Transnational Impacts of Genocide / Los Impactos Transnacionales Del Genocidio

Chair/Moderadora: Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens, Latin American Studies, CSU Northridge

• Catherine Nolan-Ferrell, History, University of Texas at San Antonio
  “The Guatemalan Refugee Crisis in Southern Chiapas, 1980-1984”
  (“La crisis del refugiado guatemalteco en el sur de Chiapas, 1980-1984”)

• Silvia Posocco, Anthropology, University of London, UK
  “Traces, Remnants, Genocide: Transnational Adoption in Guatemala in the 1980s”
  (“Las huellas, artefactos, genocidio: Adopciones transnacionales en Guatemala en los años ochenta”)

Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens joined the history department at California State University at Northridge, where she teaches classes in contemporary Latin American history, in 2001. Her research examines religion, indigenous communities, and gender in Guatemala and Peru with a special emphasis on the roles that transnational religious networks played in facilitating political and cultural transformation in these countries.  By focusing on transnational religious networks, her work also offers a cultural perspective on U.S.-Latin America relations.  She is currently working on a manuscript entitled Strange Bedfellows:  Catholic-Civil Alliances and their Unintended Outcomes in Revolutionary Guatemala, 1943 – 1996. Dr. Fitzpatrick-Behrens has been the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including an American Council of Learned Societies research grant and residential fellowships at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University.

Dr Silvia Posocco is based in the Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, at the University of London. Her research interests are located at the intersections of social anthropology, social theory, gender studies, transnational sexuality studies and queer theory. Posocco has a long-term commitment to ethnographic research in Guatemala, where she first worked with ex-combatants of the guerrilla organization Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes-Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (FAR-URNG). Since 2009, she has worked on legacies of the Guatemalan conflict from the perspective of an ethnography of transnational adoption circuits.

Posocco’s publications include the research monograph Secrecy and Insurgency: Socialities and Knowledge Practices in Guatemala (University of Alabama Press, 2015). She is the co-editor of three collections of essays, including Decolonizing Sexualities: Transnational Perspectives, Critical Interventions (with Sandeep Bakshi and Suhraiya Jivraj, Counterpress 2016). She has written numerous journal articles and co-edited a number of journal special issues, including ŒViolence and Affective States in Latin America, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2016, with Martin Fotta and Frank Smith. Posocco is currently writing a book provisionally titled Traces, Remnants, Genocide: Transnational Adoption in Guatemala.

Catherine Nolan-Ferrell, Associate Professor of History, received an A.B. from Cornell University, an M.A. from Tulane University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Nolan-Ferrell’s research interests are in migration, citizenship, and national identity in modern Mexico and Guatemala, as well as the history of gender in Latin America. Her book, Constructing Citizenship: Transnational Workers and Revolution on the Mexico-Guatemala Border, 1880-1950, (University of Arizona Press, 2012), focuses on how laborers who worked in the coffee industry along the Guatemalan/Mexican border developed an understanding of nationality, particularly after the implementation of agrarian reforms in the late 1930s. Her current work examines the movement of Guatemalan campesinos into southern Mexico and the U.S., both as economic migrants and as refugees. In the 1950s, the Central Americans, particularly Guatemalans, migrated to Mexico in search of better economic opportunities. With the expansion of the Guatemalan civil war (1960-1996), however, thousands of indigenous villagers escaped the violence by becoming refugees in southern Mexico. Families became divided by those who maintained a “Guatemalan”/indigenous identity, and those who “Mexicanized.” Dr. Nolan-Ferrell has been doing archival and oral history field work with these border communities in the summer of 2013.