Marc Becker
Biographic Data
| ID | 3615428 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Marc Becker |
| GIVEN NAMES | Marc |
| FAMILY NAME | Becker |
| SIGNATURE | BECKER M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Truman State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0321-9502 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 56 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 169 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 55 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Ecuador's Pursuit of Peace During the 1960s Cuban Crisis
In the early 1960s, as relations between Cuba and the United States rapidly deteriorated and edged dangerously close to a nuclear conflagration with the Soviet Union, several Latin American countries resisted aligning with the United States in its efforts to isolate and overthrow the revolutionary Cuban government. Leaders of these countries advocated for mediation, proclaiming that they favored a peaceful resolution of conflict in an internation…
The Complex Dynamics of Indigenous Education in Mid-Twentieth-Century Ecuador as a Theater for Political Debate
Activists in Ecuador established in the 1940s what have come to be remembered as the country's first Indigenous-run bilingual schools. Or at least this is the image that their founders presented when reflecting back on their achievements years later, and what has become fixed in the minds of subsequent educators. Archival records, however, present a more complicated picture. Rather than as "Indigenous" or "bilingual," the recently formed Federaci…
Margaret M. Power. Solidarity across the Americas: The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-imperialism
Indigenous Movements in Ecuador
"José Carlos Mariátegui o el "cojito genial: Historia y discapacidad en el Perú
What role and responsibility do scholars have in drawing attention to identities or aspects of historical figures that were not apparently of foremost significance to those people themselves? Historians have long grappled with these questions, seeking to craft a narrative that is both comprehensive and respectful while avoiding the risk of infantilizing or tokenizing their subjects. Does it do more of a service or disservice, for example, to high…
Indigenous Struggles and Bolivia's Nationalist Revolution
Depending on how one counts, the 1952 Bolivian National Revolution was either the second (after the 1910 Mexican Revolution) or third (after the 1944 Guatemalan Spring) great social revolution in Latin America. Nevertheless, despite its significance, we lack a good current synthetic treatment of those events. Kohl’s work takes us a good way toward realizing that goal of a readily accessible book that frames out the broad outline of the movement a…
Mariátegui, Race, and the Comintern's National Question
José Carlos Mariátegui's open engagement with Marxist theory and his adaptation of its ideas to his Latin American reality brought him into conflict with other leftists. At a continental conference of communist parties in Buenos Aires in 1929, he criticized the Comintern's proposal to carve up the Americas into independent African-descent and Quechua and Aymara republics, arguing that conceptualizing the struggle in ethnic rather than class terms…
The benefits of counting butterflies: Recommendations for a Successful Citizen Science Project
Citizen science (CS) projects, being popular across many fields of science, have recently also become a popular tool to collect biodiversity data. Although the benefits of such projects for science and policy making are well understood, relatively little is known about the benefits participants get from these projects as well as their personal backgrounds and motivations. Furthermore, very little is known about their expectations. We here examine…
The CIA in Ecuador
In The CIA in Ecuador, Marc Becker draws on recently released US government surveillance documents on the Ecuadorian left to chart social movement organizing efforts during the 1950s. Emphasizing the competing roles of the domestic ruling class and grassroots social movements, Becker details the struggles and difficulties that activists, organizers, and political parties confronted. He shows how leftist groups, including the Communist Party of Ec…
Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing
The recent militarized response to Black Lives Matter rallies highlights just how repressive the policing of racially marginalized and economically vulnerable populations in the United States has become. It is in this context that Stuart Schrader's Badges without Borders is a particular compelling and relevant study. For those already aware of the negative consequences of police-training programs and how they have led to extensive human rights ab…
A Latin American Peace Movement on the Margins of the Cold War
Most research on peace movements has been dedicated to the study of activism in Europe and North America. This emphasis has led to an impression that such engagement was largely absent from Latin America and Africa, in part due to their geographic distance from east–west conflicts and an overriding preoccupation with more immediate political and economic concerns. Nevertheless, during the early Cold War period the United States government investe…
The Life of José Carlos Mariátegui
Mike Gonzalez's new biography of José Carlos Mariátegui is an important attempt to introduce the Peruvian socialist to an English-speaking audience. It constitutes not so much a rediscovery of Mariátegui, but is itself part of a slow but steady embrace of a novel and innovative thinker broadly credited with the creation of a Latin American Marxism
