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Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
Reading your book makes me brace for, you know, twenty years from now when we're gonna be reading about another wave of performative politics that we all just recently lived through or are living through.
Maritza E. Cardenas:What's happened to the aftermath of these revolutions, right, the people that arrived as a byproduct of these revolutions?
Eric A. Vázquez:I think this is a kind of work of salvage that wants to track contradictions, contradictions, name them, but also not have them negate the meaning and function of solidarity for the history of The US left, the history of The US in the world. Hi. My name is Eric Vazquez. I have two colleagues who will be speaking with me about, my book, States of Defeat, US Imaginaries of Revolutionary Central America, and I'll let them introduce themselves.
Jason Ruiz:Thank you so much, Eric, and congratulations on the book. This is so exciting to see it in print. I know it's been a labor of love, so it's really, really great to see it out in the world, and I'm pleased to be a part of this. My name is Jason Ruiz. I'm a professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
Jason Ruiz:I'm also the editor of American Quarterly, the journal of the American Studies Association, and I am the director of the Institute for Latino Studies at Notre Dame. My research focuses on representations of Latinidad in the American imagination, mostly through pop culture, including my most recent book, which is called Narcomedia, which is about the war on drugs and popular culture, and I guess more specifically how Latinos have been framed as the bad guys in the war on drugs through about forty years of pop culture representations.
Maritza E. Cardenas:Hello everyone, my name is Maritza Cardenas, I'm an Associate Professor of English at the University of Arizona. I am also currently serving as a series of curators for Latinx the Future Is Now. My work predominantly these last twenty odd years has been focusing on Central American culture on the transnational level, but mostly focusing on The US diaspora. My first book it's called Constituting Central American Americans, really focused on how the identity of US Central American was sort of forged, not just in the 80s and 90s, which will be heavily spoken of today, but also on the larger nineteenth century social, cultural, and aesthetic dimensions that cultivated that. So I continued to be mostly a Central Americanist or a US Central America, because we have different ways of thinking or talking about ourselves.
Maritza E. Cardenas:I didn't want it to be just The US imperial angle, by what it does to Central America, but also what US Central Americans contribute to The US landscape, right? It's the de centering of those things. It's one of the reasons I was excited to read and engage with Eric's work, which is very much, I feel like in that sort of intellectual genealogy and scholarship, because I also have a PhD in American studies. So I come from an American studies background. And so, I'm very excited to sort of see this work, how it's in dialogue with Latinos, Latinx Studies.
Maritza E. Cardenas:Sorry, it's a generational thing. I still sometimes say Latinx. Latinx Studies, but also Central American Studies, right, as a field. So, I'm very excited to be here, and I thank you for the invitation to gather on with you all.
Eric A. Vázquez:Wonderful. I think I had a pretty perfunctory introduction, so I'll just mention that I'm a professor at University of Iowa, and my book was recently released through University of Minnesota Press. My work is similar to both these folks, so far as I'm interested in the kind of bonds that bring, Central America and The United States together through, like, culture, politics, economics, and of course military engagement as well. So this book is an evolution from my dissertation. It's a significant evolution because when I was writing my dissertation, it was primarily centred on getting these experiences of revolutionary struggle out there and kind of fusing them together into a story about Central America.
Eric A. Vázquez:And I think one of the things that I wasn't really ready to reckon with is like the retrospective character of a lot of the work. We talk in cultural studies about a little bit of a time lag that happens between events and, you know, the ways that culture metabolizes them and processes what they mean. I had taken a class in graduate school. I sat in on this class on Neraciones Guerilleras, which is guerrilla narratives in the way that folks in the 1980s and '90s, because it's primarily centered in Central America. I'd like to imagine somebody shooting a rifle then kind of typing away on their typewriter to sort of have their manifesto ready or whatever.
Eric A. Vázquez:And here, there's a sort of time lag that happens. And so what happens when things become retrospective? That kind of inflects how we want to think about revolutionary struggle in Central America in the 1980s and 90s a little bit is sort of thinking about how are people taking this stance. And there's this one moment from Roxanne Del Martiz's memoir Blood on the Border, which I discuss in chapter two. She concludes her book with her at this kind of protest at the very beginnings of the kind of war on terror moment.
Eric A. Vázquez:She's in Portland, Oregon, kind of protesting the initial moves to invade Afghanistan just after the World Trade Center bombings in 09/11/2001. She's kind of trying to start drawing this comparison between what's going on in The Middle East and what happened in Central America in the 1980s and '90s, as many others have done so before. Kind of trying to synthesize a little bit of that, motivated by that at least. I don't know how complete that synthesis really works in the book. It's sort of much more centered on the eighties and nineties, but taking that and Greg Grandin's of course famous, empire's laboratory and kind of thinking about the ways in which the learning curve that comes from Central America to some extent for military technocrats gets extended into The Middle East a little bit.
Eric A. Vázquez:And so sort of kind of connecting those pieces largely in the conclusions of the chapters. Anyway, so the argument itself centres on a couple different things. It's offering a definition of solidarity that's good for the kind of analysis, that's useful for the analysis of the works. And that really came after kind of really reflecting on what this work meant in that retrospective frame, especially in the context of Central America, as we all know, like the one genocide that has at least been recorded and named a genocide in The Americas during the twentieth century happened in Guatemala, largely between 1980 and 1985, but of course the dates are, you know, the civil war is much longer than that. And there's just kind of extensive brutality, you know, that I think mobilized a lot of folks against that.
Eric A. Vázquez:So reckoning with that, I think it became an important part of kind of redefining, at least at the micro level, solidarity. And so one of the things that I say is my redefinition of solidarity, at least in this context, is thinking about it as a treacherous impulse for reciprocity and solidarity with those who suffer injustice. Part of it was thinking about the ways in which people who are attached by proxy are attached to a struggle that may not be their own. If people can even own their own struggles, who knows? Thinking about people who are kind of engaged in that way and at that level, what gets complicated about that attachment in addition to kind of like what's really agitational about it.
