Adam Clulow, Author at Not Even Past

Review of Hierarchies at Home: Domestic Service in Cuba from Abolition to Revolution (2022), by Anasa Hicks

Anasa Hicks has written an engaging and chronologically ambitious study of gender, labor, and race in Cuban history with her book Hierarchies at Home: Domestic Service in Cuba from Abolition to Revolution. Hicks traces the effort to create and deploy the “black doméstica” stereotype—an association of domestic service with African-descended women—throughout late 19^th and 20^th century Cuba. Investigating the racial anxieties, economic power, and cultural practices of Cubans who employed domestics, as well as the efforts of domestic servants to achieve formal recognition as workers and win legal protections, Hicks illuminates an understudied history of class struggle in Cuba and across the Americas. As she argues, domestics were indeed workers, but the state’s persistent refusal to identify them as such, and the existence of domestic service as an extra-labor category, allowed racialized hierarchies to persist.

By analyzing such diverse sources as manuals on breastfeeding, sexual assault cases, novels, and newspapers articles, the first two chapters of Hicks analyzes the relationship of the domestic worker’s physical body to the Cuban state and the construction of respectable citizenship. Rooted in slavery and the plantation economy, domestic service was work in which African-descended women were overrepresented. Examining the regulation of prostitution and breastfeeding, as well as cases of sexual assault, Hicks shows how stereotypes about black and immigrant women domestics informed modern legal codes to control and manage their physical, cultural, and moral “hygiene” as Cuba transitioned from colony to republic, from slavery to free labor. Hicks then explores the response from black Cuban “aspiring classes” who rejected imagery of members of their race as only maids, laundresses, chauffeurs, and gardeners. Domestic workers—associated with tropes of servility, sexuality, and poverty—exemplified that which many black Cubans aspiring to the middle class “wanted to escape” (65). In contrast to the Partido Independiente de Color, which addressed structural impediments to black access to wages and education as part of their party platform, the black Cuban middle class promoted “respectable citizenship” predicated on traditional gender roles and family structures.

In chapters 3 and 4 of Hierarchies at Home, Hicks contemplates the struggle between liberal change and radical transformation. Hicks begins examining the 1919 establishment of “domestic economy” schools in Cuba, a government initiative framed as professionalization for women within traditional roles. However, Hicks points out that progressive sectors of the labor movement recognized domestic service as work. Despite the gradual decline of domestic service employment, the visibility of domestic workers as labor activists increased in the 1920s and 1930s, ultimately reaching a “golden age” in the 1940s. Domestic workers defied notions of docility and submission associated with such labor, forming unions and showing solidarity with striking workers in the sugar industry. For example, Elvira Rodríguez, a domestic servant and representative of the Union of Domestic Workers, decried the “fascists of the patio, the reactionaries and the descendants of black slavers” who “try to continue enslaving domestic workers and vigorously distort all that represents liberty, hygiene, organization and culture” (116). The emotional logic of domestic service, however, proved to be a powerful counterforce against domestic workers’ activism, precluding any possibility of their inclusion in the labor reforms achieved throughout the 1930s and in the 1940 constitution. Through an analysis of public reaction to a brief 1938 vacation decree, Hicks effectively illustrates how deeply ingrained social hierarchies and colonial-era racial biases influenced Cuban law, ultimately marginalizing domestic workers and excluding them from formal labor protections, since “formalizing such things as shelter, food, and paid rest would have confused and sullied the naturally intimate relationship between domestics and the families for whom they worked,” conservatives argued (105).

Cuban home life
Source: Library of Congress, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3b42700
Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-96596 (b&w film copy neg.)

The final two chapters of Hicks’ book traverses through the radically transformative events of the 1959 Cuban Revolution to assess how domestic servants fared under the revolutionary process of restoring democracy, protecting workers, and lifting millions out of abject poverty. As the revolutionary government embraced socialism, the need for domestic service was eliminated. In the revolutionary period, memories about domestic service focused on it as a symbol of the deeply racist, sexist, and unequal class society that had been overcome. Hicks, however, laments the declining memory of domestic worker activism pre-1959 in favor of a narrative that privileged the revolutionary transformations post-1959—when domestics in “unprecedented numbers…went to school…becoming doctors, teachers, politicians, and historians” (170). Importantly, Hicks integrates Miami into this study of Cuba, showing how memories about race and gender harkening back to plantation days, or a mythic mid-twentieth century ideal, promoted a vision of the past in which benevolent landholders generously bequeathed gifts to their “inferiors.” Nostalgia also rationalized paying the Black nannies who raised white children with food as an example of family love and affection, not unequal power and authority. Using a fascinating yet unlikely set of sources including interviews with Miami-based Cuban American women for a project about drug usage conducted by researcher Diana González Kirby, Hicks also shows that the loss of access to domestic servants was a regular component of the “economic backslide” experienced by middle-class Cubans who left the island after the revolution. Post-1959, memories about what Cuba was like before the revolution were supposed to bolster anti-Communist arguments, “insisting that race relations before 1959 in Cuba had been fine” (170). This connection between past and present, island and diaspora, offers a valuable perspective on racialized labor and its complex relationship to broader movements for social and gender equality.

Cuban rebel soldiers with machine gun guarding door of the Hilton Hotel, Havana, Cuba. Source: Wikimedia commons

Hierarchies at Home provides a nuanced understanding of how deeply ingrained social inequalities can persist in new forms and, at times, be challenged, offering insights for contemporary discussions about labor, race, and social change. For readers interested in social justice and labor history, the book demonstrates how the creation of the “black doméstica” stereotype was not merely a reflection of existing inequalities but an active process that shaped economic power, cultural practices, and even the state’s legal frameworks. By centering the experiences of domestic workers and their struggles for recognition, Hicks unveils a vital, yet often overlooked, dimension of class struggle in Cuba and offers a powerful case study for understanding how race and gender intersect to define who is considered a legitimate worker and citizen across the Americas. While Hicks meticulously examines the experiences of domestic workers and their employers, the book does not primarily delve into the intimate personal relationships and individual motivations within specific households. Therefore, readers seeking a micro-history centered on specific families and their domestic arrangements will find the book’s primary contribution lies in its macro-level analysis of the institution of domestic service and its profound implications for understanding the larger forces of race, class, and gender in Cuban history.

Daniel Delgado is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Southern California. His primary research interests include race, labor, migration, and U.S. empire in Latin America and the Caribbean, especially modern Cuba.

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.

Agency and Resistance: African and Indigenous Women’s Navigation of Economic, Legal, and Religious Structures in Colonial Spanish America

This essay was written as part of Dr Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s course, Colonial Latin America. Hope Payton explores how Indigenous and African women—both free and enslaved—navigated the legal, economic, and religious institutions of colonial Latin American cities. Drawing on wills from Potosí and La Plata and a freedom suit from Lima, it examines how these women accumulated property, engaged with paperwork culture, and leveraged church tribunals to assert their rights. In doing so, the essay sheds light on the appeal of Catholicism in the Spanish Indies, particularly its role as a mediator of protection, legitimacy, and social mobility for marginalized communities.

The conventional narrative of Spanish colonization in the Americas typically portrays Indigenous and African peoples as passive recipients of European conquest and conversion. This perspective, however, overlooks the agency of these groups in shaping colonial society. In cities like Potosí—major economic centers of the Spanish Empire—free and enslaved indigenous and African people found opportunities to accumulate wealth, property, and legal knowledge. Contrary to the assumption that indigenous people were always relocated to cities by force or compulsion, many indigenous groups strategically used urbanization to consolidate power and to maintain authority within their own ethnic groups; securing leadership, controlling labor, and engaging in the colonial economy while preserving traditional structures—demonstrating their agency in shaping their own futures.

Despite their rigid social hierarchies, cities in the Spanish Empire allowed for certain flexibility that indigenous and African people, especially women, could exploit. Economic opportunities, particularly in large industrial cities like Potosí, created avenues for wealth accumulation, while the Catholic Church’s legal structures provided mechanisms for securing assets and negotiating social standing. Through participation in the marketplace, property ownership, and engagement with notarial culture, women actively shaped their own economic futures.

A reproduction on 12 linen canvases in the Edward Luther Stevenson Collection of the Geocarta Nautica Universale ("Worldwide Maritime Chart") or 1523 Turin Map believed to have been made by Giovanni/Juan Vespucci from the Spanish royal standard map (Padron Real). — A reproduction on 12 linen canvases in the Edward Luther Stevenson Collection of the **Geocarta Nautica Universale** (“Worldwide Maritime Chart”) or **1523 Turin Map** believed to have been made by Giovanni/Juan Vespucci from the Spanish royal standard map (Padron Real).
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

At the same time, the Church’s bottom-up structure, reinforced by extensive bureaucratic systems and opportunities for petitioning, allowed marginalized groups to access legal protections and assert their rights. Church tribunals provided an alternative to colonial civil courts, allowing commoners, enslaved individuals, and indigenous peoples to challenge injustices and seek legal remedies. This accessibility contributed to Catholicism’s widespread appeal and deep entrenchment in colonial society. Indigenous and African women in colonial Spanish America exercised agency by leveraging urban economies, church legal structures, and Catholic institutions to accumulate wealth, secure property rights, access legal recourse, and shape both their personal and communal identities within the Catholic Church and the Spanish colonial system.

Cities in colonial Spanish America, particularly those like Potosí and La Plata, provided indigenous and African women with unique opportunities to accumulate wealth, property, and legal knowledge. Unlike rural areas, where economic mobility was more restricted, urban environments fostered commercial activity, offering women access to markets, trade networks, and financial transactions that could increase their economic standing. Cities also housed notarial offices and church institutions, which played a crucial role in recording contracts, wills, and property transactions. Through engagement with these legal and bureaucratic systems, women learned to navigate paperwork, ensuring that their assets were protected and transferred to future generations.

