June C. Nash (May 30, 1927[1] – December 9, 2019) was a social and feminist anthropologist and Distinguished Professor Emerita at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
She conducted extensive field work throughout the United States and Latin America, most notably in Bolivia, Mexico and Guatemala.
She first spent some time in Acapulco, but decided to travel to the mountains of Chiapas, Mexico where she worked alongside the American Friends Service Committee on various projects in Maya communities.
[2] With a new interest in Maya peoples, Nash returned to the United States to pursue graduate studies, ultimately receiving both her Master's degree and doctorate from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago in 1960.
[4] The Roseberry-Nash Award for a graduate student paper was created in 2006 in honor of the contributions June Nash and William Roseberry have made to Latin American anthropology.
[10] Nash traveled to Bolivia where she applied Marxist theory to analyze structural violence in the lives of tin miners.
[11] In 1992, her biography of Juan Rojas and his family, first published in 1976 in Spanish as He Agotado Mi Vida en las Minas, was published in English as I Spent My Life in the Mines.. Nash formed a strong bond with Rojas and his family throughout her field work, allowing her to learn about the life of a tin miner.
Nash describes her relationship with Rojas as well as her position as an anthropologist speaking for others in the introduction to the book: "In many ways I feel that I was selected by Juan to be the medium through which he could narrate his life story" (pqg3 7) Rojas and Nash, along with the help of Eduardo Ibanez, shared the stories of this book via an ethnographic film documentary of the same name (I Spent My Life in the Mines) in 1977.
[10] Nash published extensively on various topics in Maya communities in Chiapas, ranging from discussions of violence, political anthropology and artisan practices.
Since the 1994 Zapatista rebellion, Nash provided commentary on the social movement from her unique perspective as an anthropologist who has worked in the Chiapas area since the 1950s.
Since then, particularly in her work with the Zapatistas, Nash was criticized by some second-wave feminists for essentializing gender roles in her discussion of Latin American social movements.