Alina Scott, Author at Not Even Past

When Ghost Towns Lack Ghosts

By Jesse Ritner

Passing Red Hill, we turned onto Colorado Route 133. Ahead of us towered Mount Sopris, an almost 13,000 foot volcano. 133 shoots towards the Elk Mountain Range, a row of peaks frequently topping 12,000 feet, but Sopris still looks immense in comparison. Casting its shadow over the quaint town of Carbondale, it sits alone, topped with scree and rock glacier, strikingly grey in a valley dominated by reddish cliffs, aspens, fir, and spruce. For those in the Roaring Fork Valley, hiking Sopris is a right of passage. It is steep, exposed, and offers sweeping views. But we were not driving to Sopris, we were heading around it.

*Figure 1 Sign pointing the way to the ghost town of Crystal, Figure 2 Mount Sopris (Photo by author.)*

The Roaring Fork Valley is one of the most popular tourist spots in the country. At its northern end (down valley) sits Glenwood Springs, an old resort town which has sprawled out from its century old hotel and bathhouse. On the southern end lies the exclusive town of Aspen (up valley), where million dollar houses and multi-million dollar mansions nestle themselves into the small box canyon at the base of the world famous ski resort. For its part, Carbondale and its dormant volcano lie roughly between the two.

Carbondale is in the widest part of the Roaring Fork Valley, but behind Sopris lies a narrow stretch of road which runs alongside the perfectly clear Crystal River. So far unscathed by the wildfires which have blistered the state in recent years, Route 133 leads to a number of small mining towns. Hidden in the narrow valleys of the Rocky Mountains, these old towns and ghost towns litter the national forests which cover much of Colorado State. They once sat on the ends of a maze-like rail system that brought their wares from the scraggly valleys, out to larger valleys, like the Roaring Fork, and back east towards Denver, where their precious metals were distributed to distant parts of what is now the continental 48. But with time, these trainlines disappeared.

Today what remains behind Sopris is a winding road, taking up the little remaining space between the Crystal River and the tall mountains it weaves through. Carbondale, Redstone, and the town of Marble, which sit alongside the river, are all places to see as much as they are places to live, and all are named for the materials they mined.

*Figure 3 Hayes Creek Falls sits along 133, halfway between Redstone and Marble. Photo by author.*

We were going to a now uninhabited town. Marble is 28 miles down 133. In a tiny valley, with a population of around 100 people, the small houses feel isolated and alone. The town lays on a large deposit of sparkling white marble utilized in monuments throughout the country. (The most famous of these are the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. and the Tombs of the Unknown in the National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia.) Marble was reborn in the late twentieth-century with summer tourism, sculpting symposiums, and as a hub for backcountry skiing. We drove through the little town, were we saw shiny white statues strewn around, and small art galleries selling the unique sculptures made by local artists. Marble is small, but it is also full. Life continues and adapts, and the town, in its peculiar way, seems to thrive. But the small town of Crystal, only five miles past Marble, suffered a different fate. Crystal, like many other sites in Colorado, is now known as a ghost town.

Crystal is famous for the Crystal Mill (also known as the Lost Horse Mill and the Sheep Mountain Powerhouse). Photos and paintings of the building dot the Roaring Fork Valley, adorning the walls of exclusive restaurants and unaffordable art galleries in Aspen. But its location is a bit more mysterious. Most people who visit the resort never make their way to the town, preferring the closer locations of Independence and Ashcroft, which each sit a short fifteen minute drive from downtown.

Figure 4 A partially rebuilt cabin at Independence Ghost Town (Photo by Author)

For those seeking ghosts, the decision makes sense. In Ashcroft and Independence the Aspen Historical Society has spent decades carefully preserving ruins. The towns feature wooden footprints, and semi-rebuilt houses and hotels, all of which are carefully crafted and preserved to appear as if they are still in a state of disrepair. These towns are meant to educate the general public, and they reflect this goal in their signage. Little plaques share facts about the often shockingly large size of these boomtowns at their peak, the multiple newspapers each housed, and the impressive amount of wages spent on alcohol. The plaques also feature other forms of information. They explain the environmental impacts of mining and ranching, the current attempts to revive lost or disappearing species, and what can best be described as fun-facts about Ute Indians.

*Figure 5. Here you can see the back of an old hotel at Ashcroft. The building has been largely rebuilt to resemble its original size and design. (Photo used with permission from Cathryn Rosen.)*

There is no mention of violence in this selective retellings. While the informational readings at times allude to drunken brawls and crowded jailhouses, Indigenous removal, collapsed mines, and racial violence all seem to pass unnoticed. The ghost towns lack agency and they lack historical actors. It is as though the entire towns were imagined in the passive voice, sitting quietly as national and global changes exerted their will on the rotted wood, rusted metal, and the ghosts of people who presumably wander their streets at night. Of course, that is the purpose of a ghost town. They serve as passive observers of the present, from a past we cannot completely know.

Figure 6 A photo of Independence Ghost Town from Independence Pass. Below you can see some rebuilt buildings in the center, as well as some partial reconstructed buildings to the right. (Photo used with permission of Cathryn Rosen.)

We had already visited Ashcroft and Independence, but our trip to Crystal was different. First and foremost, it is difficult to drive to Crystal. With an ATV or a high clearance vehicle you can slowly make your way up the rocky dirt road which begins on the edge Marble. But my Subaru Crosstreck was not up to the challenge. So, we parked, and we walked. The first mile or so ascends almost 1,000 feet, but the views are worth it. For those of us who crave the narrow valleys and steep accents of the Rocky Mountains, the views of aspens and the soft rapids of the crystal river, today as they did one-hundred-and-fifty years ago, offer stunning views. That settler-colonists moved into this remote part of the country felt increasingly reasonable as we made our way down the bumpy and winding road. After about three hours of hiking, the road made its final curve to the left, and as we came around the bend the mill emerged in front of us, only about fifty yards away.

Figure 7 Crystal Mill, where it sits above the Crystal River. Both deteriorating and well preserved, its precarity gives it a character that is distinct from the other buildings in ghost towns nearby. (Photo by author.)

Although it is a ghost town, Crystal was never truly abandoned. Several people still live there every summer, preserving some buildings and giving the town life. It was first settled in the 1860s almost 20 years before the White River War removed the Ute from the Region. And in 1880, following the war, it was finally legally incorporated. Like many others, Crystal sat near rich deposits of silver, lead, and zinc. But it was always small. At its height it only boasted 500 people, making it much smaller than Ashcroft and Independence, which each housed over a 1,000 people. The town was always difficult to access. In fact, it was so remote that without Norwegian snowshoes (skis) it was almost impossible to reach in the winter, when deep snows covered the roads to Marble and Crested Butte.

