This talks builds upon Irina Carlota [Lotti] Silber's nearly three decades of research centered in Chalatenango, El Salvador, to follow the trajectories--geographic, temporal, storied--of several extended Salvadoran families. Through a retrospective and intimate ethnographic method that examines archives of memories and troubles the categories that have come to stand for "El Salvador" such as alarming violent numbers, Silber considers the lives of young Salvadorans who were brought up in an everyday radical politics and then migrated to the United States after more than a decade of peace and democracy. As the 1.5 insurgent generation and their families sustain their radical project across borders, circulate the products of their migrant labor through remittances, and engage in collective social care for the debilitated bodies of their loved ones, they transform and depart from expectations of the wounded postwar that offer us hope for the making of more just global futures.
More about the author:
Irina Carlota (Lotti) Silber is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Programs at CCNY. Additionally, she serves as Director of Strategic Initiatives at CCNY’s Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership. She is also on the Doctoral Faculty in Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her first book, Everyday Revolutionaries: Gender, Violence, and Disillusionment in Postwar El Salvador (Rutgers 2011) won the 2013 Mariposa Award from the International Latino Book Awards and was subsequently published in Spanish with a new preface with UCA Editores in El Salvador (2018). Her third book, After Stories: Transnational Intimacies of Postwar El Salvador (Stanford 2022) explores the longue durée of El Salvador’s postwar through the lives and narratives of the 1.5 insurgent generation—the now adult children of the too-often-forgotten rank-and-file Salvadoran revolutionaries. After Stories is the recipient of three awards and two honorable mentions including the APLA Book Prize in Critical Anthropology. She is also co-editor of Higher Education, State Repression, and Neoliberal Reform in Nicaragua: Reflections from a University under Fire (Routledge 2023), a volume that explores the role of the university as a space of resistance to state repression and neoliberal reform. At CCNY Lotti is also Co-PI on a three-year National Science Foundation ADVANCE award to advance inclusion, diversity, and equity in STEM. Lotti’s work spans ethnographic genres and public scholarship commitments. She received a First Prize in Poetry from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology, provided an expert anthropological dictamen for the historic El Mozote Massacre case currently underway in El Salvador, and is co-chair of the University Seminar in Disability, Culture, and Society at Columbia University.
