gre287, Author at Not Even Past

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

~ Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Guests

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

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

Hosts

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

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

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

Review of The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West by Megan Kate Nelson (2020)

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

Nelson’s writing is largely narrative and caters to a more popular audience. The layering of history compels the cultural, borderlands, and environmental historian while the details of battles captivate the military history enthusiast. Excerpts from letters and diaries as well as summaries of dialogue entertain those hunting for good stories. Nelson recounts an epic Western tale with a contemporary scholastic skillset that earned her a nod as a Pulitzer finalist in 2020.

book cover for The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West

The book balances several viewpoints of the conflict, including the perspectives of men and women, Unionists and Confederates, Mexicans, and Indigenous people. She adjusts the perspective with each chapter, unfolding the narrative through a different person’s viewpoint every ten or fifteen pages. People, rather than larger-than-life forces, are at the center of this story about power and property in the Southwest.

The book uses the stories of nine individuals to detail the battles between nations, armies, and ideas in what would become the Southwestern United States. Those people are: Mangas Coloradas, Apache leader; Juanita, wife of Diné warrior Manuelito; Alonzo Ickis, miner turned Union soldier; John Clark, New Mexico Surveyor General; Louisa Canby, wife to Union Colonel Edward Richard Sprigg Canby and nurse to injured soldiers; James Carleton, Union Colonel; Kit Carson, Southwestern frontiersman and Union Brigadier General; John Robert Baylor, Confederate Brigadier General from Texas; and Bill Davidson, a Confederate soldier and Texas lawyer.

Mangas Coloradas Stands with a rifle by his side. — *Mangas Coloradas, circa 1884. Source: Library of Congress.*

If there are any characters missing from this story, they are African Americans, whose fate in the West was in the balance (as Nelson reminds us). She notes that enslaved Blacks in Confederate held Arizona Territory were few and mostly held by Confederate military officers (83). Slavery in The Three Cornered War focuses on Mexican enslavement of Indigenous Americans. However, the reader is left to assume the Confederate vision of empire would expand the system of race-based enslavement as far west as California. This vision could have also included enslaving Indigenous Americans had the Confederate States of America endured.

The Three Cornered War concentrates on the events between 1861 and 1868, with background details for Nelson’s main characters inserted as needed. The eastern theater of the war appears only as snippets of news. The Southwestern theater was a set of wars all its own. Not only were the Union and the Confederacy competing in their visions of manifest destiny, but Mexicans fought to regain claims recently lost to the United States in the Mexican American War of the 1840s, the Apache fought to maintain Apachería, and the Navajo fought to maintain Diné Bikéyah.

Nelson does not overtly discuss borderlands in the ways scholars of the field might desire, but she does evocatively illustrate the malleability of boundaries in the New Mexico Territory in the 1860s. Land changes hands, borders move, access to water, resources, and overland routes are contested, and recent wins and losses remain only barely settled in The Three Cornered War. This tension makes abundantly clear that the present-day borders of the United States were far from predestined. The Confederates had strategized a plan for their own transcontinental railroad to connect California to Georgia, and the rebels intended for slavery to flourish across the continent, perhaps even capturing more land from Mexico.

Johnson and Ward’s “New Military Map” shows the United States' forts and military posts, circa 1862. The New Mexico Territory included present-day Arizona and New Mexico as well as southern Nevada. — Johnson and Ward’s “New Military Map” shows the United States’ forts and military posts, circa 1862. The New Mexico Territory included present-day Arizona and New Mexico as well as southern Nevada. Source: Library of Congress.

Unlike the skirmishes further east, armies in the Southwest were small: casualties could quickly devastate any of the bands of soldiers and warriors in conflict. The Apaches and Navajos fought to keep Anglos and Hispanos alike out of their lands. Mexican officials heard diplomatic pleas from both the Union and the Confederacy but attempted to delay decision making until a victor prevailed. The book includes several maps to help the reader situate the movements of these groups and the quickly changing landscape of the southwest.

Nelson makes clear that these contingencies often depended on the actions of military leaders who acted without seeking approval, in large part because there simply was not adequate time to communicate with distant officials before circumstances changed. Dishonorable and treacherous war tactics were constant, and seemed necessary, but could face delay or prohibition from central authorities. The southwestern theater was a place where men gambled with their lives, but the winnings made it worthwhile.

Though the Union won the conflict and control of the land, Nelson reminds readers this came at a price and made the United States’ objectives contradictory. She writes, “These struggles for power in the West exposed a hard and complicated truth about the Union government’s war aims: that they simultaneously embraced slave emancipation and Native extermination in order to secure an American empire of liberty” (252). The price for the eradication of race-based slavery in the United States was the very sovereignty of its native peoples. In this three-cornered conflict, the United States sharpened its blades against all in the name of liberty granted only on the Americans’ terms.

Humanities Without Walls: A Reflection

by Brandon James Render

This summer, I attended the Humanities Without Walls Pre-Doctoral Summer Fellowship Workshop – a three-week series of events and speakers that aims to connect graduate students to professionals with a background in the humanities. I’ve attended dozens of career diversity panels, workshops, and seminars, but I found the Humanities Without Walls workshop to be the most unique – and beneficial – approach to exploring professional opportunities.

Humanities Without Walls aims to create new avenues for collaborative research, teaching, and the production of scholarship in the humanities, forging and sustaining areas of inquiry that cannot be created or maintained without cross-institutional cooperation. — Screenshot from Humanities Without Walls

When I entered the PhD program in History at the University of Texas in 2017, I took an open-minded approach to post-graduate school career options. During the application process, mentors and former professors continually reminded me that the odds of landing a tenure-track job are not favorable. In my application, I stated that I would like to prioritize career paths that fit my skills and experience developed through graduate training, whether that was a tenure-track job or a non-faculty position. Throughout my graduate training, I’ve had several opportunities to engage with professionals with a PhD in a humanities field, and I’m excited about the variety of options within the expanded job market.

Despite these opportunities, I’ve continued to have reservations about pursuing a career outside of the traditional tenure-track profession. These concerns range from the practical to the abstract. How do I translate my curriculum vitae into a résumé? What does a cover letter based on educational experience look like? Many employers may not understand the process of earning a PhD – how do I communicate that my graduate training is work experience? And how do I find a career that supports my values as a humanist scholar? Although I’m confident in my skills and professionalization, I’m also concerned about how to connect my qualifications to potential employers unaware of the abilities I’ve developed throughout my graduate training.

