CLACS Blog

Armillas-Tiseyra_Magali_Argentina_05.25.09.2, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

I arrived in Buenos Aires a week ago, and will be here until June 11. My project is to conduct research on references to Facundo, o civilización y barbarie (1845) in the letters of Domingo F. Sarmiento, president of Argentina 1868-1874. Sarmiento wrote Facundo while in exile in Chile from the regime of Juan Manuel Rosas.
Ostensibly the biography of a provincial caudillo, Juan Facundo Quiroga, the text is also a denunciation of the dictator. Through its biographical description of Quiroga, his context, and rise to power, Facundo presents an archaeology of despotism as a political and cultural phenomenon. It provides a foundational binary paradigm—civilización o barbarie—for much subsequent political and cultural thought in Latin America. My research interest is in tracing the (competitive) tension between the author and his subject(s), and I am particularly interested in the correspondence because it is here that Sarmiento occasionally addressed his motivations. While as a literary scholar, the primary component of my work is close attention to the text itself, my hope is that this archival work will enrich my reading and provide new entrances into a (and much written about) canonical text.
I have spent the my first week in Buenos Aires learning how to get around the city and doing preliminary work at my primary research site: the archives at the Museo Histórico Sarmiento in the Belgrano section of the city.
Thus far, I have been fortunate to find that most of the clusters of correspondence I was interested in reading have been edited and published as volumes, often with limited distribution and almost impossible to find elsewhere. These, however, are held by the Museo and I should be able to gather copies (photocopy or photograph) of most of the relevant material to have on hand when I return to New York. Among the useful material I have viewed this week are Valentín Alsina’s notes to Sarmiento for the second edition of the Facundo (microfiche) and an edited volume (1936) of Sarmiento’s letters of Mary Mann, wife of Horace Mann, who translated the Facundo into English in 1868; I had thought I would need to access this material in the Archivo General de la Nación and was happy to find it in a more workable form. I have also found a digital archive of Sarmiento’s work available online which provides keyword-searchable PDFs of several of Sarmiento’s works—a wonderful time-saver.
In the coming week I will be making my way through the large amount of material I have located thus far; once the archive’s catalogue is back up and running I will be using it to make a wider search of the correspondence. I will also visit and register with the Biblioteca Nacional. Finally, in the coming week I will also be meeting with local scholars who work on nineteenth century literature in Argentina, with whom my professors at NYU helped me get in touch. I am looking forward to the conversation and new leads.

VanderJagt_Costa Rica_05_09, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

Hello from Quepos, Costa Rica! I arrived in Costa Rica 2 weeks ago, first participating in a language immersion program and home stay, while conducting preliminary fieldwork components. This week marks the true beginning of my interview and surveying process.
My research question concerns environmental consciousness of Costa Ricans, specifically focusing on the opinions of residents of the adjacent towns of Manuel Antonio (home of the second most visited national park in Costa Rica) and Quepos. I am most interested in the disconnect between extreme environmental ethic apparent within the programs in Manuel Antonio National Park, versus the everyday actions of residents which live around its borders.
I am happy to report that preliminary interviews and discussions have revealed an almost unanimous belief that, in accordance with my hypothesis, the majority of Costa Rican citizens do not have an embedded environmental consciousness. Most respondents feel that the level of environmental consciousness is on the rise, many attributing this growth to the steady rise of the tourism industry. One respondent explained that the large numbers of ¨ecologically conscious¨ tourists who visit Costa Rica have had a direct impact on the growth of Costa Rican environmental awareness. She explained that hotels cater to ecotourism standards expected by the clientele, and as a result, educate their employees with environmentally conscious information. I have set up an appointment with the Director of ecological programs in Quepos to discuss the following situation: Since my last visit in November, new disposal bins have been set up throughout town. These sets of bins include one for trash, one or recycling, and one for organic waste. However, upon looking into each bin, there is no separation; each contains all types of garbage. While it is apparent that town officials are moving toward more environmentally friendly practices, what can be done to successfully translate this into everyday behavior of town residents? I look forward to an upcoming meeting with the Mayor of Quepos, the Director of Environmental Education at Manuel Antonio National Park and a visit to a local school for a National Park sponsored environmental education presentation. Reporting back soon!

Weible_Christine_Argentina_06.01.09, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

It has been almost two weeks since I got to Buenos Aires. After spending the first few days familiarizing myself with the city and the transportation system – a work in progress – I began to contact and meet with various people involved in the creation of the memorial in the ESMA. As a former clandestine detention center (CDC), the use of the site is the subject of much contention and debate.

One of the first meetings that we had was with Argentine photographer Marcelo Brodsky and Argentine Historian/Archivist Horacio Tarcus. The meeting took place at NYU Buenos Aires. It was a great introduction to my investigation here in Argentina, with both speakers addressing the issues of information, scholarship, the archive and memory of the most recent dictatorship, although from very different angles.

Tarcus' explanation of the “Argentine Paradox” helped me to understand, and to brace myself, for the challenges associated with collecting information in Argentina. The perceived modernity of Argentina is attractive to many scholars, but the residual effects of an authoritarian government have made information highly valuable, and its distribution almost impossible.

This optimistic observation has not impeded my ability to speak with people thus far, however. It seems that when it comes to human rights activists here in Buenos Aires, they idea is to spread information in any way, to anyone who will listen. The eagerness of people such as Carmen Lapaco, of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo Linea Fundadora, to tell their personal stories and to discuss the state of memory and justice in Argentina today is encouraging.

A tour of the ESMA last Friday also helped to consolidate the various explanations of the state that the site is in that I had gathered online before arriving. The proximity of the former CDC to the street and surrounding neighborhood came as a shock. Tom Abercrombie observed that when he had passed by in the early 80's (when the ESMA was still being used by the dictatorship) there had been signs posted threatening to shoot anyone who stopped in front of the gates. But nonetheless the site is visible and there is little doubt that most people knew what it was being used for.

The tour itself traced the desaparecidos' experiences. From entering at the gates, through passing the security checkpoint, being taken into the basement where the torture sessions occurred, and walking through the spaces where prisoners where kept between being forced to do labor for the navy and being tortured, the guide narrated the experience using the testimonies of survivors to give us an idea of their thoughts and feelings, and the conditions they were forced to live through.

I have started to consider the performative aspects of the ESMA tour experience and am looking at Diana Taylor's work to try and frame it out. It's a work in progress, which will require me to return at least once or twice more to the ESMA while continuing my investigatory interviews. I am really interested in finding out whether the guides allow the narratives they give to be influenced by the people on their tours, how the testimonies of the survivors were selected, and the progress of the commission in charge of the memorial.

Hayman_Uruguay_06.09, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

Hello all! I’ve been in Montevideo, Uruguay since May 9th, not including a week in Argentina attending activities with local scholars and fellow grad students at NYU’s Buenos Aires campus. My first week in Montevideo was spent conducting preliminary fieldwork and setting up interviews with members of a long list of organizations to discuss the political and social dimensions of the Ley de Caducidad (Expiry Law), a controversial 1986 law that extends legal immunity to the Uruguayan armed forces for crimes committed during the country’s 1973-85 civic-military dictatorship. Thanks to wonderful help from activist Andrea Caraballo and journalist/professor Lawrence Weschler in New York, I have been able to contact members of a number of groups that form the Coordinadora Nacional por la Anulación de la Ley de Caducidad, the umbrella coalition that is campaigning to annul the law via national referendum on October 25th. So far, I have interviewed the secretary of Amnesty International Uruguay and will speak to the last AI president about the organization’s role in the political mobilization to collect signatures. I also plan to speak to the PIT-CNT, the national labor union that helped initiate the campaign for signatures, the Latin America Coordinator at SERPAJ (Servicio Paz y Justicia Uruguay), active in a prior unsuccessful 1989 campaign to repeal the Ley de Caducidad, academic experts like Marcelo Viñar, Alvaro Rico, Hugo Achugar, and journalists Natalia Castelgrande, Alberto Silva, Roger Rodriguez, and Eduardo Galeano. Interviews with smaller and lesser-known activist groups that are active in the current campaign have yielded very interesting conversations about the nature of political change in Uruguay and national identity. Two groups, Conbronca, a collective of digital artists and filmmakers, and Contraimpunidad, a small organization of activists interested in human rights in Mexico, are made up primarily of young Uruguayans who have no personal memory of the dictatorship themselves, but are actively trying to preserve and transmit the memory of state repression to their own generation. On May 20, I participated in the annual Marcha de Silencio, held every year in homage to Uruguay’s disappeared. There I had the chance to interview younger members of the PVP (Partido por la Victoria del Pueblo), one of the political parties most harshly repressed during the dictatorship, as well as two former political prisoners who I hope to speak to more in depth. In the next two weeks, I hope to visit important memory sites in Montevideo, develop a specific questionnaire to be completed by my interview subjects, and make contact with politicians and military figures on the other side of the debate. I’ve also created an experimental research blog for my project – it’s informal and I’m still figuring out how it should function (travel journal/news/analytical/hybrid?), but it would be great to have feedback from other students as my research progresses and inevitable challenges present themselves: http://memoryinmontevideo.blogspot.com/ Thanks!

Lasater_Amy_Peru_0604, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

Hello from Lima, Peru! I’ve been here for two weeks now, and I’m pleased to report that I’m finally starting to get a sense of the city and the people who live here. I should begin by saying that one of my goals for the summer was to sort out my initial thoughts about my dissertation research (which is still a couple of years in the future), and one of the ideas I’ve been interested in exploring is how perceptions of national and regional identity are reflected in Peruvian food corporations’ advertising practices and research and development plans. Accordingly, I’ve been trying not only to familiarize myself with food and ads here but also to get a sense of what, exactly, Lima’s identity might be and how that fits into consumption practices.

To that end, last Saturday (May 30) I found myself in Lima’s Plaza de Armas to celebrate one of Peru’s newest holidays, National Potato Day. The program included a parade, a speech from the Minister of Culture, a play about the benefits of potatoes for Peru’s economy, statements from representatives from private corporations, and a surprise visit from an actress from Ayacucho. (The picture I’ve included is from the parade; the potato-shaped vendors carts are actually used in Lima’s downtown.)