Notably, the town of Crystal feels different than Independence or Ashcroft. And much of that feeling comes from the mill. The mill perches precariously on a low bluff overlooking the Crystal River. From the way it sits, the wooden building appears to be a strong wind away from toppling down into the water below. But it also broadcasts a type of strength. Unlike Ashcroft and Independence, with their well-preserved deterioration, the mill is strong, built on thick timber, and clearly built to last. Which, of course, it has done. Where Independence and Ashcroft are largely in ruins, the wooden mill and the town preserved behind it are relatively unscathed. The mill is an entity in and of itself. It has no need for the town. With its horizontal turbine, which once drove air compressors for machinery at the nearby mines, the mill struck us unlike anything else we had seen.

The mill, and the town of Crystal which sits just around the bend, are unique, in that they are privately owned. The result is a town without any signage. Neither plaques or boards claim to know the history or present the truth. Instead, the mill just sits, posing for onlookers like us who gawked at this quietly celebrated gem. While Ashcroft and Independence haunt, Crystal and the mill invited us in. Rather than imagining past people wandering the street – it only has one street these days – we saw beautiful log cabins which stood proud, strong, and ready to be lived in.

Figure 8 Houses like this still stand in Crystal. With glass paned windows and filled with modern amenities, a number of residents summer in these cabins, while others are rented out on Airbnb. (Photo from the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress.)

It is almost a truism in historic preservation that the best way to preserve a building is to use it. While buildings wear and tear, frequent use allows people to see the deterioration, and to fix it and adapt to it. These buildings are cyborgs. The old parts are replaced with new ones, and the materials are occasionally discarded for newer – “better” – technologies. In this way, they are not much different than people in a sci-fi flick, where eyes are metal and arms turn magically into weapons. But these buildings are full of life. They are not simply observers. These buildings live, they breath, and as a result, the town feels alive, free from the ghost that haunt nearby towns.

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.

15 Minute History – Environmental Justice and Indigenous History

Guest: Dina Gilio-Whitaker, (Colville Confederated Tribes) Lecturer of American Indian Studies at California State University San Marcos

Host: Alina Scott, Ph.D. Student, Department of History, University of Texas at Austin

In the Spring of 2016, protests concerning the Dakota Access Pipeline dominated national headlines. For many people, it was the first time they’d thought about the relationship between Indigenous peoples and environmental justice. However, what occurred at Standing Rock and the #NoDAPL movement was part of a long history of Indigenous resistance and protest. In today’s episode, Dina Gilio-Whitaker describes the importance of those events and how they are connected to other movements, past and present. Her most recent book, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock, Gilio-Whitaker (a citizen of the Colville Confederated Tribes) explores this history through the lens of “Indigenized Environmental Justice” through the ” fraught history of treaty violations, struggles for food and water security, and protection of sacred sites while highlighting the important leadership of Indigenous women in this centuries-long struggle.”

Resources:

Episode 125: Environmental Justice and Indigenous History

Listen to more 15 Minute History

A Black Jurist in a Slave Society: Antonio Pereira Rebouças and the Trials of Brazilian Citizenship, translated by Kristin M. McGuire (2019)

by Rodrigo Salido Moulinié

Like Borges, he spent his last years in a strange solitude: blind, dictating his last words. A life split between the practice of law and politics in nineteenth-century Brazil ended with a taste of failure and defeat—yet a life worth revisiting. Antonio Pereira Rebouças, the youngest child of nine, was born in Maragogipe, Brazil, in 1798. A mulatto born from a white Portuguese father and a free Black Brazilian mother, he benefited from his military participation in the struggle for Independence and rose to high levels in the intertwined, yet separated worlds of law and politics. Rebouças became a self-taught lawyer and a provocative politician despite the hindrance of his race in a slave society. His explanation of how this could happen would be, at the same time, his greatest achievement and the reason of his subsequent failures. “Race,” for Rebouças, did not matter, or at least it should not matter more than order, property, and the law.

In A Black Jurist in a Slave Society, Keila Grinberg traces the life and works of Rebouças to explore how race, slavery, law, and politics worked in the complex, ever-changing context of early independent Brazil, and how they shaped ideas of law, citizenship, and liberalism. But Grinberg did not write a biography. She anchors her analysis in the life of Rebouças, his work as a congressperson and as a practicing lawyer in freedom trials (legal procedures where the concepts of freedom and property clashed) through his memoirs, court cases, and recorded speeches, while situating this in broader historiographical discussions of nineteenth-century Brazil. Rebouças’ work guides Grinberg through this clash when it took wider meanings in discussions on citizenship and liberalism, political and civil rights.

Race always played a role in shaping the outcomes in the life of Rebouças. Being mulatto restricted him from dinners and political positions; it raised suspicion and created endless rumors of resistance and rebellion he spent years trying to shut down. The specter of black violence followed him for the rest of his life. Yet Rebouças refused to put race at the center of his legal thinking and politics. Property and work belonged to no one, and as long as enslaved people and racialized bodies could rise to the top through effort and planning as he did, there was no reason to introduce it explicitly as part of the legal framework. In Rebouças’ mind, slavery did not entail an immoral, unacceptable system as long as anyone could overcome it. “Any pardo or preto can be a general,” he stated once, disregarding a world where it would be more difficult for them than from anyone else.

“O Sr. Antonio Pereira Rebouças,” O Novo Mundo: Periodico Illustrado do Progresso da Edade, February 1875

As Grinberg shows, Rebouças was not alone. In many ways—and sometimes against his will—Rebouças became a model for racialized figures in post-Independence Brazil. Formally a moderate speaker, legally a conservative thinker, his stances and ideas yield a striking portrait only when compared to renowned North American black intellectuals such as Frederick Douglass, who struggled and wrote for their collective freedom. Rebouças, in contrast, embraced the world he lived in and tried to change it via the mechanisms built into the system: law, politics, and the press. Like Borges, he lived the apparently contradictory life of a man of letters who is politically conservative. An avid reader and writer, he could not concede the structural difficulties others suffered. Yet, once put in context, it eventually makes sense. There lies the contribution of A Black Jurist in a Slave Society: to portray a man and his work as a product of his time.

Emma Goldman’s New Declaration of Independence (1909)

The Founding Fathers have been getting a lot of attention lately with the release of Hamilton on Disney Plus and the Pulitzer Prize being awarded to the director of the New York Times’ 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones. Among other issues, many posts online have called the Founding Fathers to task for their views on slavery. Historians have criticized Hamilton for scrubbing their records clean by portraying them as “young, scrappy, and hungry” immigrants in search of the American Dream;[1] alternatively, Hannah-Jones argues that independence was fought solely in the interest of maintaining slavery. [2] The question comes down to whether or not the Founders’ intentions were universally emancipatory or if their language of equality was a justification for taking control of profits from the colonial economy.

