Date:
October 15, 2012
Time:
1:50-3:15pm
Location:
D'Angelo Center, Room 206
"Blowback, "Cocaine Commodity Chains and
Historical Origins of the Mexican Drug Crisis
(1910-2010)"
Dr. Gootenberg, a noted historian of
global drugs, reveals our long hemispheric entanglements with
cocaine. Since 1910, cocaine's production and marketing chains
north have shifted in important ways, leading to ever-larger
supplies of the illegal drug and hotspots of violence closer and
closer to the United States, including Mexico. Much of this
perilous trade has been the unintended consequences--or
"blowback'--of previous U.S. attempts to restrict the drug.
Gootenberg will speculate what may happen as the cocaine now
globalizes once again.
Paul Gootenberg, is a Latin American historian
with interdisciplinary interests in commodity history, state
formation, economic ideas, and social inequality. He is a
specialist on modern Peruvian and Mexican history. As a Rhodes
Scholar he attended St. Antony’s College, Oxford, before earning a
doctorate in History at the University of Chicago in 1985.
Gootenberg’s books include Between Silver and Guano
(Princeton, 1989), Imagining Development (California,
1993) and the edited volume, Cocaine: Global Histories
(Routledge, 1999). He has held research fellowships from the
Guggenheim, Fulbright, Institute for Advanced Study, Russell Sage
Foundation, ACLS, and Wilson Center, and has been active in various
fellowship and research programs of the Social Science Research
Council. His Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug
(UNC Press, 2008) is a “political-commodity” history of cocaine
between 1850 and 1980.