In large part, the speakers discussed the need to reinvigorate a sense of national pride in the potato. Although the potato originated in Peru, its consumption in many parts of the country (including Lima) has been decreasing in favor of imported rice and noodles. This decrease in consumption is in turn catastrophic for the mountain communities who rely on potato farming for their survival. Accordingly, National Potato Day exists as a means of trying to promote potato consumption throughout the country – largely (as far as I can tell) through the device of marketing to the rich rather than reaching out specifically to the poor. Speakers throughout the day emphasized the fact that Andean potatoes’ exotic qualities could attract tourists and provoke new gastronomic delights. Furthermore, they suggested that farmers would be able to earn more money for their crops if their potatoes were packaged in plastic and sold in value-added forms like potato chips. The overall effect was to cast the consumption of potatoes as something that was not only patriotic but also clever; the speakers encouraged the audience not only to eat Peruvian potatoes but also to do new, creative things with them.

Overall, the ceremony articulated Peruvian identity as an amalgamation of unique historical and natural resources and modern ingenuity. But I was intrigued by the way that it also hinted at a tension between the ways that Peruvian identity is often articulated (through the evocation of Andean indigeneity) and the relative lack of indigenous cultural displays in Lima itself. For instance, the play included an unflattering and stereotyped pair of bumbling altiplano characters, and the actress chided the audience for not speaking Quechua, Peru’s indigenous language. These are the sorts of things that I’m hoping to look at further during the rest of my stay in Lima; with luck, maybe I’ll have material with which to address them in my next post!

Armillas-Tiseyra_Magali_Argentina_06-07-2009, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

Hello all,

As I near the end of my time in Buenos Aires, I am both a little overwhelmed and overwhelming pleased with the amount of material and information I have been able to gather in the last few weeks. It has been a productive trip, and I am looking forward to returning to New York to begin carefully analyzing and writing about this material.
I have focused my research in the Archive and the library of the Museo Histórico Sarmiento, where I have been fortunate to find a lot of the what I was looking for in edited—as opposed to the original document or on microfilm—form, although in vary rare editions I would have been unlikely to have access to elsewhere. This means I have also been able to photocopy some of the material, which will be of much help when I begin writing. In addition, the staff at the Museo has been immensely helpful and welcoming, which has made my work easy. I had expected to spend much more time running around Buenos Aires, but have instead found that the Museo could provide me with most of the material I was seeking.
In my time here, one of the most useful pieces of material I have looked at has been the physical (paper) catalogue of the Archive. When I arrived, the electronic database, which is keyword-searchable, was down and I was initially disappointed by the technical challenge. However, combing through the entire catalogue—which includes keywords and summaries for each of the pieces in the Archive’s collective—proved to be immensely productive, as it drew my attention to documents and keywords I would not otherwise have thought to look at or for. Challenges this such as this have helped me broaden my search and open my thinking to more innovative angles and approaches.
The greatest pleasure of my time in Buenos Aires has been meeting with local scholars, which I mentioned in my last post, to discuss my research. Conversation with experts in the field and the difference of perspective has been immensely refreshing. For example, Adriana Amante, a Sarmiento scholar who teaches at the Universidad de Buenos Aires as well as NYU Buenos Aires, was particularly helpful in (re)opening my thinking and my search toward Sarmiento’s other published texts as potential resources for my research project.
In the remaining week I will be looking at a final selection of letters I’ve made from my reading of the catalogue and also hope to take a look at the original edition(s) of the Facundo, which are held in the library of the Museo. Finally, I will be spending some time in several of Buenos Aires’s many bookstores, browsing for hard-to-get and unexpected finds.

Attached to this post is a photograph of the main room of the Archive at the Museo, where I have done most of my work. Over the desk hangs a late portrait of Sarmiento in military uniform, one of many that are scattered around the offices of the Museo.

VanderJact_CostaRica_06_09, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

Nearing the end of my time in Quepos, Costa Rica I reflect on the changes in my thought processes, obstacles encountered and adaptations made throughout my research here. An initial obstacle coming into the experience was my language level. I hoped, rather fool-heartedly, to remedy this problem to a sufficient extent during my first two weeks in a language immersion and home stay program. However, as all who have undergone the process of learning a second language know, two weeks is far from enough! While my knowledge of the language has improved by leaps and bounds, the process of face to face interviewing has been a continual struggle throughout my time in the field. During my interview with the Mayor of Quepos, Oscar Monge, I realized that I needed to make a change in my approach. Originally, I had planned to base the majority of my field research on formal interviews and participant observation with a modest number of supplementary surveys. However, realizing the language barrier’s effect on my investigation, I shifted toward privileging the collection of surveys over my original intention to gather the majority of my information through formal interviews. I was at first hesitant to make this switch, realizing the complications that accompany the use of surveys, including loaded questions, leading answers, and the contrast between qualitative and quantitative data that results from this research method. But, what other way to determine its usefulness, than to try?
With renewed inspiration I hit the streets of Quepos and Manuel Antonio daily, walking from shop to shop, street to street, introducing myself and my research to anyone who would listen. With all of my initial hesitations at the forefront of my mind, I was met with a completely unexpected enthusiasm and support from local residents. After spending 3 weeks gathering surveys, I am still amazed at the level of acceptance and cooperation that I encountered; of approximately 230 potential participants, a total of 200 surveys were collected. Throughout the surveying process I was able to meet an enormous subsection of people who, if I had proceeded with my original strategy, would have been unfortunately absent from my work. In addition to collecting a huge amount of data from local residents, the survey acted as an entry point to further conversation about environmental consciousness in the area, as well as resident’s perceptions of tourism’s role in their daily lives. In hindsight, I realize that every cloud does have a silver lining: the obstacles that I encountered led to a more fruitful method of immersing myself in the local community, an absolutely essential element for my particular line of questioning.
In addition to my survey collection, I altered my in-depth interview method as well. The majority of interviews I conducted after the first two weeks have been via e-mail, a process which each participant has kindly agreed to. Finally, as pictured above, the Director of the Environmental Education Program at Manuel Antonio National Park, Javier Herrera, allowed me to attend his presentations on the importance of environmental preservation and protection at two local schools. The presentation pictured above was targeted at primary school children in Quepos, complete with interactive question and answering as well as a natural habitat activity shown in the above photo. I look forward to my time back in the states to compile my survey data, connect already visible and interesting patterns in responses, and solidify connections between conversation and observation. Pura Vida!

Armillas-Tiseyra_Argentina_06.15.09, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

Hello all,

After spending almost a month in Buenos Aires, researching in the archive, I am back in New York, and beginning to pull together the information and material I gathered in my time away.
Reflecting on my work, I am surprised by how different my experience was from what I had expected. In preparing for my departure—pulling together bibliographies, beginning to identify documents I wanted to look at in the archive, etc.—I had thought I would get as much writing as investigation done while I was away. However, once in Buenos Aires, I found that my focus quickly shifted to gathering as much material as possible and to taking advantage of my time in there by meeting with professors, exploring bookstores, etc. Over the course of my time there, I increasingly made an effort to allow my research and my thinking to “wander,” so to speak. I found that I had vastly underestimated the importance of this intellectual “wandering” that time in the archive (or the field) researching allows. I found quite a bit of material pertaining to my initial questions, but I also encountered unexpected details that, while perhaps not immediately useful to the topic(s) on which I am working, gave me a more textured understanding of Sarmiento in general.
When I initially formulated my project, I wanted to find and analyze Sarmiento’s discussion of the Facundo in his correspondence, as a means for beginning to think about the particular tension between the various “protagonists” (Facundo Quiroga, the biographical subject, but also Juan Manuel de Rosas and Sarmiento himself, both of whom lurk in the background) of the text. This had roughly two components: (1) the discussion of the Facundo as an important social/political “tool”—i.e. as an integral part of Sarmiento’s broader political and cultural program, for which, for example, the translations of the Facundo in Sarmiento’s lifetime were important starting points, and (2) the discussion of the internal dynamics of the text itself, particularly in terms of Sarmiento’s aggressive focus on Quiroga versus Rosas. I, perhaps predictably, found much more of the former than the latter. What became increasingly clear to me as I was working, however, was that the Facundo (the text) is itself the most valuable resource for exploring my questions—close and critical reading being central to my work as a literary scholar. In the coming weeks, I look forward to developing my close reading of the tension between the various “protagonists” of the Facundo in conjunction with the material I gathered on the trip, and to presenting this research in October.

Attached to this post is a photograph of the first publication of the Facundo—it was originally serialized in the Chilean newspaper El Progreso; it appears in the bottom third of the page—one of the many documents I was able to look at in archives and library of the Museo Histórico Sarmiento.

Vazquez-Rojas_Mexico061609, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

Today it has been exactly two weeks since I arrived in Pátzcuaro to start my field research about the interpretation of plurals in P’urhépecha, also known as Tarascan. P’urhépecha is a language isolate -it has no known linguistic relatives, and it is spoken in the state of Michoacán, in Western Mexico, by approximately 100.000 speakers.

The first days of my stay here were devoted to find speakers of the language that would have the patience and time to help me out with my research. Some people kindly agreed to work with me. Two of them are from the village of Ihuatzio, and three others from the small town of Puácuaro. The two locations are approximately 50km (31 miles) from each other, but the variants of P’urhépecha spoken in each of them vary, sometimes in aspects that turn out to be of comparative importance to my research.

My research is about how Tarascan plural nouns are interpreted, in comparison to Spanish plural nouns, and this involves a survey of the contexts in which plural morphemes can and cannot occur in this language. The hypothesis that I am trying to test is that plural nouns in P’urhépecha have a different interpretation and syntactic behaviour from their Spanish and English counterparts. Tarascan plurals have a more limited occurrence than Spanish plurals. Many of the nouns that in Spanish could bear a plural morpheme –s without a problem, (say calabazas, ‘pumpkins’) in Tarascan can only bear the plural affix –icha under very particular conditions. One of those conditions is that the noun (without the plural) refers to a collection of countable things. And many of the things that in Spanish (or English) are considered countable, in P’urhépecha are not seen as such. For instance, the nouns for pumpkins, beans, avocados, flowers, tortillas, onions, and fruits and vegetables in general are not necessarily considered countable in P’urhépecha, and they are seen as a non-delimited collection of things: a mass, so to speak. These nouns can be used in their non-plural form and refer to a non-delimited collection of things that can contain one or more than one element, more or less in the same way in which English treats nouns like sand, or rice.