How do I translate my curriculum vitae into a résumé? What does a cover letter based on educational experience look like? Many employers may not understand the process of earning a PhD – how do I communicate that my graduate training is work experience? And how do I find a career that supports my values as a humanist scholar?

After working with the Humanities Without Walls consortium and attending their Doctoral Summer Fellowship Workshop, I feel more comfortable about career opportunities and balancing my professional life with personal goals and values. With thirty other fellows, I learned about career paths in consulting, non-profit, tech, and research professions that employ humanities training. In small groups, we held reflection sessions to discuss how our interests evolved throughout the workshop and how we plan to explore professional opportunities. Overall, we connected with other specialists, many of whom held a PhD in a humanities field, to discover how to leverage our graduate training outside of academia through an understanding of nuanced non-academic career exploration. The Humanities Without Walls workshop not only addressed my concerns, but also offered valuable insight into career paths that I failed to consider as I entered the job market.

Humanities Without Walls, however, is more than a networking opportunity that helps PhDs “get the job.” It is a mission-focused initiative that supports humanities scholars in maintaining a personal identity apart from the professional world, cultivate values-driven work, and channel our strengths into justice-oriented career paths. The workshop allows fellows to learn about themselves as humanists and how we view our scholarly contributions outside of formal academic settings. The Humanities Without Walls workshop and programming is an excellent community building resource that provides perspective on the relationship between scholarship and social justice. It teaches us that our work is valued outside of higher education settings and that our insight can and should be used for the public good. Often frustrated by the limits of institutions, Humanities Without Walls unlocks the potential of scholarly communities outside of the invisible walls of academe.

The Humanities Without Walls workshop and programming is an excellent community building resource that provides perspective on the relationship between scholarship and social justice. It teaches us that our work is valued outside of higher education settings and that our insight can and should be used for the public good.

In the last four years, I have taken advantage of career exploration workshops, panels, and programs focused on professional diversity. The Humanities Without Walls workshop stands apart from other initiatives due to its balance of practical knowledge, such as résumé writing, and the philosophical approach to career diversity. As most career diversity initiatives serve as a backup plan for scholars pursuing tenure-track posts, this program understands and serves the needs of students that do not prioritize faculty positions. Humanities Without Walls addressed the concerns I had about entering the non-faculty job market as I reimagined the scope of graduate training and realized the opportunities available, career or otherwise, after completing my PhD.

Research interests often reveal humanities scholars’ personal beliefs and values. The Humanities Without Walls coordinators understand that it is important for us – as workshop attendees and humanities scholars in general – to reconcile our career paths with these personal beliefs not only as a way to provide for our material needs, but to pursue our interests in community and social justice. This workshop and other programming should serve as a model for career diversity initiatives that account for scholars’ creative, values-driven professional options and I look forward to working in continuous community with past, present, and future Humanities Without Walls workshop attendees.

The Humanities Without Walls Consortium recently released a call for applications for the Summer Workshop in 2022. For more information, see their website.

Brandon James Render is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Texas at Austin. His research examines the relationship between race and higher education through the evolution of racial colorblindness in the twentieth century. He currently serves as the Mitchem Dissertation Fellow at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Austin’s Queer Migration History

by Lauren Gutterman

From the editors: This article first appeared in QT Voices, which is the online magazine of the LGBTQ Studies Program at The University of Texas at Austin. For the original article see here.

Austin is a city with a rich LGBTQ past, one that both echoes and diverges from queer history in other American cities. The University of Texas has played a key role in this story, enabling the growth of queer community by drawing students to the city, while spurring LGBTQ activism with its resistance to LGBTQ visibility. This year, LGBTQ Studies students helped document some of those vital stories.

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

Much of the scholarship on LGBTQ history focuses on northern urban centers. Many researchers, working across a range of disciplines, have recognized the lack of attention paid to LGBTQ life across the South, and a growing number of books are centering queer history in Southern cities and states. As I began preparing for my course this past semester, I realized I was hardly alone in recognizing the need to document Austin’s LGBTQ past. Local journalists have drawn attention to the need to preserve Austin’s queer history. Professor Laurie Green has recorded interviews with lesbian elders for her Austin Women Activists Oral History Project. Working together with Austin’s History Center, the Austin LGBT Coalition on Aging recently launched The Memory Project, an effort to collect and preserve historical materials pertaining to Austin’s LGBTQ history. The activist group, Queerbomb, has started collecting queer elders’ stories. And Preservation Austin is working to get city, state and federal recognition for LGBTQ spaces of historic significance.

Photograph of two men wearing black leather jackets and jeans at a Gay Pride Event. The man on the left is holding a small rainbow flag and the man on the right is holding a camera and has his arm around the man on the left. — *Attendees at a gay pride event, circa 1993. Source: Austin History Center*

Still, oral history interviews with Austin LGBTQ community members are needed and the undergraduates in “Preserving Austin’s Queer History” took steps to address this omission. We began the course by learning about LGBTQ community histories in other cities since the liberation era. We read a wide range of case studies about the lesbian feminist movement in 1970s Chicago, Black HIV/AIDS organizing in 1980s Philadelphia, and contemporary undocuqueer youth activism in Miami, from Professor Karma Chávez’s edited collection. We then familiarized ourselves with Austin’s queer past, drawing on recent articles in The Austin Chronicle, documentaries, and former University of Texas at Austin student Eric Jason Ganther’s 1990 master’s thesis. We spoke with the leaders of similar local history projects including the Tretter Transgender Oral History Project, the Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project, and the Queer Newark Oral History Project. Finally, the students read classic writing on oral history methodology and ethical issues before embarking on their own interviews.

