Portraits of Persistence is a recently published collection of poignant and illuminating profiles of individual triumph and hardship amid massive inequality in contemporary Latin America. A project of the University of Texas Urban Ethnography Lab, each chapter offers an intimate portrait of one or two individual lives. The subjects are a diverse group of individuals from across Latin America: grassroots activists and political brokers, private security entrepreneurs, female drug dealers, shantytown dwellers, and rural farmers, as well as migrants finding routes into and out of the region. Through these accounts, the writers explore issues that are common throughout the region and much of today’s world: precarious work situations, gender oppression, housing displacement, experiences navigating the bureaucracy for asylum seekers, state violence, environmental devastation, and access to good and affordable health care. Carefully situating these experiences within the sociohistorical context of their specific local regions or countries, each contribution considers how people make sense of the paths their lives have taken, the triumphs and hardships they have experienced, and the aspirations they hold for the future. Ultimately, these twelve compelling profiles offer unique and personal windows into the region’s complex and multilayered reality.
Speakers:
Javier Auyero is Lozano Long Professor in Latin American Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and Ikerbasque Research Professor at the University of the Basque Country UPV-EHU, Bilbao. His latest book (coauthored with Sofía Servián) is Squatter Life: Persistence at the Urban Margins of Buenos Aires (Duke University Press, 2024).
Katherine Jensen is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and International Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. As an ethnographer, she studies race/racism, the state, and immigration in Latin America. She is the author of The Color of Asylum: The Racial Politics of Safe Haven in Brazil (University of Chicago Press, 2023).
Dennis Rodgers is a Research Professor in the Centre on Conflict, Development, and Peacebuilding (CCDP) at the Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, and principal investigator of the European Research Council (ERC)–funded project Gangs, Gangsters, and Ganglands: Towards a Comparative Global Ethnography (GANGS).
Date and venue: 14 May 2025 from 15h to 17h, Palazzo Buontalenti.