DRCLAS: Tuesday Seminar Series: Allende, Pinochet, and the Long Spanish Civil War in Chile

Speakers: Kristen Weld, Associate Professor, Department of History

Moderator: Steven Levitsky, Professor of Government, Department of Government, Harvard University

This presentation explores the curious resonance of the Spanish Civil War in 1970s Chile, analyzing how and why Chileans of varied political stripes — from far-right golpistas to ardent supporters of Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular — invoked the Spanish Civil War as an explanatory framework for their own country’s crisis. It dicusses the formation of historical consciousness, the nature of Spanish-Latin American relations in the twentieth century, and the place of the Spanish Civil War in what historians have recently termed Latin America’s “Century of Revolution."

Kirsten Weld is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences in Harvard University’s Department of History. She is a historian of twentieth-century Latin American political conflicts and social movements. Her first book, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala, won the 2015 WOLA-Duke Human Rights Book Award and the 2016 Best Book Prize from the Recent History and Memory Section of the Latin American Studies Association. She is currently writing a history of the Spanish Civil War’s legacies in Latin America.