*Screenshot of the Queer Newark Oral History Project*

Migration is a theme that weaves through many of these oral history interviews. Nearly all of the narrators who shared their stories grew up outside of Austin, and most students asked their narrators to explain how and why they came to the city. Several of the people we spoke with moved to Austin to pursue their undergraduate or graduate education at the university, but not everyone’s path to Austin was so clear. Lois Ahrens, founder of the Real Cost of Prisons Project, came to Austin on a cross-country road trip in 1970 and ended up staying a decade. After living in New York City and Chicago, Houston-raised trans rights advocate and Ground Floor Theater founder Lisa Scheps moved to Austin in 2003 to be closer to family. Other narrators reflected on leaving the city. Ana Ixchel Rosal, former director of the Gender and Sexuality Center, decided to leave Austin in part because of the anti-Black racism her family experienced here.

The theme of migration also speaks to these interviews in another more metaphorical sense as many narrators reflected on the ways their lives and identities had changed and evolved over time. Tom Doyal, an early legal advocate for gay and lesbian rights in Austin and founder of Liberty Books, came out as gay in the 1980s after two marriages to women. Nina Wouk, a co-founder of the Austin Lesbian Organization in 1975, has since come to recognize themselves as non-binary. In her interview, artist, activist, and 2019 Austin Dyke March host Beth Schindler discussed shifting from a queer to a dyke identity. Other narrators, like Allan Baker, former co-chair of the Austin Lesbian/Gay Political Caucus, reflected on moving from a career as an LGBTQ rights activist to pursue his calling as a playwright.

Photograph of a close-up of a white shirt with a rainbow flag on the front that says "Lone Star Pride" underneath and a heart-shaped necklace and rectangular necklace that says "Dyke" laying on top — *Gay pride event, circa 1993. Source: Austin History Center*

Austin’s vibrant art and music cultures intertwine with the city’s LGBTQ history, and almost all of the narrators we spoke with are creatives. The Chicano movement has been an important factor in Austin’s LGBTQ history as well. Students in this course interviewed Yolanda Chávez-Leyva and Dennis Medina who, among others, founded Chispa in the 1980s, the first gay Chicano organization in the city and a precursor to allgo (initially the Austin Latino/a Lesbian and Gay Organization).

Several narrators made clear that racial and economic inequality have continued to shape LGBTQ life in Austin, and they rejected notions of steady political progress over time. As Beth Schindler noted, for white queer people Austin has “become like a playground.” But “for other communities within that community, it’s not necessarily the same story…Austin is fucking hard right now. This is a really, really hard place to be right now. If you don’t have money, it’s a really hard place to be. So I think that has a huge effect on queer communities. Especially for communities of color.” Jeremy Teel, a former leader of Austin Black Pride, explained that it was only after moving to Austin in 2010 that he had the experience of being the only Black person in LGBTQ spaces: “There were no Black people. I had never experienced non-Black space. I didn’t know what that — it was weird. To be the only Black person in the room. I did not get it…And so that’s kind of where the activism started.”

The incredible work the students did in “Preserving Austin’s Queer History” is the beginning of a much longer oral history collecting project, one that I look forward to continuing in the future. But the process of recording these first few oral history interviews is an important achievement in and of itself. At the conclusion of this course, I asked students to reflect on what they learned from conducting an oral history interview for the first time, and I was gratified to learn how much students took from this course and how much it affected them. But you don’t have to take my word for it: you can read the final reflections of Libby Sears, April Baik, Téa Anderson, Michelle Sanchez, and Arely González here for yourself. What is more, once the restrictions of the pandemic have lifted, you can visit the Austin History Center to read or listen to the incredible oral history interviews these students completed.

As the slate of more than 30 anti-LGBTQ bills introduced into the state legislature this session demonstrates, the LGBTQ movement’s work in Austin continues. These measures were all defeated, thanks to the work of activists and the LGBTQ Legislative Caucus. Knowing our history, learning from our mistakes, and building on our strengths, will be critical to this struggle. This spring undergraduates in “Preserving Austin’s Queer History” did their part to ensure that Austin’s LGBTQ past is not forgotten.

Note: Since this article was first published, Republican state legislators have filed additional anti-LGBTQ bills. An anti-trans sports ban, SB 3, recently passed the Senate. Learn more here: https://www.equalitytexas.org/special-session-legislative-bill-tracker/

Review of The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (2015)

In the current era of #StopAsianHate, there have been numerous conversations regarding the unique position occupied by Asian and Asian Americans in America’s wider ethnic and racial hierarchies. Importantly, these conversations have examined the origins of the so-called the ‘model minority’ myth. Esteemed Asian American historian Madeline Hsu incisively captures that history in The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (2015). In nine well-researched chapters, Hsu walks readers chronologically through the sociopolitical processes that propelled the incorporation of a privileged class of Asian migrants and how liberal immigration policy facilitated the transition from ‘yellow peril’ to ‘model minority.’ Hsu’s overall argument emphasizes that the contemporary favorable positioning of Asian immigrants in the United States is not strictly a product of cultural traits. Instead, she points to foreign and domestic policies that prioritized the entry of highly skilled, educated, Westernized Asian immigrants.

Cover of The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority; a large group of Asian immigrants poses for a group photo as they debark a Pan Am flight

In the book’s early chapters, Hsu historically situates the entry of privileged Chinese migrants during the height of America’s racial exclusion. It is important to note that Chinese were the only group identified specifically by race for immigration exclusion. United States law prohibited Chinese laborers from immigrating to the United States and obtaining naturalized citizenship. Hsu examines the contrasting experiences of the exempted classes (students, diplomats, businesspersons) of Chinese migrants who were able to enter the United States for educational purposes in what Hsu classifies as the ‘side door policy’ (36). With a special focus on exchange students, Hsu shows readers that the earliest Chinese travelers in Western countries were brought by missionaries usually as students and converts.

Chinese students were not spared xenophobic encounters and racial antagonism, but according to Hsu, they nonetheless benefited from attending American universities to foster economic development in China. Additionally, U.S. educated Chinese immigrants like Meng Zhi played an instrumental role in enhancing Sino-American partnerships by establishing cultural exchange programs like the China Institute in America to advocate for Chinese educational interests abroad. Though not explicitly stated by Hsu, the advocacy of Chinese educational interests represents early examples of transnational and diasporic politics. The political activities conducted by this privileged class of migrants laid the foundation for the elimination of America’s restrictive immigration policies in subsequent decades.

