Latinos, peoples of Latin American ancestry in the United States, are the nation’s largest minority-majority but the most disenfranchised from circuits of power and political representation. This talk engages “the Latino Question” — What is the country to do with Latinos, and what are Latinos to do about their disenfranchisement from American civic life? —as an opportunity to reflect about the complexity of the country’s relationship to Latinos at a moment of profound demographic, economic, social, and political upheaval. The need to understand the current historical moment of unthinkable “blood and soil” Nazism, of blatant racism at the highest levels of government against Latinos, and politically disenfranchised cultural others, along with media induced “alternative facts,” make an historical accounting all the more necessary. This talk explains how this came to be and the intersectional politics required to reclaim the democratic commons.

Informal graduate and faculty gathering to share research and experiences across disciplines.

Amanda J. Guzmán is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She graduated from Harvard University with a B.A. in archaeology and minors in Latin American history and the Spanish language. Her dissertation project focuses on a range of major museums to analyze the history of North American museum collecting in, and representations of, Puerto Rico. In the context of Puerto Rico’s current environmental and economic uncertainty, her dissertation critically traces understudied museum acquisition narratives documenting the island’s material relations with the U.S. mainland. Guzmán’s research has been supported by the Smithsonian Institution’s Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology, a Smithsonian Institution graduate student fellowship, a Smithsonian Institution predoctoral student fellowship, and the Mellon Mays graduate initiatives program. She is the author of the recently published Museum Anthropology article, “Collecting the Puerto Rican Colony: Spanish-American War Material Encounters Between Officer-Wives and Puerto Ricans.”

Informal graduate and faculty gathering to share research and experiences across disciplines.

Two years since the signing of the peace accord in Colombia, scholars have come together to
evaluate progress, challenges and setbacks of its implementation. The keynotes, panel presentations
and discussions will center on post-accord human rights, efforts from academia and civil society
organizations to promote the accord, political aspirations and economies of/during/for “peace,”
reproductive politics and the demobilization and reintegration of ex-combatants.