The Forum for Science and Knowledge in Latin America and the Caribbean (SKLAC) congratulates Diana Monta\u00f1o and Lydia Crafts, co-winners of the 2023 article prize.<\/p>\n
This year\u2019s prize committee read twenty articles of extraordinarily high quality, submitted by scholars who reside in Mexico, Brazil, the United States, Argentina, Germany, Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Uruguay. Submissions were in Spanish, English, and Portuguese; their authors conducted research in these languages as well as in German and French. The articles covered a range of colonies, nations, and territories, including the gulf region of the United States as well as the French Caribbean.<\/p>\n
The submission pool shed light on the rich diversity of research topics undertaken by historians of science, medicine, technology, and the environment in Latin America and the Caribbean. Articles treated a multitude of themes, including psychiatry, indigeneity, anthropology, agriculture, polio, malaria, water management, Indigenous medicine, medical experimentation, art history, electricity, slavery, racial medicine, astronomy, reproductive medicine, fertility, and cybernetics. The works were published in journals such as Hist\u00f3ria,Ci\u00eancias, Sa\u00fade \u2013 Manguinhos, Environmental History, American Historical Review, Epistemolog\u00eda e Historia de la Ciencia, and Jahrbuch f\u00fcr Geschichte Lateinamerikas\/Anuario de Historia de Am\u00e9rica Latina.<\/p>\n
SKLAC, a forum affiliated with the History of Science Society, is currently led by Karin Rosemblatt (former chair), Christopher Heaney (chair), Timothy Lorek (chair-elect), Elizabeth O\u2019Brien (treasurer), and members at large Jos\u00e9 Ragas, Rosanna Dent, and Diana Heredia. SKLAC thanks the service of the prize committee, comprised of the following members at large: Christina Ramos (chair), Marcy Norton, and Sebasti\u00e1n Gil-Ria\u00f1os. We reiterate our congratulations to Monta\u00f1o and Crafts, and we congratulate the HAHR for publishing the two award-winning essays.<\/p>\n
We asked this year\u2019s co-winners to share more about the origins and outcomes of their scholarship. Their written responses to our questions have been condensed and edited into a third-person narrative.<\/p>\n
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Lydia Crafts is assistant professor of history at Manhattan College. Crafts published \u201cMaking Medical Subjects: Regeneration, Experimentation, and Women in the Guatemalan Spring,\u201d in a 2022 issue of the Hispanic American Historical Review.<\/p>\n
Lydia first came to this project in the early 2010s when she was a graduate student at UT Austin. Crafts was helping digitize a police archive in Guatemala that had documents pertaining to people disappeared and killed during the civil war, between 1960 and 1996. Guatemalan archivists discovered police records pertaining to the experiments Crafts studies, in which researchers with the U.S. Public Health Service purposefully infected at least 1308 people Guatemalans with three sexually transmitted infections (STIs)\u2014syphilis, gonorrhea, and chancroid. U.S. Public Health researchers did not receive informed consent from Guatemalans, nor did they provide them with available treatments for the infections.<\/p>\n
Crafts learned about these archives shortly after the experiments had been revealed to the public in 2010, following their discovery by historian Susan Reverby. President Obama appointed a bioethics commission and issued a formal apology to Guatemala and the victims of the research. As the first historian to write a book about these bioethical abuses, Lydia\u2019s work highlights how the social structure in Guatemala and government institutions rendered certain people vulnerable to experimentation by local and foreign researchers.<\/p>\n
Lydia is strongly committed to telling this history in a way that humanizes the people who were subjected to experimentation. She notes that victims have not received reparations for what happened, and that they have also been largely ignored by the U.S. and Guatemalan governments. Her oral histories highlighted how syphilis spread throughout the country after the experiments, and how the medical violence traumatized generations of people. Importantly, Lydia also uncovered accusations of problematic medical ethics of US scientists in Latin America that continue to the present day.<\/p>\n
Doctors in Guatemala have told Crafts that they hope revelations about the experiments would spur conversations in Guatemala about medical ethics, as the study in Tuskegee Alabama had done in the United States. But this has not yet happened. Lydia plans to translate her book into Spanish in order to facilitate her collaboration with Guatemalan doctors as they shed light on the legacy of human subject research.<\/p>\n
When asked about the broader implications of her work, Lydia shared the following: \u201cI also aim for my work to inspire conversations about structural racism and colonialism embedded in medical institutions that enabled this research to occur.\u201d She continued, \u201cthe STI experiments were not exceptional. They rather emerged because of a culture of research that had developed throughout the Central American and Caribbean region, but also specifically in Guatemala.\u201d Lydia went on to explain that the Pan American Sanitary Bureau (PASB), which during this time largely served U.S. interests, established one of its first offices in Latin America in Guatemala, where they were primarily devoted to experimental research. When the U.S. Public Health Service researchers on contract with PASB arrived to conduct their research on STIs, they were greeted by a PASB official who told them about what they would be able to get away with in Guatemala.<\/p>\n
