CLAH Lecture: A Road Less Travelled: Making Room for Broad Intellectual Collaboration in Our Scholarship and Mentoring in Latin American History

Abstract

This essay is a lightly edited version of a speech I gave at the annual reception of the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH) at the American Historical Association meetings in New York City in January 2025. It was written as a keynote address connected with my acceptance of CLAH’s Distinguished Service Award for 2024. I focus here on what have been the two most critical and intertwined commitments of my roughly five-decade career as a historian of Mexico and Latin America: broad intellectual collaboration across disciplines, academic generations, and national boundaries, and a two-way notion of mentoring. Apart from my own monographic research, these commitments have played out in an array of editorial arenas—academic journals, multi-authored collections, a massive country-level compendium of documents, and a long-running book series—that have remained integral to my intellectual growth and figured importantly in the mentoring of my doctoral students and their mentoring of me. My career trajectory in this regard may well have been a road less travelled and one certainly not for everyone; still, there is a case to be made for giving greater emphasis to broader collaborative strategies of research and dissemination in our work as scholars and teachers of Latin America’s past.

I am deeply honored by CLAH’s Distinguished Service Award. My name has been added to a list of colleagues I have always greatly admired, several of whom I have sought to emulate, and a few with whom I have collaborated closely over the years. Two of these extraordinary scholars were taken from us very recently. One of them was my dear friend Mary Kay Vaughan, whose work has done so much to shape our understanding of Mexican cultural politics and relations of gender and sexuality. We lost Mary Kay cruelly, suddenly, in early December 2024, but her vitality and originality as a scholar, her extraordinary dedication as a teacher and mentor, and her warmth and generosity as a friend will not soon be forgotten. Not long after, we lost another invaluable colleague, Eric Van Young, a capacious intellectual whose peerless early scholarship on Mexican economic history was followed by a series of big books and provocative essays that rethought the Independence era, the bridging nature of the nineteenth century, and the place of both popular upheavals and leading statesmen and thinkers across the gamut of Mexican history. Similar to Mary Kay, an unstinting mentor of doctoral students, Eric also possessed a dry and ludic wit, and his gift for humor enlivened many august meetings. He too will be dearly missed.

This evening, in part inspired by their examples, I want to focus on what have likely been the two most critical and intertwined commitments of my career: broad intellectual collaboration and a two-way notion of mentoring.

I came of age as a historian of Latin America during the height of the region’s brutal Cold War, and much of my intellectual and political agenda as a grad student and later as a professor turned on questions pertaining to the United States’s complex and overweening presence in Latin America, and its intersection with Latin America’s tumultuous twentieth “Century of Revolution.” But it was during the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, when the Cold War—manifested in a series of often coordinated dirty wars that wrought horrific effects in Latin American killing fields and barrios—also left an indelible imprint on my own research agenda and those of many in my cohort. For me, Latin America seemed suspended in those critical decades “between tragedy and promise”—as Steve Stern, aptly put it: caught between paroxysms of state terror and the intermittent promise (ultimately illusory) of revolutionary redemption. ¹ It is not for nothing, then, that my own monographs and collaborative volumes bear titles such as Revolution from Without; Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution; Close Encounters of Empire; In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War; or Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America’s Long Cold War. ²

In truth, my research interests throughout my career have been fixed on several problems that continue to remain terribly relevant to me—especially now, in the time of Trump and Putin, amidst ongoing struggles for democracy, sovereignty, and social and racial justice—even as these problems’ inflections have changed and the means and arenas to engage them have become more sophisticated and diverse. Namely, how is rule achieved and maintained in political and cultural terms, and what happens when fragile hegemonies, democracies, and norms disappear or come under threat? Why do subordinate groups in society sometimes take terrible risks to rebel, and short of rebellion, what are their responses to the inequities, indignities, and acute grievances that shape their lives? What are the politics governing rebellion, resistance, resilience, and everyday discontent, and how do they embrace a multiplicity of classes, groups, and generations—as well as generating dynamic constructions of nation, class, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality? How have notions of “the political” changed over time for historical subjects and the historians who study them? How do ruling elites incorporate or seek to leverage the demands and fears of working-class groups and disaffected regions and subcultures in everyday scenarios of state and nation formation? What are the internal and external determinants of rule, and how do social movements and potentially revolutionary situations play out at the national and grassroots levels, which overlap with and are themselves embedded in international and transnational fields of power?