However, in some contexts the plural morpheme –icha can occur with one of these nouns, but then necessarily the resulting noun refers to a collection of more than one element: a strictly plural entity. For instance, we can say that John harvests avocadoes for a living using any of the sentences in (1) or in (2):

(1) Jwanu pikwá-sïn-ti kupánda
Juan harvest-HAB-3IND avocado
‘Juan harvests avocadoes’ (lit: Juan harvests avocado)

(2) Jwanu pikwá-sïn-ti kupánda-icha-ni
Juan harvest-HAB-3IND avocado-PL-ACC
‘Juan harvests avocadoes’

This use of the plural stands in contrast to languages like English, where one can say “dogs have tails” without entailing that each dog has more than one tail. In Tarascan it is infelicitous to utter (3), since it entails that each dog has a plurality of tails. The only right way to convey that general statement is by means of (4), where the noun ‘tail’ is in its non-plural form:

(3) # wíchu-icha chéeti-icha juká-s-ti
dog-PL tail-PL have-ASP-3IND
‘Dogs have tails’

(4) wíchu-icha chéeti juká-s-ti
dog-PL tail have-ASP-3IND
‘Dogs have tails’ (lit: dogs have tail)

So far, I have been able to test that in Tarascan some nouns that are considered non- countable can only take plural forms when they really involve more than one individualized element. The non-plural marked forms, however, are not necessarily interpreted as ‘singular’, since they can make reference to sets of one or more element (like in sentence1). The plural marker in Tarascan is thus not the exact correspondent of Spanish –s or English –z.

In order to make this inquiry, I have designed questionnaires and asked the speakers to translate some sentences from Spanish to Tarascan and vice-versa. But translations are not enough as semantic data. Hence, I have also designed some interviews where I show pictures and ask the informants to describe what they see. In order to collect negative evidence as well (that is, not only what can be said in a context in P’urhépecha, but also judgments about what cannot be said), I make some minor modifications on the sentences they provide me, adding or deleting plural morphemes in the scenarios at hand.

So far, my stay in the P’urhépecha area has let me attest directly that common place that says that different languages partition the surrounding world in different ways. The most interesting part of this statement is of course, to find out how that different semantic partitioning helps us understand how language in general is structured, which universal principles are observed cross-linguistically, and in which aspects languages like Spanish and Tarascan vary. Needless to say, this field trip has been an extremely enriching experience, not only in my academic formation, but also in my understanding of a different culture through the language they use.

Abbreviations used:
PL- plural
ASP – aspect
HAB – habitual
IND – indicative
3- third person
ACC- accusative case

Hayman_Uruguay_06.09-1, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

Greetings from Uruguay! I have now been in Montevideo for over a month and am attempting to take stock of what is and is not working well as I reach the halfway point of my research in the field. In the past two weeks, I have had the opportunity to carry out more in-depth interviews with important political and social actors in the campaign to annul the Expiry Law (mentioned in my previous blog post, below), including Marisa Ruiz, the former president of Amnesty International Uruguay, Oscar Urtazún from Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos, several members of the national labor union PIT-CNT, a member of the Partido Comunista Uruguay active in the campaign, and academic experts Marcelo Viñar and Maren Ulriksen, all of whom were incredibly generous with their time and resources.
Perhaps my most fruitful conversation in the last two weeks was with Elbio Ferrario, the current director of MUME (Central Cultural Museo de la Memoria), which opened in 2007 and receives funding through the Intendencia Municipal de Montevideo. Unlike ESMA in Buenos Aires, MUME does not occupy a former detention and torture site. Also unlike ESMA, it is open to organized school groups of children younger than 16, so there are lots of very young children from the neighborhood at the site, engaged in art classes and workshops or playing on the extensive museum grounds. The neighborhood where MUME is located is extremely distant from downtown Montevideo and is both socially and economically marginalized – in fact, the museum has implemented a breakfast program for the local children who visit because they haven’t eaten at home. Ferrario told me, memorably, that the children with whom he discusses human rights often ask him why their human rights are being violated.
I will discuss my visit to the museum more on my blog, but Ferrario has motivated me to think about how memory and human rights discourses intersect with contemporary social problems like violence, insecurity, and economic marginalization on the periphery of Montevideo.

Some of the major challenges of my research include:

1) Focusing my project. I attribute part of this challenge to the fact that I’m simultaneously conducting a reporting assignment for the Journalism Department while I’m researching for CLACS – I am more comfortable using reporting techniques to approach my subjects because I’m not trained as an anthropologist/sociologist, but I’m not sure if this will yield the results I need for both projects.

2) Conducting better-targeted interviews. To optimize the time I have, I tend to ask people two sets of questions – one for the reporting assignment, one for CLACS, but this makes everything feel very diffuse. I now explain both projects to my subjects, but I think I need to start separating the people I want to talk to for one project from the other, and to narrow down the information I specifically need from each person.

3) Getting a broad sense of the variety of opinions on the Expiry Law. Professional survey results are published periodically online, but I need to conduct my own surveys, and still haven’t put together a set of questions that will be useful for BOTH of my projects. I still need to talk to the Ministry of Defense and members of the armed forces – I’m planning to do this at an event on Friday.

4) Balancing interview time and independent archival research. I still haven’t determined how critical archival research will ultimately be in this project – thus far, I’ve left it on the back burner, which may come back to haunt me.

Any feedback or advice would me much appreciated!

Lasater_Amy_Peru_June23, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

Hello again from Peru! I’ve now been here for about a month and have just finished my work in Lima. (I’m changing locations for the last two weeks of research.)

One of the most interesting and intellectually productive events that I attended in Lima since I last wrote was a series of lectures at the Catholic university (PUCP), which dealt with the phenomenon of “lovemarks,” commercial brands that inspire a high degree of consumer loyalty and affection. PUCP had identified several Peruvian brands that they considered lovemarks, including Gloria (a dairy brand), Inca Kola (a ubiquitous and frequently maligned yellow cola), Sublime (chocolate bars with peanuts), and Crystal (beer); representatives from each of the brands spoke about the ways that the companies have worked to strengthen consumer “love” for their products. Each of the brands emphasized that they were capitalizing on the consumer’s sense of being Peruvian and on the sense that consuming these products was a way of expressing that Peruvianness. The woman from Crystal spoke particularly passionately about the ways that certain brands can unite a country; she felt that Peruvians were always told that they were a nation too diverse to unite under any common cause or way of thinking, but she thought that particular brands had the potential to bridge those divides. All of the speakers agreed that this moment in Peru’s history is a particularly fruitful one for “lovemarks” because it is a time of optimism; the years of terrorism have ended, and Peruvians are succeeding economically.

For me, the most shocking aspect of the presentation was the fact that these Peruvian brands were being held up as catalysts for positive social change the way a government might taut a particularly effective policy. (The Inca Kola representative actually implied that their campaign had done something to create the country’s feeling of optimism, rather than simply drawing upon it!) But although I was cynical about the ability of a brand to really bridge social and political difference, I was also impressed by the passion and determination that these representatives brought to their work. Not coincidentally, these are the same characteristics that they ascribed to Peruvian identity in general; the speakers were very explicit about fighting being a major element of Peruvianness, and in that context it made sense that a brand could be a symbol of a kind of national feeling that transcends regional differences as long as it sticks to a message of the passion and determination used in winning a fight. Of course, once I had it spelled out for me that “fighting” (luchando) was the basis of the identity that was being evoked in these brands, I started to see it everywhere, from the way that people secured their places in line to the way that my Peruvian friends talked about earning money and getting a good job. I saw it in a museum exhibit that I attended about the years of terrorism. And when I arrived in Cuzco yesterday, I saw it manifest itself in a slightly different way, in the way that groups of highland peasants who had traveled to the city to protest the government articulated their own fight, shouting that they were “los que siempre lucharon” and that there was “unidad en la lucha."

In short, I am starting to figure out what it means to be Peruvian and the place that both history and commerce can have in that understanding. In the coming days, I’m hoping to solidify my thinking a bit as Cuzco celebrates Inti Raymi (a celebration of both the winter solstice and the city).

Weible_Christine_Argentina_061309, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

My time spent in Cordoba Capital last weekend provided me with an interesting pair of memory sites to contrast with those that I've been learning about here in Buenos Aires. I toured both Paseo Buen Pastor, and the Archivo Provincial de la Memoria de Cordoba.

Paseo Buen Pastor is an ex-CCD/ women's prison. (Paseo Buen Pastor). It was inaugurated as a cultural space in 2007. Situated in the middle of the busy zone of Nueva Cordoba, one really would not guess that it was the site of an ex-CCD. Some of the original architecture remains, but it has been renovated and added to in a very modern style. The paseo contains upscale shops, expensive restaurants, art galleries, and venues for music and theater. There is also green space where people congregate to drink mate and watch the aguas danzantes, a fountain that is programmed to perform a nightly show with music and lights.

There is very little indication of Paseo Buen Pastor's prior use as an ex-CCD. There is an information desk that provides information about the history of the site as well as about other cultural and touristic excursions in the city and in the surrounding province. The emphasis is on creating a gathering space for people, however, not exploring the recent violent past.

At Plaza San Martin there is a former clandestine detention center that functioned in the Cabildo, the center of municipal affairs in the city. It was fairly typical in its usage as a secret place for interrogation and torture during the dictatorship. The interesting part of its recent inauguration as a memory site is the emphasis on the personalities, histories, and families of the victims. The organization in charge of the site is the Archivo Provincial de la Memoria.

Various family members have put together albums dedicated to their missing children to put on display in one of the rooms of the site. These albums look like scrapbooks that any family might have, and include things such as newspaper clippings, baby photos, report cards and drawings. I met Americo Losada, the father of one of the desaparecidos held at the Cabildo, while checking out the site. He showed me his son's album, proudly pointing out that his son had been very tall, had never failed a class, and had been a dedicated activist in various social causes. The conversation that we had about his son was very similar to any conversation that one might have with a proud father. He didn't really speak about his son's disappearance or its effect on his family. The emphasis was on his life. The photo posted above is of Americo displaying the album.

Zeichner_Brazil_062409, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

I arrived in Brazil on June 2, 2009. And, even though this would not be my first in the country, I have a clear recollection of feeling a strong sense of anxiety upon arrival, likely caused by my awareness of the difficulty one experiences in Brazil when trying to plan a research routine in advance. Remembering my previous experiences, I already knew that life in Brazil tends to be full of unforeseen contingencies that are often the result of unpredictable happenings.