Through Chapters 4 to 7, Hsu emphasizes how Cold War politics facilitated the piecemeal but eventual elimination of America’s racially exclusionary immigration policies. During the Chinese Civil War, many Chinese students studying in the United States became stateless persons with the emergence of a communist government. This reality compelled the United States government to allow Chinese students to adjust their legal status. State and private actors began privileging the voices and experiences of educated Chinese students, who were deemed to be of economic value and assimilable because of their exceptional educational attainment and shared political ideologies with the U.S. After decades of extensive advocacy from privileged Chinese immigrants, the United States government passed the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965, which abolished racial and national origin preferences in immigration. During this period the yellow peril designation began to shift to the model minority framework. While the Hart-Cellar Act was a major milestone in U.S. immigration policy, Hsu reminds readers that the act continued to selectively screen for highly educated, highly skilled immigrants in an effort to fulfill the United States economic interests. Thus, contemporary U.S. immigration policy maintained its inherently exclusive nature and reinforced U.S. racial hierarchies.

Miss April Lou, a teacher in Manhattan, poses with six Chinese children, recent arrivals from Hong Kong and Formosa, who are holding up placards giving his or her Chinese name (both in ideographs and in transliteration) and the name to be entered upon the official school records. Source: Library of Congress, photo by Fred Palumbo.

Hsu’s concluding chapters discuss the social and cultural consequences of this new racial positioning of Asian American communities in the United States after the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965. Asian Americans, specifically Chinese American communities, became celebrated for entering professional and white-collar employment. However, Hsu reminds readers that the class status of certain Asian immigrants in the United States was due to the fact that they came from privileged backgrounds thus facilitating their middle- and upper-middle class respectability in the United States. The increased visibility of Asian immigrants in the private and public spheres is due to contemporary immigration policies screening immigrants for their economic capital and employment potential for entry.

The Good Immigrants is not only a must read but serves as an invaluable contribution to the field of Critical Race Studies because it details how different groups have different relationships with America’s ethnic and racial hierarchies. The emphasis on the perceived assimilation of Asian Americans has prevented U.S. institutions from addressing the ongoing effects of racial marginalization, which the #StopAsianHate movement examines. More importantly, The Good Immigrants shows the role post-Civil Rights neoliberal public policy has played in maintaining structural racial inequality. This book illustrates how migrants with socioeconomic status and social capital have complicated perspectives regarding American racial politics and racial inequality. While many conservatives and to some degree liberals may argue that race is no longer a factor in determining someone’s success, The Good Immigrants successfully counters popular narratives about individual responsibility and ‘cultural values’ by highlighting the structural factors that produce inequitable racial outcomes for neoliberal purposes.

Review of The Optic of the State: Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil (2007) by Jens Andermann

banner image for Review of The Optic of the State

The Optic of the State explores a wide array of images, image-making processes, and display methods in nineteenth-century Argentina and Brazil. Jens Andermann argues that the ideas of the state as law in practice, or as a group that holds the monopoly of legitimate violence, are insufficient. The state also entails a visual form, a way of seeing, that is an optic. Maps, museums, and photographs lie at the core of the state’s power as a means of observation, ordering, and storage—not because of what they show, but in the ways of seeing they call for. The book unveils the politics of making and printing photographs, designing museum exhibitions, and marking up maps: images as objects, as performance, as history. It proposes that we should think of the state as the relation between spectators and images—a particular gaze.

book cover for The Optic of the State: Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil

Yet the meanings of images remain unstable, contested, and situated. An obvious display of power may actually become a sign of weakness. Maps and museums reveal the perils of state-building practices in nineteenth-century Latin America through failed policies, poorly reviewed museum exhibitions, or bureaucratic politics where they played a central role. The first part of the book deals with museums and their convoluted purposes. Whether as a space to show the appropriation of land and resources, as a storage point for the nation’s wealth, or as an educational device, the making of museums entailed reaching definitions of nationhood, people, and history. Anthropology, archeology, and paleontology took center stage in this process of delimiting the nature of these countries, who their inhabitants and their citizens were.

*Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro. Source: Tristan Weddigen*

The disciplinary aims of collecting and exhibiting, however, often failed when confronted with the people and politics outside the walls of the museum. Andermann contrasts the efforts of Brazilian and Argentinian collectors and historians via an examination of the Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro and the Museo de la Plata in Buenos Aires. He shows that the experience of seeing the museum did not always produce its desired effects of monumentality, of naturalizing history, and legitimizing state violence. By putting nature, empire, and anthropology in the same narrative-visual space, museums made the contradictions and violence inherent to state-building visible.

*Museo de La Plata. Source: Alex Rebolledo*

Maps and photographs also deploy ways of seeing and of capturing landscapes, peoples, and histories. They build the optic of the state, yet they imply a distinct epistemological status: maps, landscape sketches, and photographs were so powerful and contested because of their apparent truth-value, their “immediate access to the real.” The same click of the camera or drawing a square on a map could produce and acquire space, claim legitimacy over dead bodies and othered selves, and create a discourse with aims of objectivity. Andermann offers a series of close readings of maps and photographs that show the fragility of their meanings and objectives at the frontiers of Brazil and Argentina: captions, narratives, and markings frequently tried to anchor what images said (or better: what they were meant to say). Through these views of the margins, the book effectively demonstrates how science, nature, and the politics of representation are inseparable with what the state is and how it operates.

The Optic of the State is a provocative, perhaps even uncomfortable book. The extensive research that supports its arguments makes a cogent case for thinking about the state as a visual form, along the lines of what Ashis Nandy, W. J. T. Mitchell, and Timothy Mitchell suggest: visualizing history, nature, and nationhood entails a politics, a way of seeing. Like any other book with a wide scope, the selection of materials seems capricious at times, yet this hardly diminishes Andermann’s argument. The state as a visual form exists, and it poses a set of methodological and theoretical challenges to the historian. The Optic of the State is a good place to start.

IHS Podcast: Welcomed and then Expelled: The Plight of Chinese Mexicans from 1910 to 1960

IHS podcasts are a new podcast series initiated by the Institute for Historical Studies’ Director, Dr. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra. They are paired with weekly workshops and are designed to foster discussion between graduate students and distinguished scholars in the field. Along with graduate students and guests, each episode features Dr. Cañizares-Esguerra and Ashley Garcia, a PhD Candidate in History at UT Austin. This podcast is recorded in connection with a roundtable, Reimagining Borders: Triangular Transnationalism and Chinese Mexicans, presented by Jian Gao 高堅, University of Texas at Austin, on October 4th. Details can be found here.

