Gema Santamaria will present the paper as part of the Work-in-Progress sessions. This paper traces the weight of religion in the organization and legitimation of lynching and other expressions of collective violence, such as riots and vigilante killings, in twentieth-century Mexico. In particular, it seeks to address two questions: What makes these forms of collective violence religious? What is the entanglement between politics, power, and religion, and why does it matter in order to understand how religious violence unfolds?
Gema Santamaría (PhD, New School for Social Research), a 2017–18 Kellogg visiting fellow, is assistant professor of Latin American history at Loyola University, Chicago. Her research analyzes the history of Latin American processes of state building across the 20th and 21st centuries, with a particular attention to questions of violence, crime, justice, and the rule of law.
All are welcome.