Remembering Marysa Navarro-Aranguren, Towering Scholar of Latin American History and Dartmouth Trailblazer

Marysa Navarro-Aranguren, Charles A. and Elfriede A. Collis Professor Emerita in History, died on March 2 in Cambridge, Mass. She was 90 years old.

"A distinguished scholar of Latin American women's history and feminism, Navarro-Aranguren was also a trailblazer in Dartmouth's history," Dean Elizabeth F. Smith said in a message to the Arts and Sciences community. "During her 42 years at Dartmouth, she played a formative role in the institution's adoption of coeducation and its support and recruitment of female faculty. Her lasting influence as a brilliant historian, dedicated colleague and campus leader, and passionate teacher will be felt for years to come." 

Navarro-Aranguren was born in Pamplona, Spain, in 1934, two years before the start of the Spanish Civil War. At just three years old, she and her family were exiled to France, where they lived until 1948. They then relocated to Uruguay, where Navarro-Aranguren finished high school and her undergraduate education. Following a fellowship at Douglas College in New Jersey, she earned her MA and PhD degrees in history at Columbia University, with a focus on right-wing political movements in Argentina. After teaching at Rutgers University, Yeshiva University, Kean College, and Long Island University, she accepted a position as an assistant professor at Dartmouth in 1968.

Inspired by the feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Navarro-Aranguren helped to establish the field of Latin American women's studies. Her nine books and numerous scholarly articles on Latin American feminism include an influential biography of Eva Perón in Spanish, which was widely praised as the first rigorously researched account of the multifaceted Argentine political figure. A second co-authored biography was published in English. 

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Marysa Navarro-Aranguren (right) with colleague Brenda Silver (Photo by Nancy Wasserman)

Navarro-Aranguren played a major role in introducing North American academics and students to scholarship in both English and Spanish related to Latin America. She helped to coordinate a four-volume anthology, for example, Un nuevo saber: Los estudios de mujeres, encompassing Spanish translations of major essays in American and European feminism and women's studies. The books remain an invaluable introduction to the field of women's studies. 

At Dartmouth, Navarro-Aranguren established and chaired the Women's Studies Program (now the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program) and the Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies Program, which recently became a department. 

Among her many leadership roles in organizations promoting Latin American studies and feminism, Navarro-Aranguren was elected vice president of the Latin American Studies Association in 2001 and served as president in 2003-04. She also served as president of the New England Council for Latin American Studies and chaired boards of organizations including the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, Global Fund for Women, Ms. Foundation for Women, International Women's Rights Project of Human Rights Watch, and International Planned Parenthood Federation. She served on the editorial board of several feminist journals, including the pioneering publication Signs for 20 years. In 1980, she was invited to join the New England Association of Schools and Colleges as a member of the Commission on Institutions of Higher Education.

Navarro-Aranguren's research was supported by grants and fellowships from the Institute of International Education, Organization of American States, Social Science Research Council, American Philosophical Society, Rockefeller Foundation, and Harvard University. Among her many awards, she was named Distinguished Woman Scholar by the University of New Hampshire and was declared "Visitante Ilustre de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires" ("Distinguished Visitor of the City of Buenos Aires"). At the time of her retirement, in 2010, she was awarded Dartmouth's Elizabeth Howland Hand–Otis Norton Pierce Award for outstanding undergraduate teaching.

Advocating for Dartmouth women

When she received her job offer at Dartmouth, Navarro-Aranguren did not know it was an all-male school, she said in a 2012 Dartmouth oral history interview. "If I had known that, I probably wouldn't have come," she said. "I was a single mother, divorced, and a professor in an institution where in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences there were no women on the tenure track."

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Marysa Navarro-Aranguren teaches a class at Dartmouth. (Photo by Nancy Wasserman)

Upon her arrival on campus, Navarro-Aranguren took a leading role in the discussions that led to the institution's decision to become coeducational. She advocated against a competing proposal to form a separate women's college in Norwich, Vermont, and announced the motion for coeducation to the faculty before it was approved by the Board of Trustees in 1970.

"Marysa said that women had to be granted full equivalency with men at Dartmouth, on campus and in equal numbers," says Professor Emeritus of History Gene Garthwaite. "She was the one who really insisted on that and convinced President John Kemeny of that necessity."

Beyond structural change, Navarro-Aranguren sought to modernize Dartmouth's campus culture.

"Women were viewed as a civilizing force on the campus—very 19th century discourse that women were going to civilize Dartmouth men," she said. "All that discourse was really terribly irritating to us, to the women who were here, especially at the moment in which we as women were trying to work out what on Earth it was to be a woman in the 20th century in the U.S… and here we were, dealing with completely 19th century arguments about women and about education." 

She recalled becoming "terribly angry at times" and said that she couldn't blame her colleagues for being irritated. "You have to understand that when you go to a faculty meeting and your male colleague tells you that a woman cannot be a faculty member and a mother at the same time, and he's talking to you straight, in the eyes, you go slightly berserk," she said. "And you feel like telling him what I told him: I am not a deviant. I am a professional. I am a mother. I am a woman. These are the people who had to vote for coeducation at Dartmouth."

At the same time, Navarro-Aranguren expressed immense gratitude for the scholarly community she discovered at Dartmouth. "I was enormously happy because I had a set of colleagues who could not have been better, and I always felt that … members of the history department were a very special group of people, and I just found myself supported, embraced, delighted to be among them because they seemed to be happy to have received me and to make room for me," she said.

"I think Dartmouth was her first home," Garthwaite says. "She had a very traumatic childhood. Dartmouth provided her with the space to develop as a scholar and administrator and also the emotional support that she needed."

