The Long Honduran Night with Busboys and Poets Books
Date and Time
Nov 28, 2018 6:30 pm
Location
14th & V
Nov 28, 2018 6:30 pm
14th & V
Journalist and author Dana Frank will discuss her new book, The Long Honduran Night, a story of resistance, repression, and US policy in Honduras in the aftermath of a violent military coup in 2009.
In the book Frank weaves together two perspectives: first, the broad picture of Honduras since the coup, including the coup itself, its continuation in two repressive regimes, and secondly, the evolving Honduran resistance movement, and a new, broad, solidarity movement in the United States. Her first-person account counters the mainstream media coverage that paints Honduras as a place of desperation and shares, instead, the stories of hope and courageous organizing in ordinary people's continuing struggle against repression.
Although it is full of terrible things, The Long Honduran Night is not a horror story: it’s about sobering challenges and the inspiring collective strength with which people face them.
Dana Frank was a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism (Beacon, 1999); Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919–1929 (Cambridge, 1994); Local Girl Makes History: Exploring Northern California’s Kitsch Monuments (City Lights, 2007), Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America (Haymarket, 2016), and, with Howard Zinn and Robin D.G. Kelley, Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century (Beacon, 2001).
Frank worked for many years with the US Labor Education in the Americas Project (US/LEAP) in support of the banana unions in Latin America. Since the 2009 military coup her articles about human rights and U.S. policy in Honduras have appeared in The Nation, New York Times, Politico Magazine, Foreign Affairs.com, The Baffler, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, and many other publications, and she has testified in both the U.S. Congress and Canadian Parliament and been active in challenging US policy in Honduras.