Eric A. Vázquez:If I compare myself to other scholars who are working in similar stuff, like one of the works that I think about recently is The Ruse of Repair by Patricia Stuellke. She argues something to the effect of that when we kind of note the complicated, sometimes quasi imperialist sentimentality that many are importing into solidarity struggle, that this negates that struggle or negates maybe the things that it did. And I think maybe I'm a positivist in this way, but I think those other things matter too. And it matters to also tell the story of the fact that the Solidarity movement was not exclusively white, although it was, but, you know, was produced by US Central Americans. And so that's like a point that I think is really important.
Eric A. Vázquez:Central Americans in Central America as well. There's a recent book that just came out on the Sandinistas, that talks about their public diplomacy inside The US and how important that became to countermanding the narrative that the administration was pushing out. I think this is the kind of work of salvage that wants to track contradictions, name them, but also not have them negate the meaning and function of solidarity for the history of The US left, the history of The US in the world, and the kind of center Central America, which was thought to be kind of this unexceptional final paroxysm of the Cold War that didn't really have any implications for United States. And I think as as we know, with the sort of significant presence of US Central Americans in The US now, that is one register in which that change could be marked or named.
Jason Ruiz:Eric, it's such a fascinating book, and I I think you've provided such a great thrust of how you approach the book. But I was hoping you could talk more about how you define solidarity. You define it a few times in the book, and I sort of felt like you you hedge on it a little bit. You just called it a treacherous impulse, like such amazing phrasing. But I think you kinda go back and forth a little bit on how much slack you're willing to give US based actors in this time period that are engaging with solidarity acts, representations of solidarity, etcetera, etcetera.
Jason Ruiz:It's actually a simple question. Like, where do you land on this? What is your ultimate conclusion in the cost benefit analysis of the solidarity movements that were so prominent in this time period and that you capture so well in the book.
Eric A. Vázquez:So I think part of it is just, I'll say, yay, solidarity. Right? Like, there's a moment in the intro where I say something to the effect of for all the kind of complications, for all the inequalities, for all of the ways in which solidarists are occasionally working against the interests of the folks that they're trying to find reciprocity with. That there is something fundamental about solidarity I think is really important. You know, I'm I'm reflecting a little bit back on, like, 1990s kind of disc ourse where there was this kind of reckoning with the failures of 1968 or attempts to reimagine what are the problems with the left more generally and how do we reckon with those.
Eric A. Vázquez:Those may be of a more kind of deconstructionist bent or more bent eric and silability. Want to kind of see these as things that just cannot be solved. I want to push back on that a little bit. People's lives were saved. Revolutionary like municipalities got support that they needed to kind of keep doing the work.
Eric A. Vázquez:There's that movie that came out recently, La Sandinista, as it came out, revolutionary struggle in both El Salvador and Nicaragua really spurred the feminist movement and, pushed women who were marginal in these societies, kind of pushed them to the forefront a in way that I think is really crucial. And so I think solidarity is really important and really crucial, and it's important to learn from its errors, but absolutely, like we need to kind of keep thinking about solidarity as not always already a negative.
Maritza E. Cardenas:I have a follow-up. I'm gonna cheat and do a twofer right now. Does solidarity have to be intentional? Because you mentioned the film as Anisas, and you're absolutely right, and I'm glad you mentioned gender, because that was a question that emerged different parts for me, right? The prominence of those movements also was because of the failures of solidarity, precisely because of the asymmetries.
Maritza E. Cardenas:And this is kind of also what happened right here in like US third world politics, right? Where you have like women of color feminism is a byproduct of the failures of other solidarity movements, right? These identity politics that didn't work. That wasn't the intended outcome for like, you know, feminists to happen. But in the coalescing of these things, it was an accidental byproduct.
Maritza E. Cardenas:One can argue potentially, right? I wanted to know your sense of the intentionality, but the other one that goes back to solidarity was a question I had most like framework because as I read throughout the book, I kept thinking, because I know that you heavily rely on like political theory, there's some Marxism, there's affect theory, right? And so, but I was wondering about performance theory because at several moments it felt like Central America is used, The idea of it, like the way we use it for protests against detention or revolution as part of a performance of solidarity, right? It's a way to perform one's solidarity. And this, I think, connects to some of the questions that you raise or the way you talk about solidarity because Jason is right.
Maritza E. Cardenas:I feel like it's a moving goalpost at times. It's a commitment to justice. At one point you frame it as a recognition of injury or as a particular subject position, right? And so I was struck about how solidarity appears to be active and embodied practice shaped by repetition and memory. And again, I was thinking about the examples you give about Donovan and even Deborah Ortiz's memoir, these different women and them as an embodied practice.
Maritza E. Cardenas:And so I guess that was also my question about your analytical framework when it came to thinking about solidarity, because I felt so much of it was that. If performance theory ever became more explicit, because I feel like it's implicitly here, right? And I'm curious about all that, the conceptualization of solidarity. So when Jason asked his question, I was like, I, these are my questions. Was it intentional?
Maritza E. Cardenas:Where does it land? Right?
Eric A. Vázquez:Yes, yes. That was a great one. So I think if I'm hearing you right, like performativity kind of sits between the edge of intention and what are the things that happen when performance is enacted in a context, and what happens to that performance when it's framed with all the kind of contextual factors that shape what that performance can be and mean?
Maritza E. Cardenas:Yes, that's part of it, but also just even like this idea of forms theory, right? Tailor, the archive repertoire, embodied practices, memory, because I felt that so much of the way you described how solidarity worked within Central American revolutions, in other words, I got that from your actual case studies, Eric. So the question is not just that about the intentionality, the way you just framed it for me, but also the way that your case studies almost implicitly try to gesture towards that discussion. And so I was curious if that is a framework ever entered and why you, the project you wanted to do, why it wasn't part of the conversation.