Latin American Communisms
The Dictator Dilemma: The United States and Paraguay in the Cold War
In a moment of either senility or honesty, after being removed from power in 1989, the Paraguayan authoritarian leader Gen. Alfredo Stroessner responded with confusion to an interviewer's question about communism in his country. Communists had never existed in Paraguay, he declared. That frank admission undermined the justification not only for his deadly grasp on power but also for consistent U.S. support for his long and brutal regime. As was r…
Indians and Leftists in the Making of Ecuador's Modern Indigenous Movements
Gives historical background to late 20th century activism of Ecuador’s Native peoples, highlighting women’s role and the importance of cross-fertilization between class-based movements and ones based on race, ethnicity and identity
Indigenous Movements in Latin America
Political developments in Latin America have driven academic interest in Indigenous movements. This phenomenon emerged most clearly in the aftermath of massive uprisings that led to a flood of publications framed as “the return of the Indian” to the public consciousness. Much of our understanding of the history and trajectory of social movement organizing is a result of publications in response to these protests. Contemporary political concerns c…
Kevin A. Young. Blood of the Earth: Resource Nationalism, Revolution, and Empire in Bolivia
The April 1952 revolution in Bolivia that the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR) led has received a surprisingly small amount of scholarly attention, even though it was arguably the second (or third) great Latin American revolution, after Mexico’s (and Guatemala’s under Juan José Arévalo and Jacobo Arbenz). We do have a series of excellent treatments providing background to the Bolivian revolution. Laura Gotkowitz examines the revolution’s …
Utopia and the Dialectic
The FBI's Role in Expelling Germans from Ecuador During the 1940s
The expulsion from Latin America of immigrants from axis countries and their descendants is an important but little-studied episode of the Second World War. The role of the US, and in particular that of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), in their removal has largely disappeared from historical memory. This article examines how the FBI advanced US commercial interests, and in the process harmed vulnerable people who were subject to these e…
General Alberto Enríquez Gallo: Soldier, Populist, Leftist
A tradition in Latin America of reliance on strong leaders becomes problematic when political parties look outside their ranks for candidates who have popular appeal but do not embody their ideologies. This contradiction emerged in Ecuador in the mid-twentieth century when the Left looked to General Alberto Enríquez Gallo as its champion. His early trajectory in the military made him a most unlikely hero for the Left, but when he promulgated prog…
Ecuador’s Early No-foreign Military Bases Movement
Peace activists from around the world gathered in Ecuador in 2007 for the International Conference for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases and demanded the closure of existing foreign bases, a cleanup of environmental contamination, and an end to legal immunity for foreign military personnel. They called for support for and solidarity with “those who struggle for the abolition of all foreign military bases worldwide.”1 The conference came imm…
Activist Scholarship and Urban Land Invasions
The Correa Coup
On September 30, 2010, discontented police officers and military troops plunged Ecuador into a political crisis as they took President Rafael Correa hostage, seized airports, and stormed the National Assembly building. In response, Correa declared a state of emergency and denounced what he termed a coup attempt. To outside observers, what appeared to be in process was yet another potentially extraconstitutional transfer of power in Ecuador's tumu…
Constitutive Visions: Indigeneity and Commonplaces of National Identity in Republican Ecuador
De quién es la patria? (To whom does the fatherland belong?) is a question that has always underlain nation-building projects, and it is the core issue that rhetorician Christa Olson interrogates in her study of indigeneity and the creation of national identities in postindependence Ecuador. Olson maintains that all national identities and all nationalisms are at their base rhetorical. Rhetorical statements emerge not only through the political a…
Global Democracy and the World Social Forums
The World Social Forum quickly became the largest political gathering in human history and continues to offer a direct challenge to the extreme inequities of corporate-led globalisation. It has expanded its presence and continues to be an exciting experiment in global and participatory democracy. The book's contributors have participated in World Social Forums around the globe. Recounting dozens of dramatic firsthand experiences, they draw on the…
The Stormy Relations between Rafael Correa and Social Movements in Ecuador
Despite persistent calls for examining the diversity of Latin America's "pink tide," many scholars continue to divide the governments into a simplistic "good" or moderate left and a "bad" or radical/nationalist left. Ecuador's Rafael Correa is inevitably included with Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and Bolivia's Evo Morales as part of a triad of radical left-leaning governments in South America. While Correa, along with Chávez and Morales, has faced thr…
Correa, Indigenous Movements, and the Writing of a New Constitution in Ecuador