Returning to the Declaration of Independence may be instructive in examining this contradiction. The second paragraph, beginning with its most memorable lines, reads,

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect [sic] their Safety and Happiness.[3]

The paragraph can be read as a bold defense of people everywhere to rise up against tyranny when their rights have been violated, but some have pointed out that the three-fifths compromise, enshrined in the Constitution only a decade after its creation, contradicts the universalism of the statement “all men are created equal.”[4] Others have argued that the Constitution as it was originally written already protected slavery through its defense of private property. As historian David Waldstreicher writes, “The refusal to mention slavery as property or anything else in the Constitution means something. But what it meant was embarrassment—and damage control.”[5]

Print shows a female figure representing “History” directing George Washington, Nathanael Greene, and Alexander Hamilton up a steep mountain roadway toward the Temple of Fame via Library of Congress

We don’t have to exonerate the Founding Fathers of their racism, sexism, or elitism, however, to reclaim the universality of their avowed commitment to “equality.” In fact, Emma Goldman already did precisely this in 1909. In her “New Declaration of Independence,” published in the journal she edited, Mother Earth, Goldman uses the language of the Founders’ text to subvert its original meaning and call for the abolition of the American government. She rewrote their famous lines to read:

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all human beings, irrespective of race, color, or sex, are born with the equal right to share at the table of life; that to secure this right, there must be established among men economic, social, and political freedom; we hold further that government exists but to maintain special privilege and property rights; that it coerces man into submission and therefore robs him of dignity, self-respect, and life.[6]

Whereas the Founding Fathers attribute the guarantee of rights to the founding of governments, Goldman argues that governments exist only to enshrine special privileges in the law for the ruling class. In contrast to the Founders, who argued consent to be governed is given in exchange for the protection of certain unalienable rights, Goldman argues that the government robs the people of their rights.

Emma Goldman was a Russian-born political activist who immigrated to the United States in 1885 and landed in New York City, where she became involved in the progressive movement. She was famous for her advocacy of violence as a means of revolutionary upheaval, but she was not involved in the assassination of President William McKinley, in which she was implicated. Ultimately, in 1919, however, she was deported by the American government for her activism, along with other socialists, communists, and anarchists, and was sent back to the Soviet Union, where she soon became disillusioned with what she saw as the Bolsheviks’ authoritarianism. She spent the rest of her life travelling and lecturing throughout Europe and North America and also getting involved in the anarchist government in Spain during the Civil War. In addition to being known as an anarchist agitator, she was an early crusader for birth control and “free love,” believing people should be able to decide who and how they love without the involvement of the church or state.[7]

In the first two paragraphs of her New Declaration, she picks up on the “libertarian”[8] ethos of the original document by writing,

When, in the course of human development, existing institutions prove inadequate to the needs of man, when they serve merely to enslave, rob, and oppress mankind, the people have the eternal right to rebel against, and overthrow, these institutions.

The mere fact that these forces — inimical to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — are legalized by statute laws, sanctified by divine rights, and enforced by political power, in no way justifies their continued existence.

She goes on to describe the various ways in which the “American kings of capital” have committed crimes against the American people deserving of rebellion:

The history of the American kings of capital and authority is the history of repeated crimes, injustice, oppression, outrage, and abuse, all aiming at the suppression of individual liberties and the exploitation of the people. A vast country, rich enough to supply all her children with all possible comforts, and insure well-being to all, is in the hands of a few, while the nameless millions are at the mercy of ruthless wealth gatherers, unscrupulous lawmakers, and corrupt politicians.

In this paragraph, she points to the hypocrisy of such a rich nation denying the majority of its citizens the produce of their labor, instead hoarding it all in the pockets of an elite minority. This statement aligns her with the Occupy Wall Street movement’s critique of the 1% today. Both then and now, economic disparity has been great, as the economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman demonstrate in their article on the history of wealth inequality in the US.[9] Goldman’s text continues,

Sturdy sons of America are forced to tramp the country in a fruitless search for bread, and many of her daughters are driven into the street, while thousands of tender children are daily sacrificed on the altar of Mammon. The reign of these kings is holding mankind in slavery, perpetuating poverty and disease, maintaining crime and corruption; it is fettering the spirit of liberty, throttling the voice of justice, and degrading and oppressing humanity. It is engaged in continual war and slaughter, devastating the country and destroying the best and finest qualities of man; it nurtures superstition and ignorance, sows prejudice and strife, and turns the human family into a camp of Ishmaelites.

In the Bible, Ishmael was Abraham’s son with his wife Sarah’s Egyptian servant, Hagar. Sarah eventually told Abraham to cast Ishmael and his mother out into the desert where they nearly starved to death before God saved them. The “camp of Ishmaelites” Goldman is referring to are, therefore, people cast out by the powerful and made to starve. She is comparing their situation with the present when she writes, “Sturdy sons of America are forced to tramp the country in a fruitless search for bread.” Such deprivation of resources, she argues, leads to the degradation and oppression of humanity, breeding superstition and ignorance, prejudice and strife.

Photographic portrait of Emma Goldman, facing left. Cropped and restored from original Library of Congress version (via Wikipedia)

In another striking similarity to the present, rising inequality has taken place alongside an increase in superstition and ignorance with the proliferation of conspiracy theories, skepticism of science, and belief in occult practices like tarot and astrology. The President himself encourages this kind of behavior as a way to pander to a class that sees itself as “cast out” by neoliberal policies into a post-industrial “desert” of unemployment and scarcity. While right wingers swallow hydroxychloroquine, millennials compulsively check their horoscopes.

We, therefore, the liberty-loving men and women, realizing the great injustice and brutality of this state of affairs, earnestly and boldly do hereby declare, That each and every individual is and ought to be free to own himself and to enjoy the full fruit of his labor; that man is absolved from all allegiance to the kings of authority and capital; that he has, by the very fact of his being, free access to the land and all means of production, and entire liberty of disposing of the fruits of his efforts; that each and every individual has the unquestionable and unabridgable right of free and voluntary association with other equally sovereign individuals for economic, political, social, and all other purposes, and that to achieve this end man must emancipate himself from the sacredness of property, the respect for man-made law, the fear of the Church, the cowardice of public opinion, the stupid arrogance of national, racial, religious, and sex superiority, and from the narrow puritanical conception of human life.