Introduction

Dr. Camacho’s book, Chinese Mexicans: Transpacific Migration and the Search for Homeland 1910-1960, explores the arrival of some 20,000 Cantonese into Mexico in the three decades following the Anti-Chinese migration act of 1882 in the USA.

Dr. Camacho shows that this group of Chinese Mexicans became small merchants grocers in Sonora and Sinaloa, while keeping logistical and family connections to Arizona. Thousands of Chinese single males soon married Mexican women, including indigenous Yaqui, and created “mestizo” families, all with the support of the Mexican government.

While the revolution generated anti-Chinese violence, the Chinese Mexican community of Sonora survived and thrived until 1930-33. When tens of thousands of Mexican Americas were expelled from the United States as a response to the Depression, the long established yet ineffectual anti-Chinese party of Sonora responded by targeting Chinese Mexicans. Mobs and authorities “deported” these families back to the united states where they were in turn forced into exile to Canton. In Canton, Mexican women and their Chinese American children struggled over two generations to return to Mexico while creating and sustaining Catholic Iberian lives in Macao.

This podcast focuses on the contradictions of Mexican “mestizaje.” Led by the Calles family (founders of the modern PRI), the anti-Chinese party of Sonora summoned commoner Mexican mestizos to humiliate and expel Chinese Mexicans in the name of defending Mexican mestizo males from foreigners. These commoners, paradoxically, did not target White “gringo” groups but whom they thought were gringo proxies: the Chinese grocers.

It was the humiliation of Chinese competition over Mexican women that mobilized the Callista anti-Chinese party. The Callistas felt emasculated and presented Chinese Mexicans as degenerate mestizos, while rejecting eugenics and arguing that the Mexican Indian-Hispanic mestizo was a super cosmic race. Strangely, such a narrow notion of mestizaje could not consider other forms of racial and cultural hybridity as anything other than degeneration.

~ Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Guests

Dr. Julia María Schiavone Camacho is an historian and a fiction writer. She teaches history courses centered on reading, discussion, and research about Latin America, Asian Americas, and world and transnational studies. She also teaches general education and writing courses. Dr. Camacho is also the author of Chinese Mexicans: Transpacific Migration and the Search for a Homeland, 1910-1960 (North Carolina, 2012). Julia’s short fiction appears in The Florida Review. An excerpt from her historical novel manuscript, Across the Pacific—about the personal consequences of a vicious anti-Chinese crusade in Mexico—appears in The Hopper and was nominated for Best of the Net Anthology. An excerpt from A Sensible Man, a historical romance novel, appears in The Coachella Review Blog.

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

Hosts

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

IHS Book Talk: Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile

Book Talk: "Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile," by Joshua Frens-String, University of Texas at Austin (History Faculty New Book Series)

Institute for Historical Studies – Wednesday, September 22, 2021

Introducing the book

Hungry for Revolution (University of California Press, June 2021) tells the story of how struggles over food fueled the rise and fall of Chile’s Popular Unity coalition and one of Latin America’s most expansive social welfare states. Reconstructing ties among workers, consumers, scientists, and the state, Joshua Frens-String explores how Chileans across generations sought to center food security as a right of citizenship. In so doing, he deftly untangles the relationship between two of twentieth-century Chile’s most significant political and economic processes: the fight of an emergent urban working class to gain reliable access to nutrient-rich foodstuffs and the state’s efforts to modernize its underproducing agricultural countryside.

Notes from the Director

Hungry for Revolution (University of California Press, June 2021) is an ambitious book that offers a radical new chronology of the political history of 20^th century Chile and offers a striking new genealogy of Allende’s Socialist Revolution. This roundtable with specialists on the history of nutrition science and technocracy in 20^th century state formation in Central Europe and Latin America leaves a number of tantalizing questions open, the subject of future conversations:

Did Chile have a nutrition oriented welfare state before the USA did? Was the welfare Chilean state and its focus on nutrition something Chileans picked up from the global north in the 1920s and 30s? Or is this idea of the global north one that helps the north establish a rhetorical claim over innovation and modernity when things originate in multiple places and centers? How did the international policies in nutrition as indicators of public health come about? Are welfare state policies of nutrition in of themselves positive? Or are states responsible for creating nutritional needs and markets that were not deeply entrenched in society previously? Is socialism the only direction Chile’s consumer oriented welfare state could have taken? The emphasis on Pinochet and the coup could make us forget that Nazism, fascism, and totalitarian communism witnessed their own forms of welfare policies of nutrition too. What do the Chilean campaigns to expand consumption of seafood, as an alternative to beef, tell us about a distinct Pacific rim nutritional technocratic revolution in the mid 20^th century, from Japan to Peru to Chile?

Praise for the book

“Hungry for Revolution is a terrific history of the importance of food in struggles over national modernization and democracy in twentieth-century Chile. It radically reframes debates about consumption to show how food was central to empowering poor people as Chilean citizens.”
––Heidi Tinsman, author of Buying into the Regime: Grapes and Consumption in Cold War Chile and the United States
“This creative, deeply researched study offers scholars the opportunity to rethink some of the key narratives of twentieth-century Chilean history, re-envisioning the story of Chilean state formation as inextricably connected to everyday struggles. Not only will Hungry for Revolution shape Chilean history, but its impact promises to reverberate in the history of Latin American and political histories for years to come.”
––Camilo D. Trumper, author of Ephemeral Histories: Public Art, Politics, and the Struggle for the Streets in Chile
“Hungry for Revolution is a brilliant reconceptualization of Chile’s twentieth-century history narrated through the lens of food politics. Joshua Frens-String offers multiple insights into the ways changes in food, diet, and consumption patterns and practices were shaped by, and in turn shaped, key moments in Chilean history, from the 1920s and the formation of Chile’s welfare state to Salvador Allende’s socialist revolution and the violent right-wing counterrevolution during the Pinochet dictatorship.”
–– Thomas Klubock, Professor of History, University of Virginia

