The Conference on Latin American History recently awarded graduate student Alejandro Guardado with a James R. Scobie Award. Guardado’s project is titled, “Voices, Testimonies, and Interpretations of Mexico’s Dirty War: Indigenous and Peasant Perspectives.” The Scobie award offers up to $1,500 for an exploratory research trip abroad to determine the feasibility of a Ph.D. dissertation topic dealing with some facet of Latin American history. Guardado is advised by Drs. Yanna Yannakakis and Javier Villa-Flores. Read more about the project and planned fieldwork in the summary he provided below.

My current research focuses on the period of Mexico’s Dirty War (1964-1982) and the years that followed to highlight how peasant and Indigenous communities in the states of Oaxaca and Chiapas connected their histories of struggle with transnational phenomena including liberation theology and human rights movements. This June, I will train in oral history methods and theory at the University of Texas, Austin. As the summer advances, I will conduct interviews with Catholic activists, Indigenous intellectuals, NGO staff workers, and archivists from Chiapas and Oaxaca to examine how they interpreted state violence, social movements, ethnic identities, and internationalism. I use oral history and memory studies methods to attempt to understand how Indigenous and peasant peoples give meaning to the history they have experienced.