Alina Scott, Author at Not Even Past

Native Literatures and Indigenous Peoples’ Day: A Brief Historiography

October 14th is what most people know as Columbus Day. However, for many Indigenous peoples, the celebration of Christopher Columbus is a reminder of the generations of trauma and settler conquest of Native nations and lands. For that reason, several states, including Alaska, Minnesota, Vermont, and South Dakota (and cities like Austin), have chosen to rename the holiday Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Native activists have been at the forefront of this movement. Here is a twitter thread discussing the global campaigns to reframe the day:

I'm going to be tweeting about #IndigenousPeoplesDay a lot this weekend. I think about it a lot since I've been working on multiple #IPD campaigns during the past 4 years. pic.twitter.com/73jk2IHt3J
— UAINE (ndnviewpoint) (@mahtowin1) October 12, 2019

It is difficult to study or teach American history without including Native peoples. That said, many historians limit mention of Indigenous peoples to the period before 1776 or even 1840, but the narrative that the cultures died or were replaced by the United States relegates Native peoples to the past, furthers the colonial project of erasure, and simply does not do enough scholarly diligence. There is a difference between talking about Native peoples and teaching Native histories. “Decolonizing your syllabus” by including one Indigenous, Black, or POC scholar is not sufficient either.

On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, I’d like to suggest some easy additions to your syllabus, playlists, and bookshelf. This is a brief review of some seemingly untraditional academic works by Native authors, scholars, artists, and creators. My reflection on Native literature here includes scholarship in a number of forms that could easily be incorporated into a syllabus or added to your Comprehensive Exam List. This list is a starting point and I’d encourage readers to go further by listening to Native leaders, scholars, and artists.

ART

Images via Blanton Museum of Art and FrankWaln.com

The Blanton Museum of Art recently featured the work of Cherokee and Choctaw artist, Jeffrey Gibson in an exhibit called “Jeffrey Gibson: This Is the Day.” Gibson’s art was recognized by the MacArthur Foundation when he was awarded a 2019 MacArthur Genius grant. The exhibit was celebratory, sincere, and visually stunning. Gibson’s talent was on full display in a wide range of pieces. They included sculptures, textiles, paintings, film, even several boxing bags. Descriptions of each piece were written by Gibson himself. (They are generally written by exhibit curators so to have Gibson’s narration was an honor!)

View of Jeffrey Gibson: This Is the Day at the Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, July 14, 2019–September 29, 2019 (via Blanton Museum of Art)

A room of the exhibition hall was dedicated to the ghost shirt, a garment used by ghost dancers during the ceremony but reinterpreted here by Gibson. Each ghost shirt carries its own symbolism and messaging. Gibson’s use of a wide range of materials, textiles, prints, and textures allows his work to explore ideas of race, sexuality, gender, and religion. Gibson’s perspective bridges cultural practices and modern art forms and visualizes coalitions in the global struggle for Indigenous rights. Gibson wrote, “A garment acts as the mediator between the wearer–myself in this case– and the rest of the world. It can protect me, draw attention to me, celebrate me, allow me to be another version of myself.” The exhibit closed on September 29th, but you can find out more about Gibson’s work on his website.

Frank Waln’s “What Makes The Red Man Red” and “AbOriginal” are must listens. The music video for the former shows imagery and lyrics from Disney’s Peter Pan (1953). Scholars and social commentators have observed the obvious racism in the almost 70-year-old animated film, however, Waln’s work includes both audio clips and an answer to the question “what makes the red man red”?:

You made me red when you killed my people
Made me red when you bled my tribe
Made me red when you killed my people
(Like savages/ Like savages)

In “AbOriginal,” Waln goes home. The lyrics talk of life in his reservation— the pains, protests, and resilience that comes from his tribe.

I got this AB Original soul/ I got this AB Original flow
I got this pain that I can’t shake/ ties to my people I can’t break
Got this history in my blood/ got my tribe that shows me love
So when I rise/ you rise/ come on let’s rise like

Similarly, the music video pays tribute to Waln’s tribe and hometown in Rosebud, South Dakota. (ALSO–today he is releasing “My People Come From the Land,” a track that he worked on in collaboration with a Lakota language teacher and is his debut of playing the Native flute.)

PODS

Cherokee scholar Adrienne Keene (@NativeApprops) and Swinomish and Tulalip photographer Matika Wilbur (@matikawilbur) host the All My Relations Podcast. Their podcast bridges Keene’s expertise in the history of appropriations of Native culture and Wilbur’s interest in the modern for a truly delightful podcast. Their guests include academics, tribal elders, creatives, aunties, and artists. Their latest episode, “Beyond Blood Quantum” features Charlotte Logan, Gabe Galanda, Tommy Miller, and David Wilkins, and discusses the tribal implications, legal basis, and colonial origins of blood quantum.

Rick Harp (Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation) hosts Media Indigena, with regular roundtable guests Candis Callison, Brock Pitawanakwat, Kim TallBear, and Kenneth T. Williams. The scholars, journalists, and policymakers discuss the latest developments in North American news and the direct impact on Indigenous peoples in the 21st century. The conversations are pointed and nuanced. Each guest brings their expertise and insight into the complex issues facing Indian Country. Their latest episode, which was recorded live in Edmonton, Alberta, is called “Is the Green Movement Still Too White?” and looks at the global green movement, the media attention that propelled Greta Thunberg into the spotlight, and some of the pushback from Native Twitter.

This Land, a Crooked Media podcast hosted by Rebecca Nagle (Cherokee Nation) is especially timely. Nagle unpacks how a 20-year-old murder case in Oklahoma made it to the Supreme Court in 2019, the history of land divisions in Indian Territory, the Trail of Tears, and the long-term ramifications for tribal sovereignty and Native land rights.

BOOKS & BOOKLISTS

Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers (2019) is edited by Elissa Washutta and Theresa Warburton. This is one of the best books I’ve read as a graduate student and holds a permanent place on my shelf. The collection was composed with care and intention. As the editors described it, Shapes of Native Nonfiction is meant to hold structure throughout like a basket. The collection is structured in four terms based on the basket metaphor: technique, coiling, plaiting, and twining. Each represents a different style of non-fiction writing The editors and contributors are speaking directly to the idea that the academic essay is the only valid form of nonfiction. Form here is critical to the decolonial process. The editors write, “our focus on form-conscious Native nonfiction insists on knowledge as a resource whose coercive extraction is used to narrate settler colonialism in order to normalize its structure.”(11). It is a phenomenal collection specific to individuals, peoples, and places.

Daniel Heath Justice’s Why Indigenous Literatures Matter calls into question basic assumptions about what makes up Indigenous literature and, as the title states, why they matter. Justice’s work urges readers to expand their view of what should be considered “Indigenous Literature.” This work is accessible to the generalist and the specialist, yet acknowledges their added significance: “our literatures are just one more vital way that we have countered those forces of erasure and given shape to our own ways of being in the world…they affirm Indigenous presence– and our present.” (xix)

The Elizabeth Warren Syllabus, which seems to become timelier every year, combines the specialties of several scholars already mentioned and citizens of the Cherokee Nation: Adrienne Keene (@nativeapprops), Rebecca Nagle (@rebeccanagle), and Joseph M. Pierce (@pepepierce). The syllabus was meant to not only address Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren’s claims to Cherokee ancestry but to contextualize the history of such claims by non-natives to Native ancestry. The Syllabus is structured by theme and topic and generally touches on the ideas of DNA and genetic testing, Indigenous citizenship, Cherokee history, erasure, cultural appropriation, blood, and tribal sovereignty. The syllabus was published in the Journal of Critical Ethnic Studies.

