In recent years, scholarship on Central America has increasingly grappled with memory, migration, authoritarianism, and the afterlives of Cold War violence. Yet few books interrogate the emotional and political architecture of U.S. solidarity with revolutionary Central America as rigorously as Eric A. Vázquez’s States of Defeat: US Imaginaries of Revolutionary Central America. The book examines how U.S. intellectuals, activists, artists, and writers processed the collapse—or exhaustion—of revolutionary possibility in Central America from the late twentieth century into the present.
Rather than offering a conventional political history of revolutionary movements, Vázquez focuses on what he calls “states of defeat”: both the material defeat of revolutionary projects and the affective condition produced by their unraveling. Across literature, documentary film, memoir, testimony, anthropology, journalism, and political organizing, the book asks how solidarity changed once revolutionary optimism gave way to neoliberalism, counterinsurgency, and postwar disillusionment. The result is one of the most intellectually ambitious interventions in recent Central American studies.
Vázquez focuses on what he calls “states of defeat”: both the material defeat of revolutionary projects and the affective condition produced by their unraveling.
At the center of the book is a deceptively simple but provocative claim: defeat is not merely the end of political possibility. Rather, defeat becomes an enduring structure of feeling that continues to shape how U.S. intellectuals imagine Central America, U.S. empire, and revolutionary struggle. Vázquez defines solidarity as “the treacherous impulse to proximity and reciprocity with those who suffer injustice,” a formulation that distinguishes his project from celebratory histories of transnational activism. Solidarity, in this account, is unstable, emotionally fraught, and often entangled with imperial imaginaries even when it seeks to oppose them.
The introduction establishes this terrain through an analysis of Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar’s Opus 1981/Andante Desesperato, a performance inspired by Susan Meiselas’s iconic 1979 photograph of Sandinista fighters in Nicaragua, produced under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Vázquez juxtaposes the revolutionary energy captured in Meiselas’s photograph with Jaar’s later reenactment under the shadow of dictatorship and failed revolutionary futures. What emerges is a meditation on how revolutionary desire survives in fragmented or melancholic forms after political defeat. Importantly, Vázquez distinguishes “defeatedness” from melancholy. Defeatedness, he argues, is not simply mourning a lost revolutionary past but a diminished yet still future-oriented political desire.
This concern with the lingering emotional life of revolutionary struggle animates the book’s strongest chapters. The first chapter on Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier (1998) looks at the 1992 Los Angeles uprising alongside Guatemalan counterinsurgency and how Tobar situates urban rebellion in Los Angeles within a broader history of U.S.-backed state violence in Central America. Vázquez argues that the novel’s depiction of the uprising exposes what counterinsurgency doctrine imagines as “peace”: pacification through repression and social control. Vázquez calls this logic a “depopulated political imaginary,” where governance becomes indistinguishable from exterminatory violence.
Vázquez refuses simplistic notions of solidarity as moral purity or universal identification and views it as a messy political practice shaped by asymmetry, misunderstanding, and uneven power relations.
On a similar note, the following chapter on liberation theology and the 1980 murder of four U.S. churchwomen in El Salvador looks at the documentary Roses in December (1982) and how martyrdom, mourning, and solidarity intersected during the Salvadoran Civil War. The author investigates how grief became politically mobilizing. For Vázquez, the churchwomen’s murders reveal the asymmetries embedded within solidarity itself. Their deaths generated outrage in the United States in ways that thousands of Salvadoran deaths did not. His discussion of liberation theology’s concept of “social sin” frames structural inequality and imperial violence as a moral catastrophe. The chapter’s final reflections on martyrdom and collective responsibility are among the book’s most affecting passages.
Throughout States of Defeat, Vázquez also excels at unpacking the contradictions embedded within solidarity discourse. The chapter on Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and the “Miskitu question” in Nicaragua explores how solidarity organizers struggled to reconcile support for the Sandinista Revolution with Indigenous autonomy movements on Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast. Vázquez refuses simplistic notions of solidarity as moral purity or universal identification and views it as a messy political practice shaped by asymmetry, misunderstanding, and uneven power relations.
Chapter four on Jennifer Harbury similarly complicates humanitarian narratives. Harbury’s campaign to locate her disappeared husband, Guatemalan revolutionary leader Efraín Bámaca Velásquez, becomes a study in how love, law, and political identification intersect. Harbury’s activism emerges as an emotionally charged attempt to achieve political and affective fusion with revolutionary struggle itself. Yet Vázquez also traces the limits of legal appeals to human rights and accountability when confronting the deeply entrenched structures of U.S. imperial power.
The chapter on David Stoll and Rigoberta Menchú may be the book’s most controversial intervention. Rather than dismissing Stoll’s critique of Menchú, Vázquez examines how outrage over guerrilla violence and Indigenous suffering helped produce a broader liberal skepticism toward revolutionary politics after the Cold War. Vázquez argues that Stoll’s work dismantled solidaristic attachments to anti-imperialist struggle by repositioning Indigenous civilians primarily as victims trapped “between two armies.” Here, Vázquez makes one of the book’s sharpest political observations: that humanitarian liberalism often displaces revolutionary critique by privileging stability, order, and state-centered notions of peace over structural transformation. The chapter is especially effective at demonstrating how narratives of violence can depoliticize revolutionary struggle while simultaneously legitimizing counterinsurgent frameworks.
Vázquez neither romanticizes the revolutionary period nor dismisses it as naïve idealism. Instead, he asks what remains politically useful in the ruins of revolutionary struggle.
The book concludes with a brilliant chapter on Horacio Castellanos Moya’s novel Senselessness (2004). Vázquez reads paranoia as a rational response to societies structured by surveillance and terror. The novel’s cynical narrator, haunted by the violence embedded within Guatemalan postwar society, becomes a figure through which Vázquez explores the aesthetics of fear, impunity, and political exhaustion. Vázquez argues that postwar cynicism often emerges from prolonged exposure to state terror and failed revolutionary horizons, connecting postwar Central American literature to broader debates about realism, terror, and the emotional consequences of authoritarian violence.
What ultimately distinguishes States of Defeat is that Vázquez neither romanticizes the revolutionary period nor dismisses it as naïve idealism. Instead, he asks what remains politically useful in the ruins of revolutionary struggle. Unlike melancholy, which remains trapped in mourning, his idea of defeatedness retains a residual orientation toward future possibility even amid political collapse. This nuanced distinction allows Vázquez to recover solidarity as an unfinished and contradictory political practice rather than a closed historical chapter.
By centering U.S. imaginaries of Central America, Vázquez demonstrates how the region functioned as a geopolitical battleground and a site through which U.S. intellectuals negotiated anxieties about empire, race, revolution, and political responsibility. In an era marked by renewed authoritarianism, intensified migration crises, militarized borders, and the normalization of state violence, States of Defeat feels urgently contemporary. Vázquez reminds readers that the histories of revolutionary Central America are not sealed in the past; they continue to shape political imaginaries in the present. More importantly, the book challenges readers to reconsider that solidarity after defeat means an ongoing confrontation with complicity, attachment, and political responsibility. At a moment when the language of “security” once again justifies militarization and repression across the Americas, States of Defeat insists that the Cold War is not over. Its emotional and political afterlives remain embedded in the structures that continue to govern migration, policing, borders, and empire today.
César F. Salgado Portillo (he/him/his) is an Assistant Professor of Central American Studies and Spanish at Villanova University. His research examines how cultural production serves as a site of resistance and reimagines identity, memory, and belonging through the intersecting lenses of race, gender, and sexuality in the Isthmus and its diasporas.