Jason Ruiz:It's such an interesting question because there's like performance theory, you know, like capital P, capital T, but then there's also like the performativity of solidarity that you're talking Even high school kids now would say, like, oh gosh, there she is, you know, performing her solidarity with, you know, with x y z, you know, oppressed peoples. You know? Like, it works on multiple levels. And I think I I do think that what Maritza is saying is is so true because it shines through in the book that your own frustration, I think, with the case studies that you're providing in terms of people who there's a performativity of solidarity, and that's even, like, a cliche. We all know the sort of white person who was like too invested in Central American freedom struggles or whatever, you know, during that time period.
Jason Ruiz:I think the performativity question works on so many levels, which only makes it more interesting to me.
Eric A. Vázquez:Yeah. So, I mean, part of what I think mattered to me was to kind of bring intention back in. So much of hermeneutics of suspicion kind of demands that we kind of are like, but what are the unconscious things or what's actually going on here? And I think that's a huge part, but I wanted to kind of bring intention back in because I think the meaning of these various works that I look at, that I wanted folks' intentionality to kind of matter to my analysis. And so sometimes performativity, as far as I understand it, involves trying to bring in a different kind of hermeneutics of suspicion to be like, well, actually what you wanted to do was X or whatever.
Eric A. Vázquez:I had a conversation with Jesse Alimon about my chapter on Roxanne D'Aubarty's, who is someone who writes a lot about Indigenous issues, may have some Cherokee heritage, but people of course question that and she's sort of waffled on it. For Aleman, the critique of Dumbartiz is that she's like a failed Indian or something like that. And that what really she's after is that. And I'm like, that's fine. But I'm not really that's not really my role as a scholar to be like, actually, you're not indigenous.
Eric A. Vázquez:You know? And and so, I don't think that that's useful, I guess, this context necessarily. So I think in her example, at least, I wanted to kind of bring her intentions, her goals and how she's kind of recalibrating them in relationship to, I guess, the passage of history that I think is really important here. But I think you're right. I mean, I think one of the things that is complicated about performativity in public space in this sort of second sense that Jason is bringing up is, you know, if we look at like Jennifer Harbury who's chapter three, she was performing these hunger strikes in Guatemala City.
Eric A. Vázquez:To some degree that has to be performative. And so there's something about, you know, there's something about publicity that I think is part of politics that can't totally be excised. And so I think there is, on the one hand, she seems kind of quasi suicidal and is sort of in public doing this thing that is, you know, she's figuring how to make it work. But I also think like it's a white woman sort of deteriorating in the middle of Guatemala in a way that maybe a lot of Guatemalans Well, I know a lot of Guatemalans could not have done in that space. And so that's sort of like, okay, that's complicated, right?
Eric A. Vázquez:Like on the one hand, we can see her as a white savior kind of figure who's performing her suffering alongside her husband in this way. That could raise some eyebrows, that maybe should raise some eyebrows. And on the other hand, it's sort of like, how do we make public what for many Guatemalans, and I think still, is kind of a hidden war that was largely contained in the countryside and only was routed up in cities when Guerrilla cells are being kind of prosecuted or when, you know, union leaders are assassinated here or there. But it's largely not in many people's experience of the war. Bringing her intentionality back in there once you reassess and acknowledge the limits of her performativity, I think is sort of important to me.
Jason Ruiz:I think it's a theme that you carry out in other parts of the book as well. There is this idea of certain figures who emerge as poster children in, various solidarity movements. And I think you explore the complexities of the symbolic power, who you just mentioned is one of them, Jean Donovan's another one, you know, as like a martyr in that chapter. Rigoberto Menchus becomes, you know, it's poster child as well. So, it seems like this is something that you're really grappling with in the book, this idea that why do some people, some figures become so so associated with these movements?
Jason Ruiz:And then in terms of what you were just talking about, who gets to pick? Like who decides? Elevates as the ultimate poster children? Really interesting stuff.
Eric A. Vázquez:Yeah. Thank you. I think to just briefly respond back to this point, you know, one of the things that, at least for like Latin Americanists in the university, I think in this period of time, definitely kind of imagined themselves to be kind of political agents in a way that was sort of different. So to some degree, like with the example of Rigobert Ben Chew, who was the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize winner for the kind of testimonial that she spoke to, Elizabeth Burghos de Bray, that in trying to bring her materials into syllabi and into the university, that these scholars experienced themselves as kind of political actors in a way that perhaps they had not, because they were kind of contained by area studies and its Cold War logics, that they weren't able to kind of intervene in the same way. And so it seemed like this was kind of a, at least for them, a kind of profound experience of their political agency.
Jason Ruiz:Another question I had was about the various media forms that you engage with. It's a compliment. I I like the way you hedge on the question of solidarity. Like, you're not giving us easy answers there, and I think it ends with the hashtag. It's complicated in terms of how you feel about it.
Jason Ruiz:But I wanted to ask about various media forms, Roses in December, kind of, you know, iconic in its own grassroots y way, documentary, Manchu's testimonial, other media forms. How did you pick and choose which media forms to also, you're doing some elevating here, but what you choose to analyze. So how did you pick and what were some of your goals in terms of selecting and putting these forms in conversation with one another?
Eric A. Vázquez:I think my thought with so Roses in December is largely response to, like, feedback at my dissertation defence. You know, I wasn't really attending to the kind of liberation theology strand in the works that I was examining. And so I wanted to kind of dig into that through this film because I think that this film, when it was aired in PBS, it became like a kind of significant. And so I think that, you know, many of these, though not all, are works that have a certain level of public presence or alternatively represent a kind of engagement that is material with what's going on in Central America at the same time. And so that's why kind of memoir is important.