Cities as Sites of Agency

The will of Luisa de Villalobos, a free Black woman who migrated from Nombre de Dios in Panama to Lima and later Potosí, exemplifies how cities enabled women to accumulate wealth through diverse commercial ventures in cities. Villalobos, who drafted the will in 1577, trafficked and had investments in fine European clothing, perfumes, and silver. Villalobos left a considerable amount of her wealth to two other Black women, Francisca Godines and Maria Fula, declaring “that to Francisca Godines or her closest heirs [you] pay the value of nine glass bottles of orange blossom water and thirteen flasks of the said water” and “that one yellow skirt with velvet trim, another trimmed with velvet, one doublet of fine wool and one wool cloth in which it is wrapped belongs to Costanca, morena, of the falconer of the Villa Real.”^[1] By drafting a will in 1577, Villalobos ensured the legal recognition of her property and debts while also making strategic donations or sales to other free Black or enslaved Black women that enabled them to accumulate wealth and property as well.

Potosí, Bolivia.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Cities in colonial Spanish America were also home to cofradías, religious brotherhoods, that provided monetary support to enslaved individuals so they could purchase their freedom. These organizations were supported by the church and its administrators, such as the Jesuits. Villalobos supported cofradías by leaving a portion of her wealth to a Jesuit priest, Father Medina. In her will, she states that she has “in the possession of María Fula” a large number of expensive European textiles and that it is her “will that with all of this Father Medina does what he likes.” This donation to the Jesuit priest likely supported cofradías in Potosí, thereby reinforcing the economic and legal networks that benefited marginalized groups in urban centers.

Similarly, the will and codicil of doña Isabel del Benino, a free indigenous woman, drafted in 1601, show how urban economies enabled indigenous women to accumulate wealth. She owned a rural estate near Potosí and conducted agricultural business with clerics in Potosí, such as “Father Joseph de Llanos, priest and vicar of this valley” whom she stated in her will owed her “a remainder of thirty pesos from some goats that I sold him.”^[2] Through her business with the clerics, she was able to accumulate wealth. In her will, she also leaves her remaining estate to her daughter, “my hija natural, doña María del Benino, whom I leave for my universal heir in all the remainder of my estate.” This statement in Benino’s will demonstrates yet another way cities and their legal framework allowed women to accumulate wealth and property, through knowledge of paperwork and the property rights granted to women in cities. Despite some racial and gendered restrictions, urban centers provided economic and legal opportunities that allowed African and Indigenous women to secure wealth and navigate the colonial system to their advantage.

The Church as a Legal Resource

The accessibility of church tribunals to commoners, enslaved individuals, and indigenous people played a crucial role in the widespread appeal of Catholicism in colonial Spanish America. Unlike civil courts, which often favored colonial elites and upheld rigid social hierarchies, ecclesiastical courts provided marginalized individuals with an alternative avenue for seeking justice. The Church’s willingness to hear petitions from society’s most vulnerable reinforced its image as the moral authority that protected the faithful and the followers, fostering loyalty and devotion among indigenous and African populations. By framing grievances in religious terms, petitioners could align themselves with the Church’s broader mission of upholding Christian values, further legitimizing Catholicism’s role in daily life.

Balck women laboring, Guiana, mid-19th century — Female workers in Guiana, mid-19th century.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The lawsuit filed by Natividad, an enslaved woman in Lima, against her master Doctor don Juan de la Reinaga in 1792, focused on his sexual abuse against her, exemplifies how church tribunals provided enslaved individuals with a means of contesting their mistreatment. In her petition, Natividad requested her freedom, telling the judge, who is a member of the Church, “Your superior understanding will mean that you will have understood that this case compels me to act by in the very least soliciting that you grant me the freedom that corresponds to me.”^[3] In a civil court, Natividad would have likely only petitioned to be sold to another master, as was dictated by the Spanish legal code of the time. However, due to her master’s position as a priest and member of the Church, she hoped that his immoral acts that violated the behavior expected of his position would cause the court to act in a more severe manner. At the beginning of her petition she states that “clearly my master forgot the obligations of his position, about Christianity and about authority when, on different occasions, he proposed his dishonest relations.”

Later, she once again appeals to the judge’s religious position, stating “I could very well lodge my appeal before the Señores of the Real Audiencia where the law of God has directed that slaves demand freedom whenever they seek the sanctuary and refuge that the law grants. But I wish that the secular courts should hear about the recklessness, indifferent, and tyrannies so foreign to leniency and self-restraint that an ecclesiastical priest professes. Thus, I renounce the indulgence of royal law and bring my case before the just commission of Your Most Illustrious Lord, who is very competent to reform the immoderate powers of a priest and decree what is in the interest of the pious cause of liberty that I claim.” In her language, Natividad clearly appealed to the religious nature of the court and the responsibility that they had for the behavior of a priest of their order.

*Plan for the ports at Nombre de Dios, Panama, circa the 17th century.*
*Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

Cases like Natividad’s reveal how enslaved and indigenous individuals viewed the Church not only as a site of religious devotion but more importantly as a powerful political institution where they could seek justice and social mobility. The fact that enslaved women, despite their legal and social subjugation, turned to the Church for recourse demonstrates the faith placed in its institutions, reinforcing its central role in colonial society as well as its popularity.

The wills of commoners, enslaved individuals, and indigenous people in colonial Spanish America reflect the profound influence of the Catholic Church. These documents not only served as legal instruments for dispensing wealth and property but also demonstrated investment in Catholic beliefs, rituals, and institutions. The consistent inclusion of religious donations, burial requests, and provisions for masses highlights how individuals—especially indigenous and African women—sought to secure their afterlife through the Church while reinforcing its central role in colonial society. Wills served as a final testament to religious devotion, illustrating how Catholicism shaped personal identity, social obligations, and cultural traditions across different racial and socioeconomic groups.

The will of Ana Copana, an indigenous woman born outside the city of La Plata who later became a property owner in the Andean highlands, exemplifies this deep religious commitment. Drafted in 1598, her will contains explicit instructions for her burial. She “order(s) that my [her] body be buried in the church of our Lord Saint Sebastian in the chapel of Our Lady of Copacabana and the customary alms be paid for the burial.”^[4] Her will also contains explicit instructions for the number of masses to be said for her soul. She orders that “a requiem mass be sung over my body…eight masses be said for my soul in the parish of Saint Sebastian…another six masses be said for my soul and my executors pay the customary alms…another six masses for my soul, by selling a little bit of corn that I leave in a pirua.” Her burial choice at a chapel of significance that is quite far from her deathbed and emphasis on masses reflect how indigenous individuals actively engaged with Catholic practices, reinforcing the Church’s importance in both life and death.

Catedral de La Plata.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Similarly, the 1658 will of doña Ana de Barba y Talora, a divorced mestiza woman from Potosí, further illustrates the Church’s pervasive role in shaping individual legacies. In her will she orders “that my [her] body be buried in the principal church of this city” and “that one hundred low masses be said for my soul by the clergy that my executors wish and the customary alms be paid from my property.”^[5] These requests indicate her desire for spiritual intercession. Beyond her own salvation, she left many religious paintings, statues, and cloths, such as “a statue of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception” and “a canvas of Saint Gertrudis without frame” to her daughter and niece. The number of items left to her family emphasize the importance of Catholicism in her everyday life and her desire that her family maintain the faith. Ana de Barba y Talora also paid for the continuation of her blind daughter’s care and musical education, charging her daughter’s new guardians with “continuing to teach music as he has begun with my daughter so that she is sufficiently skilled to procure her a place in a convent. There she can serve the choir, and be kept for this ministry.” This request emphasizes how convent life was seen as both a religious vocation and a form of security for women. Both of these women’s wills reflect the popularity and influence of Catholicism and the Catholic Church among commoners and the indigenous people of colonial Spanish America.

The experiences of indigenous and African women in colonial Spanish America challenge the notion of passive subjugation, revealing instead their agency in navigating economic, legal, and religious structures to their advantage. Cities like Potosí provided avenues for wealth accumulation, property ownership, and legal literacy, while the Catholic Church functioned as both a spiritual and political institution that reinforced social mobility. Through wills, lawsuits, and participation in religious organizations such as cofradías, these women asserted control over their assets, secured their family’s future, and engaged in Catholic traditions that reinforced the Church’s authority in their communities. The Church’s accessibility, particularly through its tribunals, further solidified its popularity, as marginalized individuals viewed it as an avenue for justice and social mobility. The examination of the legal and economic strategies of indigenous and African women highlights how they actively shaped colonial society, proving that even within a complex legal system and enslavement, they found ways to exercise power.

Hope Payton is a junior at the University of Texas pursuing a BA in history with minors in Spanish and UTeach Liberal Arts. While completing her undergraduate degree, she has been involved in the creation of an online exhibit examining modernity in nineteenth century Latin America with the Benson Latin American Collection. She looks forward to student teaching social studies at the high school level her senior year

^[1] Nora E. Jaffary and Jane E. Mangan, eds. Women in Colonial Latin America, 1526 to 1806: Texts and Contexts (Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2018), 34.

^[2] Nora E. Jaffary and Jane E. Mangan, eds. Women in Colonial Latin America, 1526 to 1806: Texts and Contexts (Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2018), 41.

^[3] Nora E. Jaffary and Jane E. Mangan, eds. Women in Colonial Latin America, 1526 to 1806: Texts and Contexts (Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2018), 208.

^[4] Nora E. Jaffary and Jane E. Mangan, eds. Women in Colonial Latin America, 1526 to 1806: Texts and Contexts (Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2018), 36.

^[5] Nora E. Jaffary and Jane E. Mangan, eds. Women in Colonial Latin America, 1526 to 1806: Texts and Contexts (Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2018), 45.

Review of No Place Like Nome: The Bering Strait Seen Through Its Most Storied City

Many history books share a lie, not their entirety but a still crucial aspect. They strut and pretend to speak from an authoritative state, authors who know that even a few hundred pages on a topic cannot encompass the multitudes of contexts and perspectives or even the fullness of their research. Pride is often integral to their presentation. Otherwise, what is the point of their existence? And yet, a rebuttal, adjustment, or an alternate take is always in the offing.