Finally, one way to observe Indigenous Peoples’ Day is to support the UT Native American and Indigenous Studies program and institutions that support Native students. Show up to events. Rally around causes. The NAIS Program provides an undergraduate certificate and graduate portfolio for UT students and also hosts a number of speaker series and workshops. This semester’s lineup includes Angelo Baca (Hopi/Diné), Tiya Miles, Héctor Nahuelpan (Mapuche), and Roxana Miranda Rupailaf (Mapuche). Consider attending one or several of these events.

Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day!

Dean Page Keeton and Academic Freedom at UT Austin: Three Archival Letters

One bonus of archival research is discovering documents irrelevant to the topic but so evocative that they can’t be ignored. In the State Bar of Texas archives, I found three letters from June 1960 between Werdner Page Keeton (1909-1999), Dean of the School of Law of The University of Texas, and two lawyers. Those letters caused me to detour from my project for a while.

Black and white image of W. Page Keeton, Dean of the UT Law School, 1949-1974 — W. Page Keeton, Dean of the UT Law School, 1949-1974
Source: Law School Yearbook, 1959.

Homer L. Bruce, a tax-law partner of the Houston law firm Baker & Botts, sent the first letter to Keeton on June 15, 1960, with “carbon copies” to nine prominent members of the legal profession in Texas. Six days later, one of those nine recipients, a renowned oil and gas lawyer in a Fort Worth firm, Robert E. Hardwicke, also wrote Keeton. Both letters complained strongly about an article just published in the law school’s Texas Law Review by a UT tax-law professor, J. Henry Wilkinson, Jr. The article was titled “ABC—From A to Z,” and the letter writers were outraged that Wilkinson criticized a tax benefit for oil and gas companies known as the “percentage depletion allowance.” The third letter is Keeton’s June 28 response.

Image of letter from Homer L. Bruce to Dean Keeton dated June 15, 1960

The challenged article seems unremarkable today. Wilkinson’s topic was the “ABC” transaction, common in the oil-and-gas business. A producing property’s owner may sell a “production payment,” or a fixed quantity of the minerals to be produced, to a purchaser in a manner that takes advantage of the federal income-tax “allowance,” or deduction, of 27-1/2% of the property’s income, available to oil-producing taxpayers for the “depletion” resulting from the extraction of the minerals in the ground. Through patient examples, Wilkinson demonstrated that the ABC deal was not always as tax-advantageous as was believed. The article did refer to the allowance as “gratuitous.” And that observation drew the ire of Bruce and Hardwicke, who amplified their criticism by insisting that enemies of the depletion allowance—specifically, Hubert H. Humphrey—would use Wilkinson’s characterization of the percentage depletion allowance as “ammunition.”

Image of J. Henry Wilkinson, Jr's June 1960 article in Texas Law Review — *Wilkinson’s June 1960 article in the Texas Law Review*
*Source: www.heinonline.com*

In June 1960, when these letters were written, the Democratic Party’s national convention was a month away, and one still-active candidate for the presidential nomination was indeed Hubert Humphrey, then a two-term Senator from Minnesota who had consistently fought the depletion allowance in Congress. His fight against that and other “tax loopholes” had been unsuccessful but earned him respect as a reformer. In Texas, however, the depletion allowance was a sacred cow. The Texas Law Review had published an earlier article defending the depletion allowance, and the Chair of the Texas Railroad Commission, Ernest O. Thompson, wrote and spoke in favor of the allowance, and virtually all of the national legal literature and newspaper coverage in Texas about the allowance defended it. And Humphrey’s rival from Texas, Lyndon B. Johnson, was a protector of it. Humphrey later became LBJ’s vice-president but “never gave up” and, finally, in 1975, was gratified to see Congress abolish this tax “loophole.”

Black and white photograph of Hubert H. Humphrey — Hubert H. Humphrey
Source: WikimediaCommons

The addressee of the two letters, Keeton, was well acquainted with the oil and gas industry and its issues. He had earned the LL.B. in 1931 at UT, was hired to teach there, and quickly gained recognition in the field of torts, the law of civil injuries, and wrongful death. During World War II, he served in Washington as an executive of the Petroleum Administration for War. After a stint as dean of the Oklahoma University Law School, he accepted the deanship of UT’s law school in 1949, serving until 1974. He distinguished himself at both law schools by fostering racial integration and by continuing to teach torts as well as serving as dean. The law school grew during his deanship, and UT law alumni/ae revere Keeton. The city of Austin renamed the street alongside the law school for him, and he is buried in the State Cemetery by gubernatorial proclamation.

Moreover, Keeton was stalwart and adept, in protecting academic freedom at the law school. One innovative key to his success there was to liberate the school from overreliance on legislative appropriations by creating the UT Law School Foundation to receive alumni/ae contributions. Important supporters of this initiative were law graduates who attained positions of power within the oil and gas industry. For instance, Rex G. Baker of Humble Oil was a key supporter of the Foundation—and also a staunch defender of the depletion allowance.

Those relationships did not deter him. Keeton formulated a masterful response to the two letters that foreclosed any further discussion. “You realize, of course,” he began, “that I cannot act as any kind of a censor and do not even attempt to act as such with respect to what goes in the Review.” Having matter-of-factly vindicated academic freedom, the Dean added that he did not read Wilkinson to make any judgment about “merits or demerits of the percentage depletion allowance.” And by pointing out that the ABC structure does not always work as expected, “Wilkinson may have done a service to the oil industry.” Keeton also observed that the challenged word “gratuitous” was simply “a descriptive term,” indicating that the amount of the tax deduction was not tied to the cost of the property; the tax benefit was indeed essentially free to the oil and gas taxpayer.

Picture of a letter from Dean Page Keeton to Homer L. Bruce dated June 28, 1960 — *Dean Page Keeton to Homer L. Bruce, June 28, 1960*
*Source*: *State Bar of Texas, Archives Dept., via author*.

Academic freedom at UT has had a long history. In 1917, when Governor James E. Ferguson vetoed appropriations for UT because the President would not dismiss faculty to whom Ferguson objected, the Legislature, at the urging of UT alumni/ae, impeached and removed him. In his 1986 oral history interview, Keeton recounted less spectacular but nonetheless significant instances during his tenure of politicians and the Board of Regents seeking to meddle with the faculty and academic matters, efforts Keeton successfully repulsed. But Keeton’s defense of academic freedom was not always public, as in the example of these previously unknown letters in the archive. Keeton’s handling of that situation in June 1960 highlights the ongoing task of University leaders to protect academic freedom, and it burnishes both Keeton’s legacy and the reputation of UT as a place for the free exchange of knowledge and viewpoints.

The State Bar of Texas’s Archives Department, also known as the “Gov. Bill and Vara Daniel Center for Legal History,” contains the Bar’s permanent records. The Archives’ professional archivist also manages and provides access to the collections of the Texas Bar Historical Foundation there. The archives are located in the Texas Law Center in Austin, Texas. The three letters were contributed to this archive in 1992 by J. Chrys Dougherty, a historically minded lawyer; his father-in-law, Ireland Graves, was one of the nine cc recipients of the three letters.

Josiah Daniel (UT Law, J.D. 1978; UT History, M.A. 1986) is a Retired Partner in Residence of the international law firm Vinson & Elkins LLP in its Dallas, Texas office. After four decades of law practice, he now is focusing on the history of the legal profession in Texas and is writing a biography of Dallas congressman Hatton W. Sumners (1875-1962), based on his papers in the Dallas Historical Society’s archive. His C.V. is on his blog: http://blog-josiahmdaniel3.blogspot.com/2018/03/cv.html. He may be reached at jdaniel@velaw.com.

Sources for this article include:

Lewis L.Gould, Progressives and Prohibitionists: Texas Democrats in the Wilson Era (Austin: UT Press, 1973).

“W. Page Keeton, An Oral History Interview” (Austin: UT Austin School of Law, Tarlton Law Library, Legal Bibliography Series No. 36 (1992) 49-52, 69-74.

Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960 (N.Y., Harper, 1963)

15 Minute History – Scientific, Geographic & Historiographic Inventions of Colombia

Guest: Dr. Lina del Castillo, Associate Professor of Latin American History

Host: Nicolás González Quintero, Ph.D. Candidate in History

The historian Andre Gunder Frank has theorized that former colonies cannot develop economically until they have overcome the legacy of their colonial past. The ways that the United States has overcome the legacy of its colonial past with Great Britain is, in many ways, unique, especially by comparison to the former Spanish Americas.

Today’s guest, Lina del Castillo, recently published a book titled Crafting Republic for the World: Scientific, Geographic, and Historiographic Inventions of Colombia, which offers a new understanding of how Gran Colombia–which split from Spain at the beginning of the 19th century, and then further subdivided into Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador–came to deal with its own past, and the role that science, geography, and history came to play alongside politics as the former colonies grew into nationhood.

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The Curious Case of the Thomas Cook Hospital in Luxor

Cross-posted from Chris Rose’s blog, where he regularly tells us Important and Useful Things and makes us laugh along the way. In addition to his many other accomplishments, Chris is the brains and motor behind our podcast, 15 Minute History.

By Christopher Rose

Over the weekend, the Thomas Cook company went bankrupt and shuttered operations, leaving hundreds of thousands of people stranded worldwide and searching for flights home.

A number of us Twitterstorians became particularly concerned about the impending demise of the company a few days ago when Ziad Morsy, a martime archaeologist and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southampton tweeted that Thomas Cook’s historical archivist had lost his job.

https://twitter.com/ziad_morsy/status/1175998560178974720?s=20

The Thomas Cook company was 178 years old when it collapsed (just over a month before Britain may or may not exit the European Union–coincidences which have been commented upon elsewhere). Some of its history in relation to British imperial history was covered by another colleague in a Twitter thread yesterday:

Thomas Cook began leading tour groups to Egypt and the Holy Land 150 years ago in 1869. He was even present at the opening ceremoy of the Suez Canal in November that year. So began the history of modern Western organized tourism in the Middle East. pic.twitter.com/0pQjxNd60H
— Belated Antiquity (@afzaque) September 23, 2019

Inasmuch as it’s easy to point to the Thomas Cook Company’s early days as those of a commercial company essentially making money off of the expansion of the British Empire, there are occasional glimpses at a richer and more complicated role for the company in various contexts (@afzaque covers several of them in his thread, which is worth a read).

It’s these sorts of things that make the potential loss of the company’s archive particularly painful, as it is one of those out-of-the-box sources for material that can shed startling new light on historical periods.

And hence, I present …

The curious case of the Thomas Cook Hospital

I ran across the hospital while writing the first two chapters of my dissertation, which wound up comprising a comprehensive history of public health in Egypt between 1805 and 1914 as one did not already exist. (Wanna publish it? It’s not going to be in the monograph.)

The West Bank of the Nile, opposite Luxor, in 2010.

It was located in Luxor, a settlement that is notable mostly for what people were doing there thousands of years ago, as it is built on top of the ruins of what was almost certainly not known to its inhabitants as Thebes, but was one of the New Kingdom capitals of ancient Egypt. Across the Nile River, wide and lazily flowing at this point, is the pyramid-shaped hill that marks the location of the Valley of the Kings.

Given the numerous pharaonic sites that dot the landscape up and down the river from Luxor, Cook had the bright idea to utilize boat travel for wealthy tourists to visit them without the hassle of having to move constantly to new hotels every night. Luxor, at the epicenter, was the site of the train station from which Wagon-Lits and other operators operated sleeper trains to Cairo.

In 1890, Luxor was a small town — perhaps five thousand permanent inhabitants, which could swell as high as twenty thousand during tourist season when there was work to be had.

John Mason Cook–the son referred to in the company’s official name “Thomas Cook & Son” after 1865 — had the idea to open a hospital as early as 1887:

In 1887, he decided, driven by the reactions of rich foreigners–British, American, German–in the face of the unfortunate hygienic conditions of the local population, to construct a hospital. “Accomplished in 1891, inaugurated by the Khedive Tewfik Pacha, it comprised 26 beds (of which 8 were for women, 10 for men)*, the buildings well constructed, each isolated from the other, in a healthy and fortuitous position.”

*(no, this doesn’t equal 26).

Jagailloux, Serge. La Médicalisation de l’Égypte Au XIXe Siècle. Synthèse 25. Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les civilsations, 1986. (translation mine).

The hospital was co-directed by a Syrian doctor and an Englishman (only the latter–a Dr. Saimders–is named). Given that neither were in residence in Luxor in the off season (April to November), a third doctor–an Egyptian–was appointed to see patients in the off-season.

It was estimated that over 120,000 patients were seen, with over 2,000 operational procedures performed, in its first twenty years of operation. The hospital was presumably built primarily for the treatment of visiting foreigners, with Egyptians working in the tourist industry as a secondary priority.

“One of the Dahabeahs (sic) of Thos. Cook & Son Company (Egypt)”
Berlin: Cosmos art publishing Co., 1893.
Collection of the Brooklyn Museum

What is interesting is that, with Cook’s blessing, the hospital was opened to the public as well. In 1898, The Lancet enthusiastically reported that people were coming from over two hundred miles away to seek treatment at the facility. (“Egypt.” The Lancet 152, no. 3905 (July 2, 1898): 59.)

After the British occupation in 1882, funding for public health flatlined. Under Lord Cromer, the public health budget never exceeded 100,000 Egyptian pounds (at the time LE 1 = £0.95).

Hospitals in the provinces, which were already run down and developing a bad reputation among patients (most of them had been built in the 1840s), were frequently closed or moved to other, newer buildings that were not purpose-built to serve as hospitals.

The construction of private facilities was encouraged by the Anglo-Egyptian government; the government would not open new hospitals or dispensaries (a combination pharmacy/clinic used to supplement hospitals in smaller settlements) in towns that had “good” private facilities. Many of the hospitals were funded by local European communities to serve their own–Austro-Hungarians, French, Greeks, Italians, and Anglo-Americans all had their own facilities in Cairo and/or Alexandria, most of which referred their Egyptian patients to government facilities.

Hence, it is a point of curiosity for me as to what inspired John Mason Cook to open his hospital to the general public, especially given that his company did not lack for wealthy clientele to fill its beds.

It suggests that, even at the height of imperialism, with a company that can (and has) be considered an agent of an imperial power, things are never quite as simple as they might seem.

As I was writing this, Ziad tweeted me this tantalizing entry from the archival catalog:

https://twitter.com/ziad_morsy/status/1176877234487009281?s=20

Hence, the answer to my questions may lie in this box, whose future is now in doubt.

What you can do to help

If you’re one of us history types who has benefitted, or could benefit, from consulting the Thomas Cook archives, this thread has specific action items you can take to let people know that there is interest in saving the archive and not letting its contents be dispersed or destroyed.

People: you've seen the bad news about Thomas Cook. We *urgently* need to secure the archives, hugely important in the history of transport & mobility.

If you've used the archives, or have an interest, please help! Letters of support needed – pls contact Mike Anson: @BAC_Chair
— JTH Official (@JTransportHist) September 23, 2019

More by Christopher Rose:

You’re Teaching What?
Wrong About Everything
Searching for Armenian Children in Turkey: Work Series on Migration, Exile, and Displacement
Exploring the Silk Route

Film Review – Ayka (Dir: Sergei Dvortsevoy, 2018)

by Lilya Kaganovsky

A longer version of this review was originally published on KinoKultura

In the second season of BBC America’s TV show Killing Eve, we are introduced to a new villain, whom Eve Polastri labels “The Ghost.” In every way, The Ghost is the main villain’s polar opposite: while Villanelle’s killings are elaborately staged performances, the Ghost kills her targets simply, quietly, and without much blood. She is “considerate” and even “respectful,” as Eve and the other MI6 agents note. But most importantly, The Ghost is able to go in and out of buildings, hotels, and apartments without drawing any attention to herself. She is, as Eve puts it, “someone who can go about their business without anyone noticing, because what they do is seemingly uninteresting. They’re not important. They’re invisible. It’s the kind of woman who people look at every day and never see.”

