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At the turn of the twentieth century, several financial crises resulted in extreme illiquidity and retraction of bank credit. Such a situation created opportunities for the activities of counterfeiters and the formation of criminal networks that circulated across the Atlantic as part of larger circuits of migration connecting Europe with the Americas. National agencies sought to limit the action of local authorities – who were often suspected of negligence and even complicity with counterfeiters – and built collaborations with police from other countries.
This presentation focuses on the role of counterfeit currency within South American migrant economies, focusing in particular on the trajectory of two counterfeiters of paper money, and their strategies of construction of criminal networks in the Atlantic world. Following the transatlantic journeys of a Portuguese immigrant and a French family involved in the production and circulation of forged currency, it sheds lights on a lesser known aspect of the circulation of migrants, by exploring the many connections between migration, money, crime, and law enforcement in the urban centers of Latin America connected to Atlantic world. The argument is that these networks were not marginal to migration, but part of it and fueled by shared values and common social relations.
Through a biographical, microhistorical approach, this social history of counterfeiting networks in the context of circuits of migration dialogues with contemporary studies of money and illegal markets, migrations, organized crime, and police border surveillance, all of which are issues that resonate powerfully in contemporary Latin American politics.
Speaker Diego Galeano, Professor of Contemporary History in the Department of History at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio).
Moderated by Paulina Alberto, Professor of African and African American Studies and of History at Harvard University.
Biographies
Diego Galeano is a Professor of Contemporary History in the Department of History at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). He has a Ph.D. in Social History at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), a Master’s degree in Historical Research at the University of San Andrés (UdeSA), and a Bachelor degree in Sociology at the Nacional University of La Plata (UNLP). His research focuses on the history of the police and transnational crime in Latin America. He wrote the books Escritores, detectives y archivistas. La cultura policial en Buenos Aires, 1821-1910 (National Library, Buenos Aires, 2009) and Delincuentes viajeros: estafadores, punguistas y policías en el Atlántico sudamericano (Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 2018). Published in Portuguese in 2016, the latter received the National Research Award in Brazil. He has also published several articles in academic journals and collective books in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Portugal, France and the United States. He has been a visiting professor and researcher at the Université Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne (2017), at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München - Munich Centre for Global History (2019-2020), Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory (2022), and at the Program in Latin American Studies (PLAS) - Princeton University (2024).
Paulina L. Alberto is a historian of Afro-Latin American lives, thought, and politics as they unfolded in the aftermath of slavery, particularly in Brazil and Argentina. Her work explores the intersections of ideas of race and nation in Latin America, with a focus on how Afro-Latin Americans have shaped and contested the region's ideologies of racial inclusiveness in their ongoing struggles for recognition and equality.
Alberto’s latest single-authored work is Black Legend: The Many Lives of Raúl Grigera and the Power of Racial Storytelling in Argentina (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Black Legend reconstructs both the life story of and the legends surrounding Raúl Grigera, a Black celebrity and icon of the Buenos Aires nightlife in the early 1900s. It examines the role of “racial storytelling” in constructing Whiteness and Blackness in post-independence Argentina and the power of racial stories to shape the fates of individuals, communities, and nations. Alberto’s first book, Terms of Inclusion: Black Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century Brazil (University of North Carolina Press, 2011), charts the changing terms through which self-defined Black intellectuals in three major Brazilian cities negotiated the meanings of racial inclusiveness in their multi-racial nation, and the place of people of African descent within it, between 1920 and 1980. Her co-edited volume Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina (with Eduardo Elena, Cambridge University Press, 2016) is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that newly places twentieth- and twenty-first century Argentina in conversation with the literature on race and nation in Latin America more broadly. Her most recent co-edited work, with George Reid Andrews and Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, is Voices of the Race: Black Newspapers of Latin America (1870-1960) (Cambridge University Press, 2022), a volume of selected articles from the historical Black presses of Latin America, annotated and translated for English-language audiences.
Her work has received support from the Social Science Research Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council for Learned Societies, among other institutions, and has been recognized with the Roberto Reis Prize for Best Book in Brazilian Studies (2012), the Warren Dean Prize for Best Book in Brazilian History (2013), and the James Alexander Robertson Prize (2017).
Before joining the faculty at Harvard, Alberto taught in the departments of History and Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. Her teaching has included courses on Latin American history; comparative race, racial ideologies, and racial narratives in Brazil, Argentina, and Afro-Latin America; the borderlands of history and fiction; and the history and philosophy of History.