Michael Engelhard’s No Place Like Nome is a highbrow raconteur of a read meant for a layperson, though any scholar of Alaska will recognize the significant research underpinnings. Not quite a historical account or an anthropological study, it is instead a woven narrative that seeks to define the Alaska town through snapshots. And it is an honest book for it.

Each of us operates within our various spheres with imperfect knowledge. At best, we possess limited understandings of other people, other systems, and even ourselves. At our worst, there is the utter absence of knowledge, ignorance of context and cultures. Of course, there is no other choice, no other reality to this world. “I don’t know” is the truest sentence ever written, uttered, or thought.

More than most towns, Nome exists partly as myth, particularly as a place understood by the outsider. It is a million things at once to different people at different times. Tall tales from the Gold Rush mix with ancient indigenous culture and the mundanity of everyday modern life. There is no real divide between the present and the past, only shifting quantities of each in uneasy proportions, a weight shifting by moments and preferences. There was indeed gold in the beaches. Dogs of legend like Baldy and Balto and Togo ran here. John Wayne and Willem Dafoe pretended to live here. And there are also people struggling to find proper warm clothing, to scrape a living off the land without time to wonder about how the saloon dancehall ladies did what they did.

Engelhard explicitly acknowledges this uncertainty and does not pretend to a single Nome. Books of that ilk already exist, focused monographs in great numbers and more on their way. In his own words, “I am offering much material of less than earthshaking significance simply to fill in the colors of the personal, the idiosyncratic, or the purely eccentric that too rarely enliven anthropological and historical reconstructions.”

*Eskimo high kick during the July 4th, 1915 celebrations. Library of Congress*

The book’s structure abandons the timeline, bouncing back and forth across the years, between seemingly unrelated topics that share only a geographic proximity. A chapter about the prevalence of jade abuts a yarn about an Italian airship’s demise. A Jesuit priest organizes a football game on King Island, introducing the sport to the middle of the Bering Sea. Locals hunt for precious qiviut (muskox wool).

To be sure, widely recognized characters make passing appearances, from lawman turned saloon proprietor Wyatt Earp to prospector turned author Rex Beach to musher turned Serum Run hero Leonhard Seppala. Bars and gold eventually appear in any sufficiently lengthy Nome narrative, no matter any authorial intent for originality. But there are also fossils, wars ranging from Indigenous to international, drumming, bicycles, and herbalism—both past and contemporary.

*Placer mining on Glacier Creek, 1910. Library of Congress*

Each section is revelatory in its own way, some admittedly more than others. Nome and its gold rush will be more familiar to the average reader than Nome and its reindeer velvet trade. But prospectors and quack male virility supplements exemplify legitimate aspects of this remote outpost. Engelhard willfully ambles through these legacies, histories, cultural detritus, and ongoing capitalistic affairs, revealing the place in much the same way as a literal stroll through the community might. Revelations come in pieces, glances, and curiosities. It is a humble, deeply human approach, denying the possibility of a singular take, offering entertainment and more than occasional enlightenment.

Honesty is neither perfection nor utility, and disparate sampling is not for everyone. Baggage-laden personages, such as missionary educator Sheldon Jackson, photographer Edward Curtis, and geologist-filmmaker Bernard Hubbard, pass uncritically through the narrative. Their relative failings, from cultural genocide to base exploitation, are left to other texts, which is perhaps the intent. The consumer has their choice, between more targeted interventions or the wandering trail laid down by No Place Like Nome.

All books on Alaska must plot their course in relation to the mythos of the territory, whether to accept, contradict, or, more rarely, acknowledge that perception and reality are intimately linked. This choice is particularly relevant in a place like Nome, a town surrounded by older cultures but more often regarded as a relic of a gold rush peak that ended over a century ago. In this way, Engelhard accomplishes what few others have achieved, bridging the lore of a romantically distant Alaska city with the grittier reality of trying to live in an actual place.

David Reamer is a public and academic historian in Anchorage, Alaska. He is the author of a weekly column for the Anchorage Daily News and co-author of the 2022 Black Lives in Alaska.

Converging Roads: Researching and Working at the Forty Acres

I learned a few months ago that the old Star Seeds Café near the UT campus had been demolished, a casualty of the I-35 expansion project. I was sad about this not because I miss the food—the old Star Seeds was always an acquired taste. My sense of loss, rather, has to do with the fact that the Star Seeds Café had been at the nexus of important professional and personal roads for me since my early 20s. And I have never attended the University of Texas as a student or lived in Austin. This requires some explanation…

I am a professional historian. I’ve taught at Portland State University in Oregon, down the highway at Texas A&M University, and, since last fall, have begun what I expect will be my final faculty position at the University of Texas at Austin. So this is an interesting time for me, one of reflection. At the age of 54 after more than three decades of a professional career studying U.S., Mexican American, and Texas history at these other institutions, these days I find myself spending a good deal of time learning how things work at my new university, where to go, and building relationships with a lot of new folks in and out of Garrison Hall.

*Garrison Hall, the University of Texas at Austin. Source: Not Even Past*

As exciting as it is, this newness can also be humbling. For example, I participated in a faculty orientation process before fall classes began. This old dog was eager to learn new tricks. In those training sessions I distinctly remember a presenter chuckling about the first time they experienced the “passing period.” I had no idea why everyone thought this was funny, though context clues told me it involved students leaving class early. Oh well, I thought, each school has its own traditions. I resolved to be on the lookout for this so-called passing period on my teaching schedule, did not see it, and felt relieved—too bad for all those other suckers whose classes abutted this mysterious time! And then on my first day, I found out what it really was and how class times really worked. I had a chuckle…this time at myself. I’ve had additional little, surprising revelations in my new job, none of them quite so foolish. This is all a part of joining a new university, a universal experience for all faculty. And yet, I am in a slightly different position in that I’ve known this place in an entirely different context for decades. In fact, I’ve been coming to the University of Texas at Austin (and the Star Seeds Café) for over 30 years. The road to my historical research runs through this place.

As a historian of U.S., Mexican American, and Texas history, I have visited libraries and other archival repositories all over the country, though none so often and so deeply as the places of learning on this campus. The products of this research are my published books and essays. My first major research project, an extension of my Rice University dissertation, was a study of education policy and bilingualism in Texas schools. This resulted in some published essays in academic journals as well as a book, The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, 1836–1981 (Texas A&M Press, 2004). My next major project was a biography of the famed University of Texas educator and civil rights advocate, Dr. George I. Sánchez, whose name graces UT’s College of Education building. That project resulted in another book, George I. Sánchez and the Long Fight for Integration (Yale University Press, 2014). All told I’ve authored over 20 essays in books, journals, or magazines and edited one other book, but it is those two major projects that have cemented my longstanding connection to this university and the treasures in its libraries. In all this work I find hidden, obscured voices of the past and bring them to light; I study not just conflict and injustice, but also the passion and joy that infuse those who try to make their worlds better places; I connect the dots between past and present, always believing that our shared future can be positively shaped by studying our shared past. It’s hard not to feel romantic about that mission! For years now, I have experienced those feelings whenever I conduct research. And I’ve had many of those feelings here on the 40 acres.

Book cover for The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas

I find research highly personal. I form a strong emotive connection to the places it takes me. Whether I am spending a week or two in Sleepy Hollow, New York to work in the General Education Board papers, in Nashville, Tennessee to work in the Julius Rosenwald Fund papers, in Pasadena, California at the beautiful Huntington Library, or College Park, Maryland’s mammoth National Archives II facility, each place I visit leaves an imprint. For example, the panoptical monitoring in the reading room at the Rockefeller Archives with constant reminders about breaking the rules of how many pages one can access on one’s desk or how folders are filed back in their containers are as vivid to me as are the New York-style pies from The Horsman, the neighborhood pizzeria, and its views of the spectacular Hudson River. And that was two decades ago.

As a historian with my particular interests in Texas and Mexican American history, most of the sources I need, however, are in Austin and, more specifically, in the libraries here at UT. I started doing work at the Perry-Castañeda Library (PCL) in 1993-94 working on my history MA at nearby Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos (now Texas State University) where I researched the history of higher education expansion in Texas during the 1960s. In the second half of the 1990s my PhD research at Rice University on bilingual education in Texas involved exploring the university’s archival holdings, including the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, the Barker Texas History Center (now the Briscoe Center for American History), and the Benson Latin American Center. Since then I have continued to visit these archival repositories (and others in town) for biographical research on the University of Texas faculty member Dr. George I. Sánchez and for other projects.

So UT Austin has been an integral part of my professional life for decades now. What was all this time on campus like? It had a monotonous rhythm that, I’m sure, must seem tedious to anyone without a passion for history. These trips for the past three decades have entailed staying at several hotels, but most often at the I-35 Rodeway Inn near campus for a week or two at a time. This was usually during the summer months. On these trips I would get up early, scarf down a heavy breakfast knowing that I would work through lunch, and hustle across Dean Keaton Street to the Benson, Brisco, or LBJ archives to begin the day’s work as soon as they opened. I worked non-stop until closing time near 5:00 PM.

What scholars actually do in archives might seem mysterious. It’s not really. My day typically involved sifting through hundreds of pages of old documents, including old carbon copies of letters on onionskin paper. Unfortunately this work creates for me a wave of allergy-related ailments ranging from cold-like symptoms to uncomfortable skin rashes. It is a small price to pay for learning about the past as I see it. I try my best to ameliorate the expected physical response by daily prophylactic antihistamine doping, an obsessive regime of handwashing every hour or more, using gloves and masks, and a habit (learned the hard way) of not touching my face with my hands or fingers while handling documents. It may sound like odd workplace behavior, but I’ve often thought of this as equivalent to a professional athlete’s pre-game stretching and taping rituals or a singer’s voice exercises. It is necessary to get the job done. It is a built-in cost rather than a burden.

After being kicked out of the archives at closing time, I would seek an early dinner (and an urgent one due to having skipped lunch) at nearby eateries, which frequently involved the now extinct Star Seeds Café. After dinner I would walk around campus to stretch my legs. Since most of my research happened in the summer, this meant sweltering walks in athletic gear with copious amounts of sunscreen in a mostly empty University of Texas campus. These post-workday walks were solitary. I wandered campus lost in thought about what I learned that day and how it could inform the larger project.

