Michel Gobat joins the Mershon Center to discuss his recent paper exploring the role that Latinos played in one of the oldest US political traditions: anti-imperialism. In both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the anti-imperialist movement was most often concerned with US intervention in Latin America— arguably the world region most deeply marked by US hegemonic aspirations. Yet Latino participation in the US anti-imperialist movement remains little studied.

This is all the more surprising given that the movement’s greatest effects on Washington’s Latin America policy coincided with booms in Latin American migration to the United States. This was especially true of the 1920s, when the anti-imperialist movement supported local resistance to the US military occupations of the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua; and the 1980s, when it resisted President Reagan’s proxy wars in Central America. Focusing on these two moments, the paper seeks to provide a fresh perspective on a longstanding US political tradition by showing how Latinos strengthened the movement’s effectiveness. They made it not only less racist and less xenophobic but also more transnational and better informed of the local effects of US intervention. 

Location: OSU Campus, Derby Hall 1039, 154 N. Oval Mall.  

More information.  

Register here.