Red Emma’s Bookstore (3128 Greenmount Ave)

The Program in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies & the Center for Gun Solutions are pleased to welcome Ieva Jusionyte (Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University) for a conversation about her book

EXIT WOUNDS: HOW AMERICA’S GUNS FUEL VIOLENCE ACROSS THE BORDER

An account that turns the familiar story of trafficking across the US-Mexico border on its head, looking at firearms smuggled south from the United States to Mexico and their ricochet effects.

American guns have entangled the lives of people on both sides of the US-Mexico border in a vicious circle of violence. After treating wounded migrants and refugees seeking safety in the United States, anthropologist Ieva Jusionyte boldly embarked on a journey in the opposite direction—following the guns from dealers in Arizona and Texas to crime scenes in Mexico.

An expert work of narrative nonfiction, EXIT WOUNDS provides a rare, intimate look into the world of firearms trafficking and urges us to understand the effects of lax US gun laws abroad. Jusionyte masterfully weaves together the gripping stories of people who live and work with guns north and south of the border: a Mexican businessman who smuggles guns for protection, a teenage girl turned trained assassin, two US federal agents trying to stop gun traffickers, and a journalist who risks his life to report on organized crime. Based on years of fieldwork, EXIT WOUNDS_ _expands current debates about guns in America, grappling with US complicity in violence on both sides of the border.

Ieva Jusionyte is the Watson Family University Associate Professor of International Security and Anthropology at Brown University. A legal and medical anthropologist who studies, teaches and writes about violence and security, she is the author of three books, including multiple award-winning ethnography, Threshold: Emergency Responders on the US-Mexico Border (2018). Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and fellowships from the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, the Fulbright Program and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, among others. 

In conversation with

Nicole Fabricant (Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice, Towson University): Dr. Fabricant’s research interests focus on the cultural politics of resource wars in Latin America. Her first book and early publications  centered on the Landless Peasant Movement (MST-Bolivia) a 50,000-member social movement comprised of displaced peasants, informal laborers, and intellectuals fighting for land redistribution and the revitalization of small-scale farming. She has written about the creative ways in which displaced peoples use and mobilize cultural forms to push for political and economic reforms. Critical reflections on the new politics of resources, territory and identity in Bolivia appear in Remapping Bolivia: Resources, Rights and Territory in a Plurinational State, a co-edited volume with Bret Gustafson from Washington University (SAR Press, 2011).