The Ghost turns out to be exactly as Eve predicts: a middle-aged woman of color masquerading as a low-wage domestic worker. She passes as a nurse, a beautician, a cleaning woman, a janitor – any category of person who is quite literally invisible to our eyes because of the labor they perform. She makes our food, cleans our floors, takes out our garbage, and yet, we – that is to say, the average middle-class white viewer or customer – never see her.

Photo from Ayka, by Denis Sinyakov © VOLGA film company (via Kinoart)

Sergei Dvortsevoy’s 2018 film Ayka (Айка), is precisely about making us see this kind of woman. The film stars the brilliant Samal Yeslyamova as Ayka – a role for which she won the award for Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival – as a young woman who has come to Moscow from Kyrgyzstan in order to make a different life for herself from the one she left back home. Like all migrant workers across the globe, Ayka is trying to survive by working any odd job she can find: plucking chickens, cleaning floors, serving coffee behind the counter at a car wash, even clearing snow – any job, in other words, that doesn’t require a right to work or a residency permit. She has a bed in an illegal “hostel” – a dirty flat she shares with many other migrants, under the duel threats of extortion and deportation. And while her lot is that of any migrant worker trying to make ends meet, trying to save enough to send back home, trying to avoid police, her case is complicated by the fact that she owes money to creditors, and has recently given birth.

While this is Dvortsevoi’s second feature film, it is shot in a documentary style, with a handheld camera and an emphasis on real spaces of city streets and buildings, and engaging non-professional actors, many of them, migrant workers themselves. The project took six years to complete and is a testament to Dvortsevoi’s desire to show the real experiences of migrant workers in Russia. Besides conducting extensive interviews, and getting permission to film inside illegal hostels, Dvortsevoi spent many months observing migrant labor: the scene at the underground slaughterhouse, for example, took many months to film, and Yeslyamova and other actresses were trained in how to clean and defeather chickens. Like the bleak landscape and the limited color palette of the film as a whole, the soundtrack is minimal and entirely diegetic. Particularly, we hear the sound of Ayka’s telephone constantly ringing that signals the creditors’ ability to reach her anywhere and everywhere. This sound is replaced toward the end with the wailing of her hungry child, a different kind of demand that Ayka also tries throughout the film to resist.

The film opens with Ayka’s unexpected escape from the maternity ward through a bathroom window. We spend the next six days following Ayka around snow-covered Moscow as she searches desperately for a job that will earn her the money she needs to pay back her creditors, until finally returning to the hospital for her child. The final scene is of Ayka crying in an entryway of an apartment building while nursing her baby boy, precisely the position she had desperately tried to avoid five days earlier by escaping from the maternity ward. The entire time, the camera stays close to Ayka, making sure that we really see her: the film’s editing ranges from extreme close-ups of Yeslyamova’s face and following shots from a handheld camera that sometimes falls behind, sometimes moves alongside, and sometimes runs slightly ahead of the always hurrying Ayka.

Despite the close-ups, the story that the film tells is almost as anonymous as its heroine. Ayka is not individualized but is a kind of combined portrait of migrant women. She could exist almost anywhere: Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Canada, Mexico or the United States – anywhere, where migrant workers try to make ends meet in a hostile environment that both relies on and denigrates their labor. As it is, we barely learn Ayka’s name, where she comes from, or the fact that somewhere, perhaps back home in Kyrgyzstan, she has a married sister with many children. We piece together that this is the lot Ayka tried to avoid by borrowing money to start her own sewing business and then running away to Moscow to escape her creditors. The film tells us almost nothing about her past, her future or her dreams, but is very much about the present: a five-day desperate search for money as she struggles with the physical and psychological consequences of giving birth, of being a single woman, with no right to work or live in Moscow, surrounded by violent, cheating, or in the best case, indifferent people.

Still from Ayka (via IMDB)

Even the setting, while realist, is largely nondescript. This is not tourist Moscow. There are no major landmarks visible to orient our gaze, but instead, only glimpses of the insides of buses, trams, escalators in the metro, dank basements, grimy hallways, and traffic-heavy city streets that have to be constantly cleared of accumulating snow. From the extortionist practices of the loan sharks, to the petty crooks who exploit female labor and run off without paying wages, to the threats of the hostel owner and the police, to the unfeeling nurses in the maternity ward, and to the other women just like you who take your job while you are ill – Moscow, icy, windy, dirty and cold seems to mostly consist of underground passageways and cramped spaces, from broom closets that serve as makeshift living quarters, to illegal abortion clinics, to crowded buses and subways. It is a place where no one will give you directions, much less a job.

Like everyone else around her, Ayka lies and schemes to try to get ahead, and resorts to violence when other means fail. As we get to know her better, we understand how she was able to leave behind her newborn child and even to offer him to the creditors to pay off her debt. Despite the camera’s insistent proximity to its subject, we are not meant to identify with the main character or her struggle, but rather, to acknowledge her. The point is to make us see this “ghost,” this woman who exists on the margins, in the in-between spaces of hallways, subways, and passageways; who brushes against us every day without our noticing.

The only humanity in the film seems to be reserved for animals, and Ayka’s temporary job at an animal clinic provides a glimpse of human relations as they could be: kind words and sentiment are reserved for animals undergoing surgery and other medical procedures, conducted by doctors and nurses in a sterile environment – in direct contrast to the illegal abortion clinic in which Ayka herself is treated for postpartum bleeding and infection, or even to the unfriendliness of the maternity ward where Ayka gives birth. It is here that Ayka finds a temporary place washing floors, replacing another Kyrgyz woman with a sick child. The exchange is done without the knowledge of the veterinarian, and it is remarkable that he even notices the change. This is also the closest Ayka comes to having a place of her own or something that resembles a home: the broom closet in the back of the clinic serves as a kind of make-shift living space, with a bed, a table, and a tea kettle. The cleaning woman offers Ayka warmth, comfort, a temporary job, and she even loans her some money. It is not clear that Ayka will give her back her job if she returns.

And yet, it is also the scenes in the animal hospital that most directly speak to the ways this film is about the abject. From the child urinating into a wash bucket, to Ayka emptying her breastmilk into a tea bowl, to the incontinent dog splayed on the hospital floor, to puppies nursing at a bleeding breast – all shot in extreme close up by Jolanta Dylewska’s unforgiving camera – we are exposed to a world of bodily fluids, of blood, vomit, and piss, and wasted mother’s milk and everything that belongs inside that has now been spat out, rejected; a “dark revolt of being,” as Julia Kristeva puts it, “directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable.”[1]

Photo from Ayka, by Denis Sinyakov © VOLGA film company (via Kinoart)

For Kristeva, the abject is “improper / unclean.” It is a loathing for an item of food, for a piece of filth, waste, or dung. But more than mere disgust, the abject is also, “the shame of compromise, of being in the middle of treachery.” (2) It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.” (4) We may call it a border, writes Kristeva, but abjection is above all “ambiguity.” (11) The abject confronts us “with those fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal.”[2] (12)

It is not difficult to see that Dvortsevoy’s film is precisely about this notion of the abject. Ayka’s presence disturbs society, system, order. She does not respect borders, positions, or rules. She lives in the in-between: both victim and perpetrator, mother and non-mother, Russian-speaking but outsider, human and animal. The wounded dachshund nursing her young is meant to remind Ayka of her refusal to nurse her baby. The scene in the underground slaughterhouse visually aligns Ayka and her child with the chickens that have to be de-feathered and cleaned. The bloody water in which the naked chicken carcasses are washed and which makes Ayka nauseated are meant to remind us of bathing the newborn just after birth. They might also make one a vegetarian.