Here, she outlines her strategy for changing the present state of affairs through emancipation from private property, the law, religion, public opinion, national, racial, religious and sexual chauvinism, and puritanism in personal affairs, meaning, a tediously moral attitude toward one’s own conduct and relationships—Goldman is remembered for believing being a revolutionary does not mean one needs to become a nun, single-mindedly devoted to “the cause,” but that everyone has the right to freedom, self-expression, and “beautiful, radiant things.”[10]

In the above she also calls for the common ownership of the land, shared equally among all as a right derived from “the very fact of [one’s] existence.” The emphasis on existence here implies people are born with unalienable rights, not endowed with them by a “Creator.” In practice, the difference in derivation of rights may seem inconsequential, but, in fact, it goes to the very heart of Goldman’s political philosophy—anarchism recognizes no higher authority in life, whether God or the state, only the authority of one’s own conscience.

Unlike the original Declaration of Independence, Goldman’s text takes into consideration the racial and sexual prejudices of American society and their roots in capitalist exploitation. She demands not only freedom in the abstract but concrete economic, social, and political freedom. Without reference to God, she recognizes only the common inheritance of the land by each successive generation, making her text a proto-environmental statement as well. Her Declaration is a truly revolutionary one that seeks the liberty and equality of all, as opposed to the Founders’ one which sought only to establish an independent sovereignty in the colonies not subject to British rule and taxation.

[1] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/10/correcting-hamilton/

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/historians-clash-1619-project/604093/. See Hannah-Jones claim, “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery,” here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/black-history-american-democracy.html

[3] https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript

[4] The compromise was reached between North and South on the basis of representation in Congress, with slave-owning Southerners arguing for the personhood of slaves to boost representation, while the less agricultural North requested slaves not to be counted. See https://www.britannica.com/topic/three-fifths-compromise

[5] See Waldsteicher’s article in the The Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/how-the-constitution-was-indeed-pro-slavery/406288/), which was written as a rebuttal to Princeton historian Sean Wilentz’ defense of the Constitution in the New York Times. Wilentz also spearheaded the letter campaign to denounce Hannah-Jones’ framing of the American Revolution in the 1619 Project.

[6] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-a-new-declaration-of-independence

[7] https://www.britannica.com/biography/Emma-Goldman

[8] I use libertarian in the context of European political history, meaning a largely socialist and anti-authoritarian tradition, not the contemporary American usage, which implies a philosophy of total self-interest and contempt for government assistance to the poor.

[9] https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/131/2/519/2607097

[10] https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/goldman/Features/danceswithfeminists.html

Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale by Deborah R. Coen. (2018)

Climate science communication suffers from a problem of scale: how to accurately describe superhuman events without swallowing up local variations and human agency in the process. Climate in Motion offers a fascinating historical account of how scientists in the Austro-Hungarian Empire held local and global climate phenomenon in a productive tension. In so doing, it provides insights into translating massive systems into scales humans can more readily make sense of. Deborah Coen examines the Empire’s embrace of dynamic climatology — a phenomenon where scholars applied the physics of heat and fluid motion to make sense of the climate. This book is divided into three parts—all connected with the central theme of interweaving the global and local to grasp climate events.

(L->R) Anton Kerner, Emanuel Purkyně, Julius Hann

The first section examines the relationship of the Austrian state to scientific discovery generally and climate in particular. State-sponsored scientists like Anton Kerner, Emanuel Purkyně or Julius Hann dedicated themselves to the study of local perspectives as field scientists, synthesizing their work into a combined whole. As “civil servants,” their work joined with early collectors of species to exceed the scientific, establishing and justifying the rule of the Habsburg monarchy. For Coen, state-sponsored scientists saw themselves as bridges for the “Austrian problem” of containing various ethnic and culturally divided groups under one unified system. In this sense, the notion of unity-in-diversity as a Habsburg trope was applied to the varied Austrian climate itself.

The second section analyzes shifts in depictions of climate. Scientists translated abstract climate processes to the public by generating new climate maps, models of winds and cyclones as well as literary works that connected local experience to climatic systems. The overarching theme emphasized is an emerging sense that the climate is dynamic – connected with and sensitive to changes in local weather (e.g. storms). In contrast, previous models understood climate as static – regionally segregated, stable, and removed from local weather anomalies. This new framework saw contrasting and distinct climate regions as necessary counters in a larger Austrian climatic equilibrium (imagined to be a miniature of the world).

The third section examines “scaling” more explicitly, analyzing debates over deforestation, plants as local tools to map a larger climate history, and personal accounts of climate scientists. Finally, Coen tracks the rise of German-influenced scientific thinking in 1914 that distorted the Hapsburg account of environmental interconnectedness and dynamism in favor of an account that emphasized discrete and regional climates associated with their occupant’s placement on a cultural hierarchy. Coen argues that scaling as a process can re-orient how we represent and perceive the environment. This shifts consideration of environmental processes from either purely abstract or purely localized towards a deeper, more-than-human perspective that was as much emotional, desire-laden, and political as it was strictly scientific. For example, Coen examines autobiographical accounts of scientists that connected their scientific work on climatology with personal self-doubt, longing for home, homoerotic encounters, and an overwhelming sense of the natural sublime. Coen sees “scaling up” as a necessary shift in ethical perspective that recognizes the interconnectedness of humanity and natural forces (as represented in the interplay between climates, local environments, political and cultural divisions etc.) while also “zooming in” to account for seemingly insignificant “small” effects that combine to form that larger connection. In the conclusion, she puts this in tension with the IPCC’s disproportionate focus on the global North as the metric for climate devastation (much as Austrian weather stations pooled in Vienna or the Alps created evidential problems for understanding the climate of other regions).

*Postcard of Mountain Climbers in the Austrian Alps ca.1908. Source: Flickr*

This strength of this book lies in its rigorous analysis of the intimate connection between governmental problems (“The Austrian Idea” or deforestation legislation) and representations of emerging climate science that Coen connects to the present day. It is also the case that a potential weakness of this book is a light explanation of how scaling up can be applied as a practice to present-day global warming (as opposed to regionally specific deforestation). After finishing Climate in Motion,it is extremely clear that non-cognitive and embodied reactions ought to be considered integral to understanding phenomenon like climate change that appear on a superhuman scale. It is considerably less clear, however, how one might go about this recalibrating process or avoid engendering regressive climate responses. It seems likely that the German science Coen is critical of or modern day climate denial also rely on understanding climate through noncognitive sensations of loss, seductions of the exotic and a desire to return to a past home. Viewed as a whole, Climate in Motion offers a rich and fascinating account of the development of climate science in Austria. Historians of climate, the Austrian Empire or anyone curious about looking into the past to grasp the scale of modern climate change will find a compelling account with much to think about.

