Valle del Cauca and the Cold War: Asserting Local Context in Global Histories of Development

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

This panel presents emerging research from the United States on Colombia’s Valle del Cauca— a critical host site for Cold War development initiatives. The valley is perhaps best known through the work of anthropologists such as Arturo Escobar and Michael Taussig, who set much of their ground-breaking work there during the 1980s and 90s. Escobar, in particular, emphasized western Colombia’s contributions to the emergence of an international developmentalist discourse and imagination. However, despite the region’s recognizable position in the field of anthropology, historicized and archival studies of its mid-twentieth-century experience remain largely the province of regionally based scholars and historians writing official histories on behalf of major institutions. This panel introduces a set of projects from U.S.-based scholars that aim to assert Valle del Cauca’s international footprint in development histories while unpacking change over time across multiple scales.
Although the presenters approach the region from different angles (architecture, art, environmental history), the papers all engage foreign relations or U.S. diplomatic history. At the same time, they are deeply and locally contextualized in their engagement with a particular region. Collectively, the papers examine Valle del Cauca as a Cold War space critical to the global conflict and the history of development. Yet the valley’s international significance risks masking a complex regional history and an entangled web of actors, motivations, and conflict. In attempting to balance these complexities, these papers focus on the local in the global.

Sub Track

• Latin America and the Pacific Rim

Session Organizer

• Timothy W Lorek, Yale University

Chair

• Mark A Healey, University of Connecticut

Discussant

• Mary Roldán, Hunter College/CUNY Graduate Center

Individual Presentations

• Colombia’s Second El Dorado: The Architecture of the Green Revolution in the Cauca Valley, 1941-1973 - Nikki Moore, Rice University

• Modernization’s Architects: Planning & Protest in Colombia’s Cauca Valley - Amanda Waterhouse, Indiana University

• The Tropical Cauca Valley and the Arctic Ice: The Cold War’s Local Legacies of a Global Food System - Timothy W Lorek, Yale University