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Not Even Past

Year in Review – Academic year 2021-2022

Year in Review - Fall 2021/Spring 2022

It’s been another busy year for Not Even Past with more than 130 articles published across the academic year. To celebrate all this incredible academic content we have compiled everything in one page below. Not Even Past‘s reach also continues to grow, and we just broke a million page views over the past 12 months, making the magazine an important resource not just for the University of Texas community but for Public History online. As we conclude the academic year, Not Even Past would like to thank Gabrielle Esparza our amazing Associate Editor whose energy, creativity and brilliance as an editor has been a key part of the magazine’s success this year. We would also like to recognize Dr Joan Neuberger, our Founding Editor who will be retiring from UT over the summer. Not Even Past is unimaginable without Joan’s tireless work and we have published a brief tribute to her remarkable achievements here. Finally we would like to thank all our contributors and partners across the past academic year and of course our readers.

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Features

Features

My life’s story has come to be entwined with the history of the Relaciones. My intellectual place of origin, Bogotá, Colombia, facilitated my first encounter with them. My continued engagement with these sources from Latin American classrooms and special collections to Spanish archives has culminated in my current dissertation project at the University of Texas at Austin – the principal observatory and repository of these documents in the Americas. My life and research paths have allowed me to explore this neglected historical terrain. I argue that by drawing together the Relaciones Geográficas and Topográficas as a genre of documents, we can better envision how people from diverse ethnic compositions on both sides of the Atlantic produced a massive number of descriptions of local nature and societies around the same period. This perspective may allow us to see and understand the complex knowledge networks of Atlantic towns that the Spanish Crown wove together. Consider, for instance, how the Relaciones go beyond the famous Mexican indigenous charts as revealed by Map 2, the Relación of Valledupar, a township located in what is now Colombia.

Rafael Nieto-Bello

Robert Runyon was an astoundingly prolific photographer of the Texas-México borderlands at the turn of the twentieth century. The University of Texas at Austin hosts over 14,000 photographs donated by the Runyon family, along with related manuscript materials. Much of the collection is available digitally, and the Briscoe Center for American History also houses Runyon’s glass negatives, lantern slides, nitrate negatives, prints, postcards, panoramas, correspondence, and business records. The sheer scope of his work, which ranges from botanicals to portraiture to quotidian scenes of daily life, has rendered his imagery—in regard to Texas and the U.S.-México border—ubiquitous.

Annette M. Rodríguez

The largest green space in downtown Austin, Waterloo Park takes its name from the Waterloo hamlet, a frontier settlement that Austin replaced. It sits in a basin along Waller Creek, encompassing a particularly flood-prone stretch of Austin’s most central, urbanized stream. Though the park was built in 1975 as part of the Brackenridge Urban Renewal Project, its history dates to the end of the US Civil War, when formerly enslaved people began migrating to southern cities in search of work, education, lost family members, and haven from anti-Black violence. Many migrants were skilled farmers and craftsmen and had saved money to purchase land. As a rule, white landowners sold Black people only their “poorest” properties, relegating most Black communities to low-lying and otherwise hazardous spaces.

Katherine Leah Pace
books

Books

I remember the stink of the fishmeal plants in Iquique. During the austral winter of 1983, the vapors that turned tons of whole anchoveta into high protein fish flour lingered over the beach with the coastal fog until the customary afternoon breeze came and carried it away. Local residents called it “the smell of money.” Domestically produced fish flour had become the primary source for fish food in the new salmon farms that had begun to scar the pristine beauty of the lakes and fiords in the Chilean south. It would also become dog food, and the “high protein cookies” on school lunch menus for the undernourished children that General Pinochet’s second recession in ten years had pushed dangerously down the path of deficiency disease. But the smelly fishmeal extracted from the seemingly infinite Pacific coast of northern Chile had already become a vital element in an increasingly global ecosystem of profit-driven food production. Economists and technocrats called it a “non-traditional export.” Along with the farmed salmon, the fresh fruit out of season and the world’s finest red wines for a little less money, Chilean fishmeal would help reduce the local economy’s absolute dependence on the roller coaster of international copper prices. It would fatten pigs in Germany and chickens in California to satisfy the voracious appetites of a competing species now referred to simply as “the consumer.”

Nathan Stone

Megan Kate Nelson has written a captivating history of the southwestern theater of the American Civil War. There more than one war took place as different groups of people envisioned futures dependent on control of the region. The balance of perspectives makes it clear the Civil War was not just a battle for the preservation of the Union, or for those states that had seceded, but rather a multicultural war for control of much of the North American continent. The Union, the Confederacy, Mexico, the Apache, and Navajo (Diné) all fought for control of land, water, resources, and trade. Skirmishes in the West were layered contests among several parties. While historians often acknowledge the importance of the West in determining the fate of slavery in an expanding nineteenth-century United States, few have tackled the southwestern theater as Nelson has in The Three Cornered War.

Gwendolyn Lockman

Pulp Empire is filled with fascinating anecdotes and incisive analysis of the ephemera of US empire. This book offers something for an array of audiences from fervent comic book fans to historians of American foreign policy. Hirsch deftly deals with several dimensions of comics’ hidden history from their perpetuation of racist and sexist tropes to their use as a unique tool of soft-power popular abroad across class lines. Finally, Hirsch’s analysis of the debates over the atomic age played out in comic book pages proves both entertaining and enlightening. Pulp Empire effectively interrogates the intersection between politics and popular culture and profiles how superheroes have been deployed to serve American expansionist goals.

Jon Buchleiter
Teaching

Teaching

In Spring 2021, my course, “Preserving Austin’s Queer History,” trained undergraduate students to conduct oral history interviews with LGBTQ community members past and present. Despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and the February 2021 weather disaster, the fifteen students in this class conducted oral history interviews with nineteen people. These oral history narrators range in age from thirty-four to eighty-four years old. They include gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, trans and non-binary people, as well as artists and performers, grassroots activists, and small business owners. They are white, Black, Latinx, Asian American, and multi-racial. And they have contributed to Austin’s LGBTQ history and to local struggles against injustice in a variety of ways. 

Lauren Gutterman
Digital and Film

Digital and Film

In one of the final scenes of Jeymes Samuel’s gripping 2021 Black Western The Harder They Fall, androgynous outlaw Cuffee (played by Danielle Deadwyler) says a teary goodbye to her comrade “Stagecoach” Mary Fields (Zazie Beetz). The two share a long, not-quite-chaste kiss goodbye as Nat Love, Mary’s main romantic interest in the film, shifts uncomfortably in his saddle. Mary responds with a coy “What you looking at?” before mounting her horse a final time and literally riding off into the sunset with Love, leaving Cuffee behind. The film, which follows Nat Love and his gang of outlaws on an epic revenge quest across the American southwest, encompasses a litany of historical elisions and inaccuracies, culminating in this moment between Mary and Cuffee. It cements the movie’s final and most glaring lapse: while The Harder They Fall’s vision of the Old West is brazen, bold, and Black, its queer notes amount to little more than whispers. Not only was the real “Stagecoach” Mary Fields (as several writers have noted) much taller, darker, and heavier than she is depicted in the film, she was probably much queerer as well.

Candice Lyons

A key thread running through Dr. Brook Danielle Lillehaugen’s career is access—to language, to history, and to education. She recognizes that linguistic research on Indigenous languages is insufficient if members of Indigenous communities cannot access it. Therefore, throughout her career she has sought to remove barriers to such access via creative, collaborative research that goes beyond traditional academic practice.

May Helena Plumb

Throughout the last two years of the global pandemic, digital research has surged among graduate students and faculty alike. Travel restrictions prevented scholars from accessing important sources. Project Arte Colonial and the continuing efforts of Jaime H. Borja Gómez have provided invaluable access to colonial Spanish resources to individuals across the world who are unable to conduct research in-person. The digital humanities have become critical components to fields across the social sciences. ARCA works to create an easily accessible gateway that simultaneously serves veterans and newcomers of remote research. Historians must adopt new and diverse ways to engage with the public and other scholars through the medium of technology.

Haley Schroer
Blog

Blog

My Guatemalan father was born in the middle of a civil war. His childhood house was built from corrugated metal and adobe brick. He grew up clinging to my abuela’s back wrapped in a blanket as she weaved to sustain the family. He did not have shoes until he was 8 years old. He dropped out of school after the second grade. Before he reached my age, he was nearly murdered by the army three times. He worked as a trench digger and then as a laborer before fleeing his home in Huehuetenango. 

Ilan Palacios Avineri

In New York City, buildings are like wallpaper. If you peeled back the facades and peeked into their histories, you’d find something different, something out of style. The buildings’ old identities wouldn’t match the modern character of the neighborhood. On the Lower East Side, if you peel back the layers of luxury apartments, churches, and fusion restaurants, you’d notice a trend. Many buildings that now house fashionable venues used to be synagogues.

Amy Shreeve

Mauricio Tenorio thinks with his feet. As his soles touch the asphalt, he feels a piece of one of his dearest obsessions: the city. Not Mexico City specifically, although it might be the one he feels closest to, but the idea of the city. Cities have so much to say. A street in Barcelona, an old building in Chicago, an awkward monument in Washington. D.C., a park in Berlin: they all have stories and a history. And Tenorio, a Professor of History at the University of Chicago and Profesor Asociado at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, Mexico City, tells these stories through his work. I like to repeat one about a hidden monument in Mexico City. Inside the column of the Independence monument, the capital’s famous postcard-ready landmark with angel’s wings, the white statue of an obscure figure guards the ashes of Mexico’s founding fathers—a monument of a seventeenth-century Irishman. Tenorio tells the story of Guillerme de Lampart, the “Irish Zorro” who plotted an independence movement with religious undertones in the 1640s—a peculiar reading of the Bible led him to believe that Spain did not have sovereign rights over the Americas. He became a controversial figure in Mexican history. The Inquisition burnt Lampart in 1650, making him a martyr for anti-Church Porfirian liberals. Placing his monument publicly would have surely triggered heated historiographical and political debates, weakening the process of national reconciliation. Thus, Lampart made his way into one of the nation’s central monuments: discretely.[1] Yet Tenorio’s driving curiosity lies elsewhere: it is not so much about what cities have to say, but how they say it. The location and concealment of Lampart’s monument suggest broader discussions on religion and independence, heroes and martyrs, history and the city. Tenorio explores how cities dictate these stories.

Rodrigo Salido Moulinié

For the plebiscite of ‘88, Chile had its first political campaign in fifteen years. La Campaña del NO tried to make it fun. We all had many dark tales to tell, and maybe a moral obligation to tell them, but sad stories don’t get votes. Moreover, a very fine line, invisible to carabineros, divided protesting and campaigning. Opposition supporters had to resort to clever strategies. We would drive around with their windshield wipers on, on a dry day. Like saying “no” by moving your index finger from left to right. The cops couldn’t exactly arrest you for using your windshield wiper.

Nathan Stone
IHS & Public History

IHS and Public History

Hungry for Revolution (2021) is an ambitious book that, through the social history of food production, distribution and consumption and through a cultural history of the knowledge and science of nutrition, agriculture, and political economy of rural landholdings, offers a radical new chronology of the political history of 20th century Chile.  Hungry for Revolution masterfully goes over the nitrate export boom in the fin-de-siècle mining towns of northern Chile and the creation of the new-deal welfare state of Alessandri and the Frente Popular in the 1930s and 1940s to offer a striking new genealogy of Allende’s Socialist Revolution.