When I was working on the Sánchez biography, I would walk past the education building bearing his name, touch the plaque, and sometimes have a few silent moments in which I reflected about the remarkable human being I was studying who taught oversubscribed courses to decades of UT students all while running his department and quietly organizing groundbreaking civil rights efforts (and suffering consequences for it) from his office in Sutton Hall. My long day of allergy-related symptoms that ended with quiet reflection on hot concrete seemed like a small lift next to Sánchez’s herculean burdens. After these walks, I placed an evening call to my girlfriend who eventually became my spouse and in time these calls also involved our growing children. They punctuated a very long day and lead to a much-needed sleep to prepare for another similarly long day. I can still remember one evening during a two-week research trip in the late 1990s having an evening cheeseburger and a Shiner Bock (or a few…) at the Star Seeds while reading a monograph on early 20^th century anarcho-syndicalism along the U.S.-Mexico border by the dimmed, neon light of the bar. In that moment I was as happy as a lark, doing what I loved, though with enough self-awareness to realize I must have seemed a weird sight to the other bar patrons, who left me to my book.

*A plaque at the entrance to the George I Sánchez Building, the University of Texas at Austin. Source: Not Even Past*

However, these trips to Austin and the University of Texas contained much-needed moments in which the world outside of work joyfully broke up my owlish solitude. In the first half of the 1990s, for example, after my visits to the PCL, I would spend time with a dear cousin. We would have the kind of long chats about life that are such a part of being in one’s early 20s. In those days I also would visit a high school friend who happened to be a Longhorn football player. On one occasion this resulted in my tagging along with some very large guys to a country dance hall off of Ben White Boulevard, one of my few ventures into the famed Austin nightlife. That was fun! By the 2000s I was more personally settled. My Austin trips brought me to visit family who had moved to the area—tias, tios, and primos—at lovely dinners they provided for their vagabond relative temporarily living in a hotel near the interstate. We traded family stories and I would listen, especially to the older generations, to their lived experiences of the very things I was reading about in the archives that day.

Book cover for George I. Sánchez and the Long Fight for Integration

My sense of this campus and city is, in part, also an idealized connection. As the center for intellectual and cultural life in this state, Austin always had a special meaning for me even going back to when I was an aspiring, wannabe teen intellectual living a small South Texas town. And my academic research has always felt as if it were tapping into different parts of my personal history. Going through letters written by a young Lyndon Johnson in the 1920s about teaching Mexican American children at a segregated school brought to mind my mother and her family and the stories they told me. They would have gone to the same kinds of schools from their ranches, farms, and towns in the South Texas brush country of that era; they also would have been as unknowledgeable of the English language as young Lyndon’s students in Cotulla, Texas. For my biography of George I. Sánchez, I could not but help to compare his life and choices to my own as his work gradually revealed itself to me over many years of going through his manuscript collection at the Benson Latin American Center. I even caught myself using his own rhetorical flourishes in my daily emails!

All those experiences, the jumbling of my personal and professional selves that are so firmly rooted to this university, have now evolved. In my early 50s I find myself no longer on the outside looking into an idealized UT, but on the inside looking out in a very real and now lived-in space. Being here regularly means a different kind of connection. Now I can feel the bustle of the university when the students are going to and from class (in the passing period, of course). I now teach my classes and attend meetings in the very buildings that I once only knew as exteriors from my middle-of-summer, sweaty, evening hikes. And I now notice how many things have changed since the 1990s: the campus is more walkable, but less drivable than it once was; the massive Jester parking lot has been replaced by an art museum bearing my surname (no relation); and for the first time ever I got to actually go up “The Tower” for a reception. It was a revelation after so many years staring at it from the outside wondering what it was like on the inside. I am making all-new personal connections to this place, which remains the site of so much of the intellectual odyssey that led me here. My excitement at having new colleagues and students is only enhanced by my sense of how they are deepening and expanding upon those existing memories.

The 40 acres is a special place. For me, it’s a site both familiar and unknown—one that I’m constantly rediscovering as my roads of personal and professional discovery merge in ways I couldn’t have imagined. Sadly I’ll be having these new experiences without the Star Seeds Café, but I’m sure there is plenty more to discover on the converging road ahead.

Dr. Carlos Kevin Blanton is the Barbara White Stuart Professor of Texas History at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of History. Blanton’s books and articles involve the intersection of Chicana/o history with education, civil rights, immigration, politics, and Texas history. His George I. Sánchez: The Long Fight for Mexican American Integration (Yale University Press, 2014) won the NACCS Best Book Award; The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, 1836–1981 (Texas A&M University Press, 2004) won the TSHA’s Tulls Award; and the article “The Citizenship Sacrifice: Mexican Americans, the Saunders-Leonard Report, and the Politics of Immigration, 1951–1952” in the Western Historical Quarterly (2009) won the WHA’s Bolton-Cutter Award. He has edited A Promising Problem: The New Chicana/o History (Texas 2016) and published additional articles in professional journals such as the Journal of Southern History, the Pacific Historical Review, the Teacher’s College Record, the Journal of American Ethnic History, and Texas Monthly. Carlos holds a 1999 PhD from Rice University, a 1995 MA from Southwest Texas State University (now Texas State University in San Marcos), and a 1993 BA from Texas A&I University (now Texas A&M University-Kingsville). He has held faculty positions at Portland State University (1999-2001) and at Texas A&M University, College Station (2001-2024) before joining the University of Texas at Austin community in the fall of 2024.

Review of Making Never-Never Land: Race and Law in the Creation of Puerto Rico by Monica A. Jiménez (2024)

Banner for book review of Making Never-Never Land

In Making Never-Never Land: Race and Law in the Creation of Puerto Rico, Caribbean historian, and Black studies scholar Mónica A. Jiménez offers a new interpretation of Puerto Rican legal and political history. In her first book-length project, Jiménez explores the intersections between law, and race in the creation of Puerto Rico. More specifically, Making Never-Never Land interrogates how these intersections have framed the relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico since the territory was ceded by Spain in 1898. The book is shaped by Jiménez’s personal experience as a diasporic scholar moving from Puerto Rico to Texas. Jiménez’s family joined the first wave of Puerto Ricans who left for Houston, Texas in the mid-1980s in search of better economic opportunities which is part of a broader colonial history of forced migration, economic hardship, and discrimination. Jiménez seeks to answer the question: What is Puerto Rico for the United States? This is a question that many Puerto Ricans living in and out of the United States ask themselves every day. This question shapes Puerto Rican colonial history as a territory, historically and currently, especially following the imposition of the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (also known as PROMESA).

Throughout Making Never-Never Land, Jiménez examines the larger history of U.S. settler colonialism and racial exclusion, using an analysis of the United States Supreme Court’s decisions to better understand the unincorporated territory’s current debt crisis and disaster capitalism situation. She argues that PROMESA, which was meant to take care of Puerto Rico’s outstanding debt, reaffirmed the United States Congress’ plenary powers over the island and “effectively stripped the territory of its ability to self-govern” (p.119).

*Flags on the Coast of Puerto Rico. Source:* Pexels

To understand the limitations of a group of US Supreme Court decisions known collectively as the Insular Cases and interrogate the “state of exception” created by them, Jiménez draws back to place the Insular Cases within a more extended legal history of racial exclusion towards Native Americans, and African Americans. By closely examining early legal precedents and analyzing these cases together, in Making Never-Never Land Jiménez invites us to consider how race functions within them, shaping Puerto Rico’s present and future. Through this critical reading, she positions herself as an anti-colonial scholar with a deep understanding of Puerto Rican politics. She does not believe that simply overturning the Insular Cases will resolve the island’s challenges. Instead, she urges the reader to think about Puerto Rico’s colonial status and its history of exploitation and subjugation more broadly, which are deeply tied to the racism embedded in those decisions, as a deliberate legal reality. Rejecting that legal logic as valid is, a crucial first step, for her.

Making Never-Never Land is divided into two parts. The first part, “Toward a Legal Genealogy of Racial Exclusion” looks at the US Supreme Court’s resolution of the Insular Cases, particularly Downes v. Bidwell (1901), a foundational case that first established the legal framework of U.S.-Puerto Rico relations, placing that decision within a longer historical context of legal decisions before the United States’ acquisition of the territory. Chapter 1 puts the focus on Downes because it was in that case that the US Supreme Court pronounced Puerto Rico to be “foreign in a domestic sense,” and created a new legal category, “the unincorporated territory,” for the island effectively placing it in a legal limbo—neither fully part of the U.S. nor fully independent (pp. 19, 20). That decision created a series of limitations for the territory, continuing to undermine its sovereignty.

Chapter 2 examines the Marshall Trilogy (1823-1832), United States v. Rogers (1846), and Dread Scott v. Sanford (1856) concerning the rights of Native Americans and enslaved Africans, respectively, who were among the first nonwhite populations with whom the U.S. legal system had to contend, to connect their logics and legal reasoning to Downes. In these cases, according to Jiménez, the U.S. Supreme Court engaged in critical moments of racial formation and exclusion, were we see the birth and growth of plenary powers, creating what the authors refers to as the “American state of exception”.

In the second part of the book, “‘American’ State of Exception: Puerto Rico in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries”, Jiménez traces the legal, political, and social effects and logics of Downes into the present with implications for the future. She does this by identifying three key moments that established the limits of Puerto Rico’s relationship to the United States. For example, chapter 3 examines the immediate changes implemented after the United States acquired Puerto Rico as an overseas territory, and the Court’s ruling in Downes. Jiménez describes this process as “the creation of Puerto Rico as an experimental station,” where the island became a testing ground for colonial policies, and its inhabitants were subjected to a process of “Americanization” and were taught how to become proper U.S. colonial subjects (p. 63).

