States of Defeat

US Imaginaries of Revolutionary Central America

Eric A. Vázquez

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781452974361
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

The cultural reverberations of Central America’s failed revolutions on US intellectual thought

The thwarted Central American revolutions during the latter half of the twentieth century marked a watershed in what had become a global anti-imperialist movement striving for a more egalitarian future. Examining a range of documentary, literary, and artistic works, States of Defeat looks at how left-wing intellectuals in the United States reckoned with the fallout from these defeats through wide-ranging creative expressions of indignation, cynicism, and grief.

As he argues for the historical significance of Central America in the transition out of the Cold War, Eric A. Vázquez shows how the unfulfilled revolutionary ambitions in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala prompted intellectuals in the United States to reexamine their desires for radical transformation. Analyzing novels, memoirs, anthropological writings, documentary film, and archival materials from the 1980s and 1990s, he demonstrates how these texts prefigured later anxieties about secrecy and securitization, the rise of nongovernmental organizational forms, and state failure.

Examining the legacies of unfulfilled anti-imperialist political ideals and their implications for the global left in the twenty-first century, States of Defeat offers a renewed perspective on the function of Central America in the US imagination. Amid a resurgence of crackdowns on public protest and a rise in virulent anti-immigrant campaigns throughout the United States and globally, Vázquez presents urgent and valuable insights into the viability of political solidarity and state power.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: States of Agitation, States of Defeat
• Chapter 1. Uprising, Pacification, and the Depopulated Imaginary: Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier
• Chapter 2. On the Refusal of Finite Perceptions: Liberation Theology, Documentary Mourning, and the Catholic Martyrs of El Salvador’s Civil War
• Chapter 3. On the Magnitudes of Solidarity: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Analogical Thinking, and the Miskitu Question
• Chapter 4. Love’s Proxy: Jennifer Harbury’s Searching for Everardo and the Limits of the Law
• Chapter 5. Outrages and Relinquished Attachments: David Stoll Demystifies Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú
• Chapter 6. Cynical Reason in the Northern Triangle: Horacio Castellanos Moya and the Aesthetics of Terror
• Coda: Roberto Lovato’s Unforgetting, Biopolitics, and the State Fragility Paradigm
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Author Biography