gre287, Author at Not Even Past

Rodolfo Valentín González Pérez: 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.

He lived with his aunt, María González. I knew her. She was a member of the Association of the Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared (Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos-Desaparecidos) until the day she died. She marched alongside Doris, Inelia, and the mothers of so many others who had disappeared, carrying her placard with the picture of Rodolfo. María González was an anomaly. Rodolfo was unusual company for the other prisoