Central America

Some of the earliest grants from Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford allowed for the program in Latin American Studies at Tulane to continue its specialization in Central America, building–in part–on the existing strength of the Middle American Research Institute (M.A.R.I.). On the other hand, this specialization emerges from the interconnection between New Orleans and Central America, tied to the banana trade and other port activities.

These ventures brought a large number of Hondurans to New Orleans, and the community here remains so strong and significant that Honduran presidential candidates visit New Orleans to solicit votes. Over the years, across disciplines, Tulane has continuously hired faculty whose research agendas, pedagogies, and projects involve Central America, leading to the consolidation of unique regional knowledge.

Moreover, as the political and economic destabilization in Central America evolved in the last half of the 20th century, so did the need for further developing the academic field of Latin American Studies.¹

CIAPA and Casa de Las Mil Flores

Since the mid-1970s, two large institutions on site in Costa Rica and Guatemala helped to define and sustain the relationship between Tulane and Central America: Centro de Investigación y Adiestramiento Político y Administrativo (CIAPA) in San José, Costa Rica and Casa de las Mil Flores in Antigua, Guatemala.

Tulane had been active in Guatemala since the early 1950s. Among other projects, it conducted a summer Latin American Area Field School at San Carlos University in 1951 and developed an educational project in conjunction with Washington in October 1954. These activities were carried out through funding from the initial 1947 Carnegie Grant.

In Summer 1974, the Casa de las Mil Flores, also known as the Matilda Geddings Gray Foundation house, opened its doors to Tulane faculty and students.² This research training center offered fellowships for graduate students conducting fieldwork in Guatemala, which included three months of lodging at Casa Mil Flores, meals, airfare, research expenses, and 30 days outside of Antigua for “research in archives, libraries, archaeological sites, villages […] and art collections.”³

All four fellowship grantees of the 1974 pilot program at Casa Mil Flores were women: Dicey Taylor (MA, Art History), Barbara Holmes (PhD, 1978, Anthropology), Anne C. Collins (PhD, 1980, Anthropology), and Jo Anne Weaver (MA, 1975, History). What is more, the faculty member selected to supervise graduate students was also a woman, Anthropology professor Victoria Bricker.⁴ This achievement in gender advancement is noteworthy, considering that academia in the 1970s was still a majority male space.

That Spring, history professor Ralph Lee Woodward drove from New Orleans to Antigua to ensure the house was ready for the summer term. See below the May 1974 postcard sent to Center Director Richard Greenleaf with Woodward’s early impressions of Casa Mil Flores.⁵

Listen as Ginny Garrard and Ted Fischer discuss their experiences as graduate students in Guatemala:

libCasa Mil Flores additionally hosted summer programs, like the Summer History Seminar in Antigua (1978) or later collaborations with Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica (CIRMA) in the 1980s. In Fall 1985, Architecture professor Eugene Cizek led a group of undergraduates to Antigua to research historic preservation with faculty and students at Universidad Rafael Landivar for his course, Contemporary Design in Antigua, Guatemala.⁶ The following Winter 1986, Casa de las Mil Flores served as a base for a geological field program for Tulane faculty and staff, led by Miriam Baltuck.

Besides a presence in Antigua, Tulane began engaging with the rural community of Chimaltenango, Guatemala in the 1980s. This was due to the arrival of Dr. Carroll Behrhorst as Adjunct Visiting Professor at the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine (SPHTM) in 1985. Behrhorst had founded a community clinic and hospital in the early 1960s, but was forced to leave the country after receiving death threats. Faculty from SPHTM and the Department of Sociology jointly offered an intensive two-week course on “Health and Economic Development,” and the Stone Center coordinated a community medicine rotation in Chimaltenango for fourth-year medical students.

History & Anthropology

The 1960s-70s brought two field-defining, foundational figures: Victoria Bricker and Ralph Lee Woodward. In early 2023, we brought two Central Americanists, Ginny Garrard and Ted Fischer, students of Bricker and Woodward, into dialogue about their time at Tulane.