President Theodore Roosevelt in Ponce, Puerto Rico 1906. — President Theodore Roosevelt in Ponce, Puerto Rico, 1906.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Chapter 4 examines the events that led to “the midcentury miracle,” which lifted many Puerto Ricans out of poverty and culminated in the establishment of the Estado Libre Asociado (E.L.A.), or Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, in 1952. While acknowledging the benefits this period brought to some, including her own grandfather’s success story, Jiménez highlights the limits of Puerto Rico’s political authority and the overarching control of Congress’ plenary powers over the archipelago, much like Puerto Rican Nationalist Party leader Pedro Albizu Campos once did. In her effort to demystify archives of Puertorriqueñidad, the sense of Puerto Rican identity that became involved with the notion of E.L.A., she examines how Congress’ supremacy was reaffirmed in a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions from 2016 to 2020 concerning Puerto Rico’s current debt crisis. In Chapter 5, Jiménez further develops how the Court once again upheld the precedent set in Downes, reinforcing the island’s colonial condition.

Jiménez’s Making Never-Never Land makes a significant contribution to Puerto Rican Studies, American Studies, Legal Studies, and Caribbean Studies, by interrogating the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions through the lens of racial and colonial exclusion. Her work expands our understanding of unincorporated territories—Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa—and their relationship to the U.S. As a legal historian, Jiménez challenges the fiction that Puerto Rico holds real decision-making power, highlighting how Downes continues to justify the island’s exclusion and inequality. Her greatest scholarly intervention is tracing the genealogy of court decisions that have systematically stripped Puerto Rico of sovereignty, culminating in the imposition of PROMESA in 2016. By revisiting cases like Downes, she opens new avenues for understanding the present by rethinking Puerto Rico’s political and legal status.

Road Map of Puerto Rico, 1942.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Jiménez’s Making Never-Never Land arrives at a crucial moment when Puerto Rican Studies scholars are examining critically how the United States treats its overseas territories. She not only expands these conversations but also moves beyond centering the debate on the Insular Cases, critically interrogating their lasting impact on Puerto Rico today. In doing so, she builds on the work of legal scholars like Efrén Rivera Ramos, David E. Wilkins, Maggie Blackhawk, Paul Finkelman, and Adam Arenson, among many others. Her research also engages with Ed Morales’ Fantasy Island: Colonialism, Exploitation, and the Betrayal of Puerto Rico (2019) and Rocío Zambrana’s Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico (2021), particularly in the context of Puerto Rico’s debt crisis and disaster capitalism, making it a timely and innovative contribution. Jiménez is also successful in expanding the conversation to other states of the U.S., as this book also helps us understand the colonial dynamics still present with Native Hawaiians.

Making Never-Never Land is well-suited for courses in Puerto Rican, and Caribbean Studies, American, African Diaspora, and Legal Studies, as it addresses race, discrimination, law, citizenship, U.S.-Puerto Rico relations, and colonialism while encouraging critical engagement with these legal precedents. Additionally, Jiménez’s intersectional approach to race and law makes her work relevant for students in Native American and Black Studies. Ultimately, this book challenges us to rethink legal narratives and their ongoing consequences, urging a more profound reconsideration of Puerto Rico’s political and legal status.

Nelson M. Pagán-Butler is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin. His research explores Afro-descendant intellectuals in the Hispanic Caribbean, Black Caribbean feminist and Marxist thought, and Hispanic Caribbean queer archives.

Review of History and Fate: The Goodwins and the 1960s at the Briscoe Center

The Briscoe Center’s latest exhibit, History and Fate, is drawn from the personal papers of Richard (Dick) and Doris Kearns Goodwin. The pair met after their time in the Lyndon Johnson administration, in which Dick, a holdover from the Kennedy administration, had been one of Johnson’s principle speechwriters until 1965, and in which Doris was a White House Fellow in 1967 and a domestic policy staffer thereafter.

Despite the exhibit’s name, it is really just about Dick’s life, with the bulk of the displays focused on his time in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

The Briscoe Center acquired the Richard N. Goodwin and Doris Kearns Goodwin Archives in 2022, further cementing the sense that there is no better place to study the LBJ administration than at the University of Texas at Austin. They are distinct from Dick’s government papers in the Kennedy and LBJ libraries.

History and Fate is packed with Dick’s correspondence, memoranda of conversation, diary entries, and drafts of speeches. His typewritten diary entries are detailed, giving tremendous insight into how his days unfolded, sometimes down to the half hour. They will surely attract significant scholarly attention, as they offer insights into the inner workings of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations that have previously not been available.

After a brief section on Dick’s college years and early career, things get moving as he joined John F. Kennedy’s congressional staff as a speechwriter in 1959; The exhibit includes the letter offering his services to Kennedy, along with the cover letter of his first Kennedy speech draft. Dick ultimately played an important role in Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign, including drafting JFK’s first major civil rights address at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, California. Once Kennedy was in the White House, Dick worked in Latin American affairs, playing a pivotal role in the creation of the Alliance for Progress, a program aimed at developing economic cooperation between the Americas.

Perhaps the most entertaining parts of the exhibit are some of the materials related to Dick’s time working on the Alliance for Progress—particularly his infamous August 1961 meeting with Argentine Communist revolutionary and Cuban Minister of Finance Che Guevara in Punta del Este, Uruguay, where an Alliance for Progress conference was being held. You can see the memorandum of Dick’s conversation with Che, written at President Kennedy’s request, in the exhibit including marginalia, corrections, and such. (For a Brazilian account, see this diplomatic cable. Read Goodwin’s reflections on the meeting over 40 years later in this interview.) In the spirit of revolution, Che gifted Dick a beautifully-crafted cigar box, which is now on display in the exhibit. News of the meeting with Che leaked to the press, causing an uproar and prompting an inquiry by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Latin America subcommittee. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., a historian and special advisor to the president for Latin American affairs, jokingly sent a Western Union telegram to Dick ahead of the hearing: “Best of luck, old comrade. Give my warm personal regards to Commandante [sic.] Capehart. Che.” The quip about Capehart was a reference to Republican Senator Homer E. Capehart. Dick was transferred to the State Department because of the scandal.

The exhibit’s shift from the John F. Kennedy administration to the Lyndon Baines Johnson administration is, appropriately, quite abrupt. The first item in the LBJ portion of the exhibit is Dick’s diary entry from a few days after JFK was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, in which he recounts his experience of the day of the assassination (reproduced as typed): “It hit me like a shot. I fell to the floor and rocked back and forth saying oh no, oh no, oh no. my body shook with sobs. It cant be true, they cant do this to him. I was paralyzed with emotion.” It reveals the responses of other members of the administration. For example, Schlesinger remarked, per Dick, “what kind of a country is this. Those who preached hate and violence, the far right. This was their doing. Our fault was that we had never taken them seriously. I couldnt listen. I nodded agreement and moved off.”

But the business of government kept moving, despite the death of the Chief Executive, and as early as November 27—just five days after Kennedy’s death—Dick had a memo to LBJ about the Alliance for Progress. On December 6, he started the ball rolling on the creation of the JFK Library.

One item of particular interest is a letter Dick wrote to Jackie Kennedy—with whom he was close—about his decision to remain in the administration after her husband’s death, explaining that he thought “President Kennedy would have advised me to do it,” and that “it gives me an opportunity to do something, in a small way, to advance the things he believed in.” He also intended to leave government shortly after the 1964 election—evidence, in his view, that he was not accepting Johnson’s invitation to stay on as a means of advancing his personal interests.

Dick became Special Assistant to the President on December 10, 1963. In that role, he became one of LBJ’s primary speechwriters, as evidenced by a memo from Bill Moyers—another lead speechwriter—to Dick with a handwritten draft of what came to be known as the “War on Poverty” speech. Dick was forbidden to show the draft to anyone else.

This portion of the exhibit incorporates drafts of some of LBJ’s most important speeches, including State of the Union addresses, the “We Shall Overcome” speech (complete with a QR code to listen to the audio!), LBJ’s speech at Howard University in 1965, and, perhaps most famously, the president’s “Great Society” speech.

Almost as abrupt as the transition from JFK to LBJ, the exhibit rather suddenly introduces Dick’s resignation from the Johnson administration in 1965 with his notes and a letter on his reasons for departing. He felt unappreciated and that he did not have a seat at the table. Additionally, according to a blurb from Doris’ memoir printed on the wall of the exhibit, Dick had also become increasingly critical of the Vietnam War.

Despite his departure, Dick was brought back to draft LBJ’s 1966 State of the Union address, though he ultimately did not retain control over the editing process. So severe was his disillusionment that he never read the final speech and refused to let Doris read it to him.

L-R: Dick Goodwin, Bill Moyers, President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The portion of the exhibit covering Dick’s work immediately after his time in the White House examines his relationship with Robert F. Kennedy, his brief stint as a part of Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign in 1968, and—in what is probably the most striking item in the entire display—his dramatic, unpublished diary account of a police raid on the Conrad Hilton Hotel in Chicago during the turbulent Democratic National Convention in August of 1968.

Coverage of Dick’s post-political career is relatively abbreviated, mostly focusing on his publishing of a memoir and a play, and some personal correspondence. The last panel in the exhibit includes his draft of Al Gore’s concession speech after the 2000 election and a picture of Dick’s meeting with Fidel Castro in 2002, for the fortieth anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Dick died of cancer in 2018 at 86 years old.

History and Fate offers a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and gives historians a taste of the rich materials of the Goodwin Papers. While the University of Texas at Austin was already the place to study the Johnson Administration—after all, it is home to the LBJ Library and the Briscoe Center also hosts the personal papers of LBJ’s attorney general, Ramsey Clark—the acquisition of the Goodwin Papers at the Briscoe Center further solidifies its status in this regard.

The LBJ Presidential Library and LBJ School of Public Affairs buildings at night.
photo by Jay Godwin 08/21/2023.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Despite the exciting research opportunities teased by the exhibit, it is not without its frustrations. First, as I wandered around the display, muttering notes into my phone’s voice memo app, I found myself repeatedly remarking that there was a frustrating lack of direction or linearity in the exhibit. While the general order of pre-Kennedy to Kennedy to Johnson to post-Johnson to post-government career was fairly obvious, the more specific timeline of the displays within the exhibit was not. For a chronologically-minded person, the lack of a clearer order was, at times, frustrating. Second, there was surprisingly little mention of Doris in the exhibit, which was confusing given her time in the Johnson administration and her work as Johnson’s preeminent biographer.