In 2008, voters in Ecuador approved a new and progressive constitution. Indigenous leaders questioned whether the new document would benefit social movements or strengthen the hand of President Rafael Correa, who appeared to be occupying political spaces that they had previously held. Correa's relations with indigenous movements point to the complications, limitations, and deep tensions inherent in pursuing revolutionary changes within a constitu…
Comunas and Indigenous Protest in Cayambe, Ecuador
The 1930s was a period of slow and painful capitalist formation in the Ecuadorian highlands. Marginalized Indigenous peoples who lived in rural areas particularly felt this economic transition as modernizing elites utilized their control of state structures to extend their power to the remote corners of the republic. It was also a time of gains in social legislation, including new laws which dealt with the “Indian problem.” One of the primary exa…
Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing
The recent militarized response to Black Lives Matter rallies highlights just how repressive the policing of racially marginalized and economically vulnerable populations in the United States has become. It is in this context that Stuart Schrader's Badges without Borders is a particular compelling and relevant study. For those already aware of the negative consequences of police-training programs and how they have led to extensive human rights ab…
Pachakutik: Indigenous Movements and Electoral Politics in Ecuador
This authoritative book provides a deeply informed overview of one of the most dynamic social movements in Latin America. Focusing on contemporary Indigenous movements in Ecuador, leading scholar Marc Becker traces the growing influence of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), which in 1990 led a powerful uprising that dramatically placed a struggle for Indigenous rights at the center of public consciousness. Activist…
The Limits of Indigenismo in Ecuador
Although Ecuador is home to a large number of indigenous peoples, the country failed to produce the number of internationally recognized indigenista intellectuals or governmental policies that emerged in Mexico or Peru, countries with similar demographic profiles. Despite being one of the first countries to endorse proposals that emerged out of the Instituto Indigenista Interamericano (Inter-American Indian Institute) formed at Pátzcuaro, Mexico,…
Indigenous Struggles for Land Rights in Twentieth-Century Ecuador
Conflicts on the Zumbahua hacienda in the highlands of the South American country of Ecuador in the 1930s and 1940s present insights into the nature of rural social relations. Both wealthy landholders and Indigenous agricultural workers experimented with discursive elements as they attempted to draw state authorities to their side. Following their debates also inverts the normal view of power relations. The landholder, General Francisco Gómez de …
The Correa Coup
On September 30, 2010, discontented police officers and military troops plunged Ecuador into a political crisis as they took President Rafael Correa hostage, seized airports, and stormed the National Assembly building. In response, Correa declared a state of emergency and denounced what he termed a coup attempt. To outside observers, what appeared to be in process was yet another potentially extraconstitutional transfer of power in Ecuador's tumu…
Making Ecuadorian Histories: Four Centuries of Defining Power
South America's Left Turns
Comunistas, indigenistas e indígenas en la formación de la Federación Ecuatoriana de Indios y el Instituto Indigenista Ecuatoriano
En la dcada de los cuarenta, activistas urbanos en el Ecuador jugaron papeles importantes en la formacin de dos organizaciones que trataron de buscar soluciones a los problemas persistentes que enfrentaban los indgenas: la Federacin Ecuatoriana de Indios (FEI) y el Instituto Indigenista Ecuatoriano (IIE). Sin embargo, haba muy poca comunicacin o colaboracin entre los involucrados en las dos organizaciones. Usualmente, acadmicos -mayormente extran…
Indigenous Communists and Urban Intellectuals in Cayambe, Ecuador (1926-1944)
This case study provides an example of how people from two fundamentally different cultures (one rural, indigenous, Kichua-speaking and peasant, and the other urban, white, Spanish-speaking and professional) overcame their differences to struggle together to fight social injustices. Rather than relating to each other on a seemingly unequal basis, the activists recognized their common interests in fighting against the imposition of an internationa…
The Complex Dynamics of Indigenous Education in Mid-Twentieth-Century Ecuador as a Theater for Political Debate
Activists in Ecuador established in the 1940s what have come to be remembered as the country's first Indigenous-run bilingual schools. Or at least this is the image that their founders presented when reflecting back on their achievements years later, and what has become fixed in the minds of subsequent educators. Archival records, however, present a more complicated picture. Rather than as "Indigenous" or "bilingual," the recently formed Federaci…
Mariátegui, Race, and the Comintern's National Question
José Carlos Mariátegui's open engagement with Marxist theory and his adaptation of its ideas to his Latin American reality brought him into conflict with other leftists. At a continental conference of communist parties in Buenos Aires in 1929, he criticized the Comintern's proposal to carve up the Americas into independent African-descent and Quechua and Aymara republics, arguing that conceptualizing the struggle in ethnic rather than class terms…
Indigenous Movements in Latin America