A cultural anthropologist, linguist, and ethnohistorian, Vicky Bricker was a pioneering scholar in Mayan culture and language. She arrived at Tulane in 1969, and later began as Assistant Professor in 1970. For more on Bricker, please visit (Indigenous languages page). Ralph Lee Woodward, hired in 1970, became a key figure in Central American history, most well-known for Central America: A Nation Divided (1976). Woodward began to edit La revista centroamericana de pensamiento in 1975.⁷ With these two figures, Tulane became a hub for graduate students looking to study Central America, including Ginny and Ted.

“I started here in August of 1979, and the Sandinistas had taken over in July of 1979. And so it was poppin’. And, you know, of course, New Orleans is a place where Central Americans have historically come. And so there were people coming to school here… and then it turned out that this was THE place in the world, I would say, to this day, to study Central America.”

– Ginny Garrard

The 1970s-80s were a convoluted moment in Central America, which included the 1979 Sandinista uprising in Nicaragua, the 1982 coup in Guatemala, the Salvadorian civil war, and the various foreign interventions. Within this context, interest in the region grew as did the events about Central America sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies. Unlike other regionally focused programming (eg. Brazil, Mexico), events on Central America were almost exclusively regarding politics, economics, and business.

Take a look below at events on Panama, Nicaragua, and Honduras, as well as the annual Central American Conference.

The late 1980s brought greater attention to El Salvador, which experienced a civil war from 1979-1992. In December 1988, the Latin American Student Association of Tulane (LASA) arranged for a visit from Salvadorian political figures prior to the 1989 election: the Minister of Presidency Carlos R. López Nuila (on behalf of sitting President J. Napoleon Duarte) and ARENA party candidate Alfredo Cristiani.⁸ In 1991, the Stone Center and the Department of Political Science co-sponsored “The Politics of El Salvador: A Faculty-Graduate Student Seminar.”⁹

Woodward left Tulane in 1999 and Bricker retired in 2005. Nowadays, Judie Maxwell and Justin Wolfe carry the torch. Below Wolfe reflects on his arrival and the legacy of Woodward:

Central America & the Latin American Library

The renowned Latin American Library at Tulane has always had a particular concentration on Central American resources. As part of the “Farmington Plan,” Howard Tilton Memorial Library became the principal U.S. center for materials from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, agreeing to acquire every significant publication from the four countries from 1960 onwards.¹⁰ This agreement ensured that worldwide publications would be available to U.S. researchers.

Their vast collections include rare 19th and early 20th century Guatemalan and Honduran newspapers , the personal archive and film collection of early El Salvadoran cinematic pioneer Alfredo Massi, and the Chamorro-Barrios Family Papers (1767-1997) from Nicaragua.

“The Latin American Library is just a fantastic resource. The Central American collection, in particular, is really without parallel. And so, coming here, I could do research within the library, I could do research abroad, I could combine the two.”

– Justin Wolfe

Central American Studies: Literature, Film, & Women

The late 1980s saw the arrival of Maureen Shea whose research focus on literature and culture balanced out the existing strengths in Central American history, political science, economy, and anthropology. Within this milieu of growing emphasis on culture, the semester Shea began (Fall 1987) coincided with Tulane’s first Central American Film Festival, which screened El norte (Gregory Nava, 1984) and others.¹¹

In early 2023, we brought together Maureen Shea with her PhD advisee, Laura Barbas-Rhoden, now a Professor of Spanish at Wofford College. Listen to their entire conversation below as they discuss the shifts they experienced in the Spanish department – the turn toward the study of women writers and Central American literature – in the 1990s and early 2000s, via pedagogy, research, and academic events.

Shea immersed her students into Central American Studies, which was an emergent area of study in the field of Latin American literature and culture. In the classroom, Shea offered courses like Central American Literature and The Social Problem. Her two monographs, Women as Outsiders: Undercurrents of Oppression in Latin American Women’s Novels (1993) and Culture and Customs of Guatemala (2000) echoed this new culturally-based regional focus on Central America. A few years later, Barbas-Rhoden published Writing Women in Central America (2003).

