and the Production of Space: State-Sponsored Violence in the Margins of the State”
This paper seeks to discuss the ways in which the State tried to consolidate its institutional power through war and violence during the second half of the 19th century in Argentina. I will discuss Francisco Moreno's Viaje a la Patagonia Austral (1879) in the context of one key conflict of the period. Moreno's travelogue cannot be read -I argue-without taking into account the “Conquest of the Desert”, as the sistematic war of extermination against the Patagonian indigenous peoples was referred to, even if there is almost no direct mention of that conflict.
One key theoretical approach of this paper (following Charles Tilly and Henry Lefebvre) is that, in the period under consideration, war was a particularly effective way of seeing and producing the modern capitalist space. Taking into consideration the particularities of the Argentinian political process, I will examine the specific ways in which Moreno's text describes the status of the Patagonian regions with relation to the central State: the offical rethoric describes these lands as “deserted” and unknown. They are described as a kind of “external interiority”, as regions that are a part of the State only from a futuristic perspective (the double meaning of the Spanish word “frontera”, meaning “border” as well as “frontier” will be addressed in this respect). Thus, my paper deals with the gaze of the State over these regions and the ways in which they are appropriated through war and the discourse of travel.
New School for Social Research
“The ‘War of the Pants’: Reassessing Oaxaca’s Peasant Uprising of 1896”
This paper analyzes a peasant revolt during the Porfiriato in the Mexican southern state of Oaxaca, when more than one thousand Indians stormed the town of Juquila and killed the local authorities, in 1896—the year of a new liberal tax reform. Chatino Indians entered Juquila shouting “dead to all who wear pants”, in reference to the mestizos and whites who used European-stile clothing. When the political and military authorities regained control of the district, the newly appointed jefe politico declared that to enter the towns under his jurisdiction people could not be wearing indigenous dresses, and huipiles and calzones de manta were forbidden. The origins of this rebellion are usually analyzed as that of a common tax revolt, and its consequences (like the new clothing policy) as part of a project of acculturation to “bleach” the Indian population. By framing the revolt in a larger context of State consolidation and global economic integration, this paper interprets the so called “War of the Pants” a part of a complex process of negotiation and contestation by the people of Juquila to adapt their interests and values to regional, national and international transformations.
Princeton University
“Factional Politics and Frontier Violence: Augustin Sañudo and the Blurred Boundaries of Law in the Río de la Plata Borderlands in the 1850s”
In 1856, Augustin Sañudo appeared before the Alcalde Ordinario in Salto, Uruguay seeking payment from José Asunción Ferreira of some 751 pesos. Neither party disputed the existence of the debt, nor the court’s authority to rule in the matter. Yet, what at first glance appeared to be a routine civil case ended with an explosion of violence. On May 15, 1858, police sergeant Francisco Peralta murdered Joaquin Ferreira, Sañudo’s business associate and Ferreira’s brother. The murder set off a wave of reprisals as factional rivals sought to utilize the court case and the killing for political ends.
My paper utilizes the Sañudo case as a point of departure to understand the relationship between cross-border political connections, law, and violence along the frontier between Brazil and Uruguay during the mid-nineteenth century. The Sañudo case reveals how in these borderlands, the boundaries between law and violence were doubly blurred. On one hand, local courtrooms served as arenas of violent struggle. Legal actions required mobilizing resources, both inside and outside the courthouse, in order to succeed. Litigants like Sañudo and Ferreira tapped into social, commercial, and political connections to protect their respective legal rights. As these webs collided in the courtroom, even mundane disputes could act as flashpoints for violence. Along the frontier, recourse to law and violence often went hand-in-hand.
At the same time, the Sañudo litigation also demonstrates how factional violence played a critical role in shaping the contours of legal rights. Each new case offered an opportunity for political rivals to enhance their respective positions by gaining control over the nebulous boundaries between law and coercion. My paper explores how competing political factions blended legal actions with outright violence to enhance their power, claiming the ability to frame their own coercive conduct as in the service of law.
Columbia University
“The Experiences of Bacilio Sánchez and Isidoro Lopez in 1920’s California: Considering Age and Sexual Violence in the Study of Legal Institutions” Pending
In 1926, Bacilio Sanchez, a forty-year old railroad laborer for the Western Pacific Railroad Company from San Luis Potosi, was arrested in Butte County in California’s Central Valley after he penetrated Hiram Fong, a fourteen year-old, which resulted in the prosecution of the railroad laborer for committing a “crime against nature.” Two years later, Isidoro Lopez, a twenty-year old laborer from Sinaloa was tried and sentenced to ten years for penetrating Peter Galeti, a fourteen-year-old boy. These two cases reflect the use of the legal system to punish sex acts under sodomy statutes through which judicial authorities applied and cited statutory protections for male youths during the early twentieth-century in California’s state courts. Although these cases suggest that men and boys as transient laborers formed male same-sex sexual subcultures in rural work camps leading to their criminalization by local courts, this paper will analyze the two cases of sexual violence to explain how victims, perpetrators, lawyers, witnesses, immigration officials, and doctors in the courtroom were influenced in their administration of criminal justice by assumptions about victims’s and perpetrators’s age and gender.
This paper will argue for the analysis of sexual violence using the categories of age and gender is not only useful to investigate transient working-class male-male encounters, but that it could be potentially productive to further investigate how these two categories have influenced legal systems. This methodological and empirical research is an attempt to expand the analysis beyond the production of laws by including the practices that resulted during the interactions among institutions, officials of the law, intermediaries, and other social actors. This paper will argue that the analytical categories of age and gender could allow scholars to further interrogate the relationship between boys’ and men’s use of sexual violence within the process of the juridical construction of age-structured identities such as “children” and “juveniles.” Ultimately, this essay will examine how assumptions about age and gender have informed the evolution of legal cultures, popular attitudes towards the law, and the adjudication of sexual offenders in the legal system.