One central challenge of this work is that the bulk of pertinent documents were written by the same doctors who conducted these experiments. Those doctors also sought to keep them from the public record, thereby erasing them\u2014at least in part\u2014from the public record. In response to this methodological problem, Lydia has turned to oral history. Given the marked vulnerability and precarity of the studies\u2019 victims and survivors, Dr. Crafts has approached oral histories with attention to ethics, and with recognition that recollections of medical abuse are likely to further traumatize\u2014and retraumatize\u2014her interlocutors. Moving forward, she says, \u201cI would also like to engage in conversations with other historians of medicine to think about the archives we have available for our work, and how to write these histories in ways that do not privilege the perspective of doctors, or other experts.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Diana Monta\u00f1o is associate professor of history at Washington University in St. Louis. Monta\u00f1o published \u201cLadrones de Luz: Policing Electricity in Mexico City, 1901\u20131918,\u201d in a 2021 issue of the Hispanic American Historical Review.<\/p>\n
The inspiration for Diana\u2019s research topic came to her while she was riding a Mexico City subway car during a research trip in 2009. She was drawn to a poster of a distressed housewife surrounded by damaged electrical appliances. The poster was part of a campaign warning the city\u2019s residents of power theft\u2019s harmful consequences. To Diana\u2019s surprise, she continued to see reiterations of this public service announcement throughout the city.<\/p>\n
Although these encounters planted the seed about the topic, a serendipitous find at the National Archives deepened her interest and proved the topic\u2019s fertile ground. While researching the judicial records for injury cases against the city\u2019s electric trams at the turn of the twentieth century, Diana came across the 1908 case of Tom\u00e1s S\u00e1nchez, owner of the San Antonio mill on Pueblita Street.<\/p>\n
S\u00e1nchez\u2019s fate had taken a sharp turn after Alfonso G\u00f3mez, an inspector for the Mexican Light and Power Company (Mexlight), stopped by his mill and noticed its electric meter lacked a fuse and was, thus, not functioning. For Inspector G\u00f3mez, this was a telltale sign of power theft. Over one hundred pages captured the drama of the judicial case against S\u00e1nchez, and led Diana to locate over sixty power theft cases from 1901-1918. \u201cTogether,\u201d Monta\u00f1o says, \u201cthese told a rich story of how electricity was being understood, managed, policed, and stolen.\u201d<\/p>\n
When asked what Monta\u00f1o hopes to accomplish with her work, in a broader sense as well as a scholarly one, she answers that she hopes it helps us \u201crethink our society\u2019s relationship to technology and how we are never passive actors living through technological transformations.\u201d Too often, Diana says, technologies appear as \u201cas fixed entities that change society and culture,\u201d and are thus, \u201cinterpreted as removed from the people and the ambitions that employed them.\u201d By focusing on how capitalinos grappled with rapid urbanization, expanding industrialization, and technification of spaces, Diana sought to contrast the typical images of the electrified city as celebratory of humanity\u2019s mastery of natural forces and resources, the inevitable advance of progress and order. As Monta\u00f1o keenly observes, the picture that emerges is of the contested nature of the adoption of electricity, one that reveals the multiple contingencies and complexity that accompanied the making of electrified spaces. Diana sees echoes of these contestations in public discourse about boundary-crossing technologies such as artificial intelligence, facial recognition, unmanned drones, and driverless cars.<\/p>\n
Finally, we asked Diana to share anything else she would like people to know about her research or the field of HSMT in Latin America. Monta\u00f1o responded enthusiastically, noting \u201cOur field is quite vibrant.\u201d Since she completed her doctoral program in 2014, more and more excellent scholarship has emerged in the sister fields of the history of technology, science, and medicine in Latin America. Equally important, she says, have been the networks and forums established and consolidated for scholars based in the United States and, increasingly, those in Latin America and Spain, all of whom push our fields\u2019 boundaries in exciting ways. Diana looks forward to evolutions in our field\u2019s conversations, and particularly, the expansion of networks with our Latin American colleagues, with a focus on intellectual exchanges and collaborative endeavors.<\/p>\n
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Moving forward, SKLAC will offer an article prizes and dissertation prizes in alternating years. The awards will be presented at meetings of the History of Science Society (i.e., Portland 2023, M\u00e9rida 2024, and New Orleans 2025). Please consider becoming a member and joining us at one of the meetings!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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