As Barbas-Rhoden reflects below, undertaking research and study of Central American culture at an institution like Tulane with such deep ties to the region was a benefit to students.

To gain traction as an established field of study, the International Congress of Central American Literature and Culture (CILCA) began in 1992. The photos below, courtesy of Laura Barbas-Rhoden, were taken at CILCA 1999, held in Managua, Nicaragua. The last CILCA conference, organized jointly by Tulane and Loyola, took place in March 2015.

Around the turn of the century, two Central American academics shared research with Tulanians on Central American women and culture. Nydia Palacios (University of Mobile, Nicaragua) presented a talk on “Rosario Aguilar y sus aportes a la novela nicaragüense” and film scholar María Lourdes Cortés (Universidad de Costa Rica) discussed “Central America Reflected through Images and Women.” These types of invited lectures show that Central America is not only an object of study for Tulane, but a valued producer of knowledge and interlocutor in current debates.

Central America in The Next 100

There are many layers to the last 100 years, especially in terms of Tulane’s relationship to Central America. You can hear Shea and Barbas-Rhoden discuss this complex history in the soundbite below.

As we look to the next 100 years, the study of Central America is growing and beginning to encompass new facets, just as we saw it move into literary and cultural studies in the 1990s. Many Central Americanists like Barbas-Rhoden have adopted a framework of ecocriticism and the environment. Given the current political scenarios and the continued Central American diaspora, the idea and borders of “Central America” and its culture will necessarily widen into U.S. Latinx studies with the large influx of Central American migrants.

This story ends with a reflection from Ginny Garrard who expresses her hopes for the future of Central American studies here at Tulane:

“I would like to see Tulane continue its relationship with Latin America, with Central America in particular. That’s a unique proposition here, that Tulane has the resources in every possible way to continue to teach about and research about Central America, and to attract people from Central America to come and study here. But the future, my guess is we’re not going to be moving around as much as we do now. And so that also is limiting in some ways, but also opens new possibilities for collaborations and for shared research and shared teaching and exchanges above and beyond what currently happens. And so, I hope that Tulane will really invest in that.”

– Ginny Garrard

Text and Images: Olivia Cosentino & Alejandro Kelly-Hopfenblatt
Zemurray-Stone Postdoctoral Fellows

Research: Genesis Calderón
PhD Student, Linguistics

May 2024

References

1. To learn more about Central America in the second half of the 20th century, please consult the following resources: After the Coup: An Ethnographic Reframing of Guatemala 1954, eds. Abigail Adams and Timothy J. Smith, U. of Illinois Press: 2011; Virginia Garrard’s Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala under General Efraín Ríos Montt, 1982-1983, Oxford UP 2010; Stories of Civil War in El Salvador: A Battle Over Memory, Erik Ching, UNC Press, 2016; Revolution & Counterrevolution in Nicaragua, ed. Thomas W. Walker, Routledge 2019. ↩︎
2. Report on “Tulane University and Latin America” (1975), p. 7 ↩︎
3. “Matilda Geddings Gray” Grant Application (1975), p. 14 ↩︎
4. “Matilda Geddings Gray” Grant Application (1975), p. 23 ↩︎
5. “Matilda Geddings Gray” Grant Application (1975), p. 28 ↩︎
6. TULAS Newsletter (Fall 1985), p. 5 ↩︎
7. Report on “Tulane University and Latin America” (1975), p. 7 ↩︎
8. TULAS Newsletter (1988-1989, no.1), p. 6 ↩︎
9. TULAS Newsletter (1991-1992, no. 1), p. 3 ↩︎
10. Latin American Activities at Tulane (1960), p. 9 ↩︎
11. TULAS Newsletter (1987-1988, no. 1), p. 2 ↩︎