My project in Brazil aims to explore the formation of alternative gender constructions in the industrial suburbs surrounding Sao Paulo during Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985). During the military regime, many left-wing political organizations, among which university student activists were the dominant participants, embraced the belief that the true revolutionary “vanguard” could only be found among popular sectors. This ideological approach motivated several leftist groups to send members into factories in the Greater Sao Paulo Area to effectively become factory workers. For those that went into factories, this meant not only a rethinking of class identities, but also of appropriate ways to perform masculinity and femininity. While their inspiration to engage in this type of political and social organizing was, ultimately, based on a romanticized and essentialized understanding of what they considered to be the “working class,” these individuals toiled and marched side-by-side with rank-and-file workers and union leaders, and ultimately contributed to shaping the identity of a new age in labor-oriented activism.

Originally, my plan while in Brazil was to spend the first three weeks in Rio de Janeiro, after which I would travel to Sao Paulo for the final three weeks. However, as I feared following my arrival, events in Brazil are often unforeseeable. My first day in the archives in Rio de Janeiro was a success. After close to an hour of negotiating with the archivists in the State Archive of Rio, I convinced them to let me work with a collection of documents that was in the process of being microfilmed. Nonetheless, when I returned the next day to work with the same documents, I was "regretfully" informed that the collection was now “off limits.” Adapting to the situation, I decided to cut my time in Rio short and traveled to Sao Paulo where I was confident I would be able to work in certain archives that were already familiar to me. Little did I know that the public university school students were about to go on strike, which would bar me from accessing the Edgard Leuenroth Archive, one of the essential archival sources for my research.
While I am currently not able to do research in either of these archives for certain unforeseen contingencies, I am discovering new ways to make my time here worthwhile. I have already conducted two interviews with former activists, as well as found several new archives that are proving to be quiet useful. However, only time will tell what future unpredictable happenings shape the next steps.

kirchner, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

Argentina just had elections this past Sunday, which resulted in a significant loss of power for the Kirchners. This is significant for my project because, as I have been realizing over these past few weeks, human rights projects here are tied to politics in a way that makes them vulnerable to shifts in popularity and power experienced by their political allies. The Kirchners have used human rights as a main component of their platform since assuming power six years ago. Since then various groups, such as the Asociacion Madres de Plaza de Mayo, have accepted both their money and support. This has proven both beneficial and complicated. Some members of Argentine society perceive alliances between politicians and human rights organizations as merely a strategy to gain sympathy and/or popularity while pursuing a less heartwarming agenda behind the scenes. Others see a partnership between the Kirchners and various human rights organizations as natural and beneficial to the causes promoted by these organizations. Either way, a shift in power to politicians who are less inclined to support a human rights agenda raises the issue of how these organizations will fare without the benefit of political allies.

As I wrap up my time here in Buenos Aires I am both grateful to all of the people who have been so generous with their time and resources and sad to be leaving with so many questions left to explore. I have been lucky enough to have spent time with a variety of people, from representatives of human rights organizations such as the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo and HIJOS, to the Defensora del Pueblo de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. I've even had some extremely interesting conversations with several taxi drivers.

One challenging aspect of studying collective memory is trying to define what comprises the actual collectivity, and how to measure or gauge its various memories. This challenge has also opened up various new ways of thinking about the human rights movement here in Argentina, and the impulse to memorialize the violence of the last dictatorship. Who the repression of that era affected, or continues to affect, is in and of itself, a tricky question to answer. I have struggled to understand how so many Argentines exclude themselves from memory of the dictatorship based on their sense that it has no bearing on their lives, or that of their loved ones. I've only begun to explore this aspect of collective memory, and will sadly not be able to pursue it in person, but I know that it has important implications for my project as a whole.

Lasater_Amy_Peru_June30, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

Today is my last full day in Cuzco (and Peru, for that matter) and I’m trying to piece together everything that I’ve seen over the past month and a half. One of the objectives that I had had going into these six weeks was to get a better sense of the ways that Peru’s coast and mountain regions interact with each other in the articulation of national identity, and going from Lima to Cuzco with that specific goal in mind was definitely an eye-opening experience, although I’m still trying to determine to what extent I’m seeing only the contrasts that I want to see.

One of the highlights of my trip has been the festival of Inti Raymi, which I attended on June 24. I had read a lot about Inti Raymi (the “Fiesta del Sol” -- or “Sun Party!” -- as it is translated on a poster attempting to attract tourists to a rave), but I had never actually seen it. It’s an invented tradition, a supposed Inca ritual that actually started in the 1950s, but now tourists from all over the country and world come to see the “traditional” Inca dances and ceremonies, accompanied by a narration entirely in Quechua. (To my disappointment, this narration was not very well amplified and thus hardly intelligible, but since most of the audience doesn’t speak Quechua anyway, I suspect that the referential content of the words was not really the point.)

I was pleased to finally see exactly what goes on during Inti Raymi – the dances, the “llama sacrifice,” the pouring of chicha onto an altar – but what was far more interesting turned out to be the fact that the semiotic vocabulary of the ceremony extended to much of the activity that occurred both before and after June 24 itself. The days leading up to Inti Raymi are the “Fiestas del Qosqo,” and the parades that go on during that day are accompanied by the constant refrain of Inti Raymi: “Kawsachun Qosqo!” [Make Cuzco live!] Even apart from these official parades, though, I saw two other parades in the square this week that deliberately echoed the official events to make very different points about the city. On the day I arrived here, a group of campesinos marched the in square in a direct echo of the official, celebratory parades, emphasizing the fact that many of the descendents of the Incas (as opposed to the costumed dancers who normally occupy the middle or upper classes here) are being ignored by the government and thus have no cause to celebrate. Later in the week, I saw a parade that used the refrain “Kawsachun Christo!” to emphasize Cuzco’s religious identity (although, by using the Quechua phrase, they were obviously linking Christianity to the Inca past, something I’ve explicitly heard many tour guides in the churches do as well).

Having timed my visit here for Inti Raymi, I’m leaving Cuzco with the sense that the city has a very regionally-focused identity, while the events I attended in Lima tended to have a much more national scope (even if that scope sometimes framed non-limeños as worthy of charity or pity). That said, I know from my past experience in Cuzco that this week has contained an anomalous amount of collective effervesence, so I’m planning to look at my notes from this year in combination from my thoughts from last year.

Vazquez-Rojas_Mexico070509, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

My four-week stay in the Tarascan area is now over. I was able to find answers to some questions, but as in every productive investigation, I was left with more open puzzles than questions solved. For instance, I corroborated that a nominal phrase in the plural form is always interpreted independently on the interpretation of other operators in the sentence. In that respect, Tarascan plurals are different from English plurals and Spanish plurals. I also realized, as I posted before, that the Tarascan language categorizes differently certain aspects of the surrounding world. For instance, in Tarascan one cannot count things like avocadoes. The strict correlate of the English expression “three avocadoes” is not possible in this language. To express this concept, a Tarascan speaker would say something like “Three round-pieces-of avocado”. The expression corresponding to “round-pieces-of” (irhákwa) is called a Classifier.

Tarascan has at least two classifiers, expressions that divide a homogeneous mass into countable parts. The choice of the classifier depends on the form of the countable units that one wants to divide up from the mass concept. There is a classifier for round things, irhákwa and another one for elongated pieces (the one used to count thinks like ‘tortilla’ or ‘corn’): ichákwa. A good question now is if the similarity between these two words motivates partitioning them into different morphemes, which in turn would entail that irhakwa and ichakwa are complex expressions composed by multiple units of meaning.

Classifiers in languages like Tarascan are crucial in the understanding of plurals, because usually a language that has classifiers does not need to have plural morphology. For instance, Chinese languages have classifiers but do not have plural morphemes. Our most common Indoeuropean languages have plural morphemes, but no classifiers. It has been said that languages have either one or the other because classifiers and plurals serve the same function of making groups of individuated objects. Yet, Tarascan has both of them, an unexpected fact under some assumed typological predictions. The presence of plural morphology and classifiers not only in the same language, but also in the same sentence, is a striking fact and its explanation will definitely call into question some current theories about the cross-linguistic meaning of plural morphology.

The fieldwork stage of the project is now over and now I am devoted to analyzing the data that I gathered on the face of the predictions made by current theories on the semantics of plurals. I am really grateful to CLACS-NYU, the researchers at UNAM with whom I had the opportunity to talk (Cristina Buenrostro, Samuel Herrera, Lucero Meléndez and Rodrigo Romero) and my consultants (Saulina Ascencio, Camerina García, Santiago Marcelino and Juan Bautista) for having made of this research period a wonderful academic and personal experience.

Hayman_Uruguay_07.09, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

On June 26 and 27, the anniversary of the 1973 golpe de estado in Uruguay, I was fortunate enough to be invited to a conference held by the Asociación Psicoanalitica Uruguaya (APU). Entitled “Hacer Memoria”, the weekend-long event that included panel discussions and workshops by important Uruguayan memory scholars, historians, writers, and psychoanalysts such as Maren and Marcelo Viñar, Carina Blixen, Victor Guerra, Alvaro Rico and Daniel Gil. The conference opened with a showing of Mateo Gutiérrez’s documentary “D.F.” (Destino Final), which tells the story of his father’s kidnapping and murder in Buenos Aires in 1976 along with Senator Zelmar Michelini and the young Tupamaro couple William Whitelaw and Rosario Barredo (all Uruguayan citizens living in exile). Twenty years later, Madres y Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos held the first annual March of Memory in Montevideo to commemorate the deaths of the four Uruguayans and remember those who disappeared during the dictatorship. Filmmaker and historian Virginia Martinez, whose documentaries Por Esos Ojos and Memorias de Mujeres I greatly admire, helped facilitate the panel discussion afterward.
Although psychoanalysis has no direct connection to my project, the APU conference was designed to facilitate dialogue about memory, subjectivity and literature across different disciplines. I was able to meet several interesting people at the conference, including playwright and scholar Roger Mirza and Marisa Bukasr of “Memoria en Libertad”, a group founded by the children of the disappeared in Montevideo. I hope to speak to them in the coming weeks about their work.
Along with the conference and a number of interviews, the last two weeks have involved a serious re-assessment of my project on the Ley de Caducidad (Expiry Law) in an attempt to take full advantage of my last month in Montevideo. Well into my research, I am forced to recognize my aversion to contacting politicians and members of the Uruguayan armed forces – and more than anything, my aversion to contacting former known torturers -- to ask them about their opposition to the annulment of the Ley de Caducidad. I realize that journalistic “objectivity” demands that I seek out adversarial perspectives on the law, but I find it impossible treat this project as a debate between two equally valid points of view, and I also recognize time constraints that will keep me from fully absorbing the 20 year’s worth of literature written on the topic. I’ve finally decided to reject the idea of seeking out former oppressors for a wide variety of reasons, both personal and professional, but have made up a list of politicians and civilians opposed to annulling the Ley de Caducidad whose perspectives I hope will inform and enhance my journalistic project. As far as my Master’s thesis for CLACS is concerned, I am now concentrating on a single phenomenon, which is the conversion of the Penal de Punta Carretas into a shopping center in 1994. I expect to mention the referendum on the Ley de Caducidad in this project, but only as part of the greater debate on memory in Uruguay.

