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Speaker: Jorge E. Cuéllar, Assistant Professor, Latin American, Latino & Caribbean Studies; Founding Faculty Fellow, Consortium of Studies in Race, Migration & Sexuality (RMS), Dartmouth College
Moderated by: Kirsten Weld, Professor of History, Harvard University
This talk focuses on El Salvador in the years 2006-2016 where the country becomes ensnared by inescapable, transnational, and necropolitical ills. Through recounting these processes of social fragmentation, Cuéllar turns to the strategies deployed by ordinary in-country persons who creatively responded to a changed political terrain where struggle itself became reduced to questions of survival. Developing a theory of practical activity, Cuéllar reveals how amidst this assault on everyday life, groups valiantly produced useful articulations derived from local specificity and culture to peer beyond the cul-de-sac of the Salvadoran crisis, glimpsing a remediable future beyond state-derived order.
Jorge Cuéllar is Assistant Professor of Latin American, Latinx & Caribbean Studies here at Dartmouth where he teaches courses on modern Central America, migration, race, and critical social theory. This year, he is the Faculty of Color Working Group Fellow in Latin American Studies at Tufts University where he is advancing his first book project, Everyday Life and Everyday Death in El Salvador. Recently, Jorge has written on popular education, on the politics of older adulthood, as well as authoritarianism, water struggles, and cryptocurrency in El Salvador.
Kirsten Weld is a historian of modern Latin America. Her research explores 20th-century struggles over inequality, justice, historical memory, and social inclusion. Her first book, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (2014), analyzes how history is produced as social knowledge, the labour behind transformative social change, and the stakes of the stories we tell about the past. It is a historical and ethnographic study of the massive archives generated by Guatemala's National Police, which were used as tools of state repression during the country's civil war, concealed from the truth commission charged with investigating crimes against humanity at the war’s end, stumbled upon by justice activists in 2005, and repurposed in the service of historical accounting and postwar reconstruction. Paper Cadavers won the 2015 WOLA-Duke Human Rights Book Award and the 2016 Best Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association’s Recent History and Memory Section. Weld is currently writing her second book, Ruins and Glory: The Long Spanish Civil War in Latin America, which examines the impact and legacies of the Spanish Civil War in the Americas from the 1930s through the present. Born and raised in Canada, Weld holds a BA from McGill University and a PhD from Yale University. At Harvard, she offers courses in modern Latin American history, US-Latin American relations, archival theory, and historical methods.