Please join the Latin American Library in welcoming Lirio Gutiérrez Rivera, a 2018-2019 LAL Richard E. Greenleaf scholar, who will be giving a work-in-progress talk titled Global Entanglements in the Production of Violence and the Migration of Hondurans on Monday, May 20, from 3:00-5:00 PM in the Latin American Library seminar room.

The talk will be in English. Refreshments will follow the talk.

Abstract Honduran migration to the U.S. is not new. My research at The Latin American Library and conversations with members of the Honduran communities in New Orleans confirm the changing patterns of Honduran migration in the past decades. In recent years, violence combined with lack of economic opportunities appear to be the main reasons for leaving. Most studies tend to understand violence, crime, and inequality within regional or local processes as a consequence of state weakness, or a combination of both. I claim that Hondurans’ reasons for leaving their country are entangled with global processes. In this talk, I explore U.S.-Central America relations (in particular the ‘war on drugs’), the global agenda on migration control, and its connections to contemporary Honduran migration. These global processes contribute to reproducing violence, crime, and inequality in the region and the country, leaving many low-income Hondurans with no option but to leave the country.

Lirio Gutiérrez Rivera is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, Universidad Nacional de Colombia. She studied Political Science at the Freie Universitat Berlin and Anthropology at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. Her research investigates urban violence, contemporary prisons, youth gangs, social mobility, and state responses to crime and violence in Latin America, particularly Honduras and Colombia. She is currently working on two research projects: the first explores gender and urban planning in Medellín, Colombia; the second is based on her work as an expert witness for Central Americans seeking asylum in the U.S. The latter explores the connections between different forms of violence experienced by women and contemporary migration in Central America. Her book, Territories of Violence: State, Marginal Youth, and Public Security, was published in 2013 with Palgrave.

The Richard E. Greenleaf Fellowship Program at the Latin American Library is made possible by a generous gift from the late Richard E. Greenleaf.

About Richard E. Greenleaf (1930-2011)

Until his retirement in 1998, Richard E. Greenleaf served as the France Vinton Scholes Professor of Colonial Latin American History, and as the Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University. He also served as Chair of the Department of History. Dr. Greenleaf grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and took his Bachelors, Masters and Doctoral degrees at the University of New Mexico, where he studied under the dean of Inquisition scholars, France V. Scholes. Greenleaf’s doctoral dissertation, Zumárraga and the Mexican Inquisition 1536-1543, served as the basis for his many excellent publications on the history of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Latin America. Greenleaf authored eleven major scholarly books, co-authored or contributed to seventeen others, and published almost four dozen articles in the field of Latin American and New Mexico history. He was the recipient of many distinguished awards, among them the Silver Medal, the Sahagún Prize (Mexican National History Award), and the Serra Award of the Academy of American Franciscan History for Distinguished Scholarship in Colonial Latin American History. In his long and distinguished teaching career in New Mexico, Mexico City and New Orleans, Greenleaf served as mentor to 34 doctoral students at Tulane, and countless masters and undergraduate students. Richard E. Greenleaf died on November 8, 2011.