Author and discussants

Dr. Joshua Frens-String is an assistant professor of Latin American History at the University of Texas at Austin and an affiliate of the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS). He received his Ph.D. in History from New York University in 2015. Frens-String’s first book Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile (University of California Press, 2021) tells the story of how struggles over food fueled the rise and fall of Chile’s Popular Unity coalition and one of Latin America’s most expansive social welfare states. Reconstructing ties among workers, consumers, scientists, and the state, Frens-String explores how Chileans across generations sought to center food security as a right of citizenship. In so doing, he untangles the relationship between two of twentieth-century Chile’s most significant political and economic processes: the fight of an emergent urban working class to gain reliable access to nutrient-rich foodstuffs and the state’s efforts to modernize its underproducing agricultural countryside. From 2015-2017, Frens-String was an editor of the NACLA Report on the Americas, one of the most widely-read English-language quarterlies on Latin America and its relationship with the United States. He is currently the book review editor at the journal International Labor and Working-Class History (ILWCH). Follow his work on Twitter at @jf_string.

Featured discussants:

Dr. Mary Neuburger
Professor of History; Director of the Center for Russia, East European and Eurasian Studies; Chair of the Slavic and Eurasian Studies; and Provost Teaching Fellow, at The University of Texas at Austin.

Dr. Stefan Pohl Valero
Associate Professor of the History of Science and Medicine
Universidad del Rosario, Bogotá

Dr. Camilo Trumper
Associate Professor of History
University at Buffalo, State University of New York SUNY

Read Dr. Frens-String’s feature, “Tasting Empanadas and Red Wine in Chile’s Popular Unity Revolution,” on Not Even Past.

This discussion is part of the IHS History Faculty New Book Series.

NEP Author Spotlight – Nathan Stone

The success of Not Even Past is made possible by a remarkable group of faculty and graduate student writers. Not Even Past Author Spotlights are designed to celebrate our most prolific authors by bringing together all of their published content across the site together on a single page. The focus is especially on work published by UT graduate students. In this article, we highlight the numerous contributions to the magazine made by Nathan Stone.

Nathan Stone is a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American History. Texas-born and raised, he ventured into the wilds of Indiana for undergraduate work in English at the University of Notre Dame, graduating in 1979. After that, with a brief pause in 1986 to eke out a Masters in English right here at UT, he lived and worked in Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil for upwards thirty years. In Chile, during the dark years of the Pinochet regime, he became friends with the Association of the Families of the Disappeared. Before they were taken, many of the desaparecidos had belonged to MIR, Chile’s youthful “Movement of the Revolutionary Left”. Nathan now researches the allure of New Left revolutionary movements in Cold War Latin America. And sometimes teaches undergrads to conjugate their verbs in the Spanish department.

Remembering Pinochet: Dictatorship, Power, and Pushback

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

If you had to use the horn, the cadence was ta-tá, ta-tááá. It sounded like the slogan, y va caer—literally, it’s about to fall—the wishful refrain that had been around since the ‘70’s, calling for the military government to implode. Our efforts fell short of actual revolution, but we had to start somewhere.

Read the full article here.

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

Read the full review here.

Salvation, Science, and Synthetic Rubber

Official tallies put the death toll inflicted by the Pinochet regime in Chile over three thousand, while the imprisoned and tortured numbered over thirty-eight thousand. Not to mention almost two hundred thousand, one in every fifty Chileans, who went into exile. Staggering as those numbers might be, such statistics represent but a fraction of real victims. Most of the dictatorial blowback happened under the radar, in the clandestine shadowlands of the rural backcountry and deep within the interlocking borders of peripheral urban shantytowns, Chile’s poblaciones. There, resistance was subtle, solidarity was key, and no record survives. Chileans without friends in high places, those who lost their hearts, their hopes, and their lives in those forgotten corners, live on only in the memories of their friends, families, and neighbors.

Read the full article here.

Rodolfo Valentin Gonzalez Perez: An Unusual Disappearance

They weren’t all the same. We know of at least one soldier who had a conscience. There were several, actually. Most were weighty figures, captains and colonels who refused to follow orders. Some of them quit or went into exile. Others died. But I’m talking about conscripts, the powerless boys who were in military service when the decision was made to interrupt the institutional process of the Chilean state on September 11, 1973. When the elected socialist government of Salvador Allende was overthrown by the US-backed Chilean military. When those boys were commanded to arrest, torture, and kill their own brothers and sisters.

Rodolfo González was one such conscript. He was proud that he had been chosen for the Air Force. He was just eighteen. After the coup, he was commissioned to serve at the DINA, Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional. That was General Pinochet’s secret police.

Rodolfo wasn’t an agent, but he did participate. He had guard duty. He delivered messages. He got coffee for the boss when the boss got tired of torturing someone.

Read the full article here.

Rodolfo Müller is almost a hundred years old, now. He still lives in the same house as always, off Simón Bolivar, between Hamburgo and Coventry. That’s in Ñuñoa, a township on the near west side of Santiago. It’s a big house, and very nice but unpretentious. If he had wanted, he could have picked a more prestigious address further north, in Providencia, or up higher, in Las Condes. But he didn’t.

Rodolfo was born in Germany in about 1920. Before World War II, he came to Chile with his parents and his brother. They were just teenagers. I met him when he was almost sixty. He still looked very German after all those years: tall, blond, and blue-eyed. But he was a Jew. That’s what people said, anyway. Maybe, just on his mother’s side. They came to Chile to escape from Hitler. They left in time and made new lives in South America.

Read the full article here.

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.

Read the full article here.

Pampa Unión, today, is a ghost town lost in the Atacama Desert, a mile high and halfway between the Chilean mining centers of Antofagasta and Calama. Founded over a century ago as a medical way station, it quickly became a resting place for nitrate miners on their days off, complete with all the supplies and entertainments that working men required. With two main streets and just one tree, the 2,000 stable inhabitants entertained a floating population of up to 15,000. The town was abandoned in 1954. All that is left today are the ruins of adobe walls with broken bits of signage and a cemetery.

Read the full article here.

