Repression and Resistance / Represion y Resistencia

Chair/Moderadora: Bonnie Taub, Latin American Studies, UCLA

• Betsy Konefal, Latin American Studies, College of William and Mary“Mayan Repression, Resistance, and the Road to Genocide”
  (“Represión, resistencia Maya y el camino al genocidio”)

• Sandra Gruner-Domic, Social Anthropology, USC Shoah Foundation“Motivaciones sociales y personales para la participación femenina en actos de resistencia antes, durante y después del genocidio en Guatemala”
  (“Social and Personal Motivations for Women’s Participation in Acts of Resistance Before, During, and After the Genocide in Guatemala”)

Bonnie Taub, MPH, MA, Ph.D., a medical anthropologist, is Co-Chair of the Latin American Studies MA Program, Associate Director of the Latin American Institute and on the faculty in the Fielding School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Taub conducts research on indigenous peoples and mestizos in Latin America and among ethnic groups in the United States, and teaches courses about culture, politics and health, community and family health, human rights, traditional medicine/shamanism and Western medicine. She consults and conducts anthropological training and development of cultural assessments for clinicians and non-profits working worldwide.

Betsy Konefal is an Associate Professor of History at the College of William and Mary, specializing in modern Latin America.  Her research interests include race and ethnicity, indigenous organizing, human rights, and oppositional politics.  She received a Ph.D. in Latin American history from the University of Pittsburgh, 2005; an M.A. in International Affairs from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (and the Center for the Study of Human Rights), 1996; and a B.A. in International Relations and Latin American Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, 1990.  Her publications include For Every Indio Who Falls: A History of Maya Activism, 1960-1990 (UNM Press, 2010, named Choice “Outstanding Academic Title” 2011), and “Subverting Authenticity: Reinas Indígenas and the Guatemalan State, 1978,” Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 89, no. 1 (Feb. 2009): 41-72.  She was a 2012-13 Fulbright Scholar in Ecuador, and is currently working on a comparative study of liberation theology and indigenous organizing in Guatemala, Ecuador, and Mexico.

Sandra Gruner-Domic, PhD, was a lecturer at California State University Long Beach until Summer 2013 and worked for the Sociology and Gender Studies departments at the University of Southern California from 2008- 2011. Before moving to LA, she also taught anthropology and gender studies at Humboldt University Berlin and worked at the Berlin Institute for Comparative Research. She received her PhD in 2002 at the Department for European Ethnology at the Humboldt University Berlin. Her research interests are migration, gender, the process of representation and identity in transnational context and genocide.  Her publications include a book on Latin American women migration to Germany, Muenster/New York Waxman (2004); “Vietnamese, Mozambican, and Cuban Labor Migrants in East Germany since the 1970s” in Encyclopedia Migration in Europe since the 17th Century, K. J. Bade, P. C. Emmer, L. Lucassen and J. Oltmer eds., Cambridge University Press, New York (2010); “Cosmopolitan Sociability: Locating Transnational Diasporic and Religious Networks,” Ethnic and Racial book series, London/ New York: Routledge (2011), coedited with Nina Glick Schiller, Tsypylma Darieva; La vida intercultural de Promotoras en Los Ángeles. Identidades y pertenencias plurales. Reconstrucción biográfica y observación participativa en: Giebeler, Cornelia (Ed.) (2015)  El „Sueño Americano“. She is currently working at USC Shoah Foundation on the Guatemalan project including the collection of survivors interviews.