My first experiences with intellectual collaborations to engage some of these themes occurred in graduate school at Yale in the mid-1970s. Keep in mind that Yale’s History Department and the academic profession were in a very different place in the early to mid-1970s. There was no grad student union; diversity was minimal, both among faculty and (to only a slightly lesser extent among) students. Just before I arrived, many jobs were still arranged through something approaching an “Old Boys Network.” There were no uniform aid packages, and the Latin American history cohorts were much smaller then: For example, I was the only Latin Americanist admitted between 1971 and 1972. But I benefited from an enveloping sense of communitas and camaraderie sustained by an extraordinary cohort of fellow grad students—including Steve Stern, Florencia Mallon, Barbara Weinstein, and Steven Hahn—from whom, in truth, I learned as much (in and out of seminars) as from the excellent faculty who mentored me. Together we read big books such as E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class and Volume 1 of Marx’s Capital ³ two evenings a month and had great weekly dance parties! (Hey, it was the 1970s!) Together, some of us edited a collection of writings by some of Latin America’s great pensadores: social thinkers of colonial and nineteenth-century cities such as Argentina’s Juan Agustín García, Colombia’s Miguel Samper, and Peru’s Joaquín Capelo, among others. The volume arose from an assignment in a graduate seminar and was only published years later as I Saw a City Invincible: Urban Portraits of Latin America. ⁴ But the immense satisfaction I gained working with fellow scholars on an intellectual enterprise that spanned several centuries and academic generations kindled a desire to repeat such collaborations, and, later, to encourage my own grad students to engage in them. It gives me tremendous satisfaction that these traditions have continued over the decades among more recent graduate cohorts at Yale, who have worked together and enlisted faculty kindred spirits to stage cutting-edge conferences and to produce field-shaping collaborative volumes—for example, Jolie Olcott’s co-edited Sex in Revolution: Gender Politics and Power in Revolutionary Mexico (published in 2006) or much more recently, Andra Chastain and Tim Lorek’s Itineraries of Expertise: Science, Technology, and the Environment in Latin America’s Long Cold War (which appeared in 2020). ⁵

Moreover, our grad student cohorts consistently register the most incisive comments at the mock job talks that they themselves organize for their fellow students and graduate advisers. As one of my current advisees put it: “When one of us wins on this impossible market; it’s a victory savored by all of us.” ⁶

Now, in a scholarly sense, I am representative of a particular cohort of Latin American historians, trained largely in the 1970s, that was initially preoccupied with local and regionally grounded studies of politics and society as seen “from below” and framed by an analysis of political economy. In that regard, we were essentially products of what the great Mexican microhistorian Luis González alternately called “the regionalist impulse” and the “regional historiographical revolution of our times.” ⁷ We were conceptually steeped in approaches to social history and political economy associated with the historical structuralism of the French Annales school and in Thompsonian and other historical variants of British cultural Marxism, but also in the dissonant paradigms of development that emanated from Latin America and the Global South, such as dependency theory. In those days, working at Yale with our principal graduate mentor, one of Brazil’s greatest historians, Emilia Viotti da Costa (who fortuitously found her way to Yale after being expelled from Brazil by its authoritarian military regime), several of us placed a premium on the interplay of agency and structure within the unfolding political economy of regions and localities. In our work at Yale (and no doubt in many other training programs), we attempted to achieve an appropriate dialectical synthesis between degrees of human initiative, agency, resistance, and contingency on the one hand and the constraints of power and custom on the other. ⁸ We examined official institutional sources, consulted imperial and corporate archives in places such as Washington, London, and Chicago, and also pioneered in the use of local judicial, municipal, notarial, and hacienda archives and the challenge of reading them critically against the grain. Finally, we began more fully to integrate anthropological approaches into the historical enterprise, seeking out local informants and oral traditions and engaging more in ethnographic participant-observation. My own 1978 dissertation, which was published as Revolution from Without: Yucatán, Mexico, and the United States, 1910-1940 (in 1982), epitomizes this first generational project in the field of Mexican Studies. ⁹