Mladic_Peru_071409, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

Hello from Cusco. My name is Christine, and I will be in Cusco for 2 months to study the Quechua language. Along with three other classmates from New York, I am studying at Centro Tinku, a language school that is about a 5-minute walk from the Plaza de Armas. In addition to this intensive program, I am also planning to research photography in Peru for my master’s project. My intention is to explore the many ways that photography may be used in and around Calca, a small town about an hour drive outside of Cusco in the Sacred Valley.

While all four of us from NYU passed the evaluation into the intermediate level, all 10 of us in the class have had a different experience in learning the language. Even though our professor in New York is a native speaker from Cusco, it is incredibly challenging to attempt to converse with Quechua speakers outside of a classroom setting. One of the benefits of studying Quechua in Cusco is the countless opportunities we have to practice. Participating in a homestay, I have the advantage of chatting with my Señora in Quechua over a mate de coca or while learning a new recipe. Quechua speaking taxi drivers, waiters and sellers in the market have generally seemed willing to see how this gringa fares: I would say that I know that I have a lot of learning ahead of me, and I’m excited to have so many chances to actually use the language on a daily basis.

We are now in our second week of classes, and I finally feel like I may have a grip on being here. The first week was intense, to say the least: adjusting to life with a family as part of a homestay, battling stomach complications due to new food and bacteria, fighting off colds and the flu during these frigid winter nights, trying to wrap my head around a new language. I had hoped to be able to start research in Calca almost immediately, but I see that I needed this week to get settled. In addition to the challenges listed above, Peru is also in a time of political discontentment. Last week classes were cancelled one day due to a potential national strike, and today (8 July) Cusco participated in an organized, national strike. To see photos from the strike, visit my flickr site.

Stay tuned for more…

Salazar_Peru_071709, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

Between the years of 1980 and 2000 more than 60,000 Peruvians were murdered and/or disappeared as a result of a bloody internal war started by the guerrilla movement Shining Path. My current research is focused on the testimonials collected by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission given by women affected by the conflict. The main objective of my research project is to explore the crossings between gender and violence in the personal narratives of Peruvian women after those years of terror.
Since my arrival to Lima, I have conducted research at the holdings of Centro de Documentación para la memoria colectiva (Lima, Peru) consulting the transcriptions of thousands of testimonials given to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This Archive holds more than 16,000 testimonials and is organized by geographical location, so I decided to focus on the areas most affected by the conflict as Ayacucho, Apurimac and Huancavelica.

This part of my research has revealed some perverted gender relations during the conflict. The bodies of the Peruvian women were used as a battle camp not just by the Shining Path but also by the Peruvian Army which was supposed to protect the population. In my final report, I will present some of the techniques used by the Shining Path and the Army to develop a strategy of terror.

The next weeks I will continue the research at the Centro de Información, visit the photographic exhibition Yuyanapaq located at the National Museum, and also research some periodical publications at the National Library. The objective of this section will be to explore the configuration of the politics of memory in Peru.

Cokelet_Mexico_071709, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

Greetings from Mexico City. As I write this, my first blog entry, at 7 a.m., from a 10th story apartment overlooking a sunny but smoggy city, I am again reminded of perhaps Mexico’s most telling statistic: 70% of the population is moderately or extremely poor. Combined with another telling figure – nine Mexicans figure in Forbes Magazine’s latest listing of the world’s billionaires – I cannot help but notice that the wage gap, economic inequality, and the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few continue to characterize (if not at least partially determine) Mexico’s development. Outside my window hundreds of market vendors, domestic workers, microbus drivers, and other laborers stream in and out of Metro Chapultepec on their way to conform the country’s informal sector, which numbers 30 million people or two-thirds of working adults. Behind them, in the distance, loom the high-rise office buildings of Polanco and Santa Fe, where the most fortunate of the other one-third (the 15 million who comprise the formal economy) arrive to work in chauffeured SUVs and, in some extreme cases, private helicopters. This contradiction, the disparity between the haves and have nots, certainly motivated me to spend a few weeks this summer trying to get to the bottom of how Mexico’s elite had its cake and ate it too and, ultimately, how this bodes for democracy and development.

I arrived in Mexico City in late May after delaying my trip due to the H1N1 pandemic. Over the past month and a half I have coordinated a research project for U.S. and Mexican human and labor rights organizations about the economic and social composition of the service sector in the Distrito Federal. Though certainly a positive and productive experience, this research has occupied a good deal of my time and energy. Thanks to the generosity of the Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation, I spent an unforgettable two weeks in South Africa as a student delegate to the Academy of Achievement, from which I returned jet-lagged though happy this past weekend. And finally this week I’ve managed to focus my energies on research that I hope will become my Master’s thesis: the origin, development, and scope of Mexico’s most influential albeit hermetic group of business leaders, the Consejo Mexicano de Hombres de Negocio (Mexican Council of Businessmen, or CMHN).

The original 12 members of the CMHN, founded in 1962, with certain additions, subtractions, and generational renewal, today still comprise a decisive bloc within the organization and Mexican society as a whole, advising successive presidential sexenios, sitting on the boards of directors of each other’s corporations, intermarrying and solidifying their power, and many would argue exercising virtual veto power over the country’s economic and political apparatus. Initially my plan this summer was to conduct individual interviews with members of the CMHN and those who know them so as to construct a historical narrative of the organization and a working database of potential variables for subsequent analysis. However, I believe my time will be most productive focusing on documentary collection and the narrative structure of my research. That way I’ll be better informed and prepared when I conduct my interviews.

So, back to the archives for me and, until next time, congratulations and best of luck to all fellow grant recipients.

1. The World Bank. (2005). “Income Generation and Social Protection for the Poor.” 2010 projections.

Colijn_Peru_072009, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

Hello from Cuzco, Peru! I´ve been here for a few weeks now and it´s been somewhat of an adjustment to life here, as it´s my first time in Peru. Along with working on research for my MA project, I´m in an intensive Quechua language course along with two other students from NYU. We take taxis or buses to school or do the hour-long walk when we´re not fighting off illness due to the variety of things that have befallen us here. Trying to get research done has also been somewhat challenging, due to periodic strikes, threatened strikes, or closing (public) school due to the H1N1 flu. My research focus involves bilingual education between Quechua and Spanish, so having the schools closed for two or three weeks doesn´t help, even though it´s certainly a good reason to close school.

This past Sunday the class from our Quechua program went to a small town called Combapata about two hours outside of Cuzco. We visited the two markets they had: the animal and the "stuff" market. The animal market pictured above had mostly cows left by the time we got there. The "stuff" market, on the other hand, was selling everything from fruits and vegetables, guinea pigs and baby chicks, hand-made sweaters and scarves, to cell phones and pirated dvds and cds. We walked through the animal market, drawing lots of stares, as the five of us walking together were quite definitely the only gringos anywhere nearby. We stopped to speak to two vendors selling grapes, and wound up getting to practice speaking some Quechua with them. They asked questions like where we were from, what we were doing in Peru and in Combapata, and were pretty interested in our relationship statuses. They seemed somewhat surprised that none of us had any kids, and asked the couple we had with us if they didn´t have kids because they couldn´t have kids. By the end of the conversation, a crowd of at least 15 or 20 people had gathered to watch the gringos trying to speak Quechua.

We also attended a Catholic mass conducted almost entirely in Quechua. Interestingly, the priest was originally from New Zealand, and had been taught Quechua by one of the teachers in our school in Cuzco. We drew some stares in mass as well, but managed to follow some of the service. It´s definitely not easy to pick out the few words you know from a running stream of religious-oriented speech. According to our Quechua teacher, the priest didn´t have a very good Quechua accent, but it was likely a little easier for us to understand, as it was closer to our own gringo-accented Quechua. Some of the church members and vendors in the market, like the two people selling grapes, were fairly willing to speak Quechua with us, though they spoke Spanish as well. Some of the vendors just shook their heads, said no, or said they didn´t speak Quechua if we asked if they would be willing to speak Quechua with us. That seems to be fairly common in the places that we´ve visited thus far. At least one member of the families that we live with speaks Quechua and is happy to practice with us, but some vendors have no interest whatsoever in speaking in or about Quechua, at least with foreigners.

Our Quechua professor from NYU arrived in Cuzco yesterday. He´s from Calca, a town about 45 minutes or an hour outside of Cuzco, and has invited his students that are here in Cuzco to have lunch with his family in Calca and plans to show us around town and introduce us to people. This should open some doors as far as research goes, and will afford some great opportunities to use Quechua with our professor, his family and other friends around town, so the rest of my time here in Cuzco should be pretty interesting. Good luck to all the rest of the summer travelers!

