David Smilde

Statement

I am honored to be nominated as treasurer of the Latin American Studies Association. I have been attending LASA Congresses for over twenty-five years and have served as a council member for both the Culture, Power and Politics and the Venezuelan Studies Sections, serving as chair of the latter from 2010-2012. From June 2021 to the present I have worked as program co-chair, alongside Margarita López Maya and Yanina Welp, organizing LASA 2023 in Vancouver. It is based on these rewarding experiences that I accepted the nomination to run for LASA Treasurer.

I am a strong believer in the de-colonization of scholarly production and debate and have worked on this during my entire career. In my work on religion in Latin America I have used ethnography to portray the logic of religious and political practices that scholars in the global North misconceive as instrumental, emotional or unprincipled.

In my work with the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) I have sought to portray the logic of Chavismo to international audiences swayed by orientalist portraits provided by established opinion-makers. I have likewise sought to portray the logic of the Venezuelan opposition to the governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, which is often mischaracterized by the international left as the work of global empire. At WOLA we seek to work with Latin American partner organizations, not leading them, not following them, but engaging them as equals in portraying situations and creating strategic lines of action to promote the fulfillment of human rights and social justice.

But de-colonization depends, of course, not just on a perspective but on institutional practices and resources.

LASA is currently at an exciting conjuncture. The majority of its members are now Latin American and LASA has become the leading scholarly association in the region. Furthermore, LASA has also become a space in which open discussions of racial, ethnic, gender and sex-based discriminations are occurring, as well as efforts to address them.  

Every opportunity, of course, comes with challenges. Latin America-based scholars often do not have the institutional resources for the membership and conference fees that LASA depends on. As well, the cost of travel to congresses in the U.S., Canada and Europe can be prohibitive. LASA needs to develop a financial model in which everyone can participate, regardless of their resource base.

I have worked to address such challenges in the past. In 2012, as chair of the Section on Venezuelan Studies, I obtained money from OSF that provided ten travel grants for Venezuela-based scholars in addition to those provided by LASA. In 2021, with the Ford Foundation, I obtained $20,000 for travel grants administered by WOLA that, because of the pandemic, were eventually used to organize a LASA-SVS satellite conference in Venezuela in June 2021. Beyond LASA, from 2018-2020, I worked with the Ford Foundation to develop a program that provided Venezuela-based scholars, journalists and activists with monthly salary supplements so they could continue to work in the country, despite the crisis. I aim to bring this same vocation to LASA to address the needs of scholars across the region.

LASA has made considerable progress in sliding membership and registration fees; but more needs to be done. As Treasurer I will accelerate change. LASA needs to prioritize member-cost in deciding where to hold congresses. And it needs to make clear to the foundations it works with that the Latinamericanization of LASA provides an exciting opportunity to de-colonize and democratize Latin America scholarship.