Underground Santiago: Sweet Waters Grown Salty

Colegio Andacollo was a K-through-12 parish school in old town Santiago. The Holy Cross Fathers took it as their new mission when the military government kicked them out of Saint George’s, their traditional academy for the elite. Andacollo was another world.

The original Andacollo was a mountain town in the north where Our Lady of Deep Rocky Mines granted solace and safety to her devoted followers. Our Andacollo was on the corner of Mapocho and Cautín, in a barrio of old multifamily dwellings, cheap bordellos, and the local seafood market. The place had a history of union struggle, fiery passion, and a profound commitment to the miracle-working Virgin of Andacollo. It also had a secret tale of tragedy.

Read the full article here.

I started going to camp in 1968. We were still just children, but we already had Vietnam to think about. The evening news was a body count. At camp, we didn’t see the news, but we listened to Eric Burdon and the Animals’ Sky Pilot while doing our beadwork with Father Pekarski.

Pekarski looked like Grandpa from The Munsters. He was bald with a scowl and a growl, wearing shorts and an official camp tee shirt over his pot belly. The local legend was that at night, before going out to do his vampire thing, he would come in and mix up your beads so that the red ones were in the blue box, and the black ones were in the white box. Then, he would twist the thread on your bead loom a hundred and twenty times so that it would be impossible to work with the next day. And laugh. In fact, he was as nice a guy as you could ever want to know.

Read the full article here.

When I was very small, I lived six blocks from the Santa Fe Opera. Our home was in the Tesuque Village, which is really just a country road that runs alongside the Tesuque Creek just north of Santa Fe, with twenty tiny cul-de-sacs stretching up into the alluvial crannies of the southern Rockies. There were fruit stands and general stores. The Indians from the Tesuque Reservation would come to trade hides for cigarettes. This was before there were casinos. I remember the taste of the fresh local pears. There will be some in heaven, I assume. Once, I got lost. I was three. An Indian from the reservation took me to every house in the village and asked me, “Is that your house, little boy?”

On the horizon to the east, we had the Sangre de Cristos. They were huge, daunting, legendary and high. Mountain snow accumulated there in the winter to keep the semi-arid New Mexico wasteland inexplicably green all summer. Deep in the heart of the wilderness, at Horsethief Meadow, the early Comanche hid away in the lush green grass of summer with the wild and not-so-wild herds of mustangs that made them the wealthiest traders at the Taos market in the nineteenth century. Savages? Trade in your textbook. They knew more about selective breeding than Her Majesty’s Master of Horses.

Read the full article here.

I remember Georgia O’Keeffe. I couldn’t have been but three, first time I met her. She was already an older woman by then, or late middle age, at least. She was tall and perfectly centered, with a slender frame and grey hair pulled back in a tight bun. She wore long sleeves and dark jeans. She smoked only the best Cuban cigars. Women weren’t supposed to smoke cigars at all. But she got away with it. She and Frida Kahlo.

Miss O’Keeffe got her smokes from La Habana. They were already hard to get in ’61. The trade embargo was not yet in place, but things were already getting sticky with Fidel. The State Department didn’t like the combat fatigues, and the mob wanted their casinos back. I think they drove Fidel into Soviet arms. After that, Ché Guevara went to Angola, with a habanero in his teeth, just like Miss O’Keeffe. Cuban cigars became contraband. Reserved for drug traffickers and CIA agents. I suspect Miss O’Keeffe had some stashed away for a rainy day. But in the summertime, it rained every afternoon on the high plains of New Mexico. You learned to bide your time. You knew that’s just the way it was going to be.

Read the full article here.

Review of The Fishmeal Revolution: The Industrialization of the Humboldt Current Ecosystem (2021) by Kristin A. Wintersteen

In her recent book, The Fishmeal Revolution, environmental historian Kristin A. Wintersteen follows the scent of the uniquely situated and environmentally sensitive biomass from the unusually cold and nutrient rich Humboldt Current that bathes the western coast of South America. She describes how its extraction on a massive scale came to be framed as a question of national policy, global nutrition and economic development. She sidelines political parties, humanitarian discourses and border disputes in a manner that might seem strange to passionate political historians and meticulous cultural anthropologists. But then, the astute reader begins to understand that this author has framed her research on a much broader and more complex horizon. She moves outside the comfort zone of those more accustomed to viewing the march of time as an alternation between cruel tyrants and noble statesmen, punctuated by world wars, pandemics and technological innovations. The sheer scale of biomass extraction for land-animal consumption constituted nothing less, in her view, than a colonizing expropriation of the world’s oceans. The masters of the land had claimed the vast wealth of the planet’s seas as their own empire. Moreover, like the British in India and the Spanish in Latin America, the colonizers did not understand the complexity of the space they had appropriated. Driven by profits and the pressures of the market, decision-making processes in their quest have rarely guaranteed sustainability. Wherein the abundant ocean life survives at all, that survival is a testament to species’ resilience and the mysteries of the long and unpredictable cycles that Wintersteen’s insightful research has uncovered.

*Government officials tour a fishmeal processing plant in Peru. Source: Ministerio de la Producción*

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from Norway to California, the ocean’s “trash fish” and offal from canneries had become the raw material for fertilizer and protein supplements in animal feed. As northern hemisphere fishing industries overfished their own waters, their gaze turned south. The magic of an apparently infinite supply of plankton-eating anchoveta off the western coast of Latin America depended on the frigid Humboldt Current that moved northward just off the west coast of the South America. But the abundance of anchoveta, and the prosperity of the complex ecosystem that depended on it, periodically gave way to an unpredictable cycle of warmer currents known as, El Niño. The warm waters upset the life cycle of plankton, displacing the many species that depended on it. Increasingly, those displaced included the colonizing humans.

The author begins her account with what she calls a “deep history” of the Humboldt Current ecosystem. She traces how indigenous communities harvested its riches, how European naturalists like Humboldt and Darwin perceived it, and how it really works based on modern oceanography. The key factors are the upwelling of cold water from the Peru-Chile trench, and the long cycle of temperature shifts. She goes on to explore how nineteenth and early twentieth-century agriculturalists created their own expanding niche in the maritime ecosystem by using fish parts for fertilizer, and by extracting protein from the sea to feed land animals for human consumption. This unrelenting incursion of agricultural demand affected many ocean species, from whales to sardines, but the golden anchoveta of the Pacific coast of Chile and Peru became a special target. It offered a unique volume of biomass that the industry could utilize entirely.

