Racist Discourse and Genocide / Discursos Racistas y Genocidio

Chair/Moderadora: Norma Chinchilla, Sociology, CSU Long Beach

• Brigittine M. French, Anthropology, Grinnell College
  “Rios Montt’s Public Discourse and the Cultural Logic of the Guatemalan Genocide”
  (“Discursos públicos de Ríos Montt y la lógica cultural del genocidio en Guatemala”)

• Jorge Ramon Gonzalez-Ponciano, Anthropology, UNAM/Stanford University“El racismo y el “problema indígena” en la prensa guatemalteca antes y después del genocidio”
  (“Racism and the ‘Indian Problem’ in the Guatemalan Press Before and After the Genocide”)

Norma Stoltz Chinchilla has been a member of the CSULB faculty since 1983. She teaches courses in social stratification (SOC 420), social change (SOC 357), women in global perspective (W/ST 401), Central American and Carribean People in the U.S. (SOC 341 / CHLS 352), and international social conflicts (I/ST 317 and 318). Her recent research focuses on women’s movements in Latin America and Central American immigration to Los Angeles. She was Fulbright Fellow to Guatemala in 1965 and received one of two CSULB Distinguished Faculty Scholarly and Creative Achievement awards for 1996-1997. Her recent book, Seeking Community in a Global City: Guatemalans and Salvadorans in Los Angeles (Temple University Press, 2001), co-authored with Nora Hamilton, Professor of Political Science at University of Southern California, was awarded the 2002 prize for Best Book published in the area of Race/Ethnicity and Foreign Policy/Globalization by the American Political Science Association (APSA).

Jorge Ramon Gonzalez-Ponciano belongs to the generation of Guatemalans who were students at the University of San Carlos and had to move to Mexico in the early eighties. Ponciano is currently a Research Affiliate at Stanford University’s Center for Latin American Studies and holds degrees in Anthropology from Stanford University (MA, 1997) and the University of Texas at Austin (PhD, 2005). He is also a full-time Research Professor at the Center for Multidisciplinary Research of Chiapas and the South Border, of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, in San Cristobal de Las Casas, Chiapas. Much of Ponciano’s published work addresses the relationship of the Liberal state and indigenous populations in Guatemala and Mexico, discourses about the “Civilization of the Indians,” vagrancy and laziness that have been strategic for the labor discipline of plantation economy. He also investigates the cultural history of anti-communism and the pathologization of political opposition, which legitimized the exercise of dictatorship and the naturalization of genocide. His research considers how Guatemalan revolutionary nationalism (1944-1954) and US Cold War anthropology (1954-1962) coincided in the failed effort to construct a homogenous nation. As part of his ethnographic work, he has been working in the human formation of the Mexico-Guatemala border, the construction of the exotic in the Mayan region, and a comparative history of the tourist industry in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas and Antigua Guatemala.

Brigittine French is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at Grinnell College. French is a linguistic and political anthropologist whose diverse body of research focuses on theoretical and ethnographic approaches to narrative and testimonial discourse, violence, rights, and democratic institutions in post-conflict nations. Her book, Maya Ethnolinguistic Identity: Violence, Cultural Rights, and Modernity is Highland Guatemala, was published by the University of Arizona Press in 2010 and has received numerous laudatory reviews in the American Anthropologist, Journal of Anthropological Research, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, and Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies. French’s recent work has appeared in the Journal of Human Rights, American Anthropologist, Language in Society, andthe Annual Review of Anthropology, among others. Her research has been generously supported by the United States Fulbright Program and the American Philosophical Society.