The Independence(s) Series: From Teonanácatl to Miami Vice: Latin America's Contribution to World Drug Culture”

The Independence(s) Series
“From Teonanácatl to Miami Vice: Latin America's Contribution to World Drug Culture”
Dr. Paul Gootenberg Distinguished Professor of History and Sociology, Stony Brook University

Long before today’s entanglements with coke, meth, and weed, the Americas were a proving ground of global drug cultures. This millennium of shamanistic and Aztec psychedelics, colonial and Atlantic stimulants such as coffee and tobacco, national drug goods like tequila and coca, preceded the menacing 20th-century explosion of illicit drug trafficking, and shed light on our changing relationships to mind drugs and their commerce.

Professor Gootenberg’s research and graduate training interests span most of modern Latin America, with special strengths in Andean and Mexican history and in questions of historical sociology. His current writing centers around the history of drug commodities, especially Andean cocaine as a global drug.  He is also interested in historical dimensions of Latin American inequalities. Gootenberg helped to establish Stony Brook’s innovative interdepartmental workshop, the Initiative in Historical Social Sciences (IHSS), and serves as a coordinator of the monthly New York Latin American History Workshop, which brings together students and faculty from Columbia, NYU, CUNY and Stony Brook. He is also active in a number of interdisciplinary research programs at the (Brooklyn-based) Social Science Research Council (SSRC).