David Rooney is a Graduate student in Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Digital Archive Review: Latin American and Caribbean Digital Primary Resources

Open-access digital archives have become a crucial resource for humanities research. Online sources eliminate the costs and hassles of travel to and from the archives that preserve the actual documents. They also expand access, by granting students, scholars, teachers, and interested members of the public the opportunity to explore the sources themselves. To that end, many universities and libraries maintain online collections. However, some of these institutions occupy a more well known position than others. For example, their collections may appear more prominently on university websites or Google searches. To facilitate the localization of hundreds of valuable repositories on Latin American history around the world, the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Resources has organized a database.

Entitled Latin American & Caribbean Digital Primary Resources, it provides overviews, geographical, and temporal information on current collections. Each entry also has a direct link to the website housing its primary documents.

The above image is a screenshot of the “Map of Collections” tab, which demonstrates the relative number of resources available in each region. The large yellow circle over Cuba illustrates the high number of digital repositories available on this site.

Featured collections contain information on many regions of Latin America and range from the sixteenth through the twenty-first century. One example from Argentina is the Ramón de la Serna papers, formed from the personal drafts and photographs of the poet, novelist, and essayist Ramón Gómez de la Serna (1888-1963). The Caribbean section includes links to the Biblioteca Digital of the Dominican Republic. Portuguese-language documents are also available, such as the Diario de Pernambuco collections, a nineteenth and twentieth-century newspaper repository from Brazil.

The organization behind this project is the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American and Caribbean Digital Primary Resources. SALAM originated in 1956, and a team of librarians, archivists, book dealers, book professionals, scholars, and students continue to work towards its founding objectives. They include the “control and dissemination of bibliographic information about all types of Latin American, Caribbean, Iberian, and U.S. Latino publications” and the “promotion of cooperative efforts to achieve better library services.” The directors of SALAM first published the Latin American & Caribbean Digital Primary Resources in 2017. An underlying goal of the project was to provide a starting point for researchers. The homepage presents users with various options in their search for relevant online collections. For a user with broad interests, the homepage offers a full list of available digital repositories to peruse. By either hovering over any of the listed websites or clicking the “see data” option, users can access an overview of its contents, chronology, and topics.

*An example of the overview information available when users hover over a site that appears on the Collections List.*

Other browsing options include searching for resources by country or region. The database provides links to twenty-five different sites related to the history of Mexico, for example. For researchers interested in photographs or other non-textual sources, the site also allows users to identify digital collections by media type.

The datebase operates on an interface called Tableau, a data visualization creator. Using that format allows the team at SALAM to present their lists of digitized collections in multiple forms at once. Each of the functions (such as the search by region, or the list of websites based on media type) operates simultaneously in a different tab.

The Tableau format requires some getting used to. However, its design is generally user friendly, including features such as a back button to help new navigators find their way. SALAM has embedded the database into their website, but it functions best in its full-screen form.

Here, the “Collections List,” “Collection Content by Country,” and “Collections by Format/Genre” each function simultaneously in different ‘tabs.’ The download option appears in the bottom right corner, identified by the black arrow. (View here)

Utilizing Tableau presents several useful export options for search results. Every site included on this interface includes a direct link. However, for researchers compiling resources for future investigations, the platform allows downloads of search results. After locating promising digital collections, users can download the list of sites in a couple formats, including a .PNG or a .PDF. Results from any of the tabs are exportable.

The site’s commitment to increasing the visibility of online repositories is commendable, but so too is the site’s dedication to expanding the database. In addition to SALAM members’ contributions to the list of primary source repositories, the website encourages users to submit suggestions for new websites that should be added.

As a whole, the database serves the important goal of improving the accessibility of online libraries and archives. It provides a jumping off point for research into a variety of topics within Latin American history, and as it expands, its value will only increase. To further support its objectives, the site could aim to offer its overviews of the resources in multiple languages, instead of the mixed use of either only English or only Spanish.

Especially during times when travel to archives is not possible, databases like SALAM’s Latin American and Caribbean Digital Primary Resources are vital lifelines. This site compiles into a neat package resources that would otherwise have been scattered across the internet.

More by Brittany Erwin:

The Insecurity State: Punjab and the Making of Colonial Power in British India by Mark Condos (2017)

By Amina Marzouk Chouchene, PhD candidate, Manouba University

There has been a consistent recent interest in tracing the fragile nature of the British Empire. An increasing number of historians such as Richard Price, Kim Wagner, Harald Fisher-Tiné, and Jon Wilson have considered the precariousness of empire from different perspectives.[1] The ever-present threats of what was often called “going native,” the debilitating effects of heat, colonial rebellions and insurgencies, and the supposedly treacherous behavior of indigenous peoples were some of the concerns that triggered a sense of colonial vulnerability. Instead of focusing on the strength or successes of the British Empire, there is a now a new emphasis on its fragility. Marc Condos’s The Insecurity State confirms the findings of this impressive wave of research on the vulnerability of empire.

Condos’s book takes special interest in highlighting the precariousness of British rule in Punjab, which was widely viewed as a loyal and stable province. From the outset, Condos persuasively argues that “British colonial rule in India was a fundamentally anxious and insecure endeavor.” Most interesting, Condos suggests that “brute displays of power” like the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, “were actually manifestations of colonial weaknesses and vulnerability rather than strength” (3). This is a key argument in The Insecurity State. Yet the book does not seek only to understand the “logic” of colonial violence. It also examines the tense relationship between the empire’s commitment to the rule of law and the need to maintain its stability on the ground and how the institutions and mechanisms that were assumed to buttress colonial power became persistent sources of insecurity (18).

Condos deals with these questions in five thematic chapters. Chapter one is an overview of British rule in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries during which British colonial power in India was constantly challenged. The British fought, for instance, wars against Mughal successor states mainly the Marathas and the kingdom of Mysore.

“Assassination of Lord Mayo,” from ‘Cassel’s Illustrated History of India’, 1880 (Wikimedia Commons)

Chapter Two, deals with the Punjab government’s determined attempts to tame the “warlike” nature of Sikh soldiers after the demise of their empire through a series of schemes, which aimed to turn them into peaceful farmers. Following the Rebellion of 1857, the Sikhs were perceived to be loyal and were recruited by the Indian Army. Nevertheless, Condos clearly demonstrates, through a wide variety of primary sources including private papers, letters, personal memoirs, newspapers and periodicals, and contemporary monographs, that Punjab authorities were consistently anxious about the persistent threats of a Sikh rebellion. The rural unrest in response to the Colonization Bill commonly known as the Punjab disturbances of 1907 affirmed these fears. They “served as an indelible reminder to colonial officials of the perennially precarious situation which existed in India when even the most ‘loyal’ sections of Indian society could turn against them” (21).