Given this relentless identification of Ayka with everything that is abject, it is curious that according to Dvortsevoi the final image of Ayka crying in a cold entryway while nursing her baby was meant to be a moment of reconciliation:

I wanted to make a film about mothers. First of all, I wanted to show that maternal instinct is the strongest, stronger than any obstacles or barriers, any circumstances. At the end of the film, she takes him home – this means that she will keep him with her always and never give him up.[3]

Internationally, the film was released under the title My Little One (Moi malenkii), shifting the emphasis from the fate of the protagonist to that of her child and underscoring this “maternal” storyline. Most critics, following this logic, have understood the final scene of breastfeeding as the triumph of Ayka’s “maternal instinct.”

And yet, literally everything in the film works against this interpretation. Ayka’s final acquiescence to her child’s persistent demand – stressed in the last minutes of the film by the baby’s relentless crying – is first and foremost an acknowledgment of her impotence in the face of the forces united against her. By keeping the baby, Ayka has once more failed to pay off her debt to her creditors, and this debt is as much symbolic as it is material; it is as much to the criminal organization as it is to the Big Other. Ayka’s tears are not the joyful tears of a mother who feels the satisfaction of the newborn at her breast, but the total helplessness that comes from knowing that the choices before her are now even more limited. Still in debt, but now saddled with a newborn child (that may or may not be the product of a rape), Ayka has literally nowhere to go. And her final position, hidden in an entryway of some high-rise apartment building next to a row of mailboxes, leaves her permanently suspended in this “in-between.”

Ayka challenges us. It is a film about seeing that which we have rejected, spat out, othered and now refuse to acknowledge as part of ourselves. Ayka and other ghosts exist on the margins of our society, in the in-between border spaces that demarcate our lives. They beseech us, convulse us, cry out to us. Their ambiguity and placelessness challenge us, make us question our humanity, our privilege, our deepest held beliefs in the value of our symbolic support. Dvortsevoi’s film tries to get us to see Ayka and the others not as objects but as subjects, as equals, as that part of ourselves and our society that we have vomited up. To see them, in other words – as another director would have it – as us [Us (dir. Jordon Peele, 2019, USA).

Ayka, Russia/France/Germany/Poland/China/Kazakhstan, 2018

Director: Sergei Dvortsevoi
Screenplay: Sergei Dvortsevoi, Gennadii Ostrovskii
Cinematography: Jolanta Dylewska

Sources:

[1] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 1.

[2] Kristeva, 2, 4, 11, 12.

[3] Lazat Zhanybek kyzy, “Dvortsevoy; Ayka – obraz ochen’ sil’noi kyrgyzskoi zhenshchiny,”

https://rus.azattyk.org/a/kyrgyzstan-dvorcevoi-aika-migrants/29242917.html?fbclid=IwAR2Nk-2ZWDaw1zR7mDjwB-e1sgKGiFKt66PGlVfLsnEE69o2RWlRCzaXXjs

Digital Archive Review – Authorship and Advocacy: The Native American Petitions Dataverse

An earlier version of this review was published on halperta.com.

Embedded in the (digital) archive are structures of power. The Native American Petitions Dataverse shifts those structures by attributing authorship to tribal and Native individuals in hundreds of colonial and early American era petitions and memorials. However, is attributing authorship the sole responsibility of those curating digital collections? And even more simply, how does one acknowledge Indigenous authorship in the colonial and early American archive? Jane Anderson addresses this in part by saying “wherein colonialism is understood as a cultural project of control, archives function as the locus for the cultural technology of rule” (234). A “decolonial” project, then, would be would offer counter-narratives to the dominant methods of organizing, the hierarchy of archival sources, and the voices represented in the colonial archive.

*Petition of Esther Anthony (via Native American Petitions Dataverse)*

By that definition, the digital structure and content of The Native American Petitions Dataverse provide a key example of gesturing towards a decolonial project. The eighteenth and nineteenth-century petition is critical to understanding the engagement of people of color with political institutions and individuals. Much like colonial-era church attendance logs can be used to understand religiosity, petitions (and their signatures) offer a way into the areas of tension between legislators and those frustrated with legislation in the early years of the Republic. For many people excluded from suffrage, petitioning provided an almost direct line to governing bodies. Native people, in particular, used petitioning intra-tribally and externally. In the northeast, Native peoples appealed to legislative bodies for equality long before petitioning’s popularization in the abolitionist and women’s suffrage movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Collective and individual petitioning efforts are essential to nuanced tellings of Native histories, and therefore, an important area of focus for digital humanists.

The Native American Petitions Dataverse offers users direct access to high resolution digitized petitions from the Massachusetts State Archive and the National Archives and Records Administration. This project is an extension of the digitization efforts of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and is led by head investigator and Professor of Government, Daniel Carpenter, and Tribal Archivist for the Mashpee Wampanoag Community, Stephen R. Curley. This collection hosts digitized petitions by Native individuals, groups, towns, and nations (Abenaki, Chappaquiddick, Maliseet, Mohawk, Mohegan, Nipmuc, Penobscot, Pequot, Punkapoag, Wampanoag to name a few), to the Massachusetts colonial and state officials or the General Court. It also includes petitions from non-Native peoples on behalf of or that concern Native Americans.

With a format similar to the NEH funded Antislavery Petitions Massachusetts Dataverse, of which Dr. Carpenter was also a part, this collection features 644 petitions from predominantly Indigenous townships in Massachusetts, from 1640-1870. This digitization initiative is in collaboration with the Yale Papers Project with the intention to have 4500 items digitized. More importantly, this project was planned in “consultation with and with the support of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe, the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), and the Mohegan tribe, including consultation with representatives and governments of other Northeastern tribes and native communities” (Radcliffe Institute, 2016).

The interface is simple and clean, but it provides neither contextualization of individual documents nor an explanation of the significance of the practice of petitioning in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Researchers, educators, and students will find the expansive nature of this collection a welcome addition to the already vast number of nineteenth-century legislative documents available online. Its contents highlight more nuanced perspectives on issues such as Indigenous territorial claims, land rights, religion, the abolition of slavery, and ideas about Indigenous communities in New England. And it puts Native voices and signatures, at the forefront.

*Screenshot of Native American Petitions Dataverse (via author)*

The labor of the archivist is on full display. The methodological priorities (tagging, keywords, citation, etc.) place signers and the groups involved in petitioning efforts at the forefront of the site. In both metadata and archivist notes, The Native American Petitions Dataverse highlights Indigenous voices, by allowing users to filter petitions by keyword term, publication year, production date (year petition was signed/submitted), and geographic coverage. This reveals opportunities to restructure classic periodization and overemphasized themes in the historiography. More significantly, chosen methods of tagging and consistent categorization increase the visibility of traditionally disenfranchised figures. I am thinking particularly about Native women’s participation in petitioning campaigns and their advocacy about issues related to both individual and tribal rights.

Take, for example, the 1762 petition of Esther Anthony, a Native woman of color from the tribe of Mashpee, but living in the town of Middleborough, Massachusetts. The informational page includes several identifiers, including the total number of signatures, the extent of legislative action, the number of signatures by women of color, tribal affiliation, and additional archivist notes (i.e., widow, Jeremiah Anthony, sale, lands, payments). At the top of the page is a full citation of the original primary source along with the petition subject (which, in this case, is property) and a link to a high-resolution photograph of the petition. In the Harvard Library viewer, users can “flip” through the selected petition or browse related petitions (left of the screen) either submitted on the same date, on similar topics, or by the same petitioners as they would be organized in an archival folder. This user-friendly layout provides ample room for researchers interested in larger historical trends, genealogical networks, or public history projects. The latter opens the door to the telling of more nuanced narratives, powerful stories, specific individuals’ names, and the movement of ideas. Dr. Carpenter demonstrates one such application in a data visualization project based on the Massachusetts Antislavery Petitioning Dataverse called “Your Humble Petitioners.” This interactive map associates geographic coordinates with the locations inscribed in the metadata of the antislavery petitions. This could very easily be replicated with the Native American petitions.

