This book explores the power of words in post-Peace El Salvador and Guatemala—their violent and equally liberating power. The volume explores the entire post-Peace Accords era in both Central American countries. In “post-conflict” settings, denying or forgetting the repressive past and its many victims does violence to those victims, while remembering and giving testimony about the past can be cathartic for survivors, relatives, and even for perpetrators. This project will appeal to readers interested in development, societies in transition, global peace studies, and Central American studies.
Offering bold new perspectives on the politics of memory in Latin America, scholars analyze the memory markets in six countries that emerged from authoritarian rule in the 1980s and 1990s.
Restores the region’s fraught history of repression and resistance to popular consciousness and connects the United States’ interventions and influence to the influx of refugees seeking asylum today. At the center of the current immigration debate are migrants from Central America fleeing poverty, corruption, and violence in search of refuge in the United States. In Central America’s Forgotten History, Aviva Chomsky answers the urgent question “How did we get here?” Centering the centuries-long intertwined histories of US expansion and Indigenous and Central American struggles against inequality and oppression, Chomsky highlights the pernicious cycle of colonial and neocolonial development policies that promote cultures of violence and forgetting without any accountability or restorative reparations. Focusing on the valiant struggles for social and economic justice in Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras, Chomsky restores these vivid and gripping events to popular consciousness. Tracing the roots of displacement and migration in Central America to the Spanish conquest and bringing us to the present day, she concludes that the more immediate roots of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras lie in the wars and in the US interventions of the 1980s and the peace accords of the 1990s that set the stage for neoliberalism in Central America. Chomsky also examines how and why histories and memories are suppressed, and the impact of losing historical memory. Only by erasing history can we claim that Central American countries created their own poverty and violence, while the United States’ enjoyment and profit from their bananas, coffee, mining, clothing, and export of arms are simply unrelated curiosities.
Most non-Central Americans think of the narrow neck between Mexico and Colombia in terms of dramatic past revolutions and lauded peace agreements, or sensational problems of gang violence and natural disasters. In this volume, the contributors examine regional circumstances within frames of democratization and neoliberalism, as they shape lived experiences of transition. The authors--anthropologists and social scientists from the United States, Europe, and Central America--argue that the process of regions and nations "disappearing" (being erased from geopolitical notice) is integral to upholding a new, post-Cold War world order--and that a new framework for examining political processes must be accessible, socially collaborative, and in dialogue with the lived processes of suffering and struggle engaged by people in Central America and the world in the name of democracy.
A sweeping study of political murder in Latin America. This sweeping history depicts Latin Americas pan-regional culture of political murder. Unlike typical studies of the region, which often focus on the issues or trends of individual countries, this work focuses thematically on the nature of political murder itself, comparing and contrasting its uses and practices throughout the region. W. John Green examines the entire system of political murder: the methods and justifications the perpetrators employ, the victims, and the consequences for Latin American societies. Green demonstrates that elite and state actors have been responsible for most political murders, assassinating the leaders of popular movements and other messengers of change. Latin American elites have also often targeted the potential audience for these messages through the regions various dirty wars. In spite of regional differences, elites across the region have displayed considerable uniformity in justifying their use of murder, imagining themselves in a class war with democratic forces. While the United States has often been complicit in such violence, Green notes that this has not been universally true, with US support waxing and waning. A detailed appendix, exploring political murder country by country, provides an additional resource for readers.
