Theme: "Negotiation and Law in Latin American History: New Connections?"

The Latin Americanist Historians at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign- both faculty members and graduate students- hereby convene another Midwest Workshop on Latin American History on our campus for April 3-4, 2015. With this initiative we hope to revitalize an important venue for presenting fresh research and discussing pressing issues in our field that was successfully initiated with a series of annual workshops convened by the University of Chicago, Notre Dame University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for several years between 2002 and 2008. The University of Chicago again hosted the Workshop in 2013. Latin Americanist historians in the Midwest thus are adopting a format for advancing discussions and regional collaboration in our field that colleagues in other fields - most notably the historians of Russia and Eastern Europe - have employed with great benefit for decades. The research universities in the Midwest comprise one of the most dense and impressive cohorts of Latin Americanist history scholars and advanced graduate students anywhere outside of Latin America. It thus promises great scholarly gain and cost-effectiveness to strengthen the network among these specialists through annual workshops. The informal and friendly atmosphere at the workshops is especially conducive for the free flow of ideas. It also forms a wonderful training ground for advanced graduate students. We envision a workshop with scholarly papers by both graduate students and faculty members from Big Ten universities, and other nearby research universities. We plan to hold about six panel
sessions with 3-4 papers each, lasting from Friday morning to Saturday noon. Faculty members from participating institutions will serve as discussants for the panels. In keeping with the desired infmmality of the Workshop, the keynote event will be a panel discussion about the theme of the 2015 Workshop, held towards the end so that it can serve as a kind of wrap-up of our discussions.
All panels will be plenary so that all participants will share knowledge of all discussions. Papers will be distributed among all participants at least two weeks before the event. The workshop will include session about Latin American and Caribbean History resources at the University of Illinois Library. This Library session will introduce the participants to Illinois's renowned Latin American collection hoping to foster a discussion on research methods, sources, and archives. In order to facilitate informal discussions and networking and underscore the friendly atmosphere of the Workshop, we plan to offer two dinners and two lunches to all participants. Pending funding, we
also hope to pay for two nights lodging for out-of-town participants. While faculty members from other universities will have to defray their own transportation expenses, we hope to pay a modest subsidy for graduate student transportation costs .

The overall theme we have chosen for the 2015 Workshop, "Negotiation and Law in Latin American History: New Connections?," addresses central cutting-edge issues currently debated in Latin Americanist scholarship and is sufficiently capacious to allow most historians in the field to participate in the debate. Over the past few years, scholars in many subfields of Latin American history - from colonial ethnohistory to environmental and labor history of the twentieth century - have re-examined the role of law in defining the distribution of rights, obligations and resources among various ethnic/racial, gender, social, and regional stakeholders in the region's polities over the past five-hundred years. Rather than focusing on the limited efficacy of many laws, as in earlier scholarship, scholars are now asking questions relating to the processes through which laws are adopted and the imaginaries, interests and enforcement strategies they bring to the fore. This new approach to legal history is closely linked to another approach now employed by many Latin
American historians: as a consequence of the emphasis on the "agency" of diverse subaltern or popular groups, scholars are now exploring how institutions, power constellations, resource distributions, the ordering of space are shaped and reshaped through negotiations between different stakeholders. This approach has begun to alter our notions of socio-racial orders, political cultures,
labor relations, the organization of social movements, and family structures, the articulation of national and regional identities through sport, music or food production, among other issues, from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. While the question of negotiation privileges non-state ("civil society") interactions, the approach of legal history necessarily focuses on the interaction
between subjects/citizens and the state. Bringing these two approaches into conversation, thus will provide an especially fruitful field of related problems, from issues oftaxation to family law, and from the formation of revolutionary coalitions to the contestation over environmental regulations. Therefore, we welcome papers that discuss themes as diverse as, though not limited to:

• Workers, labor and state
• Slavery and emancipation
• Space, imaginaries and citizenship
• Social movements, sports, art and culture
• Political culture and state Formation
• National, regional and local identities
• Memory and the construction of historical narratives
• Family, law and immigration
• Gender, race and ethnicity
• Environmental and economic history
• Religion, popular religiosity and the rise of anticlerical, secular traditions

We understand the global theme of the Workshop as a loose framework for the discussions, as an invitation to focus individual projects of the widest possible range in Latin American history onto this broadly conceived field of research issues. It should not be seen as constraining participation to historians who view themselves as experts in either of the two approaches outlined above.

Submission of Paper Proposals:

Please upload the title and a brief (200 words) abstract of paper proposals to the Workshop website, latamworkshop.com, no later than Monday, October 27, 2014. We will try to accommodate as many paper proposals as possible and will confirm participation by early December 2014.

Contact Information:

Telephone: 217-333-1155 • Graduate Office: 217-244-2591 • Fax: 217-333-2297
website

The Steering Committee for the Workshop:

Ryan Bean, Marilia Correa Kuyumjian, Silvia Escanilla
Huerta, Nils Jacobsen, Elizabeth Quick, Antonio Sotomayor