research overview
- My research focuses on how the Latin American radical left thought about race, class, nation, and empire in the interwar period, and traces connections between Mexico, Cuba, and the Soviet Union. I previously trained as a specialist on Russia and the USSR, and have written two books for general audiences on post-Soviet politics and the conflict in Chechnya. I am presently completing revisions to a book titled 'Radical Sovereignty: Debating Race, Nation, and Empire in Interwar Latin America.' Based on multilingual archival research in five sites and fifteen archival repositories in Mexico, Cuba, Russia, and the US, my book reconstructs a series of transnational debates in which Latin American political radicals of the interwar era reimagined the tangled relationships between sovereignty, race, and class. I argue that these debates of the 1920s and 1930s shifted the terms in which Latin American radicals viewed the nation. In the process, the discussions laid down vital precedents for later movements advocating pan-Latin American solidarity, indigenous autonomy, and racial equality. Cases I explore include anti-imperialist exiles in 1920s Mexico City who envisioned an “Indoamerican” federation that would dissolve existing national frontiers, and Communist parties in 1930s Mexico, Cuba, and Chile that called for black and indigenous peoples to be given the right to “national” self-determination — that is, to establish separate, sovereign states if they so desired. Although neither of these proposals came to fruition, I argue that uncovering these histories recasts our understanding of twentieth-century Latin American politics: questions about nationality and race have been more integrally and durably linked with transnational movements for social justice than is commonly supposed.