"Where Memory Dwells is a crucial contribution to the current debate on political violence. Macarena Gómez-Barris has researched exhaustively on the Chilean post-dictatorship to find the deep relationship between what happened in Chile on September 11, 1973 and what is going on today, in Chile and in the world."—Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott, University of Arkansas "This book offers intriguing insights on the symbolic, aesthetic, and personal aspects of memory-making by activists, survivors, and artists during the afterlife of the Pinochet dictatorship. The author shows how specific cultural actors wrestle creatively with the dilemma of how to represent experiences of atrocity that defy our ability to know, narrate, and depict them, yet prove crucial to the building of a democratic culture."—Steve Stern, Alberto Flores Galindo Professor, University of Wisconsin "Macarena Gomez-Barris takes the reader on an often personal journey through the 'memoryscape of terror' of the Chilean dictatorship in Chile and Chilean culture in exile. This book makes a poignant and compelling contribution to the study of traumatic memory in Latin America."—Marita Sturken, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication studies, New York University "Where Memory Dwells offers an immensely luminous rearticulation of the 1990s 'politics of memory' theme for the twenty-first century. Illustrating the profound relevance of memory studies to political theory, Gómez-Barris shows with great lucidity how the remembering and forgetting of state terror are entwined with global and local forces of the neoliberal economy, nationalism, and universal human rights discourse. Where Memory Dwells exemplifies the best efforts of a sociological approach to memory as cultural mediation of power. It should be read by anyone interested in the critical work that collective memory may perform for our societies in transition.”—Lisa Yoneyama, Author of Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory "Where Memory Dwells is a creatively researched and exquisitely thoughtful study of the memory of state terror as it lives and hides in complex and politically activated cultural practices. Gómez-Barris's exploration of how authoritarianism and social injustice are remembered, forgotten, and redressed by nations, citizens, and exiles is a beautiful achievement, one with an immediate relevance for us today."—Avery F. Gordon, author of Ghostly Matters
Latin American comics and graphic novels have a unique history of addressing controversial political, cultural, and social issues. This volume presents new perspectives on how comics on and from Latin America both view and express memory formation on major historical events and processes. The contributors, from a variety of disciplines including literary theory, cultural studies, and history, explore topics including national identity construction, narratives of resistance to colonialism and imperialism, the construction of revolutionary traditions, and the legacies of authoritarianism and political violence. The chapters offer a background history of comics and graphic novels in the region, and survey a range of countries and artists such as Joaquin Salvador Lavado (a.k.a Quino), Hector G. Oesterheld, and Juan Acevedo. They also highlight the unique ability of this art and literary form to succinctly render memory. In sum, this volume offers in-depth analysis of an understudied, yet key literary genre in Latin American memory studies and documents the essential role of comics during the transition from dictatorship to democracy.
In Paper Cadavers, an inside account of the astonishing discovery and rescue of Guatemala's secret police archives, Kirsten Weld probes the politics of memory, the wages of the Cold War, and the stakes of historical knowledge production. After Guatemala's bloody thirty-six years of civil war (1960–1996), silence and impunity reigned. That is, until 2005, when human rights investigators stumbled on the archives of the country's National Police, which, at 75 million pages, proved to be the largest trove of secret state records ever found in Latin America. The unearthing of the archives renewed fierce debates about history, memory, and justice. In Paper Cadavers, Weld explores Guatemala's struggles to manage this avalanche of evidence of past war crimes, providing a firsthand look at how postwar justice activists worked to reconfigure terror archives into implements of social change. Tracing the history of the police files as they were transformed from weapons of counterinsurgency into tools for post-conflict reckoning, Weld sheds light on the country's fraught transition from war to an uneasy peace, reflecting on how societies forget and remember political violence.
Gender-Based Violence in Latin American and Iberian Cinemas rethinks the intersection between violence and its gendered representation. This is a groundbreaking contribution to the international debate on the cinematic construction of gender-based violence. With essays from diverse cultural backgrounds and institutions, this collection analyzes a wide range of films across Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula. The volume makes use of varied perspectives including feminist, postcolonial, and queer theory to consider such issues as the visual configuration of power and inequality, the objectification and the invisibilization of women’s and LGBTQ subjects’ resistance, the role of female film-makers in transforming hegemonic accounts of violence, and the subversion of common tropes of gendered violence. This will be of significance for students and scholars in Latin American and Iberian studies, as well as in film studies, cultural studies, and gender and queer studies.
This book examines the struggles that unfolded in Latin America over the memory of the pasts of political violence experienced by the countries of the continent in the second half of the twentieth century: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, the United States, Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay.