Progress promised a bright future. Through improved technology at processing plants, the coarse fishmeal used for animal feed gave way to a much finer high-protein fish flour suitable even for human consumption. In the 1960s, the precariously built settlement of Chimbote, on the northern coast of Peru, became a boomtown. For a few short years, it was home to the world’s largest single-species fishery. That boom would bust in a spectacular way with the El Niño phenomenon of 1972. After 1980, taking into account the natural cycles of the sea, the Chilean ports of Iquique and Talcahuano began to harvest and process the anchoveta as its northern neighbor had done, while also learning to diversify their catch. When the anchoveta grew scarce, they hauled in huge loads of jack mackerel (in Spanish, jurel) and the plentiful but unpopular hake (in Spanish, merluza) for human consumption.

*Fishermen in Iquique, Chile. Source: Gobierno Regional Tarapacá*

Both Chile and Peru, in consultation with international agencies, eventually imposed regulations to prevent overfishing in order to protect their unique and vital resource. But, as the author observes, legislation proved easier to promulgate than to enforce, especially when the process under regulation occurred offshore, far from prying eyes. Moreover, that natural resource that each nation state claimed as its own was not like a copper mine or a temperate forest. It could, and frequently did, simply swim away. Peruvian authorities could turn a blind eye to enforcing quotas when it seemed the lucrative catch might soon shift into Chilean waters, and vice versa.

In his study, La Frontera: Forests and Ecological Conflict in Chile’s Frontier Territory, (Duke University Press, 2014), historian Thomas Klubock observes how early twentieth century developmentalism treated the temperate forest of the Chilean south as if it were a non-renewable resource. The Chilean nation state had set about “mining the trees”, as it were, and leaving behind a charred wasteland, without regard to social or environmental impact. In Wintersteen’s account, a similar dynamic drove Pacific fisheries to self-destructive excess, with the added complication that the fluid extraterritorial medium of the potentially renewable resource made global management technically complex and politically impossible. Producers assumed that “any fish not extracted from the sea had no value” (115). As the 1972 collapse unfolded in Chimbote, fishermen saw that two thirds of their catch consisted of juveniles, up from one fifth in normal times. And yet, they dutifully ground them all into fish meal, to meet their contracts with foreign hog and poultry farmers.

*Fishing boat in the bay of Chimbote, Peru. Source: Inti Runa Viajero*

Long-term tendencies in global species competition provide the necessary context for understanding immediate political ends. Joshua Frens-String’s new book,Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile, (University of California Press, June 2021), explores the leftist Popular Unity government’s attempt to promote hake consumption as a prime source of protein among Chile’s undernourished poor from 1970 to 1973. The project met with only limited success because of unavailable refrigeration infrastructure, but also because people’s dietary habits were deeply rooted in culture, taste and habit. Wintersteen seems to intentionally ignore the local culture and partisan politics of food in order to emphasize how, one way or another, the global industrial ecosystem of food production put undue market pressure on ocean populations, no matter who controlled the reins of government, or what their ideological orientations might have been.

Wintersteen’s work suggests that the doxic presuppositions shared by apparent political rivals can predetermine policy in disastrous ways. In Courage Tastes of Blood, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), cultural historian Florencia Mallon argues that the repression typically associated with the Pinochet regime began in the indigenous Mapuche territory a month before the September 1973 coup. Whether directed by socialists or neoliberals, the Chilean state consistently acted as lord and master of Mapuche land. Wintersteen observes a similarly proprietary premise with regard to the ocean and its biomass: regardless of nationalities or political affiliations, the modern state assumed that it could own the seas. Therein lies the rub. The Chilean national anthem triumphantly proclaims, the sea that peacefully washes your long coastline promises you a splendorous future. Or, does it?

*Chilean coastline in Tarapacá. Source: Mariano Mantel*

Wintersteen concludes her analysis with the hope that this book will contribute to future policy making “by offering insights into institutional culture, by evaluating conceptual models; and by assessing program and policy outcomes” (112). Spatial and ecological contingencies cannot be ignored, especially as their cycles, aggravated by climate change, threaten collapse. The modern land-bound nation state is badly situated to govern the seas, if, in fact, that is even a valid objective. In Wintersteen’s closing remarks, she suggests that some seed of a more viable frame of mind for engaging the ocean biomass might lurk in yet unexplored “indigenous knowledge” (124); in the wisdom of the not quite conquered ancestors who knew how to treat the forces of nature with respect. She makes no specific proposals for policy change. A new planetary worldview would have to come first.

The cultural manifestations of that ecologically viable frame of mind might prove crucial for future study. While generally attuned to local lore, it seems odd that the author has excluded the association of the El Niño phenomenon with the Christmas season, occurring in early summer in the southern hemisphere. A local carol joyfully proclaims that “the Child has arrived,” but in the ironic style of local fishermen, this “child” brings not salvation, but devastation. And yet, on the other hand, the drought-prone valleys of central and north-central Chile and southern Peru rely on El Niño’s periodically heavy rains to replenish the snow cap on which they depended for irrigation in dry years. A southern myth tells of a fertility goddess, La Pincoya, who appears on the beaches under a full moon in December, to dance facing the land, predicting abundant harvests, or facing the sea, predicting full fishing nets. Coastal communities had learned to expect either one or the other, but never both.

Coastal communities had a word for the fluctuations of fortune, the vaivén, a contraction of the Spanish, va y viene—comings and goings. The term reflects a cultural acceptance of the unpredictable cycles of wind and wave to which humanity, like all other species, had to adapt. Neoliberal capitalism has no place for that kind of thinking. The linear growth charts of capitalized industry, along with the commodification of resources and the state structures created to support them, presupposed an unlimited potential for growth. The Humboldt Current ecosystem has proven that the myth of unlimited growth is radically unsustainable. Future research in this field might include the cultural artifacts that yet preserve the ancient seeds of real sustainability. As any child in Iquique could tell you, what adults called the smell of money was simply the stink of dead fish.

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Introducing the book

Notes from the Director

Praise for the book

Author and discussants

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