That said, History and Fate is a thoughtfully designed and intriguing exhibit that will fascinate both historians and the general public alike. The exhibit is open until July 25, 2025.

Benjamin V. Allison is a Ph.D candidate in History at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a Graduate Fellow at the Clements Center for National Security. His dissertation examines relations between the United States, the Soviet Union, and Arab “rejectionists” from 1977 to 1984. He also studies terrorism and has been published in Perspectives on Terrorism and by the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism. His public-facing work has also been published at Lawfare, Foreign Policy, TIME, and The Hill.

Review of Utopia of the Uniform: Affective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People’s Army, by Tanja Petrović (2024)

Utopia of the Uniform is a powerful book that challenges historians to broaden their approach to the archive and their sources. It asks how affect and feeling can add nuance to our study of the past, significant historical shifts, and the future. When we met for the first time, Tanja Petrović signed my copy with the note, “To David, for all the stories and feelings he will bring to us from the Yugoslav men”. It stuck with me for some time as I wondered what that word, feeling, meant in that context. It confused me as a historian because I had not really been trained to analyze feelings rather than historical fact. However, after reading Utopia of the Uniform I am left with a sense of wonder in seeing how the author showcased the affective afterlives of the Yugoslav People’s Army and how she skillfully wove a web that connected periods of time that have traditionally been shattered in post-conflict discourse.

To what degree is nostalgia useful for a society torn asunder by catastrophe? Perhaps a nostalgia that gazes fondly to a period prior to catastrophe might serve as a metaphorical balm, one that eases the lingering pain for the survivors of violence. Or perhaps it could serve as a temporary escape from a grim reality in which contemporary life is contrasted against life in the past, against the ‘better times’. But where does this nostalgic path lead if not to simple daydreaming? Is it capable of inspiring positive change? Tanja Petrović strives to change how scholarly discourse interacts with nostalgia in her 2024 book, Utopia of the Uniform: Affective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People’s Army.

Petrović views nostalgia as an ineffectual tool of historical analysis and seeks to craft a new frame of reference for temporal progression. As such, she encourages a more nuanced investigation of historical processes and actors in both post-socialist and post-conflict societies. Utopia of the Uniform guides the reader through a nontraditional archive of felt and affective history to showcase how shared memories, photographs, and friendships continue to influence and affect the lived experience of individuals and collectives in the lands that now make up the former Yugoslavia.

To accomplish this, the author foregrounds her study in the past and present lives of male Yugoslav conscripted soldiers. By analyzing a rich archive of personal narratives, interviews, soldiers’ photography, as well as other forms of artistic and documentary expression, she claims that this archive of felt and affective history inherently possesses its own agency; an agency that Petrović argues is capable of dismantling the limitations of hegemonic ethnic binaries that politicians exploit to keep a grip on power. It is these limitations that have kept the region of the former Yugoslavia and its history wrapped “in an ethnic straightjacket” (p. 178) by binding it to the traumatic destruction of the 1990s. A time period when the fall of state socialism coincided with the rise of nationalist politicians into power (such as Serbia’s Slobodan Milošević and Croatia’s Franjo Tuđman). This shift saw warmongering nationalism call for a dramatic reorientation of society that violently bifurcated Yugoslavia’s rich ethnic and religious diversity practically at every level. By the end of the decade the wars in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo would kill hundreds of thousands, displace millions, and destroy the social and physical infrastructure of the country. Petrović tells us that this profound pain created limiting ethnic binaries that keep this region chained to a destructive past.

Slobodan Milošević, former President of Serbia and President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, 1988.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

That past, however, did not begin at the end of the 20th century. Petrović argues that the ideological motivations found within Yugoslav socialism and the way its distinctive federal system was structured allowed for the potential of a utopian perspective. The Yugoslav socialist project after World War II could be seen as unique because of the Yugoslav Partisans’ National Liberation Struggle and their self-led victory over fascist occupation. A new understanding of Yugoslavism that “acknowledged and approved enduring separate nationhoods and sought federal and other devices for a multinational state of related peoples with shared interests and aspirations” (p. 23) emerged after the war. As a result of the mass intercommunal and ethnicized violence of World War II, the new Yugoslav movement made Brotherhood and Unity (Bratstvo i jedinstvo) one of its defining pillars of legitimacy. Thus, a system that sought peace and cooperation among Croats, Serbs, Bosnian Muslims, Kosovar Albanians, Slovenians, Macedonians, and others. The JNA and the accompanying mandatory universal male conscription was a key piece of the unifying project to create Yugoslavs.

The story that Tanja Petrović tells across the book’s nine chapters (including one interlude and an epilogue) is situated along temporal lines that are not limited to narrow linear boundaries. Her narrative examines how forces of the past interacted with each other along a trajectory that moved toward an ideal future, a future that historical actors dreamt would come to fruition. However, as a result of the catastrophic violence and destruction seen in the 1990s during the Yugoslav Wars of Succession, those hopes or utopian ideals and the temporal continuum upon which they progressed was shattered. Therefore, ideal futures that were not only possible but imminent were lost forever, while this rupture forced the former soldiers and their loved ones in Petrović’s study to be left adrift (during the period she coins as the ‘event-aftermath’) in a hostile world where arbitrary ethnic or religious affiliation determines life or death, belonging or ostracization, or prosperity or neglect.

On the left: A map of Yugoslavia, 1990; On the right: Former Yugoslavia during War, a snapshot of the front lines, 1992.
Source: Wikimedia Commons (L), Wikimedia Commons (R)

On the left: A map of Yugoslavia, 1990; On the right: Former Yugoslavia during War, a snapshot of the front lines, 1992.
Source: Wikimedia Commons (L), Wikimedia Commons (R)

Even three decades after the wars’ end this rupture still dictates how life in what was once Yugoslavia is lived and perceived. Petrović argues that the citizens of the states that emerged out of the the corpse of the Socialist Federal Republic (SFR) of Yugoslavia (the republics include Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Kosovo) live in neo-fascistic and highly ethnicized societies. Within this post-war world people face a grim present, one in which continuous governmental neglect for peoples’ livelihoods, a general disregard for their safety, and rampant corruption offers no hope for a better future. The author centers an unlikely hero in her story to serve as a utopia of hopeful thought forged in the past and lived in the present: the institution of the Yugoslav Peoples’ Army (JNA) and universal conscription of Yugoslav males for one year of military service. Utopia of the Uniform brings forth a potent contribution in that it is paradoxically within the enclosed barbed-wired bases of one of the most strict, disciplined, and conservative institutions resistant to change in SFR Yugoslavia where utopia could be found.

The bases where these soldiers served became key locations for a utopia, not necessarily because life there was perfect; in fact, Petrović discusses throughout her work that many young men felt that the army was robbing them of a year of their youth when the world was at their feet. The idea of going to someplace far away from your home, a base that was isolated from urban centers, to be molded into a good soldier with domineering discipline constantly watching your every move understandably was a source of frustration for many young Yugoslav conscripts. However, the early foundational leadership of the JNA in the postwar era intentionally designed this feature of the military in order to take Yugoslavs from all different ethnic, religious, social, and educational backgrounds and send them to serve somewhere far away from the region in which they were raised. This had the significant effect of intermingling the whole male population with people who might have been different, thus institutionally reinforcing the idea of Brotherhood and Unity in the country’s fighting force. It was in these bases where JNA soldiers forged bonds, memories, and deep friendships with their comrades in arms that would last a lifetime, especially forging strong ties with people of different ethnicities.

Welcoming Tito in Pirot, 29 September 1965
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Petrović utilizes the affective feeling of these soldiers to shatter the restrictive ethnic binary that has held the Ex-Yugoslav region in a chokehold since the 1990s. Through her gripping narrative that bridges Yugoslav times, the rupture of violence, and the eventual event-aftermath, the author colors significant nuance and elaboration into the picture of the (post)socialist and post-conflict society. Utopia of the Uniform demonstrates that the friendships and positive remembrance of former JNA soldiers’ time in military service take on what the author defines as an ‘affective afterlife,’ that is a phenomenon that lives on inspiring happiness, hope, or a fondness in the present despite unimaginable trauma. Additionally, Petrović significantly diversifies and debunks the dominating ethnic narratives that local politicians have hijacked to dictate that ethnic homogenization is the only viable path forward for the successor states.

Utopia of the Uniform demonstrates that the desires of good will and the strong friendship between soldiers of one background to their army buddies of another ethnic background refute the divisive propaganda that stubbornly lives on from the 1990s. The book articulates how the unique context of Yugoslav socialism and the philosophy of Workers’ Self-Management created an “infrastructure for feelings,” or a new social organization that “makes possible responsible decision-making under conditions of interdependency, mutual social responsibility, and solidarity, and that leads to the liberation of individuals.” (p. 189) Petrović argues that this system, despite its flaws, provided space for people to create their own dreams of utopia of the future. This utopia, found in the past within JNA bases across what used to be Yugoslavia, possesses an affective afterlife for the people who survived the 1990s and still offers them happiness, fond remembrance, and even a glimpse of hope for the future.

David Castillo is a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin, focusing on the former communist Yugoslavia and its successor states. His research explores the links between inter-communal violence, toxic masculinity, gender dynamics, propaganda, and mass manipulation. With academic foundations from the University of Texas at El Paso and Indiana University, David combines cultural history with international politics. Drawing from his experience in the region, he aims to compare post-Yugoslav masculinity shaped by the 1990s wars with Chicano/a/e ‘Machismo’ in Mexican-American borderlands, investigating how violence becomes integral to both identities.

Review of Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons, by Brittany Friedman (2025).