Eric A. Vázquez:That's why thinking about documentary is important. They offer us a different mode of evidence. But, you know, initially it was really Hector Tobar that got me thinking about this book. It was, The Tattooed Soldier, which, as we know, is a novel about a homeless, undocumented Guatemalan who kind of encounters the leader of the death squad that murdered his mother and child. His revenge story is kind of located in the centre of the LA uprising or LA riots of nineteen ninety two.
Eric A. Vázquez:The kind of collision of Central America and generationally for me, I feel like the LA uprising was kind of like this moment where I really kind of saw state violence at its most naked. As, you know, I was 12 years old, I was like, what the fuck is going on here? And and you see the video of Rodney King and you're like, it's unquestionable how effed up that is. That was like seeing those the collision of those two circumstances and the way Tobar was in the novel kind of reinterprets or offers interpretations. I don't know if he, he himself is really behind them.
Eric A. Vázquez:He's changed his mind a few times about what they mean. That that collision of circumstances helped me see and expand out and to think about this as a kind of transnational set of processes that are kind of being culturally metabolized in this. What would seem for some kind of a subterranean narrative of the 1980s and 90s because as, you know, American Studies people, as people who maybe read literature, the story of postmodernism seems to be like the biggest story of like the 80s and 90s for some, or kind of multicultural lit kind of entering the scene a little bit. Multicultural culture kind of coming in to some degree. Some of this is a little bit of digging, like where are we going to find this point of contact?
Eric A. Vázquez:How am I going to balance attention to different nations involved here? The violence was something that was really front of mind. Another generational thing is, of course, the war on terror. I think it was my second year of college when we were starting the intervention there. And so understanding constitutive nature of warfare in American society.
Eric A. Vázquez:So it pushed me to bring together some different works that I think are unattended to, or they're not necessarily particularly literary. They're not always the most compelling aesthetic forms in every case. Tobar or Castellanos Moya certainly are kind of aesthetically compelling, but the other ones perhaps a little less so. And I think that bringing those different perspectives and points of experience into the project was really useful for me to develop this understanding of solidarity's potential treachery. And treachery, again, is not really necessarily, again, about, like, anyone's intention to be treacherous, but it could be I'm putting myself out there, trying to support the struggle, and the struggle is failing in one way or another, and I can't do what needs to happen to make it, to sustain it.
Maritza E. Cardenas:You mentioned being 12 and the riots in LA. So I'm from Los Angeles. I actually was in El Salvador in 'eighty nine. And I remember when I went to El Salvador, when we landed at the airport, it was during the civil war, right? So the peace of courts had not been signed.
Maritza E. Cardenas:What was striking then is just you arrived and it was nothing but paramilitary. You arrived with soldiers of M16s waiting for you, right? Like that bitch plane. And I remember thinking, well, I'm in a different, I'm in a very different place. Right?
Maritza E. Cardenas:And I spent the summer there that year, which was interesting in itself. But when the riots happened, I live around East Los Angeles and I remember the shopping centers, the National Guard were there in military with rifles. I remember having this like connection, like I feel like I'm in the airport in El Salvador. Like it was really interesting that you said that. And so I understand like Golan would put centered, right?
Maritza E. Cardenas:Tattooed soldier, like in that historical moment and time, I think it really registered for many of us that identify as U. Central American or Central American American. But this goes back to some of the things that you mentioned in your original answer. And so one of the things that I appreciated about your book was that it recenters Central America within US American politics and cultural studies. And what I liked is that rather than revisiting familiar questions about the causes or failures of revolution, right, which dominated the scholarship and the conversation, even when we talk about migration, it's the failure of revolution, right?
Maritza E. Cardenas:Everything is always connected to those two sort of modalities. But I think your focus here is on how the idea of Central American Revolution functioned for US based writers, artists, intellectuals, and activists, right? So you're treating revolution on an effective and aesthetic register, right? So I think it's a reframing of a very well studied topic. To go back to Jason's question about like the medium of your choices, you go almost canon here, right?
Maritza E. Cardenas:Like you go, go Castellanos, Moya, Rigoberta Menchu, like these are people that so many people have written about. And so I, you know, and some of them are not as well studied, right? But my question is process. Like what was it like to return to such a heavily researched, not field, but like topic, right? Central American revolutions and approach it through fundamentally different set of questions?
Eric A. Vázquez:I mean, I think to some degree, thinking about what makes social movements function and what makes left organizations function and some of the obstacles that emerge when you kind of even start to form something like when I was 13, I joined Anti Racist Action in Columbus, Ohio, where I was growing up mostly. And I wanted to bring that extend some of that work when I moved to Portland, Oregon, right after college. And just the process of like writing the manual of trying to figure out how to be inclusive of not having the conversations about inclusion immediately shut down the organization. Like some of that is about thinking about that movement building stuff. I worked in a group home while I was in Oregon and we were trying to unionize the group home.
Eric A. Vázquez:And that's an incredibly hard thing to do, because while my home was fully behind the union and trying to get the other folks who were sort of working in the same agency, it was tough. And so part of it a little bit is just kind of trying to think about, like, how do we build movements that have this transnational dimension? The immediate obstacles that come from the basic friction of people who may have similar goals coming together. How do we move past that? Part of it was just thinking less about, central American revolution as failure and just kind of trying to say, is there a lesson to be learned here?
Eric A. Vázquez:Or is this something that we just want to shut away with the end of the cold war? My impulse is to try to look for continuity is rather than sort of imagine September 11 as this like fundamental rupture in the world system or something like that. The more reading I was doing into Central America during my PhD exams, the more I was just kind of getting outraged. And I think part of it was sort of just like, how do we balance like an attention to what is grotesque and awful and overwhelming about understanding the kind of scale of violence that impacted people in Central America with what was good or useful or worthwhile about the process of solidarity building, even if it did not reach its aims or hope for outcome. Understanding those obstacles that happened when I was kind of like, again, my twenties, maybe a teen anarchist, whatever, trying to understand how to work dynamics in groups.
Eric A. Vázquez:Is there something like microcosmically useful about those smaller struggles for thinking about kind of like a broader, more egalitarian process?
Jason Ruiz:It's funny Maritza has prodded you a little bit to talk about yourself. You actually don't really talk about yourself very much in the book. Was that a choice? I mean, your own positionality might be interesting here.
Eric A. Vázquez:If you're willing to share
Jason Ruiz:with us, like, what's your relationship to this work other than the the teenage anarchist that still lives inside of you?
Eric A. Vázquez:Thanks for that question. I'm a vicarious enjoyer of others' revolutionary struggles in the same way as many of the folks I'm exploring here. I'm not US Central American, I'm a Mexican American. You know, I was an immigrant, when I was six years old to The US. And we moved to a place where there weren't now there's tons of Mexican Americans there, but at the time there were very few.
Eric A. Vázquez:And so my family really was kind of Latino in the sense that get over here Ecuadorians, get over here Peruvians, we're like making community, right? My experience has not really been informed by like the Chicano movement growing up or whatever. Was much more about sort of like how do we build these elective affiliations and stuff like that. And, you know, my dad is a flautist and so it was always kind of like bringing together artists and stuff like that. And so there was, you know, there's something about that dimension of Latinidad for all of its complications that I think at least as a young person kind of really appealed to me as this kind of recognition of the unique experiences that make up all the kind of vast complexity of Latin America and how those travel with us consciously or unconsciously into The US.
Eric A. Vázquez:And so I think that that's one dimension of it. You know, I think that there is a part of me that hopes, especially right now, like especially in the kind of political context that we're in right now, that hopes for, amidst the crisis, a kind of a big egalitarian sort of move in myself.
Jason Ruiz:It's all interesting how we how we relate to our subject matter. And I I love that you added on, you know, how it relates to current politics because I felt like you were consistently nudging us as readers to seeing the connections between the eighties and nineties and these modes of solidarity, modes of defeat, whatever you want to call them, and contemporary politics. You mentioned Black Lives Matter. You mentioned War on Terror. So you said in your in your initial comments here that, you know, it takes decades or time to metabolize, you know, history and think about what happens next.
Jason Ruiz:But what is your take on how solidarity in that time period is informing solidarity today? I could not stop thinking about Black Lives Matter during your reading your book because I thought, God, there were so many times in which, you know, it really looked like this gigantic movement in which people were waking up and being in solidarity with the movement for Black rights. And now where we are five years later, it looks like it's almost like it never happened when you look at contemporary politics, even academia. We had alumni begging to join our Zoom meetings about race in contemporary America in 2025. And now, you know, we can't get we can barely get current students to show up to talk about these topics.
Jason Ruiz:It felt to me a little bit like your book might be speaking to missed opportunities or lost moments in solidarity potential.
Eric A. Vázquez:I was sort of going there. Yeah.
Maritza E. Cardenas:In addition to that, was it in that chapter with Donovan, the martyr, you mentioned Bushnell, air force man or Palestine, right? Who sets himself on fire, right? Because it's the chapter of martyr. So I feel that you're hedging on, it was Black Lives Matter. It was the war on terror, maybe not always explicitly, right?
Maritza E. Cardenas:Migration, what's happening, what's happened to the aftermath of these revolutions, right? The people that arrived as a byproduct of the revolutions and also this Palestine, right? Because the next sort of surge that we see in the current moment is really that in campuses outside of campus, right? And so I do going back to Jason, like, feel that you are an optimist. I'm like, there's romantic here, right?
Maritza E. Cardenas:Like a project of salvaging things. The way you said it early on is spot on. I did see the things that Jason was seeing, right? With all these different sort of social movements and also like these myths, is, it's about the defeatedness to go back to this, but there's like the hope and the defeat, the defeatedness, because that's what we're saying about like Black Lives Matter. There was this moment where we thought we're turning the corner.
Maritza E. Cardenas:Nope, no, we're not. It's gonna get worse. We couldn't foresee, right? And so to go back to the the defeatism of failures, For me, right, working in Central American studies and just having relatives, it's I know people that were part of these revolutions in La Veria who voted for Trump. What?
Maritza E. Cardenas:What? What? Right? And so I yeah. So while you're a romantic, I'm just like, there's no hope.
Maritza E. Cardenas:This is so sad. Nobody learned anything. So in reading yours, I was trying to stay on the positive side. Right? But I thought Jason's question is spot on because I do see you hedging.
Maritza E. Cardenas:Like, you're trying to say this important moment of revolution matters and it matters because maybe it can help us see how to navigate the current climate.
Jason Ruiz:Yeah. And it's also a predictor. Like in twenty years, we're gonna see all these memoirs of, you know, people's involvement with, you know, these solidarity movements. I'm glad you mentioned Gaza. I mean, exactly.
Jason Ruiz:Black Lives Matter, all these movements that we're hoping will generate something huge and a seismic shift that might just go away or might we might lose these various battles. Reading your book makes me brace for, you know, twenty years from now when we're going to be reading about another wave of performative politics that we all just recently lived through or are living through.
Eric A. Vázquez:You know, I think one of the things that I think was cool about going to the archives at California State Northridge was just like, you know, it was my first time really doing an archival or I guess it was my second time and my first real like dig, like multi day kind of dig. And, they have a archive called the Don White Archive for the C SPACE, Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. As we know, as maybe Marita knows, is LA was like such a hotbed for that. There were multiple chapters. It was kind of like the center of action for the national organization in a lot of ways.