Chapter Three considers the suppression of the “Kooka outbreak” and the extensive violence that accompanied it. The execution of 49 Sikh rebels and sixteen prisoners “by blowing them from the mouths of artillery guns” aroused considerable controversy. It brought to the fore the fraught relationship between the British ideal of the rule of law and the realities of empire where colonial officers’ transgressed laws in order to ensure the stability of the colonial regime (17).

The radicalization of colonial rule is much more evident in chapter four which explores the Murderous Outrages Act of 1867.This gave colonial officials enormous power to instantly execute those identified as so-called fanatics in Punjab. The final chapter discusses how the employment of Punjabi soldiers and policemen in Britain’s overseas empire provoked deep anxieties among British India’s officials. There were intense fears that the “popularity of overseas service” was weakening Indian Army amid widespread rumors that Punjabis were joining military service with imperial rivals such as the Germans and the Ottomans.

‘Unrest in Bengal’, Black & White, 13 July 1907 (via Mark Condos in The Historian).

Taken together the chapters counteract one of the enduring myths that British rule in India was “a powerful, confident, and nearly indomitable force” (10). Most importantly, Condos’s book offers a fresh perspective on the apparently contradictory relationship between a wider colonial sense of vulnerability and the persistent use of violence. While usually perceived as an obvious sign of imperial power and invincibility, colonial violence surfaces in The Insecurity State as the outcome of constant anxieties and insecurities. Although the book lacks a theoretical framework for defining the central concept of anxiety, which can be found for example in the work of Alan Hunt and Joanna Bourke, it is nonetheless highly valuable in providing us with a better understanding of the lived experience of empire.[2] It could also open up new avenues for future research on colonial violence and vulnerability in other imperial settings.

[1] See Richard Price, ‘The Psychology of Colonial Violence,’ in Dwyer P., Amanda Nettelbeck, eds. Violence, Colonialism, and Empire in the Modern World (Cham, Switzerland,2018)Kim Wagner, Amritsar 1919: an Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre (London,2019), Harald Fisher Tiné, Anxieties, Fear, and Panic in Colonial Settings: Empires on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Houndmills,2016), Jon Wilson, India Conquered: Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire (London, 2016)

[2] See Alan Hunt, ‘Anxiety and Social Explanation: Some Anxieties about Anxiety,’ Journal of Social History, vol.32,no.3,1999,pp.509-528, Joanna Bourke, Fear: a Cultural History (London,2005)

Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World by Ussama Makdisi (2019)

In his most recent book, Ussama Makdisi provides a more accurate account of sectarianism and coexistence in modern Arab history. In so doing, he repudiates two historical narratives. The first narrative, common in media headlines, claims that sectarian violence is inherent to the religious landscape of the region. The typical counter-argument – the second narrative – describes the region as one of unparalleled toleration, with a history of communal harmony. According to Makdisi, both narratives are politically motivated and false.

Makdisi approaches sectarianism in the modern Arab world by surveying its evolution from the early nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. He calls this period “the age of coexistence.” According to Makdisi, it was less an era of tolerance and harmony but one of persistent struggle for political inclusion. To better comprehend the age of coexistence, he also introduces a new term, the “ecumenical frame,” which he describes as the ongoing political project of valorizing coexistence and opposition to sectarianism. The ecumenical frame refers to three novel formulations: a body of thought that wrestled with secular political equality given the legacy of unequal Ottoman rule, a system of governance with traces of Islamic supremacy, and a legal order that balanced the constitutional secularity of its citizens with religiously segregated law. Makdisi argues that the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries witnessed the emergence of ecumenical thought amongst Arab Christians and Muslims alike.

Makdisi breaks the story of coexistence in the modern Arab world into two parts, beginning with its origins during the Ottoman nineteenth century. Opposed to the common narrative highlighting the tolerance of the Ottoman Empire, Makdisi focuses on its inherent contradictions. The empire distributed privileges to religious communities despite upholding the superiority of Muslim over non-Muslim. Ultimately, Ottoman imperial rule favored obedience and loyalty to the sultan, irrespective of religious, ethnic, or linguistic identity. The calculus of Ottoman rule was severely challenged during the mid-nineteenth century by European colonialism and missionary intrusion. The Ottoman government responded by issuing numerous initiatives called the Tanzimat reforms. Makdisi documents episodes of sectarian violence between Muslim and non-Muslim subjects that occurred under the tremendous stress of transition in the Tanzimat Era. He acknowledges the sectarianism of the eastern Mediterranean, culminating in the massacres of 1860, while locating the concurrent origins of the antisectarian ecumenical frame within the writings of nahda (renaissance) intellectuals like Butrus Al-Bustani. Amidst the violence of 1860, Bustani called for transcendence, reconciliation, and ulfa (concord, familiarity), instructing his readership to turn away from sectarian fanaticism and towards patriotism and shared national identity. Makdisi’s familiarity with the Ottoman nineteenth century allows him to pay proper attention to voices like Bustani. He argues with precision and erudition as he presents the violence of 1860, spurring the writings of Bustani, as the crucible of the ecumenical frame.

Makdisi then shifts attention from the Ottoman nineteenth century to European colonialism in the early twentieth century by presenting an innovative comparison between the development of the northern and southern regions of the Ottoman Empire. He first attends to the Ottoman north, the Balkans and Anatolia, where state violence rendered the potential of the ecumenical frame irrelevant. In a poignant example of the amplification of violence, Makdisi shows how in 1821, during the Greek War of Independence, the Ottoman government hung the Greek Orthodox patriarch as a warning for non-Muslim subjects of the empire. One century later, during the destruction of the Christian quarters of Izmir in 1922, Turkish nationalist forces killed the Greek Orthodox Bishop Chrysostomos, allowing the mob to mutilate his body. While the Ottomans sought to bring the Greeks back under their governance, the Turks sought their elimination. According to Makdisi, the draconian practices of the Ottoman (now Turkish) north were not replicated in the Ottoman south, otherwise known as al-Mashriq or Greater Syria, where the ecumenical frame developed between 1860 and 1914. Ottoman subjects in al-Mashriq mutually discouraged sectarianism, viewing it as a problem of ignorance, which culminated in an emphasis on national unity between Muslims and non-Muslims. By bifurcating the Ottoman north and south, claiming a distinct evolution of the ecumenical frame in each, Makdisi generalizes the history of the entire Ottoman Empire. The borderlands between Anatolia and Greater Syria were gradual, not stark. However, Makdisi’s strategic decision to sever the history of Greater Syria from the atrocities of Turkish nationalism in Anatolia extends Arab ecumenism beyond its Ottoman origins.