Political developments in Latin America have driven academic interest in Indigenous movements. This phenomenon emerged most clearly in the aftermath of massive uprisings that led to a flood of publications framed as “the return of the Indian” to the public consciousness. Much of our understanding of the history and trajectory of social movement organizing is a result of publications in response to these protests. Contemporary political concerns c…
The FBI's Role in Expelling Germans from Ecuador During the 1940s
The expulsion from Latin America of immigrants from axis countries and their descendants is an important but little-studied episode of the Second World War. The role of the US, and in particular that of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), in their removal has largely disappeared from historical memory. This article examines how the FBI advanced US commercial interests, and in the process harmed vulnerable people who were subject to these e…
W orld S ocial F orum 1
Every year at the end of January, the world's corporate and government elite gather in the Swiss resort town of Davos for the World Economic Forum to plot the future of corporate‐led globalization. In 2001, community organizers, trade unionists, young people, academics, and others began to meet in Porto Alegre, Brazil, to rethink and recreate globalization so that it would benefit people. From these humble beginnings, this alternative annual meet…
Mariátegui and Latin American Marxist Theory
Comunas and Indigenous Protest in Cayambe, Ecuador
The 1930s was a period of slow and painful capitalist formation in the Ecuadorian highlands. Marginalized Indigenous peoples who lived in rural areas particularly felt this economic transition as modernizing elites utilized their control of state structures to extend their power to the remote corners of the republic. It was also a time of gains in social legislation, including new laws which dealt with the “Indian problem.” One of the primary exa…
Peasant Identity, Worker Identity: Multiple Modes of Rural Consciousness in Highland Ecuador
On December 30, 1930, agricultural workers on the Pesillo hacienda in the canton of Cayambe, in the northern Ecuador highlands, rose up in protest against abuses they faced at the hands of their bosses. Local governmental officials reported that no one was working as the strike spread across the hacienda and threatened to engulf neighboring properties. Pesillo's newly formed peasant union El Inca, as well as Tierra Libre from the neighboring Moyu…
Indigenous Communists and Urban Intellectuals in Cayambe, Ecuador (1926-1944)
This case study provides an example of how people from two fundamentally different cultures (one rural, indigenous, Kichua-speaking and peasant, and the other urban, white, Spanish-speaking and professional) overcame their differences to struggle together to fight social injustices. Rather than relating to each other on a seemingly unequal basis, the activists recognized their common interests in fighting against the imposition of an internationa…
The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey
Has the Che cult really reached the proportions where not only a new edition, but a new translation, of one of his relatively minor works is necessary? Verso first published The Motorcycle Diaries s in English translation in 1995. Eight years later, Ocean Press has released a new edition of this travelogue as part of its Cuba series and in association with the Che Guevara Studies Center in Havana. Whereas Verso marketed it as “Easy Rider meets Da…
Making Ecuadorian Histories: Four Centuries of Defining Power
Highland Indians and the State in Modern Ecuador
Highland Indians and the State in Modern chronicles the changing forms of indigenous engagement with the Ecuadorian state since the early nineteenth century that, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, had facilitated the growth of the strongest unified indigenous movement in Latin America. Built around nine case studies from nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ecuador, Highland Indians and the State in Modern presents state formation as an …
W orld S ocial F orum 1
Every year at the end of January, the world's corporate and government elite gather in the Swiss resort town of Davos for the World Economic Forum to plot the future of corporate‐led globalization. In 2001, community organizers, trade unionists, young people, academics, and others began to meet in Porto Alegre, Brazil, to rethink and recreate globalization so that it would benefit people. From these humble beginnings, this alternative annual meet…
Indigenous Struggles for Land Rights in Twentieth-Century Ecuador
Conflicts on the Zumbahua hacienda in the highlands of the South American country of Ecuador in the 1930s and 1940s present insights into the nature of rural social relations. Both wealthy landholders and Indigenous agricultural workers experimented with discursive elements as they attempted to draw state authorities to their side. Following their debates also inverts the normal view of power relations. The landholder, General Francisco Gómez de …
Indians and Leftists in the Making of Ecuador’s Modern Indigenous Movements
Myths of Modernity: Peonage and Patriarchy in Nicaragua
Book Review| January 01 2008 Myths of Modernity: Peonage and Patriarchy in Nicaragua Myths of Modernity: Peonage and Patriarchy in Nicaragua. Elizabeth Dore. Marc Becker Marc Becker Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Agricultural History (2008) 82 (1): 97–98. https://doi.org/10.1215/00021482-82.1.97 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Marc Becker; Myths of Modernity: Peonage and Patriar…
