- Yesenia Barragan
- Position:
Associate Professor of History; and Co-director of the RCHA seminar, "Ugly: Bodies, Aesthetics, and the Politics of the Unpleasant"
- Degree:
Ph.D., Columbia University
- Specialty:
Modern Latin American and African Diaspora History: Race, Slavery, and Emancipation
- at Rutgers:
since 2019
- Bio:
I am a transnational historian of the Americas and African Diaspora, focusing on race, slavery, and emancipation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I earned my Ph.D. in Latin American History from Columbia University, where I was a Ford Foundation Fellow, and my B.A. in Philosophy and History from Brown University, where I was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow and Beinecke Scholar. My most recent book is In Latin America You Could Be Free: An African American History (Basic Books, 2026). Drawing on travelogues, runaway slave ads, and hundreds of other archival sources across the Americas, this book offers the first comprehensive hemispheric history of the place and promise of Latin America in the political imagination and of the migrations of free and fugitive African Americans in the antebellum period (1815-1861). I am also the author of Freedom’s Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Freedom’s Captives is a narrative-driven, social, political, and geographical study of the gradual abolition of chattel slavery in the majority-Black Colombian Pacific, the gold mining center of the former Spanish Empire. Freedom’s Captives won the 2022 Wesley-Logan Prize for best book on African diaspora history from the American Historical Association and the Association for the Study of African American Life & History, the 2022 Best Book Award for the 19th Century Section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), the 2023 Early Career Book Prize from the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University, Honorable Mention for the 2022 Michael Jiménez Prize for the Colombia Section of LASA, and was a Finalist for the 2022 Outstanding First Book Prize from the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD). A Spanish translation of Freedom’s Captives (Cautivas de la libertad: Esclavitud y emancipación gradual en el Pacífico negro colombiano) was published by Planeta/Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia) in 2023. In addition to these projects, I have written several articles, including “Commerce in Children: Slavery, Gradual Emancipation, and the Free Womb Trade in Colombia,” which received the 2022 Antonine Tibesar Prize from the Conference on Latin American History. In 2014, I published my first book, Selling Our Death Masks: Cash-for-Gold in the Age of Austerity (Zero, 2014), a surrealist ethnography of cash-for-gold shops in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis based on fieldwork and archival investigations in Spain, Greece, and Colombia. Selling Our Death Masks was described by anthropologist Michael Taussig as a “fast-paced brilliant, and exceedingly original history of gold and its roller coastering life under contemporary capitalism.” I am currently working on two new projects: the first is a longue durée environmental, social, and political history in West Africa and the second is a global history of the human body. I am the Co-Director of the 2026-2028 Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis Seminar on “Ugly: Bodies, Aesthetics, and the Politics of the Unpleasant” with Dr. Elaine LaFay. This seminar interrogates what is socially deemed “unpleasant” and its relations to power, violence, and inequality. We do so through the critical social category of the “ugly” and “ugliness”; that is, as a contested aesthetic site shaped by dynamics of gender, race, class, sexuality, ability, age, and body size. I am committed to public historical work and engagement. I am the Principal Investigator of “The Free Womb Project,” a multilingual (English, Spanish, and Portuguese) digital collection of gradual emancipation laws with “Free Birth” or “Free Womb” decrees across the eighteenth and nineteenth century Atlantic World. I have also served as a Country of Origin Information Expert for asylum cases related to Colombia and welcome working with new clients, particularly from Colombia and Ecuador. I welcome questions and inquiries from graduate applicants in Latin American History and the History of Atlantic Cultures and the African Diaspora. I am especially delighted to work with graduate applicants who are interested in the history of race, gender, slavery, emancipation, or post-emancipation studies in Colombia, the Andes, Afro-Latin America, and the Caribbean, Atlantic, and Pacific Worlds. Lastly but importantly, I was a first-generation student and am a first-generation American, the daughter of poor/working-class immigrants from Latin America. I am also a longtime activist involved in social and racial justice movements. I mentor and work closely with undergraduate and PhD students at Rutgers through the Aresty Research Center and History Department.