In addition to championing coeducation, Navarro-Aranguren advocated for the recruitment of more women faculty and staff. While serving on the Committee on Priorities as an assistant professor, she helped to create and chaired a committee on the status of women to demand improvements in hiring and salary discrimination. She also helped to establish a daycare on campus.

Navarro-Aranguren herself was the second woman to be granted tenure in the Arts and Sciences at Dartmouth, and as she put it, the "first woman to get tenure like a man"—receiving the promotion four years after she was hired. She went on to become the first woman at Dartmouth to serve as an associate dean when she was named associate dean for the social sciences in 1985. 

A passionate teacher and 'force of nature'

The day before the Board of Trustees voted for Dartmouth to become coeducational, Navarro-Aranguren playfully bet some of her students that it wouldn't happen, and promised that she would get dressed like a football player and "run around the Green" if the vote passed. She kept her word, and President Kemeny greeted her at her finish line in front of Reed Hall with a bouquet of flowers. 

A year earlier, soon after the student seizure of Parkhurst Hall in 1969, which resulted in more than 25 undergraduates serving time in six New Hampshire county jails, Navarro-Aranguren spent the spring term taking homework to her students behind bars. 

Patrick Dellinger '17 conducted an oral history interview with Navarro-Aranguren for the Dartmouth Vietnam Project, where she recounted driving her red Volkswagen Beetle to various jails.

"I made them study, and they passed," she said. "But they did study. Well, they had nothing else to do in the jail. I did not know New Hampshire at all, but I'm telling you that I know the jails."

Generations of students, many of whom went on to graduate school in Latin American studies, remember Navarro-Aranguren as a passionate and rigorous teacher. 

"On the one hand, she was gregarious and had this amazing ability to make you live in history," says Susan Braden '78. "On the other hand, she was tough. She demanded a lot of her students. Sometimes I thought too much. She wanted you to know all perspectives, and if you didn't demonstrate that you knew them, she would catch you." 

Navarro-Aranguren kept in touch with many of her students for decades after they graduated. "She was my teacher and mentor, and ultimately, my friend," Braden says. "I wrote a thesis on the Panama canal that she mentioned to the very last day. I visited her recently in the place she went for memory care, and within minutes of my arrival she was telling everyone about my thesis."

"Marysa nurtured my budding feminist consciousness, advised me in crafting a special major in feminist theory, engaged me as student rep on the college's founding Women's Studies Program, and stood by me and scores of other women as we protested conditions on campus and beyond," says Melinda Fine '80. "How lucky I was to have been fed by her big personality, big laugh, and big heart over more than four decades."

Kim Conroy '76, a member of the first class of women, credits Navarro-Aranguren for her decision to work in Latin America for over a decade, with stints at Save the Children in Honduras, the World Bank in Mexico, the Mexican government, and as a journalist in El Salvador and Brazil. 

"She had no compunction in reminding her students, most of whom were from the United States when I attended in the mid-70s, that for decades U.S. governments supported ruthless dictators in Latin America," Conroy says. "She was a tenacious, demanding professor who cared deeply for her students, as we did for her." 

Braden, Conroy, and Tim Rieser '76 spoke with Navarro-Aranguren regularly over the years, including via Zoom a few weeks before she died. 

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Marysa Navarro-Aranguren and Lucretia Martin '51a at Dartmouth's 50th anniversary celebration of coeducation (Photo by Kata Sasvari)

Navarro-Aranguren's influential teaching and leadership at Dartmouth continues to inspire students and faculty today. 

In 2022, Emmanuel Mariano '23 created a video essay about Navarro-Aranguren during an Historical Accountability Student Research Fellowship at Dartmouth Libraries. "Navarro positioned herself in Dartmouth's history as a trailblazer and an advocate, helping those after following in her footsteps," he said. "As a result, students like myself and many of my peers are now able to attend Dartmouth and enjoy their experience. Although I never personally had the chance to meet Professor Navarro here, I am moved by her immense efforts to make students like myself a part of Dartmouth's history."

Professor Emeritus of History Douglas Haynes describes her as "a giant in the history of the history department, whose influence on its character and identity will be felt for many decades to come," while Associate Professor of History Steven Ericson calls her a "force of nature."

Professor Emerita of History Pamela Crossley remembers Navarro-Arangurena as a "great friend to her colleagues" who worked hard to bring the compensation of women faculty up closer to the compensation of men.

Associate Professor of History Pamela Voekel recalls how Navarro-Arangurena showed her around Dartmouth's campus during her interview. "I was intimidated: her beautiful biography of Eva Perón had been on my orals list, and I had taught it several times," she says. "I remember telling her that my class always sang the Evita song from the film starring Madonna. There was a pregnant pause, and I realized I should not have confessed to that super gringa pedagogical move; then she hummed a few lines. She was a towering figure in Latin American history."

In 2022, Navarro-Aranguren returned to campus to take part in Dartmouth's 50th anniversary celebration of coeducation. In a full-circle moment, she met incoming president Sian Leah Beilock, who began her tenure as the institution's first elected female president on June 12, 2023.

"She thought the new president was just wonderful," Navarro-Aranguren's daughter, Nina Gerassi-Navarro, says. "It was a real highlight for her. Dartmouth was her anchor and it constructed her identity. Dartmouth was her home."

In addition to her daughter, Navarro-Aranguren is survived by her son-in-law, Ernesto Livon-Grosman, and her grandchildren, Nicolás and Natalia Livon-Navarro.

The Dartmouth flag will be lowered in Navarro-Aranguren's honor on Friday, March 14, and Saturday, March 15.