Third Continental Summit of Indigenous Peoples and Nationalities of Abya Yala: From Resistance to Power
Thousands of indigenous activists from 24 countries gathered in Guatemala in the last week of March 2007 for the Third Continental Summit of Indigenous Peoples and Nationalities of Abya Yala. The gathering strengthened both local and transnational indigenous organizing efforts. The summit was entitled ‘From Resistance to Power,’ reflecting key concerns of how to move beyond resistance to oppressive regimes in order to claim positions of power in …
Intimate Enemies: Landowners, Power, and Violence in Chiapas
Book Review| January 01 2009 Intimate Enemies: Landowners, Power, and Violence in Chiapas Intimate Enemies: Landowners, Power, and Violence in Chiapas. Aaron Bobrow-Strain. Marc Becker Marc Becker Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Agricultural History (2009) 83 (1): 139–140. https://doi.org/10.1215/00021482-83.1.139 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Marc Becker; Intimate Enemies: Lan…
The Ecuador Reader: History, Culture, Politics
Carlos de la Torre, a sociologist at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) in Quito, and Steve Striffler, an anthropologist at the University of New Orleans, have assembled an impressively broad compilation of writings on Ecuador as part of Duke University Press’s Latin American Readers series. Typically editors assemble anthologies from previously published material. In this case, it appears that half of the items were writt…
Struggles of Voice: The Politics of Indigenous Representation in the Andes
Both Bolivia and Ecuador have long been home to strong and well-organized social movements that have repeatedly challenged elite domination of state structures. Based on extensive field research and probing participant observation spread out over the past decade, together with a broad reading of the social science literature, this book by political scientist José Antonio Lucero examines recent indigenous movements in these two Andean countries to…
Pachakutik: Indigenous Movements and Electoral Politics in Ecuador
This authoritative book provides a deeply informed overview of one of the most dynamic social movements in Latin America. Focusing on contemporary Indigenous movements in Ecuador, leading scholar Marc Becker traces the growing influence of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), which in 1990 led a powerful uprising that dramatically placed a struggle for Indigenous rights at the center of public consciousness. Activist…
Forthcoming in Volume 47, Number 1
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Fighting Like a Community: Andean Civil Society in an Era of Indian Uprisings - by Colloredo-Mansfeld, Rudi
Correa, Indigenous Movements, and the Writing of a New Constitution in Ecuador
In 2008, voters in Ecuador approved a new and progressive constitution. Indigenous leaders questioned whether the new document would benefit social movements or strengthen the hand of President Rafael Correa, who appeared to be occupying political spaces that they had previously held. Correa's relations with indigenous movements point to the complications, limitations, and deep tensions inherent in pursuing revolutionary changes within a constitu…
Gonzalo Oleas, Defensor: Cultural Intermediation in Mid-Twentieth-Century Ecuador
Gonzalo Oleas Zambrano was a socialist lawyer from Quito who, from the 1930s to the 1970s, became deeply involved in assisting rural communities in Ecuador with their legal petitions. Intermediaries have a long and varied history in negotiating relationships between the city and the countryside, and one that is often not well understood. At various points in his career Oleas acted like atinterillo, a socialist and anindigenista. An examination of…
In Search of Tinterillos
The tradition of intermediaries negotiating conflicts between Indigenous and Western worlds in Latin America can be traced back to the colonial period. Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, semiprofessional or petty lawyers known as tinterillos assumed a seemingly ubiquitous presence in rural communities in Ecuador. Often local elites with some education, tinterillos commanded respect among their largely nonliterate Indigenous neighb…
We Cannot Remain Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States
The Limits of Indigenismo in Ecuador
Although Ecuador is home to a large number of indigenous peoples, the country failed to produce the number of internationally recognized indigenista intellectuals or governmental policies that emerged in Mexico or Peru, countries with similar demographic profiles. Despite being one of the first countries to endorse proposals that emerged out of the Instituto Indigenista Interamericano (Inter-American Indian Institute) formed at Pátzcuaro, Mexico,…
The Stormy Relations between Rafael Correa and Social Movements in Ecuador
Despite persistent calls for examining the diversity of Latin America's "pink tide," many scholars continue to divide the governments into a simplistic "good" or moderate left and a "bad" or radical/nationalist left. Ecuador's Rafael Correa is inevitably included with Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and Bolivia's Evo Morales as part of a triad of radical left-leaning governments in South America. While Correa, along with Chávez and Morales, has faced thr…
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Political science (46 works) · Law (37 works) · Sociology (37 works) · Politics (27 works) · Politics and Society in Latin America (24 works) · History (18 works) · Indigenous (17 works) · Latin Americans (15 works) · Law (15 works) · Political economy (15 works)