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

For most individuals, the Counter Reformation sought to quash new forms of democratic spiritual participation in the form of Lutheranism and Calvinism. The so-called Galileo affair epitomizes this narrative of the Counter Reformation as retrograde and even villainous. In the popular imagination, Galileo stands as the victim of the Counter Reformation’s stifling prosecution of skepticism, experimentation, and modernity. Yet Dr. Madeline McMahon begs to differ. In her manuscript the Catholic Creation of Early Modern Knowledge, McMahon argues that by creating the institution of the resident (non-absentee) bishop, the Counter Reformation became the lynchpin to the new confessional, interventionist, technocratic early-modern state.

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Author Spotlights

Texas

Texas

In our exhibit Black Cowboys: An American Story, visitors from Texas, and beyond will be introduced to a diverse group of African American cowhands, from Johana July, a free Black Seminole born in 1860 to Myrtis Dightman, called “The Jackie Robinson of Rodeo” who broke the color line at professional rodeos in the late 1960s. In addition to presenting the public with depictions of numerous Black cowboys, enslaved and free, the Witte Museum introduces the audience to the legacy of Black ranches and freedom colonies throughout Texas. The audience learns about several Black owned ranches that have stood the test of time, outlasting white supremacy and Jim Crow. These ranching families, who continue to ranch the land purchased and maintained by their ancestors in the nineteenth-century, display a tenacity of will and a commitment to their family traditions. They often withstood destruction of their family legacy by organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan while also weathering continual threats of encroachment from neighbors and state governments.

Ronald Davis
Author spotlights

The New World and Beyond: A Review of New World Nature

The New World and Beyond: A Review of New World Nature

by Shery Chanis

In honor of the centennial of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, the 2022 Lozano Long Conference focuses on archives with Latin American perspectives in order to better visualize the ethical and political implications of archival practices globally. The conference was held in February 2022 and the videos of all the presentation will be available soon. Thinking archivally in a time of COVID-19 has also given us an unexpected opportunity to re-imagine the international academic conference. This Not Even Past publication joins those by other graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin.  The series as a whole is designed to engage with the work of individual speakers as well as to present valuable resources that will supplement the conference’s recorded presentations. This new conference model, which will make online resources freely and permanently available, seeks to reach audiences beyond conference attendees in the hopes of decolonizing and democratizing access to the production of knowledge. Please feel free to spread the word: #LLC22 #archivos.

En el marco del homenaje al centenario de la Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, la Conferencia Lozano Long 2022 propició un espacio de reflexión sobre archivos latinoamericanos desde un pensamiento latinoamericano con el propósito de entender y conocer las contribuciones de la región a las prácticas archivísticas globales, así como las responsabilidades éticas y políticas que esto implica. Pensar en términos de archivística en tiempos de COVID-19 también nos brindó la imprevista oportunidad de re-imaginar la forma en la que se llevan a cabo conferencias académicas internacionales. Como parte de esta propuesta, esta publicación de Not Even Past se junta a las otras de la serie escritas por estudiantes de posgrado en la Universidad de Texas en Austin. En ellas los estudiantes resaltan el trabajo de las y los panelistas invitados a la conferencia con el objetivo de socializar el material y así descolonizar y democratizar el acceso a la producción de conocimiento. La conferencia tuvo lugar en febrero de 2022 pero todas las presentaciones, así como las grabaciones de los paneles están archivados en YouTube de forma permanente y pronto estarán disponibles las traducciones al inglés y español respectivamente. Por favor, no duden en difundir: #LLC22 #archivos

Focusing on the development of early modern nature and science, New World Nature (https://nwn.dhinitiative.org) is a delightful online resource for anyone interested in the Spanish Americas, history of science, and an innovative comparative approach to history that connects the Spanish Americas from Europe to China. Website creator Dr. Mackenzie Cooley at Hamilton College intends for New World Nature to be a platform to highlight her multiple projects and collaborations. This website demonstrates how scholars in the humanities can maintain an organic online presence and a shared space for research.

Website of New World Nature
Website of New World Nature

New World Nature makes several significant contributions. The first is creating a research tool for the Relaciones Geográficas, a corpus of responses collected for the 50-question survey sent to Spanish Americas in the 1570s during the reign of Spanish King Philip II.[1] Various Relaciones Geográficas in the Spanish empire are known, originating from Peru and the Caribbean to even Spain. The section “Searching the Relaciones Geográficas” (https://nwn.dhinitiative.org/search-archive/) offers René Acuña’s magisterial critical editions from Mexico, Guatemala, Tlaxcala, Michoacan, Antequera, and Nueva Galicia. As a result of collaboration with student researchers on translation and data management, this tool not only assisted Cooley’s students in their research but is also helpful for others who are interested in these documents.

The second contribution is its organic approach. Rather than an end product of a particular project, the website highlights Cooley’s ongoing scholarship. After introducing the Lesser Antilles archives at Hamilton College and the Relaciones Geográficas, New World Nature spotlights Cooley’s body of work which includes her manuscript-in-progress, The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Humans, and Race in the Renaissance (in press with The University of Chicago Press), her current research on sex, medicine, and empire this academic year, as well as Natural Things: Ecologies of Nature in the Early Modern World co-edited by Cooley, Anna Toledano, and Duygu Yildirim. This edited work has resulted from the project Natural Things/Ad Fontes Naturae (https://naturalhistory.stanford.edu/), an ongoing endeavor in global natural history that the aforementioned trio of scholars co-founded during Cooley’s graduate training at Stanford University.

A digital archive on the Relaciones Geográficas
A digital archive on the Relaciones Geográficas

The third main contribution of New World Nature is its comparative approach that will appeal to audiences in various geographical fields. Beyond the Atlantic connection between the Americas and Europe, the comparison between the early modern Spanish and Chinese empires brings forth an innovative – and previously overlooked – perspective in the scholarship of the early modern world. In addition to the works mentioned above, Cooley has also co-edited another volume, Knowing an Empire: Imperial Science in the Chinese and Spanish Empires, 1500-1800 (under review). Through a pioneering comparison between the Relaciones Geográficas and local gazetteers (difangzhi), a centuries-long Chinese genre, this work connects early modern Spain and China via the broad themes of empire, science, and local epistemologies.[2] This work argues for the striking parallels between these two seemingly unrelated genres, offering a model of comparability and emphasizing the polycentricity of power. It also challenges the linear progression to modernity by seeking to understand the development of early modern Spanish and Chinese knowledge production that differed from the European experience. This work is a powerful intervention in the scholarship of the early modern world that connects two of the biggest empires of the time.

The team behind this website further speaks to the collaborative and global nature of this project. Through the efforts of the Australian designer Katie Dean, New World Nature features great images from the Relaciones Geográficas that immediately grasp the readers’ attention.[3] Cooley has also been working with a team of student researchers with various academic interests at Hamilton College, including Latin American history, history of medicine, race, human rights, and archaeology. Cooley and her team have traveled to Europe and Latin America for research and co-published their works.

Chinese Gazetteers
Chinese Gazetteers

While an exciting series of works, two minor suggestions for the website might be helpful. The first is to feature an introduction that provides a road map highlighting the resources and multiple projects mentioned above. A quick orientation of the website content would help readers (especially first-time visitors to the website) more easily understand the rich resources available. Related to that, reframing and expanding the “About” section would help reflect the website’s growth and scholarship over the years. The second suggestion would be to highlight Cooley’s manuscript-in-progress more explicitly on the website.

New World Nature has created a visually appealing platform that not only aids in the research on the Relaciones Geográficas but also introduces multiple exciting works that help interested readers to further understand the dynamic nature of the early modern world.

A historian of science and ideas in early modern empires, Dr. Mackenzie Cooley is Assistant Professor at Hamilton College. Her research focuses on the natural world and the Columbian Exchange. In 2021-2022, she was a Deborah Loeb Brice Fellow at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. At the Lozano Long Conference, Dr. Cooley participated in a panel entitled “Modern Institutional Networks Visualize Early Modern Archives: The Case of the Relaciones Geográficas y Topográficas.”

Shery Chanis is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at UT Austin. She researches Ming China (1368-1644) and its connection with the early modern world. Chanis focuses on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her current project analyzes the Chinese elites’ ordering and descriptions of the southernmost maritime province of Guangdong that were attentive to the people both inside and outside of its physical boundaries. She has presented her research at UT Austin, the Newberry Library in Chicago, the AHA Annual Meeting (poster session), and the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom. She has also published on H-Net and Not Even Past.

I wish to thank Dr. Mackenzie Cooley for the wonderful email exchange and for her thoughtful and enthusiastic input for this piece.

[1] The Benson Latin American Collection at UT Austin houses part of Joaquín García Icazbalceta’s Collection of Relaciones Geográficas of Mexico and Guatemala from 1578 to 1586. See https://www.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.html?appid=1fcabf740a844d9d80d5bf0248416f47. For more on Relaciones Geográficas, see Barbara E. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). For additional analyses and bibliographical references on the Relaciones Geográficas and a more personal story, see Rafael Nieto-Bello’s recent piece on Not Even Past (https://notevenpast.org/bringing-together-the-relaciones-geograficas-and-topograficas-of-the-spanish-empire/).

[2] Co-edited by Cooley and Huiyi Wu, Knowing the Empire in Early Modern China and Spain (under review) features essays from an interdisciplinary group of scholars including Maria Portuondo, Barbara Mundy, sinologist Joe Dennis, digital scholar Shih-Pei Chen, Mario Cams, He Bian, Marcella Hayes, and Stewart McManus. This volume follows the “Knowing the Empire” Conference in November 2019 at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, sponsored by the MPIWG’s Department III under the leadership of Dagmar Schäffer. (https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/event/knowing-empire-imperial-science-early-modern-chinese-and-spanish-empires). The conference was inspired by Shih Pei Chen’s work on early modern Chinese local gazetteers (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343605827_Local_Gazetteers_Research_Tools_Overview_and_Research_Application) and Huiyi Wu’s research on the appearance of Jesuits and the partial transmission of their European knowledge in these sources.

[3] Dean is also a design collaborator in Cooley’s co-edited Natural Things: Ecologies of Nature in the Early Modern World, which includes twelve essays that explore the relationships among natural philosophy, science, medicine, and European colonialism to chart the expansion of natural science from 1500 to the early 1900s.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Knowledge and Power are Not the Same: Arndt Brendecke, The Empirical Empire, and the Spanish American Colonial Archive

Knowledge and Power are Not the Same: Arndt Brendecke, The Empirical Empire, and the Spanish American Colonial Archive

by Rafael Nieto-Bello

In honor of the centennial of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, the 2022 Lozano Long Conference focuses on archives with Latin American perspectives in order to better visualize the ethical and political implications of archival practices globally. Thinking archivally in a time of COVID-19 has also given us an unexpected opportunity to re-imagine the international academic conference. This Not Even Past publication joins those by other graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin.  The series as a whole is designed to engage with the work of individual speakers as well as to present valuable resources that will supplement the conference’s pre-circulated working papers and recorded presentations. By registering here, you may access pre-circulated materials, and attend our live-streamed keynote addresses and panel discussions scheduled for February 24-25, 2022. This new conference model, which will make online resources freely and permanently available, seeks to reach audiences beyond conference attendees in the hopes of decolonizing and democratizing access to the production of knowledge. Please feel free to spread the word: #LLC22 #archivos.

En homenaje al centenario de la Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, la Conferencia Lozano Long 2022 se propone ser un escenario de reflexión sobre archivos a partir de perspectivas latinoamericanas, para comprender mejor las contribuciones de esta región a las prácticas archivísticas globales, y sus implicaciones éticas y políticas. Pensar archivísticamente en tiempos del COVID-19 también nos brinda la imprevista oportunidad de re-imaginar la forma en la que se lleva a cabo este tipo de conferencias académicas internacionales. Esta publicación por Not Even Past se junta otras escritas por estudiantes de posgrado en la Universidad de Texas en Austin. La serie en su totalidad está diseñada para resaltar el trabajo de participantes en la conferencia al mismo tiempo que busca presentar recursos valiosos que suplementarán los trabajos escritos y los videos pre-grabados que forman parte de este evento. El evento se llevará a cabo el 24 y 25 de febrero de 2022, y usted se puede registrar aquí. Durante éste, transmitiremos en vivo cuatro charlas principales, y también múltiples conversaciones entre decenas de panelistas, comentaristas, y la audiencia misma. Nuestros recursos en línea estarán disponibles de manera gratuita y permanente, incluyendo las ponencias y presentaciones pregrabadas de cada panelista. Buscamos alcanzar audiencias más allá de las personas que asistan inicialmente a la conferencia, con el fin de descolonizar y democratizar el acceso a la producción de conocimiento. Por favor, no duden en difundir: #LLC22 #archivos

Early modern European intellectual heroes like Bacon and Hobbes popularized the idea that ‘knowledge itself is power.’ Historian Arndt Brendecke’s exploration of the 16th-century Spanish empire calls this trope to task by asking a simple question that is difficult to answer: to what extent was knowledge the basis of Spanish colonial power? Born in Bavaria and educated in the densely theoretical German scholarship, Brendecke published his masterpiece, The Empirical Empire: Spanish Colonial Rule and the Politics of Knowledge, in 2016. This book offers conceptual contributions to the fields of archival studies and Latin American history in ways that help frame the core themes of the 2022 Lozano Long Conference, “Archiving Objects of Knowledge with Latin American Perspectives.” 

The Empirical Empire: Spanish Colonial Rule and the Politics of Knowledge

Brendecke’s work helps us rethink colonialism through the archival production of information from and about the New World. His book provocatively argues that the massive amount of paperwork collected from colonial Spanish America was not a sign of an omnipotent state that  knew its subordinate populations and territories as the myth of absolutism would have us believe. In fact, it was quite the opposite. Instead, overwhelming amounts of paperwork show the political blindness and ignorance of Spanish rulers. Brendecke carefully disentangles archives from vigilance, knowledge from information, and “rational” government from patronage networks to prove his case.

Historian Fernand Braudel promoted the image of the Spanish monarchy as a sort of spider spreading out an extensive web woven out of meticulously notarized papers: millions of them. However, the Crown’s supposed ubiquity, omnipotence, and omniscience in its dominions are not what the archival record shows. The Crown and its institutions faced the challenge of long-distance rule. Despite sponsoring many projects to understand its territories better, colonial accounts of what was happening in the New World were highly mediated by the particular interests of those Spanish settlers informing the Crown. Brendecke highlights thousands upon thousands of archival texts. They reveal how conflicts among Spanish Americans of different backgrounds colored their attempts to persuade the king of  reliable information while seeking to undermine the reputation of their opponents. As a result, the monarch could not see or know the New World as it was. Instead, he controlled his subjects by trusting the ones he perceived as loyal. According to Brendecke, colonial power was based on partialized loyalties and exchanges of favors appearing in documents as information, but this information by no means represented knowledgeable, objective reports.

While a significant portion of the historiography of knowledge explores its creation as a translation of raw, subjective data into reliable, objective understandings, Brendecke complicates this assumption. By focusing on a world of actors with interests, he reveals that the Braudelian spider web was the façade that could not perceive its dominions objectively. Interests create blindness and ignorance in Brendecke’s model, but rather than obstructing the exertion of power, this dynamic was how colonial rule worked. Therefore, Spanish epistemological and political claims on the Americas involved archiving demands and petitions of favors to monarchical institutions. As a result, Spanish colonial rule was based less on acquiring objective knowledge and more on its ability to receive, archive, and adjudicate conflict among those who clamored for favors from the Crown.

Brendecke builds upon a Foucauldian idea: early modern societies experienced a “governmentalization” in which medieval pastoral knowledge/power technologies such as the inquisitorial procedures were gradually adapted and implemented for ruling states. This view enables him to connect knowledge and power through vigilance, and, in doing so, he reconceptualizes both. Inquisitors, for instance, were not the only ones who surveilled communities. Community members watched their fellows’ behavior and denounced them when convenient. For example, if some priests of a given region were to denounce local rulers for their corrupt actions in the Spanish empire, the Crown would increase their control over these subjects by receiving their denunciations and making decisions based on trust, loyalties, and favors. That is what Brendecke calls the “triangle of vigilance,” which shows both the flows of information and the ways the monarchy ensured its power despite “not knowing.”

Arndt Brendecke recognizes some efforts to centralize and systematize information in the Spanish empire, such as forming a state archive and institutions like the Casa de Contratación (House of Trade). However, centering too much on these institutions may overestimate the royal mandates while underestimating Spanish America’s role in producing information. The peninsular archival institutions did not work as ‘centers of calculation’ despite stockpiling documents because processing that massive amount of paperwork was not viable. Brendecke focuses on the 1570s and 1580s, during Juan de Ovando’s presidency in the Council of the Indies. At that time, several laws for compiling all the information possible (entera noticia) emerged, with projects like the Relaciones Geográficas. However, for Brendecke, Ovando’s reform was unsuccessful in making a more “rational” state. On the contrary, they merely reflected the expansion of patronage networks into the Atlantic world, where decisions were based on loyalties instead of knowledge. It meant that the Crown was incapable of effectively understanding the New World’s territories and populations. However, by focusing too much on the discordance between intentions and results, might this be a teleological reading of Spanish knowledge projects? After all, reading the documents from a peninsular lack of instrumental use elides the actual participation of local populations in creating knowledge about the New World.

Mapa de Teozacoalco (1580) was part of a set of documents made in response to inquiries from the Spanish King Philip II. Source: Relación de Teozacoalco y Amoltepec, Relaciones Geográficas of Mexico and Guatemala Collection, Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas, Austin.

The Empirical Empire draws on and contributes to significant debates regarding the emergence of modern states, long-distance government, early modern empiricism, the history of archives and information, bureaucratic rationalities, and patronal clientelism in Spanish America. By focusing on actors, actions, and means (information registered in documents) rather than abstract ideas and laws, Brendecke realistically evokes Spanish rulers in Iberia and the Americas as people with ambitions and vast networks of allies and enemies. 

In short, Brendecke opens the black box linking archives to social networks, thereby revealing the value of teasing out how people’s interests and influences shape the transformation of information into power. In doing so, he offers a substantial contribution to our understanding of 16th-century Spanish rule over the Americas, certainly breaking the trope that information and knowledge are actual colonial power. Brendecke’s opening leads to a logical follow-up question: to what extent might this model of ‘agnotology’ (the study of ignorance) apply to other early modern imperial regimes? Avoiding this question would force our continued blindness to how other early modern imperial monarchies may have been as blind and patronal as the Spaniards in their colonial efforts. At the end of the day, long-standing Eurocentric views of Spanish American societies have, at best, characterized them as spaces of epistemological backwardness or, at worst, portrayed the region as riddled with clientelism and ignorance perpetuated by caciques and caudillos—traditional and charismatic leaderships in Weberian terms. Researchers should also take care when considering the imperial context within which Brendecke’s model may or may not apply or risk reproducing traditional prejudices regarding the geopolitics of knowledge production relevant to understanding present political contexts in Latin America. 

Suppose we reduce the agency of the European, Indigenous, African, and mixed-race people to their struggles of interests, production of blindness, and instrumental rationality. Where does this model leave space for the Latin American peoples’ cultural, epistemological, and ontological diversity and creativity? Postcolonial approaches may indeed have overvictimized subalterns of our continent when arguing for the “epistemicide.” Claiming ignorance as the core component at work in Spanish colonial rule leaves unexplained the processes by which inhabitants of Latin America have creatively ruled and known their own local contexts. Indeed, knowledge is not automatically power, but a more nuanced view of what knowledge is, beyond objectivity and empiricism, may demonstrate that subjects and rulers in Spanish America were anything but blind and ignorant. In fact, we may discover that curiosity, intercultural entanglement, and even cooperation were significant catalysts for the production of knowledge, perhaps at times more so than interpersonal conflicts and distrust.

Rafael Nieto-Bello is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of History at UT Austin. He obtained a double B.A. in History and Political Science and a double minor in Philosophy and German Language in the Universidad de Los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia, 2018). In 2021, he was awarded the Fellowship on “Race and Caste” from the Institute of Historical Studies (IHS) for preparing a grant proposal. Additionally, he obtained the Lozano Long Centennial Fellowship from LLILAS Benson for the coordination of the 2022 Lozano Long Conference “Archiving Objects of Knowledge with Latin American Perspectives.” His research is a history of knowledge from the 16th-century Spanish municipalities. He explores how town communities from diverse ethnic backgrounds described and claimed to know their populations and environments through corporate efforts placed on the local councils.

Works Cited

Brendecke, Arndt. The Empirical Empire: Spanish Colonial Rule and the Politics of Knowledge. Berlin, [Germany]; De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2016.

Bringing Together the Relaciones Geográficas and Topográficas of the Spanish Empire

Bringing Together the Relaciones Geográficas and Topográficas of the Spanish Empire

by Rafael Nieto-Bello

From the editors: In 2021, Not Even Past launched a new collaboration with LLILAS Benson. Journey into the Archive: History from the Benson Latin American Collection celebrates the Benson’s centennial and highlights the center’s world-class holdings.

In Spanish, the word relación encompasses both to narrate (relatar) and to connect (relacionar). The Relaciones genre, prevalent from the fifteenth to the sixteenth centuries, incorporates this dual aspect. They consisted of short reports to the imperial government about a person, community, or town. These accounts help show the nature of the relationship between those narrating (communities), those that were the object of narration (towns), and those receiving the information (the empire). Emerging from the relación genre, the Relaciones Geográficas (of the New World)and the Relaciones Topográficas (of the Castille) were comprised of maps and texts describing hundreds of communities throughout the late 16th-century Spanish empire. Scholars who have delved into these documents have tended to follow the structure of archival memory that distinguished the Relaciones Topográficas from Geográficas. Moreover, studies on the Geográficas have primarily focused on the texts produced for the townships of New Spain (Mexico). Scholars are right to be intrigued by the Relaciones maps of New Spain. Consider Map 1 depicting Cempoala through Nahuatl logograms and Spanish texts.

