Histories of Utopias in 20th-Century Latin America

The yearning for utopia, or visions of a radically more egalitarian future, have been a constant feature of Latin American political and social movements. Such moments bring together issues of time and space in contradictory, yet generative ways. While quintessentially revolutionary moments have received scholarly and public attention, we focus instead on spaces where horizontal and cross-class exchanges flowered, but have been largely uncodified in written form. Jay Winter has termed these experiences as “minor utopias,” or smaller scale yearning for liberation, unlike the large-scale and sometimes violent major utopias of the twentieth century. This panel will examine and compare minor utopian social experiments and their encounters with the Left and the state across the continent during the twentieth century.