(This article was originally published by the Institute for the Study of the Americas at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.) I’ve watched the coronavirus crisis unfold from a quiet street in the suburbs of Quito, where I’m living with my family while on a research fellowship in Ecuador. After an early outbreak… Read More Dispatch from Quito: Coronavirus and La Cuarentena in Ecuador
Landslides severed Ecuador’s two oil pipelines last week, spilling heavy crude into the Coca River in the country’s northeastern Amazon region. Now, amid the ongoing coronavirus crisis, pipeline operators OCP Ecuador and Petroecuador are deploying humanitarian aid to communities downstream and trying to halt the oil before it reaches the Amazon. Emergency teams are also… Read More Ecuador Landslide Deepens Virus Crisis as Oil Pipelines Severed for Weeks
Ecuadorian ex-President Rafael Correa is on trial again, this time for campaign-finance fraud. Three years after a national referendum forced him from office, Correa is being tried in absentia for his alleged role in a scheme to extort government contractors for campaign contributions during his decade in power. Given the number of former Ecuadorian presidents… Read More Ecuador’s Splintered Left on Trial with Correa
Enrique Mayer’s Ugly Stories of Peruvian Agrarian Reform, a “people-oriented kind of oral history,” provides a memory study of the 1969 land reforms enacted by Peruvian President Juan Velasco Alvarado. Written from the perspective of historical stakeholders and incorporating Mayer’s lifelong participation in the reforms as an academic observer, he weaves a series of testimonies… Read More Enrique Mayer: Ugly Stories of the Peruvian Agrarian Reform
The role of violence and the importance of cultural identity in the struggles between indigenous communities and the nation-state are the subjects of Ana María Alonso’s monograph, Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and Gender on Mexico’s Northern Frontier (1995). This anthropological history of machismo in the culturally-mestizo Namiquipa community in Chihuahua looks at how violence,… Read More Ana María Alonso: Thread of Blood
Florencia E. Mallon, Courage Tastes of Blood: The Mapuche Community of Nicolás Ailío and the Chilean State, 1906-2001, Radical Perspectives (Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2005). Florencia Mallon’s 2005 book, Courage Tastes of Blood: The Mapuche Community of Nicolás Ailío and the Chilean State, 1906-2001, examines the history of a Mapuche indigenous community in southern… Read More Florencia Mallon: Courage Tastes of Blood
By N. H. Gill (April 2, 2019) – Jeffrey Gould’s monograph, To Die in This Way (1998), looks at the dialectic relationship between indigenous identity and the formation of the nation-state in Nicaragua from the late nineteenth century until the mid twentieth. Gould challenges the “myth of mestizaje” that holds that, except for the… Read More Jeffrey Gould: To Die in This Way
