Chronicle of an Implosion Foretold: Toward an Actionable Analysis of the Central American Crisis (1970-2020)

Date
-
Event Sponsor
Center for Latin American Studies
Location
Bolivar House, 582 Alvarado Row, Stanford, CA
Chronicle of an Implosion Foretold: Toward an Actionable Analysis of the Central American Crisis (1970-2020)

This talk begins and ends with the image of Central American families, camped at the southern US border, making desperate petitions for asylum, to which the US government responds with criminalization, incarceration and deportation. Humanitarian outrage over these images—though justified and necessary—has the unintended consequence of framing the crisis as a product mainly of current “push factors” such as poverty, violence, corruption, elite capture of democratic institutions, rather than historical and systemic conditions that the US government, together with transnational elites, fostered and condoned for decades. This historical perspective on the crisis, viewed through the lens of indigenous and Black Central American experiences, also reveals a paradox: popular responses to the crisis—both collective “voice” and individual “exit”—end up obliged to appeal to the same principles of capitalist liberal democracy that produced the crisis in the first place. I offer two arguments to help us move outward from this paradox:  first, beneath the surface of these ostensibly contradictory appeals lie inklings of “minor utopias” with radical transformative potential; second, this potential can only be realized if resistance movements adamantly retain autonomy in relation to dominant actors who may present themselves as allies—a lesson that Black and indigenous peoples have learned through bitter experiences of attempted alliance with both liberal democratic and revolutionary movements of change, since the mid-20th century.   

Charles Hale is the SAGE Sara Miller McCune Dean of Social Sciences as well as a professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Global Studies in UC Santa Barbara. He is a leading social science scholar whose research bridges multiple disciplines, with a focus on race and ethnicity, racism, social movements and identity politics among Black and indigenous peoples in Latin America and the Caribbean. He is highly regarded for his innovations in collaborative approaches, which characterize not only his research and teaching, but his administrative leadership as well. Hale, who previously taught at the University of Texas, Austin, is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship for research and teaching in Oaxaca, Mexico. He earned his B.A. in Social Studies from Harvard University, and his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford University.

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