*Esther Anthony’s Mark (via Native American Petitions Dataverse)*

The priority to distinguish Native petitions, or petitions about Native issues, commits to a partial restructuring of the power balance of the colonial archive. However, one is forced to ask whether it goes far enough. Is attribution enough? “Authorship is foundational to the organizational framework because it operates as a core node in the classification of all materials within the modern archive”(Anderson, 230). How is authorship determined? Is that the role of the archivist or the researcher? While this archive does not answer those questions, it does open up a world of research into key figures and names in the history of Indigenous petitioning efforts in the northeast and is a valuable resource to an interdisciplinary and intertribal pool of scholars. This project shows how prioritizing authorship can make room for Native voices and advocacy in the digital humanities but leaves unresolved key contextualizing details that would further illuminate the importance of this collection.

References:

Anderson, Jane. “Anxieties of Authorship in the Colonial Archive.” In Media Authorship. Taylor and Francis, 2013. 229-246. DOI: 10.4324/9780203136010
Cort, Ben G., and Isabella S. Beroutsos. “Sections.” We The Petitioners: Rewriting the History of Massachusetts’s Native Americans. The Harvard Crimson, www.thecrimson.com/article/2016/10/6/native-american-petitions/.
Native American Petitions Dataverse Accessed November 1, 2018.

More by Alina Scott:

Missing Signatures: The Archives at First Glance
Cynthia Attaquin and a Wampanoag Network of Petitioners
The Public Archive: Woven Into History

Romero

The most terrible things are quickly learned,

And beauty will cost us our lives.

-Silvio Rodríguez

A romero is a pilgrim, comrade. I guess we are all pilgrims, to some degree, though some pilgrimages seem to go on forever, while others end abruptly.

When Pope John Paul II came to Chile in April of ’87, the local church tried to script his visit. They wrote him a theme song and they played it non-stop the whole week: Messenger of life, pilgrim of peace. But John Paul was no friend of solidarity, human rights or poor people who got organized. That was all communism to him. Polish Jesus hated communists. The Holy Father’s Messiah became flesh and dwelt among us to impose order on a chaotic world with neoliberal capitalism, an M-16 and logistical support from the CIA.

Ex officio, the Pope aligned himself with authoritarian figures, especially if they seemed anti-communist. That didn’t square with the worldly politics of the Second Vatican Council, and he knew it. He had done everything in his power to roll back the Council, to mystify the crowds with papal pageantry and impose his moral authority using a constant, authoritative threat of hell. The way it used to be, in the good old days.

Communism was John Paul’s childhood trauma. He knew what it was like to be under the Soviet thumb. Behind the Iron Curtain, it was illegal to be Catholic, and it was illegal to have lots of money. So, when John Paul was all grown up and flying around the planet in his handsome white gown, he was most comfortable with anti-communist Catholics who had lots of money. Of course, in Latin America, those were the right-wing oligarchs; and dictators, torturers and death squads who supported them. I can’t imagine he was ignorant of their methods. I guess he figured it was for a good cause.

John Paul’s visit to Chile in ’87 was supposed to be a celebration. Everyone knew that he was conservative. Popes are supposed to be conservative. But the team that prepared the visit was the old guard, Cardinal Silva’s boys, the guys who had created la Vicaría, the soup kitchens, and the basic communities. All the things John Paul found suspicious.

That was behind the scenes, though. In ’87, the show needed a happy ending. Javier Luis Egaña was the producer. He always got the impossible jobs. His team prepared the speeches, the songs and the program. They made it ambiguous enough for Vatican approval, but edgy enough so that it wasn’t a lie. That was as good as it got.

Pope John Paul II's rally at the National Stadium in Chile — Pope John Paul II’s rally at the National Stadium in Chile (via La Tercera)

A Pontifical visit to the National Stadium was controversial enough. The Stadium had been used as a gigantic cattle pen for suspected communists after the coup. People were tortured there, and some were shot. The script included a sprinkling of holy water. That could be read as the re-consecration of a desecrated place. It could also be understood as a Papal blessing for the bloodiest atrocities of the military coup.

By ’87, the coup seemed like ancient history to the younger crowd. The Stadium rally was just another big event, for them. You had to have tickets, to get in. They were free, but there were quotas for parishes, movements and Catholic schools. The team had printed seventy thousand tickets, which was the capacity of the stadium, including standing room. But there were ninety thousand tickets, comrade.

The JJCC had gotten hold of one and printed up twenty thousand copies for their all their militants. The kids from la Jota were told to go early. They knew that, at some point, Carabineros would have to shut the gates. We went early, too. We were packed in like sardines, a crowd calamity waiting to happen. Over the loudspeakers, we were asked to kindly stand sideways so more people would fit. When the gates were sealed, ten thousand devoutly Catholic kids with real tickets were left outside. They were pretty pissed. And a quarter of those who were already inside didn’t even know the Our Father.

Communist Youth from the JJCC looked like normal kids from poor parishes. Once inside, the red flags and banners unfurled. The hammer-and-sickle was as omnipresent as the crucifix and the Virgin Mary. They kept it light, but their slogans didn’t exactly come from the New Testament. La Jota went to the Stadium to get noticed, and the Holy Father was not amused.

That wasn’t all. The Pope walked right into a trap so ingenious that James Bond couldn’t have set it up. It must have been the Holy Spirit, comrade.

We had been there since the middle of the afternoon. The sun was hot. We were hungry. Everyone was already a little punchy. The Pope arrived about eight. It was getting dark, so, in his whites, John Paul became this bright light shining in the darkness.

His command of Spanish was not great, but his pronunciation was elegant. The speeches had been carefully prepared, and he had a theatrical flair. Reaching for climax, he asked the badly overheated crowd, Do you renounce the idolatry of power?

Everyone answered, ¡Sí!

He continued, Do you renounce the idolatry of money?

Again, everyone shouted, ¡Sí!

Three is golden, and he went for it. Do you renounce the idolatry of SEX?

There was a brief and deafening unanimous silence. Then, altogether, a loud, resounding, ¡Nooo! The Holy Father was noticeably disturbed. He repeated his question with gravity, and he managed to get a lukewarm, Well, yeah, I guess… from the Legionnaires of Christ and the Opus Dei, in their coats and ties, sitting in the box seats.

Of the 80 thousand people present, 90 percent thought the whole thing was terribly funny. The Holy Father had to lighten up. The authorities blamed the JJCC, but that was ridiculous. The response had been massive, universal and spontaneous.

The speechwriters had committed a strategic error. They had failed to allow for the comic wit of Chilean youth. That was picardía, comrade, an acute awareness of the ridiculous, more Chilean than empanadas and red wine. Picardía was necessary for survival, and indulgently tolerated by the older generation. They might scold and laugh at the same time, happy to be reminded that they had all been young once.

But His Holiness wasn’t Chilean, he didn’t get the joke and he was sanctimoniously furious. He had chosen the topic. His Most Reverend Excellency had a personal vendetta against youthful genitalia. That was the one line Catholic youth had to tow in John Paul’s Church. Feeding the hungry was optional, a blind eye could be turned to death squads, but premarital celibacy was absolutely obligatory.