Eric A. Vázquez:One of the things that I think I noticed that I think social media kind of lets us off the hook for is just kind of the basic sociality of movement building. Some of the things that I found in the archive are like all these different kinds of fundraisers, phone trees, like all the things that were demanding that people kind of interact consistently and not in these sort of what feels like performative ways, like putting your black square on your Instagram profile or whatever. There's something powerful in kind of building that experience of instantaneity by doing something like that, and at the same time, the energy of that kind of folds away, because once everyone recognizes that everyone else thinks that that is a good idea, There's something about the maintenance of these struggles that can fizzle out at the end. One of the things that I think what makes C Spis continue to function is this kind of longer history of like doing like a danceathon to raise money, meeting people there and following up with your phone tree. Making sure that folks can like have contact with Central Americans who are visiting from the Isthmus who have something to tell us about like their harrowing experiences or something like that.
Eric A. Vázquez:Making sure that folks can kind of go and meet the folks. There was a sister cities movement that developed that was really important for sustaining folks in Central America. And some of those, like, I think were really important for doing that, to build that work. And so being able to kind of like have folks go out there and meet the folks that they are helping to support, maybe be human shields for them in the best possible way are really important. And so I think the duration of social change and the endurance that that requires, I think that there is something about just recognizing that those things don't totally change.
Eric A. Vázquez:I feel like there are a lot of structural factors that make that difficult for us. One of the fake subtitles I had for the conclusion of the book, which is on Roberto Lovato's Unforgetting, is in praise of blowhards. Because it's sort of like the folks, But remember El Salvador in 1981 or whatever, right? Like there is some element to those folks who are insistent that we remember those moments of agency, whether or not it's purely performative and experiential or like concrete and historical, that there's something important about having those folks kind of keep reminding us about those moments. So yes, there is a romantic in here.
Maritza E. Cardenas:I have a question for you, Eric. I'm just curious. What is your favorite chapter? If you had to pick, I know you're gonna say the diplomatic answer is all of them, they're all wonderful, and they are
Eric A. Vázquez:all wonderful. They're all
Maritza E. Cardenas:great. What is your favorite, it could be for whatever reason you wanna give it. I mean, I have a favorite.
Eric A. Vázquez:I'm curious what your favorite chapter is first.
Maritza E. Cardenas:Mine is the one with Roxanne's work, her memoir. I think people have, even for U. S. Central Americans, there's a very still romanticized understanding of the Sandinistas. And they were wonderful.
Maritza E. Cardenas:I'm not as romantic as you, but they were uber problematic in their racial politics, in their gender politics, in their all of their other politics, except for their anti imperialism, they're solid. Anti capitalism, they're solid. Right? But there was a there and there's a long standing as I've written about history of racialization of, you know, especially black populations in those coastal areas. And so navigating the indigenous, all that, I thought that it really, I love contradictions and complexities.
Maritza E. Cardenas:And I also like because the recording and the memory of the revolution is always very much male centered, right? Like especially for Central America. Romero versus Donovan, right? Like even just that, right? Romero is everywhere.
Maritza E. Cardenas:We love him and he's great and we should love him, right? I'm not saying, but that was not the only mark like you said, there's not only martyred figure. I mean, who gets to be elevated as a martyr? And so in her as complicated as it was, it was seeing her battle, her constant shifting of positionalities. I just found that to be a very sort of engaging thing that a lot of people when talking about solidarity or allies, if you wanna use different terms, don't really talk.
Maritza E. Cardenas:So I thought in terms of showing the asymmetries, but the worthwhileness of still engaging, I think chapter three, three really brought that because I'm not a fan of Stole. So I was reading that like, okay, okay, Eric. I don't know why, but I can It made me think about Jason and Eric. Like, I guess it's a question to both of you. Like, what was your favorite and why?
Jason Ruiz:Well, I mean, I like chapter three too. I mean, I'll give a different favorite, but I also I'm Chismoso, so I like how prickly, you know, that chapter can get around, you know, Dunbar Ortiz and all of her sort of, I won't say blow heartedness, you know, but like it is a callback to what you just said, sort of being into kind of every issue. I'm at Notre Dame and I give the most Catholic school answer possible and say, I really thought chapter two was particularly they're all great. I thought it was really illuminating and thinking about martyrdom in this really interesting way. And I thought the ways that you unpacked her agency in being you know, like, having her eyes open in terms of what she was doing.
Jason Ruiz:Is it an overstatement to say, like embracing the possibility of her murder? I thought was very challenging to read, but in a productive way. And it, I thought, you know, the engagement with liberation theology was very, I'm glad your committee yelled at you to include it because, I mean, it's a huge thing on my campus. It's a huge topic. You know, people are still talking about, you know, this liberation theology moment that like, you know, was like changing the world, in Central America at the time.
Jason Ruiz:And then I think dealing with Donovan in terms of her martyrdom with such complexity as you do, I think is just very, very smart.
Eric A. Vázquez:Thank you. You know, I think part of what I liked about that chapter at least was sort of thinking about what do we assume like the subject of resistance is like necessarily? And what does that ultimately what is, let's say, like the worst kind of intersectionality invite us to understand is like the always sort of most revolutionary perspective is going to be and the most agential point of historical transformation is going to be. And I think that one kind of really challenged me to think about that potentially as complicated and complex. You know, I think my favourite chapter is actually the Dunbar Tees chapter.
Eric A. Vázquez:It's the one that's like sort of at the centre of how I wanted to think about solidarity and name it and sort of describe it. I think that there's a lot to learn about how you balance these two intentions here and try to bring them in a conversation and try to, you know, if revolutionary moments are not predetermined ahead of time, moments of, of contingency, of extreme contingency and a revolutionary moment can turn in, in any direction and at significant points in, in this sort of moment of, of transformation. And so it can be, you know, it can, like in Egypt, it can kind of revert back to a kind of like military authoritarianism, or it can kind of do other things. What I like about Dumbarty is at least her recognition that the social upset and the recognition that things could change, I think was really important to me. And also just thinking about analogy and the way that, again, in like movement context, people are trying to kind of like make sense of each other's experiences and how they connect with an issue.
