The Council on Latin American & Iberian Studies Latin American History Speaker series presents
Ana María Otero-Cleves, Lecturer, History of Latin America, University of York:
“Plebeian Consumers: Global Connections, Local Trade and Foreign Goods in Nineteenth-Century Colombia.”
Plebeian Consumers is both a global and local study. It tells the story of how peasants, day workers, formerly enslaved people, and small landholders became the largest consumers of foreign commodities in nineteenth-century Colombia, and dynamic participants of an increasingly interconnected world. By exploring Colombians’ everyday practices of consumption, Otero-Cleves also invites historians to pay close attention to the intimate relationship between the political world and the economic world in nineteenth-century Latin America.
Born and raised in Colombia, Otero-Cleves specialises in the history of nineteenth-century Latin America, with a particular interest in the history of consumption and material culture, global history and legal culture. She is the author of Plebeian Consumers: Global Connections, Local Trade and Foreign Goods in Nineteenth-Century Colombia, winner of the Toynbee First Book Manuscript Workshop Competition (2022), (Cambridge University Press, 2025). Her work has been published in a number of journals in English and Spanish, such as the Hispanic American Historical Review, the Journal of Latin American Studies and Historia Crítica.
Ana María is also an enthusiastic public historian and co-founder the public history initiative Historias para lo que Viene (Histories for what’s to come). Historias para lo que Viene is a collaborative project in which historians, public humanists, and communities affected by the Colombian armed conflict come together to aid the process of peacebuilding in Colombia, through public history workshops and other collective projects, including #ClasealaCalle. (@clasealacalle)