Realistically, virgin or not, you will never get a stadium full of sweaty youth to wildly cheer for chastity after five hours in the sun. When football matches lasted that long, guys would take the lucky condom out of their wallet, inflate it to maximum expression and let it fly. Just to cheer for the home team. Anyway, heads would roll. A direct, personal order from Rome. The Pope was pissed, and someone had to pay.

Diplomatic protocol required a meeting between heads of state. The organizers had to allow for a visit to Pinochet at La Moneda. John Paul couldn’t not shake the tyrant’s hand. Some people imagined that he would go to the presidential palace and demand an answer for the families of the disappeared. But that was never going to happen.

The team had warned the Holy Father not to step out onto the balcony with Pinochet, but he paid no attention. The Polish Pope was, perhaps, insensitive to the finer points of local politics, but he was no fool. He wanted to send precisely the message that the local church wanted him not to send. The balcony at La Moneda was the emblematic spot from which Presidents had addressed the crowds for a hundred years, the place where illustrious visitors were welcomed and presented to the cheering crowd. The photo of the Pope on that balcony with Augusto Pinochet traveled around the world, communicating his moral support for the dictatorship and all of its excesses.

John Paul II and Pinochet on the balcony of La Moneda, Chile's presidential building — John Paul II and Pinochet on the balcony of La Moneda, Chile’s presidential building (by Marco Ugarte/AFP/Getty)

In December of ’79, Oscar Romero made a trip to Rome to speak with the Pope about priests who had been murdered in El Salvador. When the Holy Father discovered what the meeting was to be about, he canceled it. So, the Archbishop approached the Holy Father at a general audience to insist. It was his right as archbishop. The Pope finally received him. Romero showed the Holy Father pictures of a young priest who had been murdered by military death squads. His Holiness asked if perhaps that man was not also a guerilla fighter, assuming, in all is majestic infallibility, that if those brave soldiers had killed him, that he must have deserved it.

It was not a friendly meeting. The Holy Father ordered Monseñor Romero to strengthen the ties between the Church and the Salvadoran dictatorship. He said that Romero should see to the sacramental needs of Roberto D’Aubuisson his family because, in spite of what the Archbishop might think of D’Aubuisson’s regime, the Holy Father had heard from his trusted sources that the Salvadoran dictator was a practicing Catholic.

Óscar Arnulfo Romero with Pope John Paul II (via Wikipedia)

Within three months, Oscar Romero had been assassinated. It happened as he was celebrating Mass. The Vatican was silent. The authorities refused to recognize that he was a martyr. John Paul was the absolute authority in the Roman Catholic Church for 27 years, ten more than the rule of Pinochet. In that time, the Church lost all the credibility that it had earned on the street, with blood and sweat, after the Council, among the poor.

If the Holy Father had publicly shown some support for the Archbishop, if it had become clear to Roberto D’Aubuisson and his death squads in El Salvador that the Holy Father and all his cardinals in Rome would not tolerate the spilt blood of archbishops, they never would have touched him. Roberto D’Aubuisson was no fool. The cost would have outweighed the benefit. As it was, it seemed as if the death squads were doing the Holy Father a favor. Just like back in the good old days of excommunications, recantations, public beheadings and witch burnings.

Monseñor Romero had not always been a champion of the poor and oppressed. He was, in fact, quite a conservative young churchman, very orthodox in every way. He was comfortable in the old system; strict in his observances and rigorous in his demeanor. That was probably why he was chosen to be the Archbishop.

He became the shepherd of a fractured country. El Salvador in the ’70s was as tormented as it was tiny. He spoke to mothers who had lost their sons. He presided at the funerals of the young men executed in the street. He consoled the survivors of torture.

Then, they murdered his friend, a country priest. Father Rutilio Grande had served the poor. For Oscar Romero, that was the last straw. He wrote letters to President Carter, begging him, send no more weapons. They are killing my people. The US had a long tradition of bankrolling assaults on poor people. It was Standard Operating Procedure.

Romero asked the Holy Father for protection. The Holy Father directed him to embrace the authoritarian state. Roberto D’Aubuisson was still a young man. He liked to personally go on patrol with his death squads, to feel the thrill of squeezing off a few rounds and watching his victims bleed out. The Pope didn’t understand that. Or maybe he did. Maybe he thought it was a good thing. Maybe he really believed that D’Aubuisson was a local hero, a man to be honored, blessed and congratulated.

The Archbishop was gunned down while celebrating Mass. Time Magazine said that as he raised the chalice, the bullets hit him in the chest, that his blood mixed with the blood of Christ on the church floor. That’s not true. He was preaching. They killed him for what he said. For insisting that the massacre of the Salvadoran people had to stop.

A woman carries a photo of Romero as she walks through a crowd of mourners — El Salvador mourns the assassination of Óscar Romero (by Harry Mattison via International Center of Photography)

That was March of 1980. It was a cool morning in Peñalolén when we heard the news on Radio Cooperativa. We had only been there about six months, and we were just beginning to understand what it meant to live in the shadow of a regime that had no qualms about killing its own. The Archbishop of El Salvador has died, they said. Like Thomas à Becket. After that, we knew that the Promised Land would not come cheaply, that it would cost everything we had.

There were good reasons to become a revolutionary, comrade. Winning or losing was not really the issue anymore. It’s just that we could no longer continue down the road we had been walking. Our new pilgrimage would have to take another path. Wherever it led us, that was where we would go, romeros in search of a saint we could believe in.

More From Nathan Stone:

José and His Brothers

Three-year-olds on the world stage

Underground Santiago: Sweet Waters Grown Salty

Related materials by Nathan Stone:

Taller: ¿Noticia, Opinión, o Propaganda?

15 Minute History – History of Sexual Orientation Conversion Therapy in the U.S.

Guest: Dr. Chris Babits, Andrew W. Mellon Engaged Scholar Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow

Host: Christopher Rose, Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute for Historical Studies

Sexual orientation conversion therapy, the attempt to change one’s sexual orientation through psychological or therapeutic practice, has now been banned in 17 American states and the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, three Canadian provinces, one state in Australia and several nations in Latin America, Europe, and Asia. Beyond the merits of sexual orientation conversion therapy as a medical practice, however, lies a social importance of what the practice represents for a segment of American society.

Today’s guest, Chris Babits, is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, where he researches the history of the practice and why so many people still support it, even in the face of opposition from medical and psychological professionals.

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Remembering the Tex-Son Strike: Legacies of Latina-led Labor Activism in San Antonio, Texas

By Micaela Valadez

The year 2019 marks the 60th anniversary of the Tex-Son strike, a major labor battle waged in San Antonio, Texas from 1959 to 1963 by mostly Mexican, Mexican-American, and some Anglo women all of whom were active members of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) Local 180. This strike is important for the history of Mexican Americans, women, and labor organization because it bridged the two other major moments for Mexican and Mexican American labor activism: the Pecan Shellers strike in San Antonio during the 1930s and the other Farah strike of the 1970s in El Paso. Little is known about labor activism strategies of marginalized women in the Southwest during the period in between these two infamous labor organizing efforts. The Tex-Son strike unveils what working women did to advocate for their needs on the garment factory floor during the Cold War period, especially in a historically anti-labor, anti-union state.

Black and white image of two women carrying picket signs, Tex-Son "On Strike" for Local 180, ILGWU, San Antonio, 1963 — Two women carrying picket signs, Tex-Son “On Strike” for Local 180, ILGWU, San Antonio, 1963 (via UTA Libraries)

The Tex-Son strike was organized by the ILGWU, affiliated for most of its existence with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and then the AFL-CIO when the AFL merged with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1955. By the mid-1930s, most of the garment industry moved to the Southwest as the region offered a low-cost labor pool of Black and Latinx workers. This industry transition proved to be complicated for the ILGWU as the union sent Anglo men with little experience in Spanish-speaking communities to represent workers in the Southwest. Eventually, the ILGWU maintained a presence in large cities in Texas, including San Antonio.