Eric A. Vázquez:Analogy is a thing that for all of its problems is like one of the ways that we just sort of understand each other's perspectives. You know, that's why I'm kind of all pragmatics of resemblances. It's unfortunate for whatever limitations there are to that and whatever potential liabilities that emerge from it. Think that there is something just kind of true about that in movement building from my experience. I think that chapter really stood out for me.
Eric A. Vázquez:The Stolen chapter is really about A, John Beverly was originally in my committee and he had to duck out because he got sick. So he's like, You have to write about David Stollan. So I was like, Okay.
Maritza E. Cardenas:That makes more sense. I get it now.
Eric A. Vázquez:But I think he represents kind of the liberal who bought into the war on terror narrative, right? He's the one who sees suffering, wants to make that suffering the kind of central part of their politics, and ending that suffering by whatever means is necessary becomes how a certain kind of subjectivity adapts to a situation where, you know, the suffering is unquestionable, but it's like, what do we do about that? As much as I like hated writing the first shot, the first version of it was 60 pages, like just like this endless takedown of Stole. I'm so glad I got it down to a more smaller amount, but, I think it, I think it works for me insofar as I think, like, for a lot of folks. The Rigoberto Menchu controversy comes up again.
Eric A. Vázquez:It came up again in, like, a sociology magazine, like, probably about ten years ago recently, as a kind of the exemplar of the potential duplicitousness of indigenous people or of anthropological informants. And so I think that it's like this perennial case study in the joint between kind of like scholarly intellectual work and political work in the world. And so even though it's an annoying thing to kind of go through, I think he authorized a lot of folks to be like, Well, the gorillas have always been lying. The left has always been lying. This is what we know about the left, etcetera.
Eric A. Vázquez:Even though he was not my favorite.
Maritza E. Cardenas:I know, I've had to teach him because I teach, know, but interesting is in terms of your discussion of solidarity, you don't really go too much into, you know, who goes to Bray, but you know, And I don't if it's because it's been over, like you felt like it's overkill, the complicated politics of solidarity there have already been discussed, but I was just, that was one of my questions. Like, why not delve in that chapter as you're dealing with Manchu and you're dealing with Stol and complicated allies, because I spent like a whole, this is complicated solidarity work, right? Because either she's like another form of extensive, like white savior type person, right? Depending on where you sit on it, right? But you're a romantic.
Maritza E. Cardenas:So now I have to ask, I'm a cynic. I'm like incense, I'm the paranoid cynic.
Eric A. Vázquez:Should be, you should be.
Maritza E. Cardenas:I should be, yeah. Yeah, so I'm curious, where do you, was that a choice and why?
Eric A. Vázquez:Think it was more just about I sidestepped that question a little bit by just sort of trying to introduce that point that she makes later because her intro to Stoll's second edition of Rigoberta Menchio and the story of all poor Guatemalans, she kind of talks about it as a piece of propaganda, political propaganda. And I know Josie Saldana Portillo kind of describes Rigoberta Menchu as a kind of book as kind of realpolitik. And I think like I'm I'm sort of fine with that. But I think, I think Stoll, in terms of, like, his impact inside The US, ends up having, like, a more And I do think, like, it was important for me to to recognize the way in which when the left ends up on the back foot, you know, at this Cold War transition moment, they start to shift to a language of human rights as a way to sustain some of the projects they saw as worthwhile. That suffering is to some degree a big part of how human rights conceptualized.
Eric A. Vázquez:And so I wanted to to hang on to him despite whatever my objections were, because I think for him suffering like who's the actual person who started suffering as a result of the Guatemalan civil war and who is qualified to suffer is a question that I think he feels sort of implicitly throughout the book. That's kind of why I wanted to sort of go to him, even if he's a pretty complicated or maybe just an altogether disposable figure. I don't know.
Maritza E. Cardenas:No, he's not disposable. He changed under in some ways, depending where you stand, right undermined the, I mean, so he's not disposable. He's a central figure that you should have. So I totally not, not the biggest fan of his work, but I totally get where he's coming from. I use it.
Maritza E. Cardenas:It was more for me the use of STOL and not really getting into Burgos De Bray and Medici because also pivotal for the revolution because that testimony gets taught. It's part of the culture wars here in The U S it rallies, it's consciousness raising, it's all of it. And that's an example of solidarity, right? The interlocutor, the anthropologist, right? And so it just, but I do also know that that's been written about, discussed.
Maritza E. Cardenas:I mean, it's had its also its moment. So I didn't know if you were like, people have been there, done that, I'm not really invested in it, or if there was a strategic other reason. That was all.
Eric A. Vázquez:Yeah. No. I mean, I think it was sort of primarily John Beverly, primarily kind of like, I'm too deep in this now, I need to make this work. And also just to kind of think of him as a certain kind of jaded liberal, I guess.
Jason Ruiz:But it would also be a little weird if you didn't include Rugo Berta Menchu in this book. You know? The the subject is US imaginaries of revolutionary Central America. Like, I I do think you have to deal with her as a figure, as impetus to all the things that Maritza was just mentioning. Like, we all remember the book cover from undergrad, you know, because she became such a cost celeb and I think probably the most potent signifier of these struggles.
Jason Ruiz:And I think it would be weird if you didn't include her in in the book.
Eric A. Vázquez:Yeah. Agreed. Agreed.
Maritza E. Cardenas:Post your child.
Eric A. Vázquez:Would you all like to share some of the things that you're working on now? Because I'd love to hear about it.
Jason Ruiz:You tell us. You go first. What's your next work?
Maritza E. Cardenas:Yeah. Your next work. Agreed.
