Marysa Navarro Aranguren

It is with heavy hearts that we note the passing of Marysa Navarro, eminent historian of Latin America, on March 2, 2025. A former president of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) and 2017 recipient of the Kalman Silvert Award, she was a major contributor to LASA’s development and a pioneer in the field of women and gender in Latin American history. Marysa taught at Dartmouth University for forty-two years where she was the Charles A. and Elfriede A. Collis Professor of History.

Marysa’s involvement with LASA began in the mid-1970s with the Task Force on Women, which she chaired between 1983-1988. She served on an extraordinary number of LASA Committees, ranging from the Committee on Constitutional Revisions to the Development Committee, and co-chaired the LASA2000 Congress in Miami. She was twice an elected member of the LASA Executive Council, from 1992-1995, and then LASA’s Vice President (2001-2003), President (2003-2004), and Past President (2004-2006). In these roles she diversified LASA’s funding sources and chaired the search committee that hired Milagros Pereyra-Rojas as Executive Director.

Milagros recalls that, upon becoming LASA’s Executive Director in 2004, Marysa generously guided her—with kindness and patience—through the vicissitudes and challenges of her new role. Their mentorship soon blossomed into a lasting friendship, one that extended beyond Marysa’s presidency and came to include Milagros’s husband, Enrique Mu, a lifetime LASA member. The three of them often found themselves in deep conversation during their travels, listening to stories from Marysa’s rich and fascinating life—memories she shared with both insight and heart.

Marysa was intensely committed to the well-being of Latin America in all dimensions. In 1988 she served on the LASA Commission on Compliance with the Central American Peace Accords. In 2007 she was part of the LASA Fact-Finding Delegation to Oaxaca regarding abuses of academic freedom and human rights. 

In addition to her service to LASA, Marysa was a resolute member of the New England Council of Latin American Studies (NECLAS) and served as its President (1981-1982). Carmen Diana Deere first met Marysa through NECLAS and got to know her through their common friendship with June Nash and Helen Safa and a standing date to dance all together at the Gran Baile at LASA Congresses. They mentored each other through their respective NECLAS and LASA presidencies and the challenges presented by the need to formulate appropriate responses to various U.S. government outrages regarding Latin America. Deere remembers with awe Marysa’s unstinting commitment to the Association and to the advancement of feminism.   

Marysa Navarro was born in Pamplona, Spain in 1934, and her early life was spent in the shadow of the Spanish Civil War and exile in France. Her father, Vicente Navarro Ruiz, was a committed Republican and education inspector imprisoned by the Nationalist forces and exiled to internment camps in France in 1936. After being interned in Pamplona, Marysa and her mother and brother fled to France, where they lived until she was fourteen. Her older sister was evacuated by ship with other refugee children and spent ten years in the Soviet Union. With the help of the Red Cross, the family was finally reunited in France and settled in Uruguay in 1948, where Marysa completed her undergraduate degree at the Instituto José Batlle y Ordoñez and pursued studies at the Instituto de Profesores Artigas. In 1958, she enrolled at Columbia University and received a PhD. in history in 1964. She was briefly married to journalist-scholar John Gerassi, with whom she had a daughter, Nina Gerassi-Navarro, currently the King Felipe VI of Spain Professor in Spanish Culture and Civilization at Tufts University.

Her long career at Dartmouth College began in 1968, where she was the second woman to achieve tenure at what was then an all-male institution. Marysa was a strong advocate behind co-education as well as equal pay for women faculty and staff and day care on campus. She served as Associate Dean for the Social Sciences (1985-1989), a first for a woman scholar at that institution. She also established and chaired its Women’s and Gender Studies Program, the first among Ivy League schools, as well as its Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies Program. She was appointed to her named chair in 1992 and was awarded the Elizabeth Howland Hand-Otis Norton Pierce Award for outstanding undergraduate teaching in 2010. On notice of her death, the flag of Dartmouth University was lowered in her honor on March 14 and 15, 2025. 