Zeichner_Brazil_072109, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

During my final weeks in Brazil, the newspaper O Estado de Sao Paulo, broke the story that retired coronel Sebastião Curió, the military official who was in charge of the campaign against the Araguaia guerilla movement from 1972-75, would now, after over 30 years of silence, allow a reporter to review his personal archives, as well as give his own public reflections on the barbarous role the military played during these events. In the days that followed the news story, interest in finding and reopening archival sources from the military dictatorship (1964-1985) became a hot political issue. As a historian, just the thought of gaining access to certain documents produced by certain branches was tantalizing, however, to be perfectly honest, somewhat difficult to imagine. The most useful documents I worked with this time, came from information compiled by the State Political Police divisions (DEOPS/DOPS) from 1964 to 1982. As one of the principal arms of state repression and executors of torture, the documents created by the DEOPS/DOPS forces are, in certain ways, treasure troves of useful information. However, the history behind the opening of DEOPS/DOPS collections is, sadly, one of very few victories. Today, thanks to the hard work and determination of several important activists, the Sao Paulo DEOPS/DOPS collection is almost completely open to the public. However, while the work in Sao Paulo has been successful, efforts in many other states were not. It is also notable that the State Political Police was not the only government agency used by the generals to terrorize the nation. Today, the Lula government continues to restrict the public’s access to research of national security documents. It is interesting to note that after the story of Curió’s intention to allow his personal archives to be reviewed broke, many of the individuals I interviewed on this trip, some of who had previously thought differently, voiced their desire to request their own documents. Now in their sixties and seventies, I spoke with individuals who were excited that I was interested in the history of those who considered themselves the “forgotten heroes,” and were eager to offer me their help in the future. Because a great many of the yet “confidential” national documents are accessible only by request by the featured individual, I expect that the contacts I made on this trip will prove highly valuable in the years to come. And, while the public’s desire not to forget the past will hopefully continue to pressure the government to open archives, I know that if progress is made it will likely be a very long and arduous process. As for myself, I will do what I can through my own contacts to make available the documents I manage to recover. One step at a time.

Hello from Cusco, Peru! My name is Liz, I am a second year MA student in CLACS. I am here in Cusco studying intensive Quechua. In addition to studying Quechua during my first year at NYU, I have also been researching constitutional reform and indigenous activism in Ecuador. I am particularly interested in the acknowledgment of cultural and territorial rights of indigenous peoples in Ecuador’s 1998 and 2008 constitutions. My experience learning Quechua has inspired me to further explore the legal and philosophical debates surrounding the inclusion of cultural rights in recent Andean constitutions.

Even though I have been studying Quechua for a year, the first few weeks of class have been extremely challenging. Everyday we have grammar class for four hours and twice a week we have conversation class for two hours. While the intensity of the course has been extremely helpful, I found it slightly overwhelming at first. I´m finally feeling more comfortable with the pace of the class. I am also living with a family here in Cusco. Technically, there is only one Quechua speaker in the household, Maria Adelma, the grandmother. It has been interesting to observe the multiple levels of Quechua ´proficiency´ in Cusco. For example, Eloy, the father in my family, can understand everything in Quechua but has trouble speaking. Eskarleth, Eloy´s wife, is a science teacher in a local high school and often communicates with her students in Quechua but is reluctant to call herself a Quechua speaker. Maria Adelma, however, speaks proudly in Quechua and laments the fact that her children resisted learning the language. I have heard other people here in Cusco describe similar experiences with Quechua. In this sense, it´s been interesting to observe the range of reactions to my clumsy attempts to speak Quechua; everything from uncontrollable laughter, patient understanding, to outright resistance. But, as my favorite saying in Quechua goes ´pisi pisimanta´, with time I´m confident that my Quechua will improve little by little.

Liz Kelley
MA Candidate, CLACS

Photo: Actor Marçal Costa training for a Teatro da Vertigem production.

Hello from São Paulo! During the past two weeks, I have been researching the space of the body in the work of theater and dance companies here. My primary focus is the group Teatro da Vertigem, but I have also been able to meet and familiarize myself with the work of several other performing artists.

Vertigem is currently developing a new piece after The Castle by Franz Kafka. They view this project as an intervention in the city, as well as a theater piece. The company usually stages its performances in site-specific locations; in the past, these have included a church, prison, and hospital (all at least partly abandoned). This time around, The Castle will be performed on the outside of a glass building, about three stories up. The cast of seven will hang from rock-climbing ropes and harnesses, as well as move in three suspended boxes, such as those used by window cleaners. The audience will be inside the building, looking out at the performance through the glass. This staging is a direct response to the particularities of place of São Paulo and their psychophysical effect on its inhabitants. The glass wall separating those that are inside the bureaucratic “castle” from those who cannot gain access is a powerful one in here. Aware of this basic formulation, Vertigem is exploring more deeply the themes of work and control.

I have been able to observe both the rehearsals at the company’s base/studio and the physical training with the ropes and harnesses, which occurs outside a nearby building. They are about halfway into their eight-month rehearsal process, and I am seeing what a struggle it is to try to adapt their bodies to the shifting ground they will be occupying.

Another prevalent element in Vertigem’s work is their collaborative process, which is an intensive exchange between the director, actors, designers and writers. I interviewed the director about the early phases of this exploratory work, and also observed an individual rehearsal with one of the performers. The rehearsal consisted of a vivência, in which the director led the performer to exhaustion through dancing and then through several improvised scenes that combined her personal memories with the character’s biography. The vivência brought about new images and sensory relations as the performer worked within and beyond the narrow window box that her character’s family occupies during the play. I have yet to see how this translates into the group work, but it was a fascinating investigative process.

Mexico City – Un saludo desde México. There are a host of problems in Latin America, ranging from governance and democracy to market functionality and development. However, one statistic best captures the essence of the problem. According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 80% of Latin American leaders overwhelmingly say that private (de facto) economic groups exercise too much power in Latin America, which “limits the capacity of governments to respond to the demands of their citizens.” In other words, there is a crisis of governability provoked by the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few. Where transparency and accountability do not exist, impunity reigns and de facto powers fill the void. In Mexico, for example, The Global Integrity Report ranks anti-corruption measures and the rule of law as very weak. In order to understand why and how Mexico suffers in these and other similar categories – in other words, the crisis of governability – I have followed the logic of the UNDP and others in an attempt to track the origins (origin?) of Mexico’s de facto powers.

Mexico’s most influential group of business leaders, the Consejo Mexicano de Hombes de Negocio (Mexican Council of Businessmen, CMHN) originated in 1962 during the peak of the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s (P.R.I.) 71-year reign over Mexican politics and government. Unlike the country’s many cámaras, or business associations, which were originally encouraged by the Mexican government during the country’s post-revolutionary political and economic consolidation of the 1920s to promote broad economic and industrial growth, the CMHN was founded four decades later, initially as an informal mouthpiece for Mexico’s economic élite. However, the organization, comprised of the upper crust of Mexico’s richest and most successful families, soon found its legs as a powerful albeit nearly invisible political and economic broker largely credited with shaping and promoting the P.R.I.’s centralized, undemocratic, and corporativist stranglehold on the Mexican presidency. Throughout the years, the CMHN has consistently promoted and financed the country’s political and economic consolidation in the hands of an oligarchy, tending toward centralized power and economic monopoly versus a legitimate democracy and the free market. However, the CMHN has historically encouraged the Mexican government and businesses to seek international financing for economic stability and expansion, willing to encourage foreign investment as long as the Mexican élite continues to control the country’s government and economy.

Since its inception, the CMHN evolved from its informal roots to become an organized, conservative, and influential power behind the scenes of the Mexican government, though it later created the subservient Business Coordinating Council (CCE) to relate with other business and political sectors. The organization rarely participated in or consulted with other business associations, preferring to meet with and influence the president and heads of state directly. Following a period of particular tension during the presidencies of Luis Echevarría Álvarez (1970-76) and José López Portillo (1976-82), when the government invested public capital and nationalized certain industries, the CMHN achieved a permanent consultative status with Mexican presidents in the 1980s, particularly Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-94), who used neoliberal privatization schemes to clearly benefit Mexico’s ruling élite. The CMHN habitually dealt exclusively with the Mexican president until 1994, ignoring other important actors such as the Mexican congress and judiciary. As the P.R.I.’s power began to decline, the CMHN sought to influence and impose upon the national leadership of the conservative National Action Party (P.A.N.) and ultimately deal directly with presidents Vicente Fox de Quesada (2000-06) and Felipe Calderón Hinojosa (2006-12).

The CMHN was founded on September 13, 1962, by 12 business leaders led by Bruno Pagliai, a wealthy Italian-American iron industrialist and close confidant of former president Miguel Alemán Valdés (1946-52). The group’s other founders included, among others, Jorge Larrea, President of Construcciones Jorge Larrea; Agustín Legorreta, Director of the Banco Nacional de México; Rómulo O’Farril, Chairman of the Board of Televisa; Bernardo Quintana, President of Ingenieros Civiles Asociados (ICA); and Juan Sánchez Navarro, Director of Cervecería Modelo. In the decade following its inception, the CMHN incorporated 15 more members, including Prudencio López, president of Gases Mexicanos, and Rolando Vega, director of Banco de Industria y Comercio. These particular families and their businesses are still intimately connected today. Could it be that the origins of Mexico’s de facto powers lie with the CMHN? Hasta la próxima vez . . .

Greetings from Santo Domingo! For the past weeks I have been in the Dominican Republic researching the constitutional reform that proposes to change the definition of Article 11 in the current constitution to state that the children of undocumented immigrants born in the Dominican Republic would not be considered Dominican nationals.

Currently, the majority of undocumented immigrants are Haitian and for many civil society groups this amendment to the constitution is just the last of many attempts to create laws that would legally exclude a population that has been historically marginalized. With this proposed reform the children of undocumented immigrants will never be considered Dominicans and never have the opportunity to exercise their rights as full citizens. This would mean limited access to basic services and a sense of belonging nowhere; in sum, statelessness.

I’ve been looking for answers to many questions over the past few weeks and I feel that those questions have generated even more questions. The fact of the matter is that while there are undocumented immigrants coming from countries other than Haiti, the data on these groups is non-existent making it difficult to see how these laws and constitutional changes are affecting groups other than Dominicans of Haitian descent. It is also public knowledge that many opinion leaders have explicitly stated that Dominicans of Haitian descent are just as Haitian as their parents. In a country where politics are so entrenched in the daily lives of all, the opinion of these individuals does matter and can effectively influence.

My interviews with several non-governmental organizations have revealed that their struggle for inclusiveness and the right to a name and nationality for Dominicans of Haitian descent has been an uphill battle and at times they have felt as if all of their recourses had been exhausted. However, there have been victories such as Yean y Bosico vs Republica Dominicana in which the Inter-American Court of Human Rights demanded that two young Dominican girls of Haitian descent be granted their birth certificates and publicly acknowledge and apologize. The Dominican Republic continues to reject this ruling and in many ways have negatively responded to the international attention this case received.

In a country where economic development has not directly translated into human development it is concerning to see how large sectors of the Dominican population are being excluded. I must add that citizenship rights are not only limited to Dominicans of Haitian descent but to many poor Dominicans who are not of Haitian descent that do not have access to their birth certificates. In a country where birth certificates equal Dominican nationality it remains to be seen how those who cannot prove their nationality can define the imagined nation.

