Genocide Denial In Guatemala / Negación Del Genocidio En Guatemala

Chair/Moderadora: Beatriz Cortez, Central American Studies, CSU Northridge

• Rebecca Clouser, International and Area Studies, Washington University, St. Louis
  “Elite erasures and lethal legacies: Examining genocide denial in Guatemala”
  (“Borrando las élites y legados letales: Examinado la negación del genocidio en Guatemala”)

• Debra Rodman, Anthropology/Women Studies, Randolph-Macon College, Ashland, VA
  “Greasing Guatemala’s Military Machine: Genocide Denial in Eastern Guatemala”
  (“Engrasando la máquina militar guatemalteca: Negación del genocidio en el oriente de Guatemala”)

Born in El Salvador, Dr. Beatriz Cortez migrated to the United States in November 1989. She obtained a Ph.D. In Latin American Literature from Arizona State University (1999). She specializes in contemporary Central American literatures and cultures from the perspective of gender, identity, and cultural studies. She is the author of numerous articles on postwar Central American literature and culture, exile, the construction of identity, and gender. She has also translated a number of literary and academic texts from Spanish into English. Her book Aesthetics of Cynicism: Post-War Central American Fiction was published in July 2010 by F&G Editores in Guatemala. She is co-author of the reader Introduction to Central American Studies, published by Kendall Hunt in 2008. She is co-editor of the third volume of the collection “Towards the History of Central American Literature” titled Per-Versions of Modernity: Literatures, Identities, and Displacements, published by F&G Editors in Guatemala in 2012 . She co-edited a special issue of Revista Iberoamericana on Contemporary Central American Literature and Cultural Studies, published by the University of Pittsburgh in 2013.

Debra H. Rodman is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women’s Studies and the Director of the Women’s Studies Program at Randolph-Macon College. She received her doctorate in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Florida, and both her M.A. and B.A. from the University of Miami. She works with Guatemalan transnational communities in Eastern Guatemala and the Northeast United States and serves as an expert witness for Central Americans seeking political asylum. Her research interests include race and ethnicity, gender studies, gender and development, and more specifically the impact of migration on gender and ethnic relations among Ladinos and Maya in Eastern Guatemala. Dr. Rodman is a former Fulbright Scholar and has received support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Rebecca Clouser is a postdoctoral teaching fellow in International and Area Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She holds a PhD in Geography from Indiana University. Currently, she teaches courses on human geography, geographies of development, and violence in Central America. Her research is located at the intersection of critical development studies, cultural geography and geographies of emotion. She has authored papers in the Journal of Latin American Geography and Progress in Development Studies. Her current research investigates the multidimensional aspects of the relationship between fear and development projects and processes in post-conflict Guatemala.