Colloquium: Eric Vázquez

Please join the Department of Spanish and Portuguese in welcoming author Eric Vázquez, Associate Professor at the University of Iowa as he discusses his book States of Defeat: US Imaginaries of Revolutionary Central America.

This talk explores the precarious analogies extended through the pragmatics of solidarity struggle. There he interprets Roxanne Dunbar-­Ortiz’s Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War (2002) as both a chronicle of political struggle and a means to theorize solidarity practice itself, in 1980s Nicaragua and beyond. During the 1980s and 90s, she would be counted amongst the other internationalist brigadistas who sought solidarity with the Sandinista National Liberation Front who had recently toppled President Anastasio Somoza Debayle's brutal and dynastic regime. “I cared about the survival of the Sandinista revolution,” she explains, “but cared equally, if not more, for the liberation and self-­determination of [Nicaragua's] indigenous peoples. I knew that an alliance with the United States Contra counterinsurgency would backfire on any group that entered into it.” In her role as a diplomat for the UN's International Indian Treaty Council, the memoirist and historian, operates as something of a double agent. Dunbar-Ortiz's comparative approach to mutual struggle is what I call analogical thinking. The term expresses the haphazard way nhthat solidarity organizers reach for prior historical experiences to diagram oppressive or exploitative situations through a pragmatics of resemblances. Such modes of thought offer a protean yet vital means to situate US intellectuals in political proximity to Central Americans. Throughout her memoir, Dunbar-­Ortiz weighs the value of various historical and personal analogies in calibrating her support for the fledgling Sandinista government with her efforts to advance indigenous Nicaraguan claims for regional autonomy.