Mexico City – Un último saludo defeño. Few families are as enigmatic as the Larreas. While Mexico’s most wealthy individual, Carlos Slim Helú, and quite possibly other well-known captains of industry and oligarchs are public and often polemical figures, the same cannot be said of the Larrea family. Comfortably placed in slot #4 behind Slim, Ricardo Salinas Pliego, and Alberto Bailléres González in the rankings of Mexico’s richest families, Germán Larrea Mota-Velasco and family, as well as their companies, are certainly not household names. However, upon closer inspection, a pattern develops similar to that of the development of other Mexican family fortunes. The growth of the Larreas’ financial success from a small construction company in Mexico City to one of the world’s largest mining companies and the country’s largest railroad enterprise can be traced alongside the emergence of perhaps Mexico’s most influential group of business leaders, the Consejo Mexicano de Hombres de Negocio (see my last two blogs). Just as the Mexican Council of Businessmen (CMHN) evolved to become economically and politically dominant within Mexico while thriving on its own insularity and even secrecy, the Larrea family has applied the same model to itself, operating behind large, faceless holding companies while using proxies to tend to its affairs and grease the wheels of Mexico’s political and corporate hierarchy.

Germán’s father, Jorge Larrea Ortega (b. 1912, d. 1999), began his business career in Mexico City during the presidency of Miguel Alemán Valdés (1946-52) by starting his own construction company, Construcciones Jorge Larrea, which would later become México Constructora Industrial, S.A. de C.V. Subsequently, Larrea Ortega met and gained the confidence of Bruno Pagliai, an Italian-American businessman and perhaps Mexico’s wealthiest individual at the time, becoming the industrialist’s legal proxy in matters concerning his seamless tube business in Veracruz, Tubos de Acero de México, S.A. de C.V. (TAMSA). Through this relationship, Larrea Ortega became a shareholder of TAMSA and began his rise in the steel and metallurgic sector. Around this same time, Pagliai introduced Larrea Ortega to what would become a lifelong passion, horses and racing. Pagliai had recently constructed Mexico City’s only horserace track, Hipódromo de las Américas, at the insistence of former presidents Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940-46) and Alemán Valdés. Later, in 1962, 12 business leaders, including Pagliai and Larrea Ortega, founded the CMHN, which historically has included members of Mexico’s wealthiest families.

In 1965, Larrea Ortega guided a group of investors through a partial acquisition of the American Smelting and Refining Company’s (ASARCO) Mexican properties and a partial acquisition of the La Caridad copper mine, after changes in mining laws favored Mexican-controlled companies. He later added more mining construction, financial, and railway interests to his group, while expanding from the mining and refining of copper into wire and other copper products. However, Larrea Ortega became truly wealthy during the Salinas de Gortari presidency (1988-94) after Larrea’s mining company, which would later become Grupo México, bought out the Mexican government’s share of the bankrupt La Caridad mine in 1988 for an exceptionally low US$680 million and won a privatization bid for Cananea, Mexico’s largest copper mine, paying only US$475 million in 1990, again well below market value. In 1994, Larrea Ortega ceded control of his holdings to his eldest son, Germán, while remaining Grupo México’s honorary president. Throughout his career, Larrea Ortega invested in numerous businesses and sat on various corporate boards, many controlled by other founding members of the CMHN. Additionally, many of them also sat on the Grupo México board of directors.

In 1981, Larrea Ortega named Germán to the Grupo México board of directors, later naming him Executive Vice-Chairman of the Board of Minera México and Grupo México. Upon his father’s death in 1999, Germán Larrea was ceded the family’s professional responsibilities and today is Grupo México’s largest individual shareholder. Currently, he is the Chairman of the Board, President, and C.E.O. of Grupo México. Larrea is also Chairman of the Board of Americas Mining Corporation; Chairman of the Board of Southern Copper Corporation; and Chairman of the Board of Grupo Ferroviario Mexicano, S.A. de C.V. Previously, Larrea was Chairman of the Board and C.E.O. of ASARCO. Germán Larrea also owns several other companies with significant investments in or business interests tied to Grupo México. Among these, Larrea is Chairman of the Board and C.E.O. of Empresarios Industriales de México (a holding company which is Grupo México’s largest shareholder) and chairman and C.E.O. of Compañía Perforadora México (drilling company) and Fondo Inmobiliario (real-estate company). He also founded a printing and publishing company in 1978, Grupo Impresa, where he remained President and C.E.O. until it was sold in 1989.

In addition to Grupo México and his separate business interests, Germán Larrea is a board member of several corporations and institutions linked to the CMHN, including: the Mexican Council of Businessmen, Mexican Stock Exchange, Grupo Bursatil Mexicano, Grupo Televisa, Grupo Financiero Banamex-Accival (owned by Grupo Financiero Citigroup), Banco Nacional de México, and Grupo Comercial America (owned by ING). He has also been linked as an investor to Grupo TMM and ScotiabankInverlat. And given his passion for horses and racing, which he shares with his father, he has long been rumored to frequent the Hipódromo de las Ámericas, where it is rumored that he is also an investor. Additionally, the Larreas, through Germán’s mother, Sara Mota Velasco, own Desarrollo Punta Bruja, a real-estate company.

According to the Mexican on-line financial daily Sentido Común, Germán Larrea’s net worth is nearly US$3.5 billion. The Larrea family owns approximately 47% of Grupo Mexico’s shares, including individual and business shares. Germán Larrea is married and has two children, a son and a daughter. He reportedly spends more time at his castle in Tuscany, Italy, among his grape vineyards and far from his family and business interests, than he does at his homes in Mexico City and Acapulco and for that matter his own corporate headquarters. Given the intimate linkages between the Larreas, their businesses, and other members of the CMHN – relationships that date back to at least the 1960s – it would seem that the origins of Mexico’s de facto powers do indeed lie with the CMHN. Volviendo a los archivos, los deja . . .

Director Eliana Monteiro and assistant director Maria Emilia work with actor Bruna Freitag during a Teatro da Vertigem rehearsal

During one of my final weeks in Brazil, I was able to accompany Teatro da Vertigem to the Festival de Arte Serrinha, an arts festival in the interior of São Paulo state. Four company members led a workshop in developing theatrical pieces. They tried to condense their years-long processes into one week to teach students some techniques for collaboratively creating and presenting site-specific works.

The first day, company members discussed the history of Teatro da Vertigem with students. Though I had read about the group’s productions, this was a wonderful opportunity for me to hear them describe the processes of each piece and their personal experiences rehearsing and performing them. They traced how each piece had evolved from a theme and concept to a performance. To mirror this, they chose the themes of waiting and skin for the workshop in Serrinha. For each piece in Vertigem’s repertoire, they explained how each performance space had been selected. They emphasized the importance of a space’s history—the ghosts that stay in the walls of a room and how the space “contaminates” the actors, the play, and even the spectators. For example, during performances of O Livro de Jó (The Book of Job), which took place in a disused hospital, spectators would occasionally faint and comment on the smell of ether. However, company members explained that the space no longer had the smell of ether; it was the spectators’ associations with hospitals combined with performance that made them sensorially experience the memory of a smell as real. The company members’ use of the image of contamination to describe a particular kind of relationship between the internal space of the actors’ and spectators’ bodies and the external space surrounding them fascinates me. It emphasizes the porousness of the border between these two areas and stresses the dynamic exchange between interior and exterior of the body in Vertigem’s work.

In January 2009, led by a coalition of trade unions and community groups, a Lyannaj Kont Pwofitasyon (Alliance Against Profiteering) began a general strike in Guadeloupe. Over 44 days they convened large community demonstrations, shut down schools and businesses, and brought activities on the island to a near halt. They were protesting la vie chère, or the high cost of goods and services that make life in Guadeloupe, a non-independent island of the French Caribbean, increasingly difficult for ordinarily people. Martinique shares the same political status as Guadeloupe, and the bone that strikers had to pick with the French state (and equally important, for Martinicans, with the white minority béké class that continues to control most of the commerce on their island) was shared by Martinican citizens. On 5 February that island, too, went on strike. Over 38 days cars were burned, businesses shuttered, and mobilized groups (both organized and not) clashed with the police in downtown Fort de France.

The unrest that rocked this island all of those months ago has left its traces both on the landscape and in the narratives that people tell me now, in the lull of this place’s summer quiet. In the streets of the city signs of political mobilization are everywhere visible: graffiti on the side of French mega-department store Galéries Lafayette calls for jistis kolonial (colonial justice); there are burn marks in the roads- traces of February’s garbage cans, cars, and barricades in flames; some businesses never re-opened their doors after incurring the losses of that time, and their windows remain broken and boarded up. Everyone I talk to is eager to tell me about the grève (strike)- about what they did during that time, about the iconic events and their conflicting experiences of them. Even corporate marketing bears the traces- billboards for a local supermarket sport a new tag line: Solidaires, Contre la Vie Chère! (In solidarity, against the expensive life).

Coming back to Martinique at this moment has left me thinking about the economic crisis and where my own work on sexual politics fits in this field. The café that has served as a haven for young gay men in Fort de France was hit hard during the strikes (windows broken, stock looted, closed for weeks), but its proprietors are still working to maintain their presence, however quiet, in the community. A number of my lesbian and gay interlocutors were involved in the political mobilizations- either as supporters of the strikers or detractors interested more in public order- and seem to be thinking much more seriously about their own political work these days. In anthropology, there are traditional ways to think about political economy and sexuality- by focusing on sex work, kinship networks, and neo/liberal family policy- but this trip is pushing me to think through other ways that these fields intersect, both in people’s lives and in the theories that we develop to understand them.

