Above: Professor Garofalo near a Favela shanty town in Rio, 2005
Contact Leo Garofalo
Education
B.A. History & B.A. Hispanic Studies, Brown University;
M.A., Boston College;
Ph.D., University of Wisconsin at Madison
"A prominent writer from the U.S. south once commented that the
past was not dead, nor was it really past. The same could be said of Latin
America, a region that Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García
Márquez compared to Faulkner’s Mississippi. History remains
strikingly relevant to many Latin Americans’ everyday struggles against
an increasingly unequal status quo. In the Andes, the meanings and lessons
of the past provide a valuable tool for change and a terrain of intellectual
and political conflict. Certainly no part of the world could be more relevant
to the U.S. today."
- Leo Garofalo
Some links of interest suggested by Professor Garofalo:
Current information on Latin America:
http://www.wola.org
http://www.lawg.org
http://www.ciponline.org
http://www.nsarchive.org
Travel/volunteer
on U.S. Mexico Border
La
Unidad (at Connecticut College)
Latin American Network Information Center
(LANIC), an academic database and information service containing extensive
organizational and news links for Latin America.
News in Spanish from Peru
Primary sources from the colonial Americas
Manuscritos
de America en las Colecciones Reales
Assistant Professor of History
Joined Connecticut College: 2002
Specialization:
- Latin American and Caribbean history
- The history of race and ethnicity
- African diaspora and Afro-Latin America
- Peru and the Andes
Leo Garofalo's research in Peru draws attention to the central roles of Native Andeans and Afro-Peruvians in shaping daily life within colonial cities. Marketplaces and taverns witnessed tremendous changes over the first two centuries of colonial rule and transformation in the Andes. Through the buying and selling of commodities and the brewing and drinking of chicha corn beer, a diverse groups of colonizers and colonized created a colonial Andean culture in Peru's principal cities: the old Inka capital of Cuzco, and the Spaniards' easily defended coastal creation called The City of the Kings (Lima).
Recently, his work led him into the archives of the Spanish Inquisition and the cavernous vaults of the Spanish imperial bureaucracy in Seville to uncover traces of the passage of the tens of thousands of West Africans forced into slavery and brought to the Andes in the 1500s and 1600s. In order to fully understand the colonization of Pacific South America, he continues to reconstruct the physical and cultural paths of Afro-Andean peoples and their impact on colonial society and upon the Portuguese and Spanish Atlantic worlds they passed through.
Leo Garofalo's current research is on the Afro-Iberian roots of Andean witchcraft and the Atlantic and European routes of the West African Diaspora to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Andes. He was recently awarded a Social Science Research Council Grant and a Fulbright-Hays Research Grant.
He has brought to campus as speakers people such as Luis Murillo, Former Governor of Colombia's Choc—, Felipe Luciano, chairman and co-founder of the Young Lords Party, and the historian Johanna Fernandez who has studied the Young Lords within the wider context of civil rights movements various streams of political activism in the 1960s and the 1970s.
He
also brought the Afro-Peruvian music and dance group Negrura Peruana
to perform on campus. (Seen at left, a Negrura Peruana performer
using the quijada, an instrument made from the jawbone and teeth
of a mule.)
He has most recently co-edited a book M‡s All‡ De La Dominacion y La Resistencia, Estudios de historia peruana, siglos XVI-XX (2005) with Paulo Drinot.
His recent publications and papers include: "The Shape of a Diaspora: The Movement of Afro-Iberians to and from Colonial Spanish America"; "Conjuring with Coca and the Inca: Defining Colonial Cultural among Afro-Peruvian Ritual Specialists, 1580-1690"; "The Case of Diego Su‡rez: Afro-Iberian Roots in the Confraternities and Christian Identity of the Early Spanish Atlantic World"; "To Drink With Friends: The Dynamics of Gender and Ethnicity in the Andeanization of Peru's 17th-century Inns and Hispanic Shops"; "The Inka's Drink in Colonial Goblets: Kurakas in Cuzco's Chicha Corn Beer Market, 1640-1700."
Professor Garofalo currently teaches Introduction to Latin American and Caribbean History (HIS114), Modern Latin American History: Nation and the Poverty of Progress (HIS216), Rebellion and Revolutions in Latin America: Tupac Amaru to Subcomandante Marcos (HIS219), History of Gender in Mexico and the Andes (HIS220), Migration and Immigration in Latin America (HIS450), and "Race" in Colonial Latin America (HIS212).
View the History and Latin American Studies Program (at Connecticut College) sites.