"Violence and the Politics of History in Bolivia after World War II"

University of Maryland, College Park

Latin American Studies Center

 Café Break Series

Presents

Trials without End:

Violence and the Politics of History in Bolivia after World War II

 Laura Gotkowitz, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Pittsburgh

Wednesday, April 17
3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
2120 Francis Scott Key (Merrill Room)

This talk will focus on the tortuous course of the trial of high-ranking associates of former Bolivian President Gualberto Villarroel López, its uses of history and myth, and its connections with a global post-war moment defined by democratic openings, decolonization, and emergent human rights. Taking the July 1946 lynching of Villarroel by a revolutionary mob, Gotkowitz will interrogate the labeling of his deposed government as Nazi-Fascist by political opponents.

Laura Gotkowitz is an associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of A Revolution for Our Rights: Indigenous Struggles for Land and Justice in Bolivia, 1880-1952 (Duke, 2007), which received the American Historical Association John E. Fagg Prize for 2008. Gotkowitz edited Histories of Race and Racism: The Andes and Mesoamerica from Colonial Times to the Present (Duke, 2011). During 2012 - 2013 she is an ACLS-Burkhardt fellow at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.

For more information about this event please contact the Latin American Studies Center at lasc@umd.edu or by phone at 301-405-6459.