John Collins is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Queens College of CUNY Graduate Center. His paper analyzes the state-directed reification and commodification of qualities configured as essential to both minority citizens and the nation.

Ernesto Seman is a PhD student in the Department of History at NYU. In 1945, Perón's rise to power in Argentina ignited a virulent reaction within U.S. foreign policy against "the Fascist dictator." This moment came to represent a landmark of Latin American populism, marking U.S. departure from the Good Neighbor Policy. By studying the role of Spruille Braden, then ambassador to Buenos Aires, this paper tells a different story of the episode, placing it as the first step towards the hemispheric alliance that would shape the Latin American Cold War. It argues that the domestic experience of the New Deal, rather than Fascism, provided a language of social reform and national development that would be at the core of the populist project.

Kahlil Chaar is a PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at NYU. Celebrated as the most important Cuban novel of the 19th century, Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés is conventionally read as a narrative about the emergence of Cuba’s national imaginary. Instead of grasping Cecilia Valdés as a symbolic repository of the nation, this paper explores the novel as a representation of the heterogeneous anti-colonial imaginary articulated by Cuban letrados throughout the 19th century.

Anne Eller is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at NYU. She will present a paper which explores how the renewed project of Spanish colonialism in the Dominican Republic brought debates over nationhood, sovereignty, and especially abolition to the fore.