Map of Cempoala, Pasayuca, and Telistaca, towns in the Archbishopric of Mexico
Map 1: Relación de Cempoala, New Spain. Source: Benson Latin American Collection

My life’s story has come to be entwined with the history of the Relaciones. My intellectual place of origin, Bogotá, Colombia, facilitated my first encounter with them. My continued engagement with these sources from Latin American classrooms and special collections to Spanish archives has culminated in my current dissertation project at the University of Texas at Austin – the principal observatory and repository of these documents in the Americas.[1] My life and research paths have allowed me to explore this neglected historical terrain. I argue that by drawing together the Relaciones Geográficas and Topográficas as a genre of documents, we can better envision how people from diverse ethnic compositions on both sides of the Atlantic produced a massive number of descriptions of local nature and societies around the same period. This perspective may allow us to see and understand the complex knowledge networks of Atlantic towns that the Spanish Crown wove together. Consider, for instance, how the Relaciones go beyond the famous Mexican indigenous charts as revealed by Map 2, the Relación of Valledupar, a township located in what is now Colombia.

Map of the Relación de Valledupar, New Granada
Map 2: Map of the Relación de Valledupar, New Granada. Source: Biblioteca Digital Real Academia de la Historia

My first encounter with the Relaciones was not via the vibrant native maps of New Spain as experienced by many scholars from the global north, but through the Relación de Valledupar (Map 2). During an undergraduate course on Colombian geography, I was assigned to analyze and contextualize this document with the earliest known map of this tiny Caribbean town. The map shows an urban design based on a square grid, principal rivers, mountains, and no indigenous glyphs. At first glance, I was surprised by how close this 1580s map was to our modern understandings of space and knowledge-making. Its empiricism and “cartesian” portrayal of the environment took place years before Descartes wrote his works. Through this piece, we can see how a peripheral village conceived of its environment, demography, and connections to the empire and did so by answering a survey, as in modern governmental censuses. I fell in love with this topic and drafted my honors thesis about the Relaciones of Santa Marta.[2]

My honors thesis work quickly brought me to the realization that the Valledupar Relación was just one tiny piece of a puzzle formed of hundreds of similar manuscripts and maps composed between 1575 and 1590 under the rule of Philip II. In the Universidad de Los Andes, my alma mater, I found not only marvelous transcriptions of the many Relaciones from Peru and New Granada, but also the excellent book by Barbara Mundy about the Relaciones of New Spain.[3] I began to realize that the Relaciones could help us re-think the connections that may have existed among various Spanish-American communities in this knowledge-crafting effort. My place of origin mattered for this argument because I began to identify with past and present Spanish-Americans who have engaged in processes of interpreting our historical realities. By doing so, we have produced and continue to produce knowledge about ourselves, not only through (or following on from) European and U.S.-American academic views.

Thanks to Los Andes’ library’s collections, I also learned that the Relaciones are now dispersed worldwide, and it has been challenging to bring them together. Roughly speaking, the current location of these documents depends on the place they described. I learned that the Relaciones Geográficas encompass over 250 reports from New Spain, New Granada, Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, Central America, the Caribbean, and that the Relaciones Topográficas covered over 700 municipalities in the Kingdom of Castille. El Escorial hosts more than seven hundred Relaciones Topográficas de España that depicted Castilian towns. The Real Academia de la Historia keeps 19th-century copies of these Castilian reports and many of the Relaciones of New Granada, Venezuela, and New Spain, some of them with their own maps. In addition, the University of Glasgow hosts the Relación Geográficas de Tlaxcala. At UT Austin, the Benson Latin American Collection shelters forty-three Relaciones’ manuscripts and twenty-six maps (also known as pinturas) from Mexico and Guatemala. Finally, the Archivo General de Indias possesses at least a hundred Relaciones’ texts and more than a dozen maps from the whole New World.

Figures 1 and 2: Frontispieces of the questionnaires of the Relaciones Geográficas (left) and Topográficas (right)
Figures 1 and 2: Frontispieces of the questionnaires of the Relaciones Geográficas (left) and Topográficas (right)

In 2017, the Colombian government awarded me a research grant to travel to Spanish archives and delve more deeply into the history of the Relaciones. In the Real Academia de la Historia, I became curious about the similarities between the Relaciones Geograficas and Topograficas, usually considered entirely separate efforts. Scholars and archivists after the sixteenth century assigned the labels “Geográficas” and “Topográficas” to distinguish New World descriptions of municipalities from those of the Old World. And yet, I came to see how both corpora were essentially chorographical—i.e., town descriptions and were remarkably similar conceptually. Consider the titles to the questionnaires reproduced in figures 1 and 2. Notice how similar they are: “Instrucción y Memoria de las Relaciones que se han de hacer para descripción de las Indias […] para el buen gobierno y ennoblecimiento de ellas” (for the Geográficas),[4] and “Instrucción y Memoria de las Relaciones que se han de hacer […] para la descripción y historia de los pueblos de España […] para honra y ennoblecimiento de estos reinos” (for the Topográficas).[5] The Royal Cosmographers López de Velasco and Vásquez de Salazar designed parallel surveys in the same decade to describe both the Indies and Castille (respectively) at the municipal level for enhancing their governmentality. Despite the similar purposes and timing, they differed in some questions about landscape and customs’ description. Additionally, the Topográficas were more numerous and briefer, while the Geográficas were usually more prolonged, and many included maps.

The project that led me to UT Austin has been to reconnect and recontextualize the Relaciones Geográficas and Topográficas as ambitious bottom-up knowledge endeavors about nature and human communities during the Early Modern period. However, since they did not produce tangible results like an encyclopedic compendium of Spanish municipal geography, some scholars still see them as either as curiosities or even as failed efforts. Shifting attention away from the Relaciones questionnaires, their two cosmopolitan white male designers, and subsequent uses of the reports may open a path towards an alternate understanding of why these documents are valuable. I argue that we need to understand how these documents reveal the collective efforts of thousands of ordinary people in these townships. At the end of the day, the real creators of the Relaciones were their communities themselves.

Each municipality responded to the questionnaire and sent it back to the cosmographers. But the process of generating responses to the questionnaires was complex. Every town council summoned courtroom meetings in which local sages stated their answers and drew maps. They discussed toponymies, climate, fauna, flora, minerals, topography, customs, traditions, and urban layouts. Answering questionnaires was not rare in the Spanish legal culture of interrogatories. Nevertheless, employing these methods to craft empirical knowledge about nature and societies was not common. Before a scribe notarized it, these officials and local sages signed and approved their responses through ritualized agreements.

The consensus these documents show elides frequent factional struggles occurring in these townships, highlighting instead the minimal agreements formed amongst powerful elites. Eliding political competitors through these representations nevertheless offered political gains. The Relaciones often excluded key political actors’ direct participation and hid local conflicts that would be visible to the Crown via other mechanisms, especially a massive number of litigation cases. Those who successfully answered these questionnaires then implicitly represented themselves as reliable producers of knowledge valuable to the Crown. They also showed themselves powerful enough to tap into local knowledge about places produced by people of diverse ethnic backgrounds, for instance, to know the meaning of native toponymies. In this sense, the Relaciones can be considered selective narrations that may distort the complexity of town life, yet they also show how different communities participated in producing knowledge elicited by Crown questionnaires. These complex dimensions are what make the Relaciones valuable as historical documents.

The Relaciones enable comparisons between distant towns thanks to the questionnaire’s structure. They also offer historical snapshots for hundreds of tiny municipalities in regions lacking documentation, such as the Caribbean basin. Many show valuable information in the indigenous lexicon. We can learn much about early modern ways of knowing nature and humans from reading the Relaciones on their own terms and interrelatedly. The knowledge created was similar to what we now label “modern science”: empirical, organized, participative, and consensual. Currently, my research efforts point towards thinking about a systematic way to show, analyze, and compare these sources through digital and cartographical tools.

To conclude this personal and analytical trip through the Relaciones, I would like to invite the readers of Not Even Past to join the discussion of these sources that will take place next February 2022 in the Lozano Long Conference in honor of the centennial of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection: “Archiving Objects of Knowledge with Latin American Perspectives.” In that event, we will have a panel called “Modern Institutional Networks Visualizing Early Modern Archives: The Case of the Relaciones Geográficas y Topográficas,” which aims to explore the archival and digital possibilities of cooperating in facilitating the access and analysis of these documents. We have invited digital humanities practitioners and archivists who have worked with or have custody over these manuscripts and maps in different archives and collections worldwide. We encourage anyone who is intrigued by these sources to attend this event that will take place virtually.

Rafael Nieto-Bello is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of History at UT Austin. He obtained a double B.A. in History and Political Science and a double minor in Philosophy and German Language in the Universidad de Los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia, 2018). In 2021, he was awarded the Fellowship on “Race and Caste” from the Institute of Historical Studies (IHS) for preparing a grant proposal. Additionally, he obtained the Lozano Long Centennial Fellowship from LLILAS Benson for the coordination of the 2022 Lozano Long Conference “Archiving Objects of Knowledge with Latin American Perspectives.” His research is a history of knowledge from the 16th-century Spanish municipalities. He explores how town communities from diverse ethnic backgrounds described and claimed to know their populations and environments through corporate efforts placed on the local councils.

DIGITAL HUMANITIES AND ARCHIVAL CATALOGUES

LLILAS Benson Relaciones Geográficas Collection:

https://www.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.html?appid=1fcabf740a844d9d80d5bf0248416f47

New World Nature: https://nwn.dhinitiative.org/

Unlocking the Colonial Archives: https://unlockingarchives.com/

KEY BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES

Campos, Francisco Javier. “Las Relaciones Topográficas de Felipe II: Índices, Fuentes y Bibliografía (Separata).” Anuario Jurídico y Económico Escurialense2 36 (2003).

Cline, Howard F. A General Survey: The Relaciones Geográficas of the Spanish Indies, 1577-1586. A General Survey: The Relaciones Geográficas of the Spanish Indies, 1577-1586. HMAI Working Papers ; 39. Washington, n.d.

Jimenez de la Espada, Marcos. Relaciones Geográficas de Indias. Peru. Madrid, 1897.

Konyushikhina, Nadezhda. “The Past in Everyday Perception of the Spaniards of the 16th Century (Based on ‘Relaciones Topográficas de Felipe II’).” Istoriya 9, no. 10 (74) (2018). https://doi.org/10.18254/S0002503-2-1.

López Gómez, Julia, and Antonio López Gómez. “Cien Años de Estudios de Las ‘Relaciones Topográficas de Felipe II’ Después de Caballero.” Arbor, no. 538 (October 1, 1990): 33-.

Mundy, Barbara E. The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Nichols, Madaline W. “An Old Questionnaire for Modern Use: A Commentary on ‘Relaciones Geográficas de Indias.’” Agricultural History, no. 4 (October 1, 1944): 156-.