But in the 1990s and 2000s, as with many members of this academic generation, my interests evolved from an abiding interest in politics and society to a greater concern with politics and culture. To be sure, the transition was partial, far from the kind of “paradigm shift” that Thomas Kuhn famously described. ¹⁰ Thus, scholars of politics and culture inquired into how elite and popular actors constructed political projects and languages of meaning, and how their religious, racial/ethnic, gender, and generational identities were shaped within broader scenarios of state and nation (and transnation) formation. We were still attentive to the mix of structural factors and human agency in our analyses, but we had become more preoccupied with the transnational social fields where power was deployed and where multistranded, hybrid subjects and identities were fashioned and imagined. For some of us, nuanced Gramscian, Foucauldian, and gendered understandings of power and hegemony, labor and patriarchy, and “subaltern” modes of resistance, accommodation, and negotiation distinguished our work. Some of us were influenced by recent comparative scholarship on the rise of the modern medical–legal state and the production of knowledge, and on state formation as cultural revolution—currents that were often associated with “New Cultural History” of Mexico and Latin America. ¹¹ The collaborative volumes of mine that issued from this reorientation to studies of politics and culture include Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (1994), Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations (1998), Reclaiming the Political in Latin American History (2001), Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico since 1940 (2001), Crime and Punishment in Latin America: Law and Society since Colonial Times (2001), and In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War (2008). ¹² But this change of direction was also reflected in the special issues of the Hispanic American Historical Review (HAHR) devoted to Mexico’s New Cultural History (1999) and Gender and Sexuality in Latin America (2001), both published during my tenure as the journal’s co-editor (with Stuart Schwartz). ¹³

Now, over the course of my career, several colleagues have asked me, only half facetiously, “What’s with all this editing? How do you have the time and patience? Don’t things drag on endlessly? Take time away from your own research and monographs? Don’t you and your collaborators often end up wanting to strangle one another? And to be sure, most of them have stayed away from the kind of editorial gambits—academic journals, multi-authored collections, a massive country-level compendium of documents, ¹⁴ and a long-running book series—that have remained so central to my intellectual growth, providing me unusual opportunities to work across disciplines, national boundaries, and generations, and figuring so centrally in the mentoring of my students and their mentoring of me.

Of course, one must be honest about the costs: a commitment to collaborative projects, especially multi-authored volumes, requires the cultivation of certain habits and a willingness to learn from one’s successes and failures. It likely also requires a touch of masochism and madness—as well as a relish for deep collaboration that is often rare in the profession of history, which has such an individual, artisanal cast to it. Moreover, university administrations, as well as increasingly strapped academic presses and encumbered foundations who often have narrow mandates, have typically undervalued collaborative volumes in their allocation of prestige and funding.

Beyond these practical disincentives, collaborative projects require immense patience and the ability to delay gratification, obliging one to commit to the process as much as the final product. A sense of equanimity, flexibility, compromise, and humor (sometimes an appreciation for dark humor) is needed along the way. In my case, the ability to roll with the punches when often-intense negotiations turned sour, in one early editing project literally meant rolling with the punches, as I dodged a haymaker that one of my fellow editors threw at another as I stood between them in a failed effort to dampen an escalating argument about our volume’s conceptual framework!

Editors need to be extroverts, good networkers, and even institution builders—and it helps if you can relish and channel the feelings of camaraderie and excitement that can flourish within the discursive communities that editorial projects can unleash, while simultaneously defusing combustible contentiousness before the breaking point. (After my early experience with fisticuffs, I got better at this!)