In the second half of the book, Makdisi sketches the development of the ecumenical frame from its Ottoman origins to its politicization within the nascent Arab nation-states. He initially contrasts the manifestations of political ecumenism in Lebanon and Iraq, focusing on the views of Michel Chiha and Sati‘ al-Husri. Chiha, one of the architects of the Lebanese constitution, worked closely with French colonial authority to craft a communalist political culture. Husri, a prominent Arab nationalist thinker in Iraq, advocated alternatively for a secular nationalist culture in opposition to British colonial authority. As Makdisi explains, both political visions, despite their differences, originated in the ecumenism of the late Ottoman Empire. Chiha and Husri sought to overcome sectarianism and political exclusivity in Lebanon and Iraq respectively. Nonetheless, their ecumenical efforts were derailed with the establishment of the state of Israel. While Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq witnessed the logical continuation of the Ottoman ecumenical frame, novel sectarian conflicts between Arabs and Jews altered the trajectory of Palestine. The events leading to the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948 created new ecumenical identities as Palestinian nationalism coalesced under the banner of anti-Zionism rather than religion, class, clan, or geography. Makdisi ends his work with a melancholic yet hopeful tone for the broken but ongoing project of ecumenism in al-Mashriq.

Makdisi excels throughout the book in outlining the logical evolution of the ecumenical frame without choreographing its inevitability. He crafts a powerful and timely response to misrepresentations of the Arab world, which haunt contemporary politics. In doing so, he achieves a rare feat by seamlessly bridging the historiographical divide between the late Ottoman Empire and modern Middle East. Readership within and outside of the academy will find this work useful as Makdisi’s ecumenical frame provides an empathetic and consequential perspective on the making of the modern Arab world.

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Radical Hope and Global Environmental History: Teaching with Erika Bsumek

In Spring 2021, Dr. Erika Bsumek will once again be teaching HIS 350L – Radical Hope and Global Environmental History, a course based on the highly successful Radical Hope Syllabus. The course description is as follows:

This class is a Global Classroom course. That means we will meet with students from Queens University in Belfast for at least 1 hour every other week. The idea for this course grew out of the Radical Hope Syllabus Project, which Dr. Barry (Queens University) and Dr. Erika Bsumek spearheaded. This course addresses the history of global environmental issues by using a customized version of the syllabus to introduce students to a cross-disciplinary approach in order to better understanding global environmental issues ranging from polluted air that hinders healthy living to the construction of mega-dams in the American Southwest to help with drought. Other topics will include, but are not limited to, a unit on poetry and the environment as well as an analysis of contemporary governance related to efforts to rebuild communities in Nepal after the devasting earthquake that hit there in 2015.

By and large, each section of the syllabus was designed by a scholar, activist, or artist who conducted original research or had first-hand experiences related to the issues they address. Students will read and analyze material from specific units on the syllabus, engage in cross-classroom discussions with their peers in Belfast, write papers, blog posts, and work in groups to create a new unit of the “radical hope” syllabus. As they work they will develop a timeline of a particular problem using ClioVis.org (digital timeline software developed here at UT) and come up with their own assessment of how the concept of Radical Hope can better help us understand global environmental history and the future of sustainability. Students will conduct individual research on a specific an area of interest to them and produce longer research project.

This course is designed around a key question: What is “radical hope” and how is it (or can it be) related to the environment, climate change, or the anthropocene? Students will examine different perspectives on radical hope from variety of individuals, from across the globe, and who represent different disciplines. They will explore and exchange ideas on that renewable and essential resource: hope. Hope is a resource that is often sadly, and noticeably, lacking in academic and popular conversations on the dominant framing of the anthropocene in terms of the overwhelming ecological crises, pragmatic pessimism, cognitive dissonance, climate denialism and scientific realism we face every day. The class will not simply offer soothing narratives of “techno-optimism” or support the idea that a slight “greening” of “business as usual” — overseen by various experts — will somehow see us through our current crisis. We are interested in pushing students to determine how the concept of hope can help us reframe contemporary discussions, and influence sustainability transformations.

Adding to the syllabus

Group Project Description: Students collaborate with their peers in Austin and in Belfast. Together they design a unit of the syllabus.

Students ask, “What’s missing from the syllabus?” The group will come up with a proposal to identify and address a gap in the syllabus. You will then, as a group, source a section of the syllabus to fill that gap. Each new unit must be built around a specific topic, include an introductory abstract to that unit, a definition of Radical Hope, and a list of resources that anyone wishing to learn more would utilize. (Students can also make an optional Cliovis Timeline related to your section of the syllabus that can be embedded in the website. Making these as a group will also help familiarize you with the software before your paper is due. ClioVis.org. You will need to work on this section with QU students prior to the end of their semester.)

Here are examples of some of the new units created by students last year.

Sustainable Computing: Reframing Our Relationship to Technology and the Environment

By Anushree Biradar, Aimun Khan, Lucy Li, and Annanya Chaturvedi

One of the defining features of the 21st century is our ever-growing reliance on technology. There were 4.39 billion Internet users in 2019, and that number is growing exponentially. As the Internet grows, so does its growing impact on our planet. For some, computation acts as a gateway to worlds that were not previously accessible. For others, it represents a rising fear of globalization and automation displacing their ability to work and earn a living...Analyzing our relationship to technology can also help give us insight into how our relationship to the environment has also changed over time. Historically, technology has been used as a force to further globalized capitalism’s expansion without regard for the environment. However, movements away from pure techno-optimism show that technology’s disruptive ability to challenge status quo ways of life can be repurposed towards more sustainable alternatives to hyper-consumerism.
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From Green Living to a Green Death

By Noe Godinez

We have yet to collectively live a better green life. While we have achieved some small steps towards this noble objective, we should not be confined to a tunnel vision focused solely on our actions during this life. We need to consider environmentally-friendly ways of being dead as well…There is a slow-growing movement for a more nature-friendly approach to burial. The goals of a green burial are to reduce or even eliminate the harmful practices or effects of current burials. Cremations are a primitive version of green burials. They do not require the harmful chemicals or resources of standard burials; however, they do rely on the burning of fossil fuels. While cremation is far from perfect, it goes to show we are capable of greener approaches to death.
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Inspiring Collective Action?