San Antonio was home to one of the largest populations of ethnically Mexican people in the United States, which the garment industry exploited for some of the lowest wages in the country. Many working-class ethnically Mexican women in San Antonio were able to obtain positions in the defense industry during WWII, but afterwards were left with slim options besides factory jobs. Tex-Son, owned by brothers Harold and Emanuel Franzel, employed both Anglo and Mexican American women, but were actively outsourcing work to Tupelo, Mississippi where Black women made up a lucrative labor force. In response to an uptick in union membership among Tex-Son workers by the ILGWU, the Franzels produced anti-union literature and warned their workers against signing any union agreements in the fall of 1958, before the strike began. In response, the ILGWU Negotiating Committee sent demands to the Franzels which included better wages and benefits among others.

The work of Gregoria Montalbo was essential to building momentum for the strike. An organizer from Chicago, her main job was to explain to hopeful recruits about the benefits and necessity of a strike against Tex-Son. Montalbo’s role as the president of Local 180 was focused on recruitment prior to the strike as well as working to gain support from San Antonio’s clergy during the strike, appealing to the many workers who were members of Catholic congregations in the city. One of the most committed clergy supporters was Father Sherrill Smith who agreed with Local 180 that San Antonio needed unions in order to create a more equitable work environment for everyone. He played a key role on the picket line and going door to door to recruit more people to join the strike.

The Tex-Son strike was the first to use an ILGWU Chicana lead organizer, Sophie Gonzalez, who became the face of the Tex-Son strike. Gonzalez began union organizing in 1949 after her brother, a union organizer for the Amalgamated Meatcutters and Butchers of America Union, encouraged her to accept a position in the ILGWU. Her presence in local newspapers and on the picket line was an integral piece of the ILGWU’s strategy. She maintained a certain physical appearance that portrayed her respectability as a woman but remained fierce in her communication of worker’s demands to the media and locals.

The very first week of the strike was the most tumultuous in terms of physical altercations between the women and allies on strike, the women who continued to work throughout the strike, and the police. On February 26^th and 27^th, the women on strike, angered by scab workers being escorted in and out of the factory, began throwing eggs and rocks at strike breakers and getting in physical altercations. The police charged the strikers with rioting and drunkenness, however there was not sufficient evidence to prove that any of the strikers were inebriated while on the picket lines.

Black and white image of Helen Martinez and her four children in San Antonio, Texas — Helen Martinez and her four children, San Antonio (via UTA Libraries)

The ILGWU also engaged in a propaganda campaign to accompany the strike and boycott of Tex-Son goods. This campaign exploited the dominant ideology of the time about motherhood instead of on the women’s role as economic providers. In doing so, they produced materials such as reproducing checks given to Tex-Son employees next to pictures of their children, effectively communicating the inability to care for a family on such dismal paychecks. Even children participated by handing out balloons to other children entering surrounding department stores with “Don’t Buy Tex-Son Children’s Clothes,” imprinted on them. These tactics, however, were detrimental to the image of strikers as workers, not just mothers.

In the first year of the strike, the ILGWU women gained support from other local unions, such as the International Union of Brewery Workers, and other male supporters who assisted in picket line activities. However, the daily hardships that came along with picketing wore down many of the women who originally joined the strike. Many were forced to seek out other kinds of employment, especially after being blacklisted by Tex-Son, barring them from working at other garment factories. By September 1960, ILGWU strikers began to fear that their leadership was giving up on them, which eventually came to fruition when two months later, the small benefit checks from ILGWU stopped entirely and Gonzalez and other union leaders pulled out of the strike entirely. After appeals from people like County Commissioner Albert Peña Jr., the AFL-CIO office in Washington, D.C. agreed to continue to fund the remaining 80 women on the picket line. However, morale was already low and a few women complained that Gonzalez’s absence hurt the propaganda strategy. Others, however, complained that her leadership style and charges of opportunism hurt the strike from the very beginning. Ultimately, the strike lost its fervor due to continued violence perpetrated on the women and general distrust and lack of enthusiasm and financial support. By the end of 1962 the ILGWU pulled out of San Antonio altogether. On January 24, 1963, only eleven women were left on the last day at the picket line.

Black and white image of brewer workers supporting Tex-Son strikes — Brewer workers supporting Tex-Son strikes (via UTA Libraries)

The consequences of an unsuccessful strike were clearly visible; after the ILGWU pulled out of San Antonio, unionism in the city remained practically absent. Many factories began to mock Tex-Son’s strategy of outsourcing work to the Deep South and across the U.S.-Mexico border. However, the Tex-Son strike is an important episode in the history of ethnically Mexican women’s Cold War era strategies to gaining labor rights for themselves. Blending public and private spheres by challenging the public to support their fight as mothers making ends meet for their families, the women presented locals with a new idea of women’s roles in the realm of labor. The Tex-Son strike also served as a primer of sorts for Texas Chicano Movement activism in the late 60s and early 70s that began to appeal to Chicanas’ racial and ethnic identity and oppression, rather than solely on gender identity and motherhood.

In addition to the historical importance, the strike also connects with current issues such as the recent Mississippi ICE raids at a poultry processing plant. Many observers suggest that the workers were targeted specifically because they successfully unionized and won a law suit against Koch Foods for $3.75 million over sexual harassment, national origin and race discrimination, and retaliation against Latinx workers. Although there are obvious differences between these two events, there are some salient congruencies. Both involved gendered discrimination and discrimination based on race and ethnicity. More obvious though, is the constant threats of violence that Latinx workers face then and today and their vulnerable position in exploitative labor relations. The Tex-Son strike and the unionization of the Mississippi poultry plant both ended in victory and defeat causing families to be uprooted and the loss of important sources of income. The immigrants detained by ICE are facing some of the most horrid conditions in detention and the women of the Tex-Son strike were beaten and chastised on the picket line. As different as the consequences of each are, the women involved share unsatisfactory and even dangerous work conditions alongside gender, ethnic, and national origin discrimination.

Sixty years after the beginning of the Tex-Son strike, Latinx people in the U.S. are still a major source of cheap labor and a punching bag for anti-union and anti-immigrant sentiments. Fortunately, strong labor activist roots for Latinx peoples of all nationalities and races still remain at the core of obtaining equitable working conditions. The Tex-Son strike of 1959, among others throughout the hemisphere, should be remembered as a foundation and lesson for labor activists today as anti-immigrant rhetoric is spewed from the highest bodies of government here and abroad.

This article draws on the following sources:

Lori Flores, “An Unladylike Strike Fashionably Clothed: Mexicana and Anglo Women Garment Workers Against Tex-Son, 1959-1963. Pacific Historical Review. 78, no. 3 (August 2009), 367-402.

Irene Ledesma, “Texas Newspapers and Chicana Workers’ Activism, 1919-1974. Western Historical Quarterly, 27, no. 3 (1995), 309-331

Vicki Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. 10^th Anniversary Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

15 Minute History – The Case for Women’s History

Guests: Ellen Hartigan O’Connor and Lisa Materson, Professors of History at the University of California, Davis

Host: Christopher Rose, Institute for Historical Studies, Department of History, UT-Austin

In the spring of 2019, a widely circulated column assailed the field of history for being too “esoteric,” in particular calling out subfields like women’s and gender studies. The executive director of the American Historical Association, Jim Grossman, wrote a response suggesting that the critic should have talked to actual historians about why fields that may seem esoteric are actually very valuable. Today’s guests are the editors of the Oxford Handbook of American Women’s and Gender History.

Ellen Hartigan O’Connor and Lisa Materson, both professors of history at the University of California, Davis, join us to discuss the field of women’s studies, which as they’ve argued in the introduction to the book, is not an esoteric topic at all, but actually quite critical to our understanding of American history.

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