Let me focus on a few collaborative ventures where eventually all the circuits came together and resulted in volumes that moved the field in provocative new directions. Each of these volumes represented an intense collaboration and, to one degree or another, helped galvanize a discursive community. Some of them, such as Fragments of a Golden Age, started modestly, as scribblings with my co-editors Anne Rubenstein and Eric Zolov on napkins at the bar of a convention hotel like this one. Others (such as Everyday Forms of State Formation) developed over the course of a fellowship year, when Daniel Nugent and I worked together at the University of California at San Diego’s Center for US–Mexican Studies. Yet another collaborative project, In from the Cold, which constituted a substantial interrogation of the prevailing direction of Latin American Cold War Studies, then tied to traditional bipolar renditions of the global struggle, which I coedited with the preeminent Mexican–Czech historian Daniela Spenser, was nurtured over years across several cycles of the American Historical Association (AHA), Latin American Studies Association (LASA), and the Historians of Mexico congresses.

By contrast, Close Encounters of Empire was brainstormed with postdoctoral fellows Ricardo Salvatore and Catherine LeGrand in the stimulating environment of Jim Scott’s Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale. The inspiration for still other volumes arose in graduate seminars in discussions with my students. Thus, for example, Jolie Olcott first began to develop some of the ideas that would later appear in Sex in Revolution, her pioneering collaboration with Mary Kay Vaughan and Gabriela Cano, in seminar, and it was in the same context that Greg Grandin and I began to brainstorm the conference at Yale on revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence constituting a “long Cold War” that led to A Century of Revolution. ¹⁵

Typically, most of these collaborative volumes came at the beginning of cycles of research and helped to shape the trajectory of the important discussions that followed. In a real sense, then, most these projects were exploratory and raised as many questions as they answered. In most cases, there was a considerable period of gestation. The core ideas were initially developed by the editors of the volume, then vetted by a broader international group that included both kindred spirits and more heterodox skeptics. In each case the result was a proposal to external funders such as the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) or the Social Science Research Council (would they still had the same level of funding for these purposes!), the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS-Mexico City), or the Woodrow Wilson Center’s International Cold War History Project, as well as to intramural funding competitions at Yale. In each of these projects, a collaborative attempt was made to generate something of a manifesto to move the field in a new direction, sometimes out of a deep rut in which it was mired. For example, in the 1990s, Everyday Forms of State Formation attempted to transcend dichotomous portrayals of the Mexican Revolution as either the culminating moment of heroic popular struggle in Mexican history or the ultimate triumph of a Leviathan state over the people. In launching our proposal, we hoped to encourage a new discussion of the revolution among Mexican and international scholars as a culturally complex, historically generated, multiscale process, in a manner that might concretely illuminate the multistranded relationship between such abstract notions as “the state” and “the people.”

In each of these projects, it was critical for the editors not only to initially produce a proposal that “pushed the envelope”—suggested a new course—but also to identify the right mix of interlocutors, from both the North and South and across academic generations. Critically, in each instance some of these interlocutors were neither historians nor Latin Americanists, but colleagues who had thought long and creatively about the conceptual issues at stake—for example, public intellectuals such as Jim Scott. In the case of Everyday Forms of State Formation, after the post-conference fisticuffs I alluded to earlier, three editors became two, and ultimately some contributors could not, or would not, for love or money, produce the revised essays we required. Difficult choices had to be made, and a full 4 years elapsed between our NEH conference and the publication of the volume. But in the end, it was worth the wait.

The year-long collaborative planning that resulted in another large NEH grant to stage the megaconference (55 scholars strong) that gave rise to Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations did much to ensure that the volume would reach a broad comparative audience. Ultimately, it also produced a rich discussion with US international historian Emily Rosenberg that led to the creation of a new book series with Duke University Press, “American Encounters/Global Interactions.” Building on the interest in Close Encounters, Emily and I believed there was a pressing need to bring mainstream diplomatic historians and edgier foreign relations scholars into contact with area studies specialists in a manner that might enrich these approaches and, in the process, expand the conceptualization of culture and power in everyday imperial encounters. Created in 1998 with the publication of Close Encounters and now numbering over 70 titles, the series remains an important outlet for scholars, particularly younger crossdisciplinary researchers, who propose new interpretive frameworks for studying the United States’ imposing and multiform presence in the world, and who engage in multisited archival and ethnohistorical research.

