Edinburgh University Press
Anti-Colonial Texts from Central American Student Movements 1929-1983
Key Metrics
- Heather Vrana
- Edinburgh University Press
- Hardcover
- 9781474403689
- 9.4 X 6.3 X 0.8 inches
- 1.3 pounds
- History > Latin America - Central America
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
Few people know that student protest emerged in Latin America decades before the infamous student movements of Western Europe and the U.S. in the 1960s. Even fewer people know that Central American university students authored colonial agendas and anti-colonial critiques. In fact, Central American students were key actors in shaping ideas of nation, empire, and global exchange. Bridging a half-century of student protest from 1929 to 1983, this source reader contains more than sixty texts from Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, and Costa Rica, including editorials, speeches, manifestos, letters, and pamphlets. Available for the first time in English, these rich texts help scholars and popular audiences alike to rethink their preconceptions of student protest and revolution. The texts also illuminate key issues confronting social movements today: global capitalism, dispossession, privatization, development, and state violence.
Key Features- Makes available for the first time to English-language readers a diverse archive of more than sixty foundational documents and ephemera accompanied by an introduction, section introductions and further reading
- Expands the geographic scope of anti-colonial movement scholarship by presenting anti-colonial thought in the most contentious decades of the 20th century from a region peripheral even within anti-colonial and postcolonial studies
- Advances anti-colonial and postcolonial studies by taking urban students as critical actors and so recasting thematics of the peasantry, the rural/urban divide, and religion
- Suggests a new social movement chronology beyond the so-called Global 1968, or the common notion that student movements peaked in May 1968 in Paris, New York City, Berkeley, and Mexico City
Author Bio
Professor Heather Vrana (Ph.D. Indiana University, 2013) is a historian of modern Latin America with an emphasis on Central America, and joined the University of Florida in August 2017 after teaching at Southern Connecticut State University. Vrana is author of This City Belongs to You: A History of Student Activism in Guatemala (University of California Press, 2017) and Anti-colonial Texts from Central American Student Movements 1929-1983 (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), and co-editor with Julie Gibbings of Out of the Shadow: Revisiting the Revolution from Post-Peace Guatemala (University of Texas Press, 2020).
Vrana’s current research project, Disability and the Making of Modern Central America, follows disability, as a concept and in reference to groups of people and bodies, across twentieth-century-Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua to reveal contradictions in projects of democratic restoration, revolutionary uplift, and technocratic modernism.
This book project emphasizes four themes: interrelated professionalization of medicine and elaboration of disability terminologies; competition over responsibility for care among religious charities, government, and family; development paradigms in public health and social security institutes; and human rights as a framework for addressing harm after the civil wars. Ultimately, this analysis suggests a comprehensive reexamination of Central American state formation.
Source: University of Florida
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