About this Event
Invited Lecture by Rossana Barragán Romano,
With comments by Brooke Larson and Sinclair Thomson. Moderated by Pamela Calla.
Senior scholar Rossana Barragán Romano is the foremost historian of her generation in Bolivia, and one of the most important ever in Bolivian historiography. Since the 1980s, she has produced a torrent of historical work that is deeply informed by Anthropology and other social sciences. She has worked on all periods of Bolivian history from the preconquest period to the present. She has worked on all manner of themes and topics, spanning from the economic to the political to the cultural sphere.
Last year, she published her magnum opus – El imperio del trabajo. Historia social de la producción de plata de Potosí para el mundo (s. XVI-XVIII) (La Paz: Plural, 2025). It is a hugely ambitious and empirically profound study that derives from many years of research in Bolivian and foreign archives. It is far and away the most important long-term study of Potosí, the global center of silver production in the early modern period. Rossana’s study explores many different dimensions of life and production in Potosí from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, but it is, at its core, a labor history that puts Indigenous Andean workers, male and female, at the center of the story.
We would like for Rossana to give a lecture on her monumental book, and follow that with comments from Brooke Larson and Sinclair Thomson. Brooke Larson is Emerita Professor of Latin American History from the State University of New York, Stony Brook. She is the preeminent historian of Bolivia in the United States, and arguably the preeminent Bolivianist of any discipline working in the United States. She is the author of three masterful works: Cochabamba, 1550-1900: Colonialism and Agrarian Transformation in Bolivia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988; rev. 2nd ed. Duke University Press, 1998); Trials of Nation-Making: Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810–1910(Cambridge University Press: 2004); and the 2025 winner of the Bolton-Johnson Prize, presented by the Conference on Latin American History for best book in Latin American history, The Lettered Indian. Race, Nation, and Indigenous Education in Twentieth-Century Bolivia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2023). Rossana’s longtime colleague Pamela Calla would be the moderator of the evening.
Event venue & nearby stays
Espacio de Culturas Auditorium, 53 Washington Square South, 4W, New York, United States
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