In so many of these collaborative projects, the Duke University Press and its senior editors, specifically the late Valerie Millholland and her successor Gisela Fosado, has been of critical importance. During the period 1997–2002, when I edited the HAHR at Yale with my colleague Stuart Schwartz, Duke encouraged our plan to include more pieces by Latin American scholars and to increase their presence on the Board of Editors. The Press also enabled us to do more than publish freeze-dried chunks of recent dissertations, supporting our move to place greater emphasis on state-of-the-field thematic volumes and double volumes, such as the heated debate about Mexico’s “New Cultural History” in 1999. That issue was ludically subtitled Una Lucha Libre? and was amply illustrated with masked Mexican luchadores strutting their moves on the issue’s pages, as if to punctuate and leaven the sometimes nasty scholarly exchange playing out alongside the images of the wrestlers. In general, our editorship of HAHR placed greater emphasis on visual culture and expanded the use of contemporary photographs and drawings, a trend that has since continued under new teams of editors.

Without question these multiple editorial collaborations have stimulated and continually renewed my individual research projects, whether on revolutionary and postrevolutionary Mexico, the cultural dimension of the United States’ imperial relationship with Latin America, or the region’s distinctive variant of the global Cold War, among others. But they have also paid rich dividends in the way I have been able to mentor my own graduate students—and their ability to mentor me. My students have taken some of these themes and approaches in new and exciting directions, rethinking and refashioning them, thereby enriching prevailing intellectual frameworks and galvanizing new ones.

Mentoring and learning from my students (a commitment that Emilia Viotti da Costa herself modeled for me) has perhaps been the richest part of my career and has played an integral role in motivating me well into my fifth decade in the profession. It has sustained rich dialogues that have lasted a professional lifetime. My last book, Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution, an interpretive volume on the Mexican revolution and its legacies, was, in part, the product of multiple engagements with students in seminar or during and after their dissertation work. More directly, it was co-authored with one of my most senior former students Jürgen Buchenau, now one of the leading authorities on Mexico’s great twentieth-century upheaval. ¹⁶ Similarly, my knowledge of the “long Cold War” owes much of its substance and subtlety to Greg Grandin; my appreciation of the intersection of gender, patriarchy, and politics is indebted to Jolie Olcott; and my knowledge of Latin American vernacular music and love of Mexican corridos have been immeasurably enriched over decades by former students such as Bryan McCann, Tim Henderson, and Jonathan Graham. My appreciation of the everyday dimensions of revolutionary (and counterrevolutionary) process has been honed by conversations over many years with—among others—Greg Grandin, Marian Schlotterbeck, Alison Bruey, Ray Craib, Victoria Langland, Jessica Stites-Mor, Kirsten Weld, Mike Bustamante, Jenny Lambe, Adrián Lerner Patrón, Emily Snyder, Ricardo Alvarez-Pimentel, Polly Lauer, and Mariana Díaz Chalela. And so it goes—I could go on in this vein for another 25 minutes, invoking the work of each of my 64 former and current doctoral advisees, all of whom I esteem as colleagues.

Another exciting, more recent turn in this reciprocal mentorship is the development of a new generation of first-gen Latinex Ph.D.s, scholars such as Kaysha Corinealdi, Carlos Hernández, Ricardo Alvarez-Pimentel, Andrés Bustamante Agudelo, Lucero Estrella, Javier Porras Madero, Cristián Padilla Romero, and Richard Velázquez, who are now emerging in the forefront of their own burgeoning fields, contributing new methodological approaches and interpretive frameworks to the history of Mexico and its borderlands, Central America and the circum-Caribbean Basin, and the Black Atlantic. I am terribly proud to have played a small role in helping to facilitate this generational emergence. Let me conclude by invoking the words of one of my generation’s truly innovative poets and mentors, the recently departed Nikki Giovanni. In a retrospective observation several years ago, on her own career as a mentor—one that resonates, I am sure, for so many of us—Giovanni reflected, “There’s just nothing as wonderful as knowing you have done your job.” ¹⁷