When Brittany Friedman began researching the formation of the Black Guerilla Family, a prison-based organization affiliated with the Black Power Movement, many people questioned the relevance of her project. Friedman recalled one interview with a former California Department of Corrections (CDC) official who, upon learning of her research topic, laughed and asked, “Why would you do that?”[1] From the perspective of state officials, this story had been written decades ago. The CDC and other government agencies, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), had generated thousands of pages of documentation and reports on the Black Guerilla Family and other “Black Extremist” organizations. What more could a new study possibly add?

In fact, the resultant book, Carceral Apartheid, reveals a much more complex story. Friedman, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California, conducted over forty interviews with the founders of the Black Guerilla Family, CDC officials, and members of other race-based prison organizations such as the Aryan Brotherhood. Friedman describes her approach as historical ethnography. She uses these interviews to “invigorate and triangulate” traditional archival sources including prison administration documents, surveillance records, and personal correspondence.[2] Together, these sources paint a troubling portrait of the conditions that precipitated the creation of the Black Guerilla Family in California’s San Quentin Prison in 1970.

Popular narratives reduce the Black Guerilla Family (BGF) to a prison gang involved in criminal activity and the contraband economy. However, in tracing the group’s origins, Friedman argues that the founding of the BGF was a response to the system of carceral apartheid that structured—and continues to structure—life behind bars in the United States. California prison officials used racial classification systems to create divisions within the prison population and relied on white prisoners, especially those affiliated with white supremacist groups like the Aryan Brotherhood, to maintain the prison’s hierarchy. Officials fostered interracial conflict by spreading rumors, supplying weapons to white prisoners, and failing to intervene when violence broke out. In this way, the CDC was able to maintain a strict system of racial segregation that operated without any formal policy in place. Many of the people Friedman interviewed joined race-based groups such as the Mexican Mafia, Aryan Brotherhood, or the Black Guerilla Family out of fear. Traversing racial lines was often met with violent repercussions. This extralegal violence was not only sanctioned but encouraged by prison officials. As Friedman acknowledges, carceral apartheid relies on this relationship between state-sanctioned legal controls and extralegal violence and intimidation.

*Chester County (PA) Prison main cell block, 1960. Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

It was within this context that the BGF emerged. Drawing from her extensive interviews with founding members, Friedman argues that this group differed from existing prison gangs in two ways. First, the group was formed defensively to protect Black prisoners from the pervasive violence that they were subjected to by other prisoners and guards. Second, the BGF adopted a political stance that was influenced by organizations including the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the Black Liberation Army (BLA). Members were expected to engage in political education, develop skills in martial arts and hand-to-hand combat, and take an oath modeled after that of the Kenyan Mau Mau, who challenged British colonial rule through armed rebellion. Over time, the BGF would spread outside of California. In the process, it became less politically oriented and more closely connected to the prison’s illicit economy. As Friedman writes, this was largely due to the increase in membership and the CDC’s crackdown on political activity.

A poster of the Black Panther Party, 1971.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Carceral Apartheid offers a nuanced study of the BGF and a compelling framework for understanding the U.S. prison system. It also points to some areas for further research. Friedman focuses entirely on men’s prisons, which seem particularly conducive to the kind of violent policing of racial segregation that she documents. But what might a study of “carceral apartheid” in women’s prisons reveal? Regional differences represent another route. While the book focuses on California, Friedman notes that this system of governance was not unique to the state. Prisons across the country adopted similar strategies for managing their populations. The Texas prison system is an excellent example. Historian Robert Chase has written at length about how the state’s building tender or “trustee” system granted certain prisoners enhanced power and privileges that gave way to rampant sexual violence.[3] It would be interesting to explore how these practices differ from place to place.

While the book does contain some disciplinary jargon that may be off-putting to those outside of the academy, Friedman’s interviews—which she quotes at length throughout the book—and her rich narratives anchor the text. In a study that is largely focused on organizational structures and dynamics, Friedman takes care to center the voices of people impacted by these systems. This commitment is also evident in her work as a Principal Investigator of the Captive Money Lab. Founded by Friedman and her collaborators, April Fernandes and Gabriela Kirk-Werner, the Captive Money Lab conducts research and engages in advocacy around the “pay-to-stay” fees that many city, county, and state governments impose on incarcerated people. These findings have informed public policy and signal an ongoing need for research on the criminal legal system.

Carceral Apartheid is an excellent contribution to this literature and offers important context for understanding prisons in the twenty-first century.

Sarah Porter is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She studies twentieth-century social movements, policing, and mass incarceration in the United States.

[1] Brittany Friedman, Carceral Apartheid, 153.

[2] Brittany Friedman, Carceral Apartheid, 166.

[3] Robert Chase, We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

Memories of War: Reflections on Japanese Borderlands Experiences and Nikkei Incarceration

Introduction by Lucero Estrella, Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at Lawrence University

When developing my syllabus for ETST 110: Introduction to Ethnic Studies, I thought of ways to have students at Lawrence University engage with the themes of race, ethnicity, borders, gender, indigeneity, and migration beyond the United States. Each week, we discussed themes such as settler colonialism, racialization, criminalization, and resistance and how these appeared across various temporalities and global geographies.

For our week on resistance and exclusion during the mid-twentieth century, I decided to have my students read my NEP piece “Memories of War: Japanese Borderlands Experiences during WWII,” alongside Karen M. Inouye’s article “No Simple History: Nikkei Incarceration on Indigenous Lands.”[1] My goal was to have students engage with alternative histories of Japanese internment that they might not have encountered in the past. While my NEP piece approaches Japanese incarceration and family separation through a hemispheric lens and discusses Japanese wartime experiences on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border, Inouye’s work centers Nikkei women’s narratives of incarceration on Indigenous land to highlight the interconnections between racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and wartime incarceration. Both works discuss the importance of memory in historical studies of the wartime period as a way of uncovering the continuing legacies of state violence.

*Japanese internment detainees, 1942. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

For my class, students were expected to write one weekly, in-class free writing exercise based on a few guiding questions. During the week we read both works, students were required to tackle one or more of the following questions: How do Estrella and/or Inouye use memory in their works? Who do these memories belong to? What new perspectives and possibilities emerge from the use of memory as a historical source?

The four reflections below are from four Lawrence University students who took my Fall 2024 term Introduction to Ethnic Studies course: Tahlia Moe, Niranjana Mittal, Nicholas Lubin, and Riya Jehangir Stebleton. Their short preces include reflections on some themes and methodologies that structured our class discussions for the term, such as relational race, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and incarceration.

Student Reflections

Tahlia Moe

Memory serves as the gateway to a hidden archive. Employing memory as a historical source unearths relations, stories, intimacies, and experiences that traditional historical methods often overlook. “Memories of War: Japanese Borderlands Experiences during WWII” by Estrella and “No Simple History: Nikkei Incarceration on Indigenous Lands” by Inouye explore the hidden archive as they prioritize memories as primary sources. Estrella highlights memories from Japanese families and activists in the U.S. and Mexico to display the legacies of violence and anti-Asian exclusion on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Meanwhile, Inouye writes about Nikkei incarceration on Indigenous lands in Arizona, featuring memories from Japanese women who were imprisoned as children in Poston. The memories of these women reveal legacies of racial capitalism and settler colonialism that are downplayed, erased, or otherwise not found in the archives. Their memories reveal interactions between the Japanese prisoners and the Indigenous people as they created their own economies and forms of resistance. A relational race approach becomes significant to understanding the interactions between the groups and the effects of state-sponsored violence and settler-colonialist ideologies and policies. Compiling these memories helps form a fuller, more empathetic picture that cares about and honors subjects of violent histories. Emerging perspectives from people involved thus introduce the personal perspective and intimate value, combatting traditional historical methods.

*Poston, Arizona, 1945. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

Niranjana Mittal

Estrella’s piece titled “Memories of War: Japanese Borderlands Experiences during WWII,” explores lived experiences from the Texas-Mexico borderlands through the lens of memory. By using oral histories and personal recollections, Estrella centers the humanity of these historical events, presenting an intimate narrative that contrasts with more traditional archival sources. Memory in her work becomes a vital tool for uncovering some overlooked aspects of history. Estrella’s use of memory is particularly powerful in reconstructing histories that lack extensive documentation or have been marginalized in mainstream narratives.

The memories she draws upon belong to individuals who lived through the upheaval of war. These are ordinary people whose voices are often absent from official records but whose experiences illuminate the complexities of war beyond its grand strategies and political machinations. For example, recollections of displacement and resource scarcity challenge the monolithic view of Japan as solely a wartime aggressor, adding nuance to our understanding of suffering in Japanese Mexican communities during the war. Estrella uncovers the brutality of imperial policies and how individuals navigated and survived these oppressive systems.

One of the most significant effects of Estrella incorporating these memories is how it opens up new perspectives on history. Memory, unlike official records, is subjective and malleable, shaped by individual experiences and the passage of time. This fluidity allows us to reveal dimensions of history that might otherwise remain hidden. For instance, memories often preserve emotional truths and everyday experiences that are absent in traditional state sources. They bring to light stories of resilience, survival, and moral ambiguity that challenge simplistic narratives of victimhood or villainy. Estrella shows how the memories of those at the margins, such as borderland communities, challenge nationalistic accounts that erase the interconnected and often contradictory realities of the war.

A dentist's office at the Granada Relocation Center, Amache, Colorado, 1942. — *A dentist’s office at the Granada Relocation Center, Amache, Colorado, 1942. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

Moreover, memory as a historical source opens up possibilities for reconciliation and healing. By including voices that have been silenced or ignored, Estrella’s work fosters a more inclusive understanding of history that acknowledges shared pain and loss across national and cultural boundaries. This approach humanizes history and highlights how memory itself is contested and politicized as individuals and communities negotiate their relationship with the past.

Ultimately, Estrella demonstrates that memory is not just a supplement to traditional historical sources but a vital means of understanding the complexities of human experiences. By foregrounding memory, she shifts the focus from the macro-level forces of war to the lived experiences of individuals – offering a richer, more empathetic perspective on the past.