Nieto-Bello, Rafael David. “Descripciones Para El Buen Gobierno y Provecho de La Tierra, Vecinos e Indios Samarios: Conocer Las Provincias de Santa Marta a Través de Las Relaciones Geográficas de Indias (1577-1582).” Universidad de Los Andes, 2017. https://ezproxy.uniandes.edu.co:8443/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat07441a&AN=cpu.795129&lang=es&site=eds-live&scope=site.

Tovar Pinzón, Hermes. Relaciones y Visitas a Los Andes / Hermes Tovar Pinzón. Relaciones y Visitas a Los Andes. Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, 2010.

Vallina Rodríguez, Alejandro, and Nadezhda Konyushikhina. “Los Interrogatorios de Los Catastros Españoles de La Edad Moderna: Fuentes Geohistóricas Para Conocer Los Paisajes y Las Sociedades.” Catastro, no. 89 (2017): 39–62.

[1] Among pioneer works produced at UT Austin, we can highlight these ones: Nichols, “An Old Questionnaire for Modern Use: A Commentary on ‘Relaciones Geográficas de Indias’”; Cline, A Gen. Surv. Relac. Geográficas Spanish Indies, 1577-1586.

[2] Nieto-Bello, “Descripciones Para El Buen Gobierno y Provecho de La Tierra, Vecinos e Indios Samarios: Conocer Las Provincias de Santa Marta a Través de Las Relaciones Geográficas de Indias (1577-1582).”

[3] Jimenez de la Espada, Relaciones Geográficas de Indias. Peru.; Tovar Pinzón, Relaciones y Visitas a Los Andes / Hermes Tovar Pinzón.; Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas.

[4] “Instruction and Memory of the Relaciones to describe the Indies’ provinces […] for their good government and ennoblement.”

[5] “Instruction and Memory of the Relaciones for the description and history of the towns of Spain for the honor and ennoblement of these kingdoms.”

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

IHS Podcast – The social history of 16th and 17th century Andean “ethnographic” knowledge, bottom-up or top down?

The social history of 16th and 17th century Andean “ethnographic” knowledge, bottom-up or top down?

IHS podcasts are a new podcast series initiated by the Institute for Historical Studies’ Director, Dr. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra. They are paired with weekly workshops and are designed to foster discussion between graduate students and distinguished scholars in the field. Along with graduate students and guests, each episode features Dr. Cañizares-Esguerra and Ashley Garcia, a PhD Candidate in History at UT Austin. This podcast is recorded in connection with a roundtable, The Relaciones Geográficas of the Spanish Caribbean: Local Knowledge on Human Populations in the cabildos of Santa Marta, Venezuela, and Puerto Rico (c. 1570-1590), presented by Rafael Nieto-Bello University of Texas at Austin, on October 11th. Details can be found here.

Introduction

In this podcast with Jose Carlos de la Puente, we explore the ways in which a cadre of indigenous paralegal natives created much of the “ethnographic” knowledge in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century colonial central Andes (Peru), usually attributed to European elite intellectuals.

Most knowledge (ethnographic or not) emerged in the context of factional conflict and legal squabbles. We explore the origins of the Huarochiri manuscript (an indigenous colonial bible for the regions of Huarorchiri, not unlike the colonial Popol Vuh (for the Maya) in squabbles among factions of indigenous cabildos that used inquisitorial probes (extirpation of idolatry) to denounce potential and actual rival factions. We have long attributed ethnography to Jesuits, yet it was indigenous scribal knowledge produced among rival cabildos that generated this and other ethnographic religious texts.

De la Puente sheds abundant light on the vast encyclopedia of ethnographic knowledge that is Guaman Poma’s Primera nueva cronica y buen gobierno. Based on extensive archival research, De la Puente has reconstructed the many ways in which Guaman Poma collected both information and experience in various types of colonial paperwork and administrative roles, participating since the 1560s as a paralegal of the church (extirpations of idolatries) and the lay state of corregidores and viceroys (land conflicts and litigation).

Guaman Poma got also involved as administrator of indigenous commons in regions like Huamanga, allegedly representing the interest of commoners vs curaca—cacique elites. Guaman Poma’s role as administrator of commons gained him access to information on all types of tribute as well as on new types of property and financial instruments. Guaman Poma, the “Indian”, was thoroughly familiar with the everyday paperwork and financial instruments of communities and the “Spanish” colonial bureaucracy. His ethnographic knowledge was the result of his scribal bureaucratic role and is a reference to current indigenous practices not ancient traditions.

Finally, De la Puente explores how legal and ethnographic categories scholars have attributed to top down colonial mandates by corregidores, viceroys, oidores, council magistrates, and ultimately monarchs were rather the product of local conflict within communities. The new terms emerged in the testimonies of factional parties in legal conflict.

~ Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Guests

Dr. Jose Carlos de la Puente is a scholar of native Andean peoples and the Spanish empire. The bulk of his work is devoted to understanding the formation of colonial indigenous legal, political, and literate cultures. His scholarship has made interventions in several interrelated fields, including native accounting technologies, the colonial Inka nobility, indigenous intellectuals and intermediaries, and colonial systems of land tenure and territorial representation. His current book-length project reexamines the history of the Andean colonial commoning and uncommoning practices through the lenses of land and tenure. Andean Cosmopolitans, his latest book, reconstructs the world of native litigants and favor seekers at the royal court of the Spanish Habsburgs. His earlier monograph, Los curacas hechiceros de Jauja, centers on witchcraft accusations launched by indigenous lords against their political rivals in late-seventeenth-century Peru.

Rafael Nieto-Bello is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of History at UT Austin. He obtained a double B.A. in History and Political Science and a double minor in Philosophy and German Language in the Universidad de Los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia, 2018). In 2021, he was awarded the Fellowship on “Race and Caste” from the Institute of Historical Studies (IHS) for preparing a grant proposal. Additionally, he obtained the Lozano Long Centennial Fellowship from LLILAS Benson for the coordination of the 2022 Lozano Long Conference “Archiving Objects of Knowledge with Latin American Perspectives.” His research is a history of knowledge from the 16th-century Spanish municipalities. He explores how town communities from diverse ethnic backgrounds described and claimed to know their populations and environments through corporate efforts placed on the local councils.

Hosts

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and the Director of the Institute for Historical Studies.

Ashley Garcia is a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research includes 19th century political history, American communitarianism, and American political thought. Her dissertation, “An American Socialism: The Associationist Movement and Nineteenth Century Political Culture,” explores America’s most popular utopian socialist program: the Associationist movement of the 19th-century. Ashley has also completed a Portfolio in Museum Studies as her secondary PhD field.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Institute for Historical Studies, Race and Caste Research theme, 2021-22

Not Even Past is delighted to collaborate with the Institute for Historical Studies and its innovative Race and Caste research theme in 2021-2022. Under the leadership of a new Director Dr. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, the Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History, the Institute’s program this year centers on the work of nine junior and advanced graduate student Fellows from the History Department at The University of Texas at Austin. Each student will develop either an essay for submission to a scholarly publication, or a proposal for a grant application.

Each piece will be workshopped twice during the year. Fellows will present the first draft of their work virtually via Zoom in the Fall semester, and a revised version of the essay in Spring in-person on campus. They will receive two rounds of critical feedback and crucial guidance on their projects from leading scholars in their fields joining from UT and across the globe. At each workshop, the student will be in conversation with three scholars– two from outside of the university and one UT affiliate. With their final, polished essays at year’s end, Fellows will submit their works to scholarly publications in their field, or to grants organizations.

“The intention here is to guide the student on how to transform a good essay into a great essay,” said Cañizares-Esguerra. “There are no formulas, of course. We want discussants to help Fellows identify blind spots in their arguments and in the structure of the essays, if there are any. Each respondent brings a different expertise to bear. That is the beauty of this exercise.”

The Race and Caste cohort has already participated in intensive discussions around the mechanics of essay writing. Last July, Cañizares-Esguerra invited a roundtable of accomplished UT History alums to speak about their publications, and to define how a “great” article follows particular structures. As graduate students, these alums submitted pieces to leading journals, including American Historical Review, The Hispanic American Historical Review, Journal of American History, Renaissance Quarterly, and The William and Mary Quarterly.

“The basic structure we concluded,” Cañizares-Esguerra said, “is to bring two, and sometimes more, separate, unrelated historiographies to bear on a third subject, thus changing perspectives on all three areas at once. To do this, one needs a command of the interventions these historiographies are seeking to make. We need students to do the historiographical work daringly and explicitly.”

In addition to workshopping their essays, Fellows will host podcasts with their respective respondents to explore and engage with the external scholar’s work in relationship to the Fellow’s research. Fellows will also write short articles examining respondents’ publications, particularly those works that speak most closely to the students’ areas of study. Recordings of the workshops, podcast episodes, and short written pieces will all be featured on UT History’s public history resource, Not Even Past. The first podcast is available here.

Alexander Chaparro-Silva

Launching the Race and Caste workshop series on Monday, September 13 at Noon, Fellow Alexander Chaparro-Silva will present “Democracy and Race in the Americas: Readings of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America South of the Rio Grande” in conversation with three prestigious scholars working in his field: Dr. Lina del Castillo (Associate Professor of History, University of Texas at Austin); Dr. Nicola Miller (Professor of Latin American History, University College London); and Dr. James Sidbury (Professor of History, and Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities, Rice University). Chaparro-Silva is an intellectual historian and doctoral student in History at UT Austin. His dissertation analyzes how Latin American intellectuals came to the US, offered a sophisticated comparative reflection on democracy and race relations in both Americas, and crafted racialized continental differences during the nineteenth century. His research is supported in part by The Conference on Latin American History and The Tinker Foundation. He coedited a book about print culture in Spanish America during the Age of Revolutions and has published several peer-reviewed articles in the US, Colombia, and Argentina. Register to attend this workshop and receive the pre-circulated paper here, and save the date for his second workshop taking place January 24, 2022, at Noon (details forthcoming).

Read about this year’s Race and Caste Fellows and their projects:

  • Sheena Cox
  • Gary Leo Dunbar
  • Jian Gao 高堅
  • Rafael Nieto-Bello

“The Mexican Empire under Agustin de Iturbide and Indigenous Texas”

By Sheena Cox

Sheena Cox is a Borderlands Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research is focused on the Liberal Enlightenment in Texas, and its impact on Indigenous relations with Tejanos and Mexicans, 1810-1839. In addition to her dissertation research, Sheena is also dedicated to public history and historic preservation through projects with the Bullock Texas State History Museum and the Texas Historical Commission. From 2019-2021, Sheena worked as the coordinator for TSHA’s annual meeting program. She has served as a graduate research assistant for the Handbook of Texas, and as an assistant editor for the Handbook of Texas Women and Handbook of Dallas Fort-Worth Handbook projects. 

“Pacific Soundings: Race, Abolitionism, and the Birth of Mexican Citizenship”

By Gary Leo Dunbar

Gary Leo Dunbar is a doctoral candidate in Latin American history. His research examines the history of slavery, abolitionism, and citizenship in the Americas with a specific focus on Pacific Mexico. Gary holds a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of Oregon and completed his master’s work at Central Michigan University (CMU) in the U.S. and Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP) in Mexico. His research has been funded with grants from the U.S. Department of Education, LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections, and UT’s history department and College of Liberal Arts. He is the recipient of a President’s Award for Best Conference Paper at the International Graduate Historical Studies Conference, a Graduate Paper Prize from CMU’s College of Humanities and Social and Behavioral Sciences, and an Outstanding Graduate Thesis/Project Award from the Office of Research and Graduate Studies at CMU for his master’s work. Gary is currently at work on the second edition of Thomas Benjamin’s The Atlantic World: Europeans, Africans, Indians and their Shared History, 1400-1900 for Cambridge University Press.