Marysa’s initial scholarship was in the field of political history and she authored her dissertation and a book, Los Nacionalistas (1969), on right-wing political movements in Argentina. Her growing involvement with feminism subsequently led her to focus on the emerging field of Latin American women’s studies. In the biographical piece that she wrote for the LASA Forum (Spring 2017, 1) upon being named the Kalman Silvert Award recipient, she explained that from the 1970s on her professional mission was twofold: “to integrate scholarship on women and gender into mainstream disciplinary debates, and to promote cross-national and cross-cultural discussions and networks among scholars working on those issues.”  She excelled at both, having a lasting impact on the integration of feminist scholarship across the Americas and Europe.

Marysa was best known for her biographical works of Eva Perón and her many articles on Latin American feminism. She co-authored Eva Perón (1981) with Nicholas Fraser and subsequently authored Evita (1982), published and republished multiple times in Buenos Aires.  She also edited Evita: Mitos y representaciones (2002). She participated in the first Encuentro Feminista of Latin America and the Caribbean in 1981 in Bogota and was one of the first scholars to reflect on that meeting, and through multiple articles, on the emergence and challenges of second-wave feminism in the region. She participated in most of the subsequent Encuentros up through the 2017 meeting in Uruguay.

Her efforts to disseminate the ideas of feminism in the region included co-editing with Catharine Stimpson (the founding editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society) the four-volume anthology, Un nuevo saber: Los Estudios de Mujeres, published by the Fondo de Cultura Económica in Argentina between 1998 and 2002. It included translations of many of the major essays in North American and European feminism and women’s studies, a project that she initiated as chair (1989-2003) of the LASA/Ford Foundation Committee on Women’s Studies in the Americas. Marysa gave equal attention to disseminating Latin American gender scholarship to an English-speaking audience through her twenty-years on the Editorial Board of Signs, her participation in the Organization of American Historians “Restoring Women to History” project, and the PBS Americas project.  She also served on the editorial boards of many of the major Latin American feminist journals including the Mexican periodicals Revista de Estudios de la Mujer, Debate Feminista, and Política y Cultura, in addition to the Brazilian Revista Estudos Feministas and Cadernos Pagu.  

Her service contributions were many and varied and included being on the advisory boards of the Global Fund for Women; the Ms. Foundation for Women, Ms. Magazine; the International Women’s Rights Project of Human Rights Watch; the International Planned Parenthood Federation (Western Hemisphere); and the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame. She also served two terms as member of the Commission on Institutions of Higher Education of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. 

Marysa was an active member or supporter of several Latin American feminist NGOs where she made deep and lasting friendships, among them, at Articulación Feminista MARCOSUR (AFM) and at the center Cotidiano Mujer y Mujer Ahora in Montevideo, which named its main meeting room in her honor. Lilian Celiberti and Lucy Garrido, two members of this latter center, remember Marysa as follows:

Marysa retired from Dartmouth College in 2010 and became a senior resident scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, where she continued work on the history of Latin American women in international organizations and on her family’s history in Spain. Merilee Grindle, who directed the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies during most of Marysa’s tenure, remembered “her fierce advocacy for high quality scholarship, her extraordinary dedication to mentoring graduate students and annual cohorts of visiting scholars. She delighted in these interactions and her laughter rang out from her office. We called her La Reina; she truly was a queen at the Center.”

In addition to the honors already mentioned, Marysa was declared “Distinguished Visitor of Buenos Aires” in 2007 and “Illustrious Visitor of Montevideo” in 2019. The Universidad Pública de Navarra awarded her a Doctor Honoris Causa in 2017.

When Marysa turned 90 last year, Milagros and Enrique traveled to Boston to celebrate with her. Over a small feast and a glass of wine, they marked the occasion with joy—unaware that it would be her final birthday. We close with her final words at her Kalman Silvert Award Lecture (LASA Forum, Summer 2017, 7): “If I died and was reborn and someone asked me what I would want to be, I would tell them my daughter’s mother, a historian, and a feminist militant.”

Marysa Navarro Aranguren is survived by her daughter Nina Gerassi-Navarro, son-in-law, Ernesto Livon-Grosman, and grandchildren Nicolas and Natalia Livon-Navarro, of Cambridge, Massachusetts.