Eric A. Vázquez:So I'm trying to work on this project called Murder Capital that thinks about tech money and capitalist experiments in Central America, particularly in Honduras and El Salvador, who, for whatever complicated reasons, this designation emerges. For a period of time in the twenty teens, Salvador and Honduras shared or exchanged the title of Murder Capital of the World. And so what is it about, like, these contexts that have had, you know, in some way for Honduras, for example, having been in Honduras a few times and talking to movement folks, feeling like there was an undeclared war by the coup government against just anyone. Many people who would be perceived to be resistant because of their age or because of their identity. And so just thinking about that intersection with Peter Thiel being behind a charter city in Honduras, or thinking about the introduction of Bitcoin in El Salvador, trying to think about what is it about tech capital in particular that wants to fantasize about these unimaginable hoards of wealth that could be pulled out of these societies that have undergone extensive violence?
Eric A. Vázquez:This book too, and I'm trying to get there, but I need a break first. How about y'all?
Jason Ruiz:I'm editing AQ. I just finished my first year year and a half of a five year contract for that. I'm directing the Institute for Latino Studies here at Notre Dame. In my own research, I'm really interested in Latinx villains in popular culture. I want to write this book called Bad Latinidad that I've started tinkering with where I look at various modes of villainry, but also your book's a lot about failure, a lot of sort of failures of Latinidad as part and parcel with that.
Jason Ruiz:So that's that's on the horizon for me.
Eric A. Vázquez:Lots of queer villains too. Right?
Jason Ruiz:Lots of them. Wrote a little bit about that in narco media, but I I love my queer villains, and I can't get enough of them. So I'm continuing with that. Actually, the the case study that kinda starts me with this is the is the case of a real life person, Aaron Hernandez. Speaking of murder again.
Maritza E. Cardenas:Totally obsessed. I'm all crime doc.
Eric A. Vázquez:Are you? Oh my god.
Maritza E. Cardenas:I love that. Talk about queer conflict. I love Latinx failures. Right? I love that as a premise, figures, right?
Maritza E. Cardenas:Oh,
Eric A. Vázquez:thank you.
Maritza E. Cardenas:As figures, yeah. Love that.
Jason Ruiz:Yeah, absolutely. And like, I think, you know, the symbolic power of Aaron Hernandez as like, you know, like not Latino enough sort of possibly closeted. All this stuff, I think makes him such a complicated sort of text to interpret for us, but interested in him and then a million other different Latino bad guys and bad girls.
Eric A. Vázquez:I love it.
Maritza E. Cardenas:I it. I can't wait to read it. I'm all about it. I've I've seen all the documentaries about it. I'm very nervous.
Jason Ruiz:Well, we'll record that podcast. I'm inviting both of you to
Maritza E. Cardenas:to Yeah. I'll be there. My next project is really looking at the relations between Latinx and disability studies. I'm thinking about modes of identification, which is like my theme. I don't understand how migration studies doesn't see itself as disability studies.
Maritza E. Cardenas:If you think about migration, not even just the rules for who can come in, how our bodies seen or read, but even the process itself, when you think about PTSD, we think about like, you know, one in every three in terms of like these different sort of medical reports, thinking about Central American migrants in particular. I'm curious as to ways that disability studies has been for the lack of it, were very white and the way that as a category doesn't register for Latinx communities who maybe have the same symptoms, behaviors, but are not allowed to, I think it is a privilege as, and this would be like to identify as disabled in certain contexts. And I think about people that I know, and I think about different communities here, there's a liability for Latinx communities to identify as disabled in ways that it is a reprieve and respite for white communities that they don't have access to. And if you go back and you think about the early narratives of Central Americans, Like even those North there, right? At the end, he's like, I've got strong hands, right?
Maritza E. Cardenas:It's able-bodiedness. If you think about all of our slogans for solidarity and activism within Latinx studies, that's all ableist. It's what you can contribute, stand up, do this, be heard. It's all saturated in discourse of ableism, right? And so how do I merge these two different spaces together?
Maritza E. Cardenas:And so, you know, there's different case studies and like one of them briefly that I want to look at is bizarre because I'm all over the place. Pop culture is like X Men, right? And that last, that Logan movie, right? Where you had the women with these, you know, are unaccompanied minors, right? These are metaphors for the different sort of things that are happening in that sort of moment.
Maritza E. Cardenas:And so, but they're disabled, right? And they're also trying to work on genetics and curing and fixing things. And I'm not an original, like everybody said that about X Men. So that's not my original. But I want to frame it within a Latinx context, know, those conversations as to more Latinx issues.
Maritza E. Cardenas:So, you know, there's different things, different like epidemiology, like looking at medical discourse, they talk about Latinx bodies. And so it's a big project and it's a very personal project. Like my family's got disability issues. I have a son who has autism. So I always write from a very personal place and I'm unapologetic about that as well.
Maritza E. Cardenas:So I am done, it's daunting and I'm excited, but yeah, that's what I'm working on.
Jason Ruiz:Well, we've done the unthinkable of putting Rigoberta Menchu, Aaron Hernandez, and the X Men in conversation with one another.
Eric A. Vázquez:I love that. That's a good to spend. I'm really excited to hear about your both your projects. Really cool stuff.
Jason Ruiz:Congrats again on the book. It's such a huge achievement. It's going to be so important to Central American Studies, Latino Studies in general, American Studies. I mean, you're working in so many fields here and there's so much to be learned from the book and from you in it. Thank you for writing it.
Eric A. Vázquez:Thank you. What a compliment. Thank you so much.
Maritza E. Cardenas:Yes. I echo all of that. Eric, it's great. And I love that you use Pathetic Theory. It doesn't get nearly enough time in Central American Studies.
Maritza E. Cardenas:Thank you.
Eric A. Vázquez:I'll bring it. I'll always bring it. Thank you.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book States of Defeat U. S. Imaginaries of Revolutionary Central America by Eric Vazquez is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.