“Reimagining Borders: Triangular Transnationalism and Chinese Mexicans”

By Jian Gao 高堅

Jian Gao is a third-year PhD student at UT Austin. My primary research focuses on the transnational history of the Chinese in Mexico during the first half of the twentieth century, and my secondary research focuses on the global dynamics of Latin America during the Cold War era. My works have appeared in The Latin Americanist, Asian Journal of Latin American Studies, and International Report on Drug Studies. My papers won multiple awards from Latin American Studies Association (LASA), Rocky Mountain Council on Latin American Studies (RMCLAS), Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies (SECOLAS), and the World History Association (WHA).

“Relaciones in Response to a World of Questionnaires: Community Knowledge, Ethnicity and Legal Culture from the Spanish Empire’s Towns (c. 1570-1590)”

By Rafael Nieto-Bello

Rafael Nieto-Bello is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of History at UT Austin. He obtained a double B.A. in History and Political Science and a double minor in Philosophy and German Language in the Universidad de Los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia, 2018). In 2021, he was awarded the Fellowship on “Race and Caste” from the Institute of Historical Studies (IHS) for preparing a grant proposal. Additionally, he obtained the Lozano Long Centennial Fellowship from LLILAS Benson for the coordination of the 2022 Lozano Long Conference “Archiving Objects of Knowledge with Latin American Perspectives.” His research is a history of knowledge from the 16th-century Spanish municipalities. He explores how town communities from diverse ethnic backgrounds described and claimed to know their populations and environments through corporate efforts placed on the local councils.

  • Jesse Ritner
  • Rodrigo Salido Moulinié
  • Alina Scott
  • Haley Schroer

“Skiing on the Sacred: The San Francisco Peaks, Indigenous Rights, and the U.S. Ski Industry”

By Jesse Ritner

Jesse Ritner is a Ph.D. candidate studying U.S. environmental history. His dissertation “Elegy of a Dying Sport: Snow, Technology, and the Rise of the North American Ski Industry” explores how science and technology were used to build a weather-dependent sport in climates that lacked the reliable snowpack needed for alpine skiing. His project then traces how new technologies created new classed and racialized relations between the ski industry, skiers, laborers, and the non-human world. “Skiing on the Sacred” is closely related to the final chapter of his dissertation which looks at the ways in which technology created a dependent relationship between the ski industry and the Forest Service at the expense of nearby populations. The article “Skiing on the Sacred” in contrast focuses on the ways in which laws, the Forest Service, and the ski industry systematically invalidated Indigenous claims to the San Francisco Peaks. Jesse has received several grants and Fellowships for his research, including an especially generous grant from the American Meteorological Society. Along with studying history, Jesse is also an avid skier.

“Covarrubias’ Crossings: Picturing the New Negro and the Making of Modern Mexico”

By Rodrigo Salido Moulinié

Rodrigo Salido Moulinié is a writer, photographer, and doctoral student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a Fulbright-García Robles Scholar and a Contex Doctoral Fellow. His work explores the interconnections between the histories of photography, science, and anthropology. I trace the tensions between the making of ethnography and the development of new visual methods of representing otherness—photography, painting, sketching, and writing. In 2018, nexos awarded my essay “Testigo (in)voluntario: la muerte de Kevin Carter” with the Carlos Pereyra Essay Prize. I was born and raised on the outskirts of Mexico City, where I worked in various filmmaking and music projects. I graduated in Politics and Public Administration from El Colegio de México. Learn more about his work at www.rsmoulinie.comm and follow him on Twitter at @rsmoulinie.

“’They Have Always Worn Spanish Clothes:’ Indigenous Elites and Sumptuary Legislation in Seventeenth-Century New Spain”

By Haley Schroer

Haley Schroer is a Ph.D. candidate in colonial Latin American history. Her work focuses on the intersection of race and material culture in colonial Latin America. In particular, her dissertation examines the rise of racialized clothing laws in the Spanish Empire throughout the seventeenth century. Her research has received support from the Fulbright Program, The Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship Program, the P.E.O. Sisterhood, and The Conference on Latin American History’s James R. Scobie Award. Schroer received a B.A. in History and Spanish, Summa Cum Laude, from Texas Christian University in 2016. She earned her M.A. from UT-Austin in May 2018 where her master’s report, “‘Scandalizing the Public’: Clothing and Perception in Mexico City’s Seventeenth-Century Inquisitorial Sumptuary Trials” won the 2019 Perry Prize for Best Master’s Thesis/Report. She is currently completing her dissertation under the direction of Susan Deans-Smith and Ann Twinam.

“‘Whether We Bore The Resemblance of Indians’: Kinship and Coalition Building in Black and Indigenous New England”

By Alina Scott

Alina Scott is a History Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research explores eighteenth and nineteenth-century Native intellectual history and literature, digital humanities, critical race theory, archival studies, gender and sexuality, and religion. Her dissertation,”Murder by Inches: Indigenous Intellectuals, Land, and Sovereignty in Wampanoag Petitions, 1820-1850″  examines Indigenous petitioning campaigns and protests throughout the nineteenth century. Alina has served as Associate Editor and Communications Director at Not Even Past and a managing editor for Native American and Indigenous Studies Journal. She hosts the weekly 15 Minute History Podcast, part of the University of Texas’s Podcast Network. Her research has been supported by Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, the McNair Scholars Program, Native American and Indigenous Studies Program at the University of Texas at Austin, National Society of the Colonial Dames of America, Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society, Georgetown Humanities Ambassador Fellowship, and the Institute For Historical Studies, University of Texas at Austin.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

2022 Lozano Long Conference: Archiving Objects of Knowledge with Latin American Perspectives

2022 Lozano Long Conference: Archiving Objects of Knowledge with Latin American Perspectives

In honor of the centennial of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, the 2022 Lozano Long Conference initiated a conversation on archives with Latin American perspectives and practices. The conference took place on February 24-25. Archives, broadly speaking, are sites where the collection, organization, and processing of documents and objects have preserved memories or silenced pasts. Archives also serve as repositories of knowledge and spaces of interpretation where we can uncover and reshape past and present power relations. The Benson Latin American Collection at The University of Texas at Austin offers a unique archival vantage point to study the colonial, republican, and modern histories of Latin America and the Caribbean. From that platform, this interdisciplinary conference explored evolving practices, philosophies, and politics of archival work; identified ways to improve access to cultural heritage; and fomented community engagement and empowerment. The conference brought together leading and up-and-coming scholars, archivists, social activists, and digital humanities practitioners. In assembling this diverse group, the organizers sought to strengthen archival networks while also activating dialogues between and among U.S., Iberian, and Latin American academic communities working on and with archival materials. While significant scholarly work has engaged in the “archival turn,” and pioneering scholarship has considered the role of archives for the North Atlantic world, relatively less consideration has been given to the early-modern Iberian Atlantic and subsequent Latin American and Caribbean worlds. This, despite the fact that Latin American archives have historically played critical roles in state-building processes, enabling academic research, safeguarding national memory creation, empowering communities, or even contributing to post-conflict reconciliation efforts. Furthermore, recent developments in the digital humanities as related to Latin America and the Caribbean are expanding and reformulating archival practices of display, outreach, and collaboration in ways that seek to democratize access. In short, centering the conference on Latin America allowed for a rethinking of archival practices and their ethical and political implications on a global scale.

To consult specific conference sessions, use the links below:

Thursday, February 24
Archival Politics, Philosophies, and Practice

Opening Ceremony and Keynote Address

Opening Remarks by Adela Pineda Franco, Director, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS); Melissa Guy, Director, Benson Latin American Collection; and Lina Del Castillo, Associate Professor, LLILAS and Department of History

Opening Keynote by Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, University of Chicago, CIDE
On History and Monuments

Respondent and Q&A moderator: Lina Del Castillo

Panel 1 – Histories of Collecting and Stories

This panel centered on collecting, understood as the process of categorizing things as similar and then bringing them together into the same space, be it in physical or virtual forms. Each process of collecting has a history, and the collectibles themselves each also have stories to tell. The case studies explored here include tangible objects, such as documents or artifacts, as well as intangibles, such as literary narratives. By opening an interdisciplinary dialogue on narratives of collecting and collecting narratives in Latin America, we hope to highlight diverse ways of understanding processes behind the creation of archives.

Moderator: Lina Del Castillo, Associate Professor of Latin American History, The University of Texas at Austin
Discussant: Sylvia Sellers-García, Professor of History, Boston College

Zeb Tortorici, New York University
Erotic Archival Imaginaries: Collecting, Archiving, and Destroying Pornography in Mexico

review coming soon
view presentation
read review by Camila Ordorica Bracamontes

Miruna Achim, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Cuajimalpa
Jade drawers and speculative cartographies: collecting, storing, and configuring Mesoamerica since the nineteenth century

view presentation
read review by Ashley Garcia

Adriana Pacheco, Founder/Producer, Hablemos Escritoras Podcast
Escritoras que no existen. Repensando la función del archivo frente a la producción literaria contemporanea

view presentation
read review by Bianca Quintanilla

César A. Salgado, The University of Texas at Austin
Boom and Bust: Locating Revolution in the Benson Collection’s Julio Cortázar Papers

view presentation
review coming soon

José Manuel Mateo Calderón, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Los papeles y los días (terrenales) de José Revueltas

Spotlight on the Benson

Evocación de Genaro García: coleccionista, historiador y maestro
José Montelongo, John Carter Brown Library, Brown University

Panel 2 – Public, Access, and the Archival Dimensions of Digital Humanities

The expansion of digital humanities has started to redefine how we think of, and with, archives — not only in terms of provenance, selection, and preservation of documents, but also in terms of accessibility and use. Big-data tools have also streamlined ways of tracing how users interact with online collections — often informing the digital projects themselves. This panel seeks to identify the archival dimensions of select public-facing digital humanities projects by centering the user. All projects developed here have made real-world objects and documents that are not necessarily located in one physical space available for broad public access via virtual space. Questions to explore include the ethical, political, pedagogical, and technological considerations and challenges that have gone into making these collections available to a broader, engaged public.