This post comes nearly two weeks after my return to the United States from Montevideo, Uruguay. As I could have predicted, my last couple weeks in Uruguay were conducted at a feverish pace as I struggled to fit last-minute interviews, museum and archive visits, events, and political marches into my last days in the field. I think my efforts paid off, and I’m happy to report that I was able to interview over forty subjects about the Ley de Caducidad (Expiry Law), each representing a wide range of political, ideological, and social perspectives on the law. Highlights of my last two weeks in Uruguay include interviews with the former president of Uruguay, Julio Maria Sanguinetti, presidential candidate Pedro Bordaberry, Senator Rafael Michelini, and other members of the Uruguayan government who were astonishingly easy to gain access to, despite my somewhat questionable status as a graduate student with no real press credentials (yet!). I was struck by the receptiveness of all my subjects, and could literally walk into Colorado Party headquarters off the street, ask for the phone numbers of the list of politicians I’d written down, and immediately receive a detailed list of work, home, and cell phone numbers. One party secretary scheduled an interview for me on the spot with the former Defense Minister, who received me in his home in Carrasco. While I’ve never enjoyed this level of access in the United States, it also created problems I hadn’t anticipated. Looking back, I regret not beginning the process sooner during my research – I may have been able to interview Tabaré Vazquez, the president of Uruguay and an important subject since he initially withheld his public support of the referendum on the Expiry Law and his party, the Frente Amplio, never attempted to repeal the law despite holding a majority of seats in Parliament. I’m sure it would be difficult to achieve the same level of access as in any other country as a student, but conducting interviews in Uruguay, “el país de las cercanías”, was an incredibly rewarding and fascinating experience.

I also spent several days at the Punta Carretas Shopping (my other topic of research), observing visitors to the mall in Punta Carretas, formerly a prison. I conducted a series of brief oral interviews with shoppers of all ages and was surprised that my original assumption that most visitors to the mall would be members of the middle and upper-middle class from the most affluent neighborhoods of the city was mistaken. In fact, a number of people I spoke to came from very far away (the neighboring province of Canelones, and I even spoke to two Paraguayan immigrants) and several of the shoppers were from working-class neighborhoods. My sample size was too small to make any sweeping generalizations about the kind of people who shop at Punta Carretas or how they feel about memorializing the prison that once existed there, but it was a very interesting journalistic and sociological exercise since I’d never done an oral survey before. Again, I regret not beginning the process sooner (if I had done this twice a week during my entire time in the country, my findings would be more conclusive). I was surprised that anyone would talk to me at all, but the fact that I was affiliated with a foreign university helped me more than I could ever have anticipated.

My last full day in Montevideo coincided with the kick-off of the campaign for the “papeleta rosada”, named for the pink color of the ballot that Uruguayans voting to repeal the Ley de Caducidad will put in their voting envelopes in the October 25th national elections. This event was the perfect conclusion to a summer spent interviewing former political prisoners and human rights activists, and I saw many familiar faces in the paraninfo of the University of the Republic of Uruguay, the same auditorium where Che Guevara came to speak to the Uruguayan public in 1961. Seated at the front of the auditorium were members of the Coordinadora para la Anulación de la Ley de Caducidad, several of whom I had interviewed, and other important cultural figures in Uruguay including writer Eduardo Galeano and popular musician Daniel Viglietti, whose emotional performance at the end of the night brought everyone in the audience (and the overflow crowd watching outside) to their feet. I realized then that for every person in the audience I had interviewed this summer, there were at least twenty people I hadn’t, and I know that my project can only really scratch the surface of over twenty years of struggle, frustration, and preserverance for every Uruguayan committed to bringing human rights violators to justice. This popular movement is at once twenty years in the making and only just beginning – the campaign to repeal the Ley de Caducidad started in earnest the day I left Uruguay, but the struggle for “memoria, justicia, y nunca más” will continue long after Uruguayan voters make their decision on October 25th.

Cheers from Brazil! Two weeks ago I arrived in São Paulo to collect the data for my research on police corruption at the Police Ombudsman Office (Ouvidoria). Though I’ve lived 8 years in this city prior moving to NYC, it feels that coming here after exactly 1 year away has a different “taste”: maybe my experiences in NYC have exacerbated my critical look towards the city.

This exercise of alteridade begun right before my plane landed: the Brazilian air plane company I was flying with screened a promotional video about Sao Paulo emphasizing it’s multiculturalism, it’s dynamism and it’s “inner character” for both entertainment and business. Images of “the city that can never stop” were edited in accordance to this idea of movement and velocity. For a moment, it felt like we had returned to JFK! I couldn’t stop thinking about it for the next couple of weeks – it seems that Sao Paulo sees (and sells) itself as a sort of Brazilian New York; actually, more specifically as Manhattan.

Ironically, the next week I saw two exhibitions at MASP – the MoMA of Sao Paulo (?) – that brought again those thoughts in my mind. The first one, entitled To Look and Be Seen, was about modern portraits and had the following explanatory sentence: “(…) however the great similarity between the portrait and the portraited (…) they do not reveal themselves entirely, do not expose themselves. What is seen is the persona, the mask the subjects wear to let themselves be seen (when not to see their own selves). In a way, this is an attribute of most portraits if not of all”. The second exhibit was about myth, art and reality, which also had an interesting phrase that caught my attention: “(…) Man is an animal that tells himself stories, this is what distinguishes him from all other species. And myth is one of the first stories, of the first forms of meaning that man gave himself. Jacob Bryant, mentioned by Edgar A. Poe in his famous novel about the stolen letter, wrote that we keep forgetting that we do not believe in fables but keep acting according to them as if they were existing realities”. In this sense, was that video a sort of portrait of a paulista mythology? Anyhow, what exactly all these thoughts have to do with my own research? I still have no idea… but it will definitely remind me about the importance of always paying attention to the correlations of three processes whatever my object of research is: how one sees himself, how one portraits himself and what one hides about himself!

Uno de los objetivos de mi viaje era seguir el rastro de los archivos de los procesos judiciales de reforma agraria que se llevaron a cabo después de 1953 en los departamentos de Cochabamba y La Paz, pues para mi tesis estoy interesada en estudiar los procesos de afectación y redistribución de tierras después de la reforma.

Para La Paz
Sabia de antemano que esa información no estaba en el Archivo histórico del Departamento de La Paz y tampoco se encontraba en el Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria. Uno de los retos de este viaje era encontrar donde había quedado esa información.

Encontré que los juicios de afectación de haciendas estaban guardados en el Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria (INRA) a nivel departamental. El INRA departamental no es propiamente un archivo histórico sino más bien un archivo judicial que esta en el centro de la ciudad y al que deben asistir alrededor de 100 personas en promedio cada día. Es una oficina con gran afluencia de abogados, miembros de las comunidades campesinas y comunidades indígenas, dirigentes de cooperativas demandando a los mas o menos 5 abogados, y alrededor de 10 o 15 auxiliares que ahí trabajan copias de algunos de los documentos que requieren para proseguir algún trámite judicial (tales como consolidación de su títulos de propiedad a nivel personal o comunal, etc). No hablamos pues de un espacio apto para historiadores sino para abogados donde los litigios, enojos y estreses están a la orden del día.

De hecho, creo que un tema de investigación fascinante seria analizar por ejemplo los encuentros y desencuentros cotidianos de la ciudadanía con el Estado. Es decir, si nos alejáramos brevemente del propio material del archivo, resultaría igualmente fascinante concentrarse en las interacciones de la ciudadanía con los funcionarios estatales. Mas allá de la norma, mas allá de los derechos que esos demandantes puedan tener; la posibilidad de conseguir y hacer valer esos derechos depende de con quien se habla, en que momento se habla, quien demanda, etc. Genero, etnicidad, nivel de educación, idioma, etc todas son variables que juegan un rol trascendental en las respuestas que uno puede obtener del estado.

Como se imaginaran lo último que se espera ver en una oficina de estas características es un historiador. Es así que mi entrada tuvo que estar mediada por cartas, permisos.

Una vez logrado mi ingreso al archivo me dedique centralmente a trata de mapear la información organizada en cajas de distintos colores para cada provincia. Para la provincia de Omasuyos - que es la que me interesa trabajar - existen 103 cajas que contienen alrededor de 500 expedientes.

Como disponía de escaso tiempo el propósito de esta primera entrada era claramente garantizar acceso al archivo y verificar que era posible disponer de esa información para la realización de mi tesis. En las semanas programadas para trabajar este archivo intente extraer líneas generales que me permitirán en el futuro hacer efectiva la investigación de un archivo tan voluminoso. Decidí revisar en detalle pocos expedientes lo que me permitiría, por una parte, tener una primera idea de cuánto tiempo se requiere para revisar cada caso y, por otra parte, cual es el tipo de información que me puede ofrecer estos procesos judiciales

Revise para el caso de La Paz alrededor de 17 cajas. Cada caja contiene entre dos a tres procesos judiciales diferentes. Se trata de expedientes voluminosos y por ello al principio no estaba segura si deberia tomar notas, fotografiarlos, o que. Decidi en los primeros casos empezar a tomar notas, que aunque tarda mucho tiempo uno tiene a su favor que uno tiene la posibilidad de explorar un caso en detalle y ver las multiples posiblidades que puede ofrecer un caso. Despues del tercer expediente decidi que era mejor revisar el caso, marcar los folios mas importantes y fotografiarlos. Usando este ultimo metodo es que pude revisar 17 cajas es decir alrededor de 50 expedientes. De lo contrario hubiera tomado mucho mas tiempo.

The other day I was walking by the library at UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) and noticed a series of tall, skeletal-like trees next to me. They were “spent” magueys; once the plant reaches sexual maturity it sends up a flowering stalk about the height of a small tree and then withers. It made me think more concretely about the incredible time investment that people in the pulque industry made in these plants. It can take between eight and twenty-five years for one plant to reach maturity and, if you don’t “castrate” the plant in time, it’s impossible to harvest it for agua miel (the unfermented precursor of pulque).
Since trying a “curado” pulque (flavored with tomatoes) from Xochimilco—a place that keeps coming up In the eighteenth-century records I’ve been looking at—I’ve been thinking a bit about the risks of a lost investment in a maguey in terms of the liquid itself. Pulque spoiled quickly—within a matter of days—and If you didn’t judge the market correctly, you could lose an investment measured in terms of years. I’ve found repeated mentions of colonial-era prosecutions for the adulteration of pulque through the addition of fruits, roots, or herbs. Of course, most of these records emphasize that the purpose of said alteration is to make a stronger beverage, but I wonder if this doesn’t reflect more the prejudices of colonial record-makers than the realities on the ground. Mixing juices and other materials with soured pulque (in the period I study, referred to as tepache) would result in a stronger drink, but mainly because the pulque itself becomes stronger. The question becomes, is the adulteration of pulque mainly a way of disguising the flavor of soured pulque in order to sell it? And how does one find the answer to this?
Furthermore, the desiccated plant remains were, at the time of the Conquest, a form of fuel for Tenochtitlán. Looking at the spent plant, I could certainly see why… but what happened to them during the colonial period? I’ve been spending some time with the AGN search engines trying to find this info…