Nicholas Lubin

In both Estrella’s and Inouye’s works, memory functions as a significant tool for recovery from the deterioration of Native American and immigrant narratives. Due to the United States’ history of isolation and displacement, many families are left with gaps in their history. However, memory functions to fill this gap. Although instances of displacement and isolation are not always documented, memory and oral histories help fill this gap. Memory in Inouye’s piece serves as a connector for the experiences of Japanese Americans who were subjected to incarceration following Executive Order 9066 and those of Native Americans who were displaced from their lands.

Inouye illustrates this overlap through the locations of campsites on Indigenous reservations mirroring the state-imposed limits and borders for the “allowed” spaces for Native peoples. Despite the differing circumstances of the two groups, the process of isolation and extermination is one and the same. Both works feature minority groups that were forcibly relocated because of the unsettling habits that hegemonic powers hold onto, such as settler colonialism and xenophobia. In Estrella’s work, she details this, showing the reader the widespread cross-border relocation of Japanese nationals following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Families across the Americas were torn apart, and many never returned to their homes, causing this impactful moment to fall under the radar. Estrella’s inclusion of oral history and memories of a Japanese Mexican family illustrates how the attempt to silence these voices with equivocation can be combated by preserving the narratives and memories of those who experienced violence and displacement during the wartime period.

Riya Jehangir Stebleton

The erasure of immigrant and Indigenous stories in the United States is a constant theme within hegemonic white narratives. Many families are unable to retrace the steps of their ancestors due to the history of exclusion, internment, and forced separation of ethnic groups. In the works of Estrella’s “Memories of War” & Inouye’s “No Simple History,” memory and empathy are used as powerful mechanisms to bridge historical gaps in the lives of both Japanese and Indigenous communities in the Americas. Although these communities endured different forms of injustice, an overarching system of racism in incarceration and exclusion can be seen through a relational race lens.

Civilian exclusion order #5, posted at First and Front streets, directing removal by April 7 1942 of persons of Japanese ancestry, from the first San Francisco section to be affected by evacuation.
Source: Library of Congress, Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-34565.

Estrella discusses the mass displacement of Japanese immigrants after WWII, as well as the obscured and unknown history of Japanese Mexicans. In addition to the criminalization of Japanese migrants following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, working-class migrants in Mexican states such as Coahuila encountered discrimination through forced relocation. Similarly, Inouye highlights the misconstrued narrative of the Nikkei community in the U.S., which is made up of Japanese descendants who have permanently settled abroad. These communities were placed in incarceration camps under the War Relocation Authorities on land where native tribes’ reservations were located. Wartime systems of relocation and incarceration draw direct comparisons to the processes of settler colonialism. Due to the consistent reinforcement of white power, the stories of Japanese migrants and the entanglement of injustices are left unheard of in social spheres, education, and sometimes within families. So, how can these narratives be retold and amplified? For many, the answer lies in the ability to convey memory and empathy in a historical context.

Fragments of memory, combined with empathy, can be utilized to translate and preserve the overlooked histories of both immigrant and Indigenous communities. The usage of memory as a historical source allows for these stories to be retold, drawing connections between systems of incarceration, racialization, and dispossession that affected numerous non-white populations in the United States. For example, there are major gaps in the poorly documented history of Japanese Mexican families, and the usage of empathetic agency can bridge connections across the divide. Narrating history through a first-hand perspective also allows for the descendants of those affected to share the intergenerational impacts of settler colonialism and exclusion, demonstrating the long-term impacts. The preservation of these hidden narratives offers new perspectives on the underrepresented history of Japanese migrants while also integrating emotional analogy, remembrance, and personal influence. Incarceration rooted in white dominance continues to be a relevant issue in the United States. Consequently, it is crucial to remember and extend the narratives of Japanese migrants through mechanisms of memory, empathy, and knowledge, to break the cycle of ethnic erasure and carceral systems of injustice.

Lucero Estrella is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at Lawrence University

[1] Karen Inouye, “No Simple History: Nikkei Incarceration on Indigenous Lands,” Journal of Transnational American Studies, 15(1), 2024.

Review of Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia, by Vladislav Zubok (2009)

banner image for Review of Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia, by Vladislav Zubok

Zhivago’s Children is a thorough account of the experiences of Russian intellectuals who formed the Soviet Union’s second-generation intelligentsia. The book’s primary strength lies in the author’s nuanced depictions of the interactions between Moscow intelligentsia and the changing political environment. Drawing extensively from memoirs and interviews of its members, Zubok points out that these intellectuals remained vocal advocates of reformist socialism for most of the Soviet era, contrary to common stereotypes that portray them as anti-Soviet dissidents. As writers, artists, and scientists in prestigious social positions active in post-Stalin Russia, their life experiences were entangled with the course of Soviet history, contributing to the growth of state power, advocating reform in times of political turbulence, willingly or not, undermining the Soviet system in its last decade, and finally, fading in the post-collapse turmoil. Their rich Russian culture and humanist ideals shaped the universe of Zubok’s parents and his upbringing. Thus, more than a genuine scholarly project, this book is also an homage paid to a past etched in memory.

A major contribution of the book lies in its convincing depiction of a constructed socialist affinity among the second generation of Soviet intelligentsia, whom the title Zhivago’s Children refers to — a term borrowed from Boris Pasternak’s Nobel Prize-winning novel, Doctor Zhivago. It traces this back to the Stalinist education and complex experiences of World War II, strict cultural control and dogmatization under the influence of hardcore Stalinist official Andrei Zhdanov, and antisemitic persecution in the last days of the dictator. In so doing, Zubok reveals the material and ideological background that shaped the generations’ socialist and reformist inclinations, which contributed to the intelligentsia’s ambivalent sentiment and changing affinity to the regime in the Khrushchev years (1953-1964), resonating with his volatile cultural policies. This forms the core of his chapters.

The historical perspective maintained by Zubok crucially permits a fascinating exploration of the hybrid culture that emerged from this intelligentsia: the embrace of Western culture coexisted with the antagonism against capitalism, while criticisms of Soviet bureaucracy coexisted with an aspiration for genuine, “humane” socialism. To be sure, this generation of intelligentsia had diversified entering the 1960s, seeing the growth of liberals and the Russian nationalists. Yet, as Zubok points out, the deeply rooted socialist affinity only collapsed in 1968, when the Soviet Union forcefully ended the Prague Spring—a lethal disillusionment at the zenith of a global atmosphere of leftist change. In his view, dissidents, the conventional focus of liberal narratives, only played a contributing role in the course of history instead of the pioneering one.

*Soviet tanks and soldiers at Hradčany Square to suppress the Prague Spring. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

What deserves greater attention in assessing Zhivago’s Children, however, is the unparalleled historical significance the author placed on the pivotal turn of 1968. It seems that for Zubok, more than a disillusionment of one generation of intelligentsia amongst many, the crackdown of Prague Spring marked the decline of the last Russian intelligentsia in general. This can be seen clearly in the book’s arrangement. As if writing in haste, the author condenses the long decade from 1968 to 1985 into a single chapter, ominously titled “The Long Decline,” followed by the epilogue, “The End of the Intelligentsia.” Given that he devotes seven chapters to the years between 1956 and 1968, one has to ask, why is it so?

In the book’s conclusion, the author summarized its story as the struggle of intellectuals to “regain autonomy from an autocratic regime.” Nonetheless, an answer to the above question may lie in the author’s implicit theme: the tense yet unbroken and mutually dependent relationship between the Soviet regime and the Russian intelligentsia. Whilst the intelligentsia maintained a critical stance against the state and pursued high culture, the Stalinist and post-Stalinist systems were essential for their survival because they provided social privileges, economic benefits, proper education, incorporation into the field of power, and a dream of searching for a utopian society. In short, those “Zhivago’s Children” may be critical to the autocratic regime precisely because they were constituents of it. Just as the author notes, “the preoccupations and aspirations in the intellectual milieu remained essentially non-capitalistic.” This significant irony of history became most apparent at the end of the USSR: when the intelligentsia finally envisioned its revival in the reformist-minded Gorbachev, the lifting of censorship in the glasnost tore the system apart, as with the dreams and livelihoods of millions of intellectuals. On top of the corpse of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic now stood a new capitalist Russia, whose ruthless force of the market left little place for “Zhivago’s Children.” Thus, as the book’s subtitle suggests, they were the “last Russian intelligentsia.”

*Mikhail Gorbachev, the last General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Moscow, October 1991. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

This tragic downfall of “Zhivago’s Children” raised my expectations for a more profound reflection on the characteristics of this generation of intellectuals and, moreover, on the cultural and ideological system of the Soviet Union. This can be formulated as two preliminary sets of questions. First, what was the relationship between this intelligentsia and the broader Soviet masses? To what extent did these socialist intellectuals identify with the people? Or did they see themselves as a privileged group, de facto distant from the rest of the population? Second, what were the theoretical and ideological implications behind the humanist ideals of “Zhivago’s Children?” This deserves particular attention if one attempts to situate the “genuine” Marxist intelligentsia mentioned by the author in the conflict between humanist and structural Marxists (e.g., Louis Althusser) in the 1960s, where the latter tried to correct the perceived humanist distortion of Marxist theories that emerged with Khruschev’s denunciation of Stalin’s guilt. Unfortunately, Zubok does not explore either of these two topics, likely due to his deep commitment to the stories and values of “Zhivago’s Children.”This dedication leaves little room for critical reflection on their potential theoretical shortcomings or intellectual elitism. Considering the subject matter of this book, I think the above problems are more serious and intriguing as well than other issues, such as the author’s reliance on memoirs.

In sum, Zhivago’s Children is an exciting but problematic read. As a nuanced chronological intellectual history, it deserves high praise. The author, Zubok, is no doubt passionate about his subject. However, perhaps because of his strong opinions, several vital topics remain regrettably unexplored, which means that readers should approach this book critically.

Shutong Wang (王庶同) was born and raised in China. He earned a B.A. in History at McGill University and is currently a PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin. He studies the social movements of the 1950s, with a particular focus on the interactions between grassroots communities in Modern and Contemporary China.

Recent Posts