Moderator: Camila Ordorica, PhD student in History, The University of Texas at Austin
Discussant: Christina Wasson, Professor of Anthropology, University of North Texas

Alex Borucki, University of California Irvine
In Search of Captives and Slave Ships: Reflections on the Spanish American Archives of the Slave Trade Routes (related: The Slave Voyages Database)

Jaime Borja, Universidad de los Andes
Archivos visuales y minería de datos. El proyecto Arca y la cultura colonial como espacio digital

Carolina Villarroel, University of Houston
Latina/o/x Perspectives in the Digital Archive

Brooke Lillehaugen, Haverford College
The Ticha Project: Digital Approaches to Pedagogy and Language Activism through Colonial-era Zapotec Language Manuscripts

Inez Stampa and Vicente Arruda Câmara Rodrigues, Centro Memórias Reveladas
Memórias Reveladas: A reference center for the archives of the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964–1985)

María de Vecchi, Artículo 19
Camino a la verdad: La experiencia de Archivos de la Represión y Archivos de la Resistencia en México

Closing Keynote

Cristina Rivera Garza, Author, Translator, and Critic / Distinguished Professor in Hispanic Studies, University of Houston
The Liliana Rivera Garza Archive: The Afterlives of Femicide

Respondent and Moderator of Q&A: Adela Pineda Franco, Director, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies

Friday, February 25
Inter-Institutional Archival Networks, Social Justice, and Community Memory

Opening Keynote

Gustavo Meoño Brenner, Guatemala, ex-director, Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional
El Archivo Histórico de la Policía Guatemalteca y los Derechos a la Verdad y la Justicia

Respondent and moderator of Q&A: Lina Del Castillo

Panel 3 – ‘(Re)conociendo’ Community Rights Through Archives and Memory

Different communities in Latin America have sought to have their political rights recognized through the gathering of documentation and the collection of memories. The presentations in this panel demonstrate how communities have documented their experiences of human rights abuses, their territorial claims, or their right to exist as a distinct cultural group. These stories do not often sit comfortably with dominant narratives. The process of recognizing — or el proceso de “(re)conocimiento” — matters precisely for that reason. Being cognizant of challenging truths as they have played out in the region may help us create more nuanced understandings about the ways communities and individuals can assert their right to have rights.

Moderator: Janette Núñez, LLILAS and iSchool master’s student, The University of Texas at Austin
Discussant: Kirsten Weld, Professor of History, Harvard University

Daniel Arbino, Benson Latin American Collection
“Una herida abierta”: The Anzaldúa Archives as a Nepantla Space for Healing

Cecilia Bautista, Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo
Los indígenas michoacanos frente a la privatización de la propiedad comunal a través de la digitalización de la colección de los Libros de Hijuelas, 1719-1929

María Paz Vergara, Fundación de Documentación y Archivo de la Vicaria de la Solidaridad, Chile
El archivo de la Vicaria de la Solidaridad y su aporte al derecho a la verdad, justicia y reparación en Chile

Celina Flores, Memoria Abierta, Argentina
Conocer el movimiento de derechos humanos argentinos a través de sus archivos: la experiencia de Memoria Abierta

Tatiana Seijas, Rutgers University
Waiting for Freedom in Mexico’s Black Pacific, a story from 1597

Panel 4 – Modern Institutional Networks Visualize Early Modern Archives: The Case of the Relaciones Geográficas y Topográficas

The 16th-century Relaciones Geográficas y Topográficas allow us to delve into archival interdependence then and now. The Relaciones endeavored to describe and map hundreds of municipalities in the Spanish Empire in response to a standard questionnaire. The project was remarkably successful in gathering information. Although we have yet to fully grasp how this information was put to use, we do know that it circulated throughout imperial archival networks. As such, the Relaciones become a representative case study for understanding archival networks as mechanisms to make knowledge possible and visible in both the past and the present. Invited scholars and archivists discuss the challenges involved in gathering vast amounts of documentation hosted by dozens of archives worldwide. They do so to highlight the processes behind reconstructing the archival and epistemological networks that this corpus evidences, and showcase the pedagogical and research potential of digital tools that necessarily must be developed through inter-institutional collaboration.

Moderator: Rafael Nieto-Bello, PhD student in History, The University of Texas at Austin
Commentator: Kelly McDonough, Associate Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, The University of Texas at Austin

Rosario I. Granados, Associate Curator, Blanton Museum of Art
Mapping the Memory of an Exhibition: The Relaciones Geográficas at the Blanton

Mackenzie Cooley, Hamilton University
Knowing Nature, Knowing Empire in the Relaciones Geográficas

Nadezda Konyushikhina, Universidad Estatal M.V. Lomonósov de Moscú
Aplicación de GIS en la reconstrucción del régimen señorial en España en la segunda mitad del Siglo XVI (a partir de las Relaciones Topográficas de Felipe II)

Mariana Favila, Digging into Early Colonial Mexico
Explorando el México colonial temprano: estudio de caso sobre redes de conectividad en las Relaciones Geográficas utilizando un gazetteer del siglo XVI

Closing Keynote

Arndt Brendecke, Professor of History, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
Unreadable Things

Respondent and Moderator of Q&A: Rafael Nieto Bello, The University of Texas at Austin

The 2022 Lozano Long Conference is grateful to the following organizers, sponsors, and collaborators.

Organizers

LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections — A partnership between the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection and the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, LLILAS Benson raises awareness of past and current issues that affect Latin America and US Latina/o/x communities through its world-class collections, globalized higher education, research, international exchange, and public programs.

Sponsors

Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies

Latin America Initiative, School of Law, The University of Texas at Austin — The Latin America Initiative promotes and consolidates the relationship between Texas Law and law schools throughout Latin America.

Collaborators

Institute for Historical Studies, The University of Texas at Austin — Established by the Department of History at The University of Texas at Austin in 2007, IHS provides a dynamic space for scholarly inquiry and exchange. The Institute organizes international conferences, fosters scholarly presentations and roundtables, promotes critical discussion of historical themes and methods, and encourages reflections on the origins and legacies of historical events.

Not Even Past — This digital magazine, published by the Department of History at The University of Texas at Austin, serves as a robust platform for public history.

Review of Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347-1600 by Nükhet Varlık (2017)

By Rafael David Nieto-Bello

Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347-1600. By Nükhet Varlık. New Jersey: Rutgers University, 2017, vii-xviii, Pp. 336. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.99 (paperback).

The historiography of the Black Death has tended to cast the Ottoman Empire as the “sick man of Europe.”  Nükhet Varlık does admirable work in breaking down this Eurocentric view by tracing the Black Death’s history during the rise of the Ottoman Empire, a history she considers as a long process of recurrent outbreaks rather than an isolated event. Varlık frames her work within the historiography of diseases, creatively intertwining environmental history, the history of science, and imperial political history. Moreover, she models how historians can work with up-to-date scientific research, including recent studies in epidemiology, genomics, ecology, and bioarchaeology.  

Cover of Plague and Empire

Varlık argues for a correlation between the plague’s epidemiological patterns and the empire’s consolidation, which is visible through the interaction among ecological zones as human and nonhuman mobility increased. These mobile nonhuman agents included fleas, lice, rodents, and the pathogenic bacteria Yersinia pestis, and they determined the plague’s expansion and waves of recurrence.While ‘global’ histories of disease tend to flatten social difference and take connections for granted, Varlık builds upon the idea of a ‘network’—a dynamic set of relationships that assemble the asymmetrical flow of ideas, humans, goods, animals, as well as pathogens.

Plague and empire focuses on what conventionally has been called the “second plague pandemic” (the Black Death) —the first being the Justinian plague and the third the East Asian plague. Nevertheless, the second pandemic was not a single discreet event that took place in 1348. It consisted of several waves of epidemics over 250 years. It is no coincidence, Varlık argues, that this period coincided with the transformation of the Ottoman semi-nomadic regime into an extensive empire in the eastern Mediterranean. Therefore, she situates the Ottoman epidemic cycles within the context of  imperial expansion and the conquest of cities like Edirne and Istanbul as trade connections with Europe and Asia increased. Thus, she overcomes a variety of historiographic fallacies, including the “westward diffusion of the plague,” Turkish indifference to the Black Death (fatalism), and “epidemic boundaries” between the Christian and Muslim Mediterranean worlds. 

The Black Death: Map of the World with vignettes, watercolor by Monro S. Orr. Source: Wellcome Library

Varlık synthesizes historical primary sources with current scientific research on the etiology of the plague, including new understandings about the interaction among hosts (such as rodents, humans, and other mammals), vectors (fleas and lice), and the pathogen (Yersinia Pestis). She also explains how the disease remained “inactive” in wild foci of animals––that is, groups of infected animals that became plague reservoirs. Moreover, she suggests that climate played a role in the migration of some of these hosting species.

The book employs a wide range of documents such as medical treatises, travel accounts, and official reports, not only from Turkish sources but also from Arabic, Byzantine, Italian, and Iberian sources. Although there is an apparent absence of the plague in early Ottoman sources, she explains that it does not mean a real absence of the disease. Instead, she argues that the plague gradually became significant enough to register in Ottoman culture as the empire urbanized and its officials moved between territories. Thus, environmental factors became entangled with perceptions and knowledge about the plague and governmental measures for controlling outbreaks.

Despite its broad regional scope, Plague and Empire centers on Istanbul.  Methodologically, this choice makes sense, particularly after its conquest by the Ottomans in 1453, because this new capital became the primary node where imperial and epidemic networks converged. Varlık’s focus on connections helps us understand how Istanbul was not isolated, but the core of governmental processes and the catalyst of epidemic waves in the Western Mediterranean.

Varlık’s model of intertwining imperial history and the flow of disease could productively be applied and tested in other contexts, including different epidemics. For instance, thinking about smallpox epidemics in the Conquest of America––simultaneous in time with this long Black Death––could be a fruitful comparison. Another case to think about is our current context of dealing with COVID-19. Considering its zoonotic origins, environmental drivers, post-modern circulation networks, and the state’s crucial role and supranational institutions to control its spread, we have much to learn from Varlık’s approach. 

Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World constitutes a bold and reliable approach to the history of diseases in imperial and globally-connected perspectives. It incorporates current scientific research in ways that make it relevant across disciplines. Varlık carefully links social, political, and environmental analysis. As a result, the book offers not only a crucial addition to the new historiography of diseases but also makes a contribution that is relevant to our present pandemic experience. 


IHS Climate in Context – Book Roundtable on The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, Carolyn Merchant (1980)

By Atar David, Khristián Méndez Aguirre, and Rafael David Nieto-Bello

In 2020-21, the Institute for Historical Studies will convene a series of talks, workshops, and panel discussions centered on the theme “Climate in Context: Historical Precedents and the Unprecedented”. As part of that, we are delighted to publish this roundtable discussion consisting of three reviews focused on Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature, a classic work in environmental history and the history of science. These reviews come out of Dr Megan Raby’s class, History Of Science And The Environment.

Nature’s Death or the Killing of Nature?

Caroline Merchant’s the Death of Nature (1980) challenges the heritage of progress often associated with the scientific revolution. Forty years since its first appearance, it is more relevant than ever. Rather than blindly accepting the fact that the scientific and intellectual developments of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries fostered progress for all, Merchant asks “progress for who?” as she examines how ideas about nature and scientific innovations brought, in addition to economic and intellectual development, social repression. She suggests an “ecosystem model of historical change,” which “looks at the relationship between the resources associated with a given natural ecosystem… and the human factors affecting its stability or disruption over a historical period” (p. 42-43). For her, nature and culture are deeply connected. Analyzing rich source material, ranging from fiction to scientific writing, Merchant reconstructs the process through which the scientific apparatus recognized alleged problems of disorder with both nature and women, subjugated and regulated the two, and finally institutionalized this intellectual tradition through modern science. 

