04/20/2026
Lecture: The Last Letter of 'Red' Condori: Resistance in the Archives of Cold War Bolivia
Thursday, April 23, 4:30 p.m.
Psych 105 (Free Admission)
In June 1967, a miner named Casildo Condori wrote a birthday letter to his wife Nancy from the rearguard of Che Guevara’s guerrilla column. When he died in a fire fight with the Bolivian army a few days later, the soldiers kept the letter and the money he sent home. Nancy, fearing Casildo had abandoned their daughter, eventually turned to the courts to track her husband down. Che’s diary barely mentions the young miner and a Cuban memorial uses the wrong name, but Casildo was more than a footnote in the Cold War. In this talk, I use an unexpected archive: the family courts of a small mining city, to put Nancy, Casildo, and their peers in the center of their own revolutionary struggle to protect working families and the keep resistance alive in the face of a violent state and a harsh physical landscape.
Elena McGrath is Assistant Professor of History and Assistant Dean of Studies at Union College in Schenectady, New York. Her research interests, which started with a 2006 Reed History thesis advised by David Garrett, include race, gender, and revolution in the Andes. She received her PhD in Latin American History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2016 and her first book, The Limits of Revolution: Worker Citizens in a Bolivian Mining City, was published by the University of Texas Press in March.
