Agrarian Studies Colloquium: Mariana Diaz Chalela "Good Creditors and Good Debtors: Campesino Identity and Agricultural Credit in the Colombian Twentieth Century"

The core of the Agrarian Studies Program’s activities is a weekly colloquium organized around an annual theme. Invited specialists send papers in advance that are the focus of an organized discussion by the faculty and graduate students associated with the colloquium.

This topic embraces, inter alia, the study of mutual perceptions between countryside and city, and patterns of cultural and material exchange, extraction, migration, credit, legal systems, and political order that link them.

It also includes an understanding of how different societies conceive of the spatial order they exhibit. What terms are meaningful and how are they related?: e.g., frontier, wilderness, arable, countryside, city, town, agriculture, commerce, “hills,” lowlands, maritime districts, inland. How have these meanings changed historically and what symbolic and material weight do they bear?

Meetings are Fridays, 11am -1pm Eastern Time.

Meetings will be held in a hybrid format, both on Zoom and in-person at 230 Prospect Street, Room 101.

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Mariana Díaz Chalela is a Ph.D candidate in Latin American history at Yale University. Her research interests include the history of international development, state formation, agrarian reform, and the role of law in shaping historical change. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Borrowing Out of Poverty: Credit and State Formation in the Making of Rural Colombia (1929-1980)” examines the history of agricultural credit policies in Latin America and their connection to state formation and land politics. Before coming to Yale, Mariana earned her law degree and an M.A. in History at Universidad de los Andes and worked as a lawyer in Colombia. Her research at Yale has been generously funded by the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, the Tinker Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council.