Merchant begins her inquiry by identifying an intellectual tradition that began in ancient Greece, which associated the concept of “nature” with feminine qualities and projected a dual image of both nature and women. On the one hand, the earth was a “nurturing mother” who provided her children – humanity – with products and resources. Such was also the image of the mother/wife who held an important social role in maintaining the household and held key social positions in society. At the same time, nature/woman could be cruel, unpredictable, and chaotic, holding not only the power to build and nourish but to destroy. Some even went as far to  present women as witches. Both nature and women posed a challenge for those who aspired to reorganize society according to scientific principles. 

Merchant then moves on to describe how both nature and women were subjugated through the intellectual effort and the technological invasions of the scientific revolution. At the core of this revolution stood the idea that nature, which in the past was understood as a holistic organism, was actually a manageable system that can be taken apart and then reorganized to benefit human needs. The idea of a “mechanism,” according to which both nature and the human(feminine) body were seen as machines, allowed a reconfiguration of the two according to scientific as well as economic ideas and interests. The subjugation of nature reached its peak during the seventeenth century with Newton and Leibnitz, whose works helped institutionalize these ideas and created the basis of modern science. 

Highly acclaimed for her intervention in both environmental and feminist historiography, Merchant should also be praised for her unique contribution to understanding the power structures that fostered the scientific revolution. Her analysis begins with a Marxist reading of natural changes, where a capitalist struggle over the fenlands, farms, and forests of England (the means of production) resulted in the reconceptualization of “nature”, and later during the seventeenth century, of women as an economic resource. The realization that to maximize revenues and increase surplus value nature needs to be reconstructed and regulated was one of the main catalysts for the scientific revolution. The deterioration in the status of nature and the scientific/capitalist desire to control it was followed by attempts to subjugate women of various social classes. Scientific measures of experiment and regulation were used to control the behavior of lower-class women, while their middle- and upper-class contemporaries were stripped from their production and reproduction of social place and became passive, and therefore dependent on men’s support. 

For Merchant, the “death of nature”  was not only due to the dramatic ecological changes that followed the scientific revolution, where meadows turned into fields and forests to timber. Nature’s death was first and foremost the result of the collapse of the concept itself.  Nature, once a complex ecosystem built on interdependence and equilibrium, became an economic resource, stripped from its core values, turned into a machine in the service of men, a market worthy of man-made regulation. The process described in the book is not so much the “death” of “natural causes”, but rather the killing of it by the hands and minds of men and women who sought to subjugate it, transforming the once vivid system to a passive one. Merchant calls to restore equilibrium to the ecosystem and suggests possible solutions for some of our contemporary ecological and social challenges such as climate change and women’s oppression. The Death of Nature can be read not only as a description of the past, but also as a prescription for a better, more balanced and equal, future. 

Atar David is a Ph.D. student in the History department at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on the socio-economic history of the modern middle east, with special emphasis on food, agricultural, and resource allocation.

A Predecessor to Intersectional Eco-Feminisms

Although Carolyn Merchant’s current research is focused on American Environmental history, her first and most influential publication had a much different geographic scope: 16th and 17th-century Europe. The Death of Nature is a text that remains at least as important today as it was following its original publication. Her scholarship explored parallels between women’s movements and ecological movements –both of which sought complementary kinds of liberation in the 1960s. It was also heralded by much more pointed events, like the Three-Mile Island reactor accident in 1979 Harrisburg, PA. More and more, it began to seem like the mastery over nature and women also meant their suffocation and demise. And so Merchant went to work. Her proto-ecofeminist arguments are perhaps even more relevant today, as the backdrop to both environmental activism and scholarship that foregrounds how the impact of environmental degradation is worse for different sectors of the population based on their gender and other forms of identity.

The book details the philosophical, political and economic transitions into modern capitalism and away from a more –to use her term– ‘organic’ understanding of nature. Merchant describes the dissection, control, management, capture and ultimate attempted mastery over nature that also paralleled an equally violent re-conception of women and their control, management, and subjection. Both nature and women, Merchant argues, have become increasingly (but never completely) subjected to man’s mind, his technology, and his theorization of their role in an ideal world. Her examples of violence to the (female) earth and women themselves range from mining to the execution of women accused of witchcraft and the use of forceps to do what men believed midwives could not. Notable men wrote philosophical treaties, supported them with (or used them to justify) capitalist economic systems, and developed physical and conceptual machines and instruments to achieve their progressive mastery over nature and women.

The scope of the book is wide. She foregrounds the role that the environment played in the history of European capitalist societies, like Dutch organic farming and early British technocratic farming during the 16th and 17th centuries. She also identifies the patriarchal philosophical traditions that envisioned organic quasi-egalitarian utopias (like Campanello’s City of the Sun) but also those with sexist and oppressive ones (like Bacon’s New Atlantis). Finally, she situates particular machines, like the clock, in the mechanization of nature. Through wide-ranging sources and methodologies, Merchant firmly establishes her argument within philosophy, environmental history and history of science.

The writing is detailed, but her sections are scaffolded and easy to follow. This makes the text both accessible to a more general audience and worthy of inclusion in any academic study. Some sections contain intriguing and powerful illustrations with historical woodcuts, etchings or drawings. The visual quality of these images provides bold visual references and forceful characterization to her subject: the patriarchal ideas about mastery of nature weren’t only abstractions, but realities experienced by women’s bodies. 

As a robust argument for the relationship between the domination of nature and the domination of woman, The Death of Nature paved the way for other kinds of histories of science vis-a-vis particular identities. For example, Merchant’s ‘historicizing ‘the theory of female passivity in reproduction’ during the 16th century, likely influenced –if not all together enabled– the histories that detail the medical experimentation on Black women slaves in the American south during 19th century (such as Deirdre Cooper Owens’ Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and The Origins of American Gynecology (2017)). In summary, the text remains ambitious, rich in sources and approaches, and opened many doors for scholarship to follow its footsteps.

Khristián Méndez Aguirre is a theatre-maker and arts-based researcher, currently a second-year PhD student in Performance as Public Practice in the Department of Theatre and Dance. His research focuses on the relationship between theatrical performance and climate change in the Americas. He holds a B.A. in Human Ecology from College of the Atlantic (Bar Harbor, ME, USA) and an MFA in Performance as Public Practice.

Reviving The Death of Nature: Female presences in the configuration of the Early Modern cosmos

Forty years ago, Carolyn Merchant published The Death of Nature which aimed to critically reassess the Scientific Revolution by considering changes in the conceptions of nature in Renaissance Europe. Merchant embraced an ecofeminist perspective, associating images of nature with feminine allegories and metaphors that were popular in intellectual spheres. She linked the consolidation of mercantilist capitalism to environmental transformations and scientific reflections of an expanded canon of thinkers (including women, utopians, and magicians).  

She argued that precapitalist nature was understood as a living nurturing feminine organism before the Scientific Revolution, before being gradually transformed into a feminine wild or inert mechanism. That new conception of nature demanded to be controlled and exploited for human benefit and progress. The triumph of mechanism condemned to a secondary role the images of nature, earth, and cosmos as holistic or vital systems, although twentieth-century ecology tended to recover some of those ideas with a certain degree of reductionism.

This book lies halfway between the history of science and environmental history, carefully considering the discourses of thinkers and the concrete processes of land-owning, usage, and exploitation. Because of that, the author analyzed processes of farming, deforestation, famines, fens-drainage. Regarding Francis Bacon, she described how his works illustrate the triumph of mechanism and exploitation of nature, based on the development of crafts and sciences to know and claim power over the female nature. Merchant discovered that the “penetrations” and “inquisitions” of the new Baconian method were related to the language used in witch trials, observing the overlaps in their sexist biases. 

The book organizes its narrative and argument around the correspondences between nature and women. Thus, the changes in women’s reproductive and productive roles in a mercantilist world were analogous to the “death” or mechanization of nature. Notable examples of this were the subjugation of early modern women to housework and the end of traditional midwifery. Furthermore, she examined  alchemical and philosophical approaches to the conciliation of feminine and masculine aspects of the cosmos and charted the role of female thinkers in the preservation of holistic perspectives of nature. For instance, she studied Margaret Cavendish, a literate and naturalist closely related to the Royal Society of London, and Anne Conway, a cabalist and natural philosopher who was close to Leibniz.

This is a militant book that emphasized the normative condition of the relation between humans and nature. This in no way undercuts the strength and relevance of its purpose.  Merchant’s style and arguments were deeply empowered by ecofeminism, and her intentions were not merely descriptive. She was denouncing the moral implications of the transformation in the conceptions of nature and woman in modernity (which were still relevant to her and our time). In a late-Cold War age, she supported an ecological critique of capitalist progress and mechanist sciences from the academic sphere but also engaged as an intellectual in the effort to bring closer the social movements of environmentalism and feminism, very active during the second half of the twentieth century. 

Merchant engaged in a context of growing academic criticism toward the technical rationality of modernity, following the legacies of Heidegger and Marcuse. Besides, the influence of the Annales School (a historiographic trend) seems clear when it comes to her effort in connecting geographical and ecological concerns with social history. Additionally, she was committed to Bookchin’s anarchic-communism, shaping her analysis of late-medieval communal peasantry and their organic interactions with nature and also her ideological support to communitarian projects which understand nature as a holistic system rather than as a resource (Mitman, 2006). Nevertheless, she did not advocate for a return to premodern conceptions of nature. 

A few critiques can be suggested: she still believed in the existence of a modern Scientific Revolution (Park 2006) and overestimated the agency of intellectual sources to explain concrete environmental changes, instead of focusing on practices. Moreover, the relative omission of the Iberian discovery and conquest of the New World, seems glaring in retrospect (Park 2006). However, her work has brought new opportunities for the scholarship to reframe the relationship between Iberian naturalists and the New World starting from their considerations of nature as wild or profitable.  

This book is, despite the latter critiques, a milestone in ecofeminist approaches to the histories of science and the environment. This book should interest readers concerned with natural philosophy, political thought, feminism, and environmentalism. Merchant was important in reframing a predominantly patriarchal history of early modern science and providing a nuanced and source-rich testimony of how gender problems and real women were always present and active in this long story. 

Rafael David Nieto-Bello is a first-year Ph.D. student in the History Department. He holds a BA in Political Science and History from the Universidad de Los Andes (Bogota, Colombia). His research interests include the history of social knowledge, Latin America’s intellectual history, ethnohistory, and history of science in the early modern Atlantic. He is currently working on the Relaciones Geográficas’ concern on depicting Spaniards and indigenes’ customs and the configuration of social knowledge to “govern better” the Spanish Atlantic empire.

References

  • Mitman, Gregg. 2006. “Where Ecology, Nature, and Politics Meet: reclaiming The Death of Nature.” Isis, no 3 (September): 496-504.
  • Owens, Deirdre Cooper. Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology. University of Georgia Press, 2017.
  • Park, Katharine. 2006. “Women, gender, and Utopia: The Death of Nature and the Historiography of Early Modern Science.” Isis, no 3 (September): 487-95.

Image Credit | Image 1: Cover of Death of Nature; Image 2: Photo by Tom Fisk from Pexels; Image 3: Portrait of Francis Bacon via Library Company of Philadelphia.

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