By Sarah Freytag, Aimee Morales, Amy Akins

Inspiration can only get us so far. For a novelist, inspiration provides the idea, but without the writer’s hands on the keys every day there is no novel. To achieve any goal, a combination of motive and follow-through are required—environmentalism is no exception to this rule. For this unit we asked how, in regard to protecting and sustaining the environment, we could progress from inspiring sympathy to inspiring action. What are the ingredients in a successful social and scientific movement? How does a movement inspire significant collective action? Does it appeal to a collective conscience or the conscience of every individual? What role do inspirational public figures in the media play, and do they spur on effective action? What can we do to participate in collective action? Because this is a unit of many questions and debates, our unit theme itself is not only a topic but an open challenge to think critically.
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Trendy Environmentalism

By Cameron Ayles, Ajah Davis, Sarah Roytek, and Taryn Shanes

Trendy environmentalism complicates the environmental narrative. Sustainable products have come onto the scene in recent years as ‘green’ and ‘ethical’ alternatives to the products all around us. Companies large and small promote their environmental image as a way to attract customers. The drive to adopt sustainable trends is thus, at least in part, rooted in a deeper interest in expanding the consumer base—a potentially troubling development for the environment at large…In order to truly induce tangible change, there must be a collective effort on the part of our designers, producers, investors, consumers, and politicians to stay true to environmental trends. From the straws through which we sip to the buildings we build, it is important for a product to respond to contemporary and future environmental and social needs, not just to private capital.
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Out of the Rubble: Doctors Strikes and State Repression in Guatemala’s Cold War

Medical professionals are often viewed as apolitical, but what happens when they come to challenge a government? On February 4th, 1976, a cataclysmic earthquake brought an embattled Guatemala to its knees. Amidst a raging civil war, the terremoto (earthquake) razed countless houses and killed roughly 21,000 people in just 39 seconds. Thousands more emerged from the rubble with serious injuries and over a million, disproportionately Mayas from rural regions, were left homeless.

As Kjell Laugerud García’s right-wing regime scrambled to rebuild critical infrastructure, the country’s crippled hospitals became inundated with a flood of patients. In the crisis’s aftermath, doctors and nurses grew increasingly embittered by the abysmal state of public hospitals and began to agitate for more rights.

*Guatemala City Terminal Hotel (Wikipedia)*

In August of 1976, public health care workers in Amatitlán organized a strike to demand salary increases along with better working conditions. These putatively middle-class physicians also insisted that their fellow employees, previously dismissed by the Public Health Ministry, be immediately restored to their posts. Contemporary news reports revealed that the government feared the prospect of solidarity between these urban workers and their rural counterparts. Such a history showcases how natural disasters can spur the middle-class into activism and threaten the established order.

As the health workers’ strike stretched into its third week, Agencia EFE published a lengthy speech by President Laugerud García that called for an immediate end to the protests. The dictator excoriated his country’s health care workers not only for violating Guatemalan laws prohibiting public employees from striking, but for engaging in an “immoral” movement. Invoking the Hippocratic oath, he lambasted the doctors and nurses for abandoning their “obligation to look after the sick” following the quake. He then pitted middle-class physicians and nurses against the peasant class, arguing that “the poor are the ones who suffer the most…who have been deprived of medical attention.”

After shaming the hospital employees, the caudillo (leader) threatened violence similar to that being deployed against leftist guerrillas in the countryside. “I am responsible for the health of all 6 million Guatemalans…,” Laugerud declared emphatically, “and [I] will not hesitate to act as drastically as necessary.” Notably, such warnings were a deliberate response not only to the physicians, but to growing protests among others “not involved in the hospital dispute.”

*Landslide in Zone 2 of the City (Wikipedia)*

This conflict between the government and the health care workers persisted as the nation struggled to recover from the earthquake. Laugerud García faced another doctor’s strike in 1978, this time among physicians at the Instituto Guatemalteco de Seguridad Social (IGSS). In early March, Agencia EFE described how the institute’s doctors union ordered a strike demanding higher wages. In a public statement, the IGSS lamented how their past pleas for better working conditions were ignored following the historic temblor. Like the health care employees in Amatitlán, the outgoing Laugerud García government expressed outrage with the growing demands for improved economic conditions among middle-class workers.

As the ongoing civil war heated up, subsequent leaders began to act aggressively on their predecessor’s threats. In June of 1980, for example, two medical students were shot down by machine guns in Guatemala City’s Zona 11. Among them, Jose Leon Díaz, the son of former secretary of the San Carlos University, “died instantly” at the scene. In a similar vein, the Guatemalan press reported on the extrajudicial killing of a doctor by the nation’s armed forces on October 31st, 1981. This murder coincided with 14 killings of leftist guerrillas and 1 university professor all of which the Fernando Romeo Lucas García regime characterized as “subversives.” This grouping revealed the government’s mounting fear of medical professionals becoming radicalized enemies of the state.

And as successive strongmen accelerated the execution of doctors and nurses, the insurgent Organización del Pueblo en Armas (ORPA) stood in solidarity with the hospital employees. In a statement published in the Prensa Latina, the guerrillas lambasted President Efraín Ríos Montt for killing physicians opposed to his regime. They questioned if it was such a crime for professors, peasants, and doctors to liberate themselves “from hunger, misery, and neglect.” In so doing, the guerrillas cast health care professionals as fellow workers and valued comrades in the fight against a right-wing dictatorship.

This history remains strikingly relevant in our present moment. Amidst a new natural disaster, the COVID-19 pandemic, medical professionals are challenging the Guatemalan government once more. On July 22nd, 2020, for example, heads of Guatemala’s Roosevelt Hospital demanded to meet with President Alejandro Giammattei to discuss the poor conditions in the nation’s hospitals. The hospital’s Chief of Pathology, Luís Chávez, lamented the Health Ministry’s indifference towards medical professionals combating the coronavirus in dilapidated buildings. His colleague, Miguel Angel Siguantay, went even further. Beyond restating his hospital’s commitment to “the good of the patients,” the doctor threatened “other types of measures” if the government ignored ongoing requests for aid. Echoing doctors from Guatemala’s past, the physician stated firmly that his fellow workers would no longer be neglected by their country.

Although this long history of health care employees’ activism demands further study, these press reports elucidate much about Guatemalan politics over the past half-century. For one, right-wing governments during the Civil War grew disturbed not only by insurgent guerrilla victories, but by demands for better pay among hospital workers. The medical professionals’ pressure also prompted leaders to categorize them in similar ways as their armed counterparts.

Yet, these newspaper articles also suggest that Guatemalan doctors and nurses may be beginning to conceptualize themselves as working people, forced to contend with unjust labor conditions like their rural counterparts. This development echoes Eyal Weinberg’s findings on Brazilian doctors, who similarly advocated for workers’ rights amidst economic downturn and social upheaval during the 1970s and 80s. Taken together, such findings reveal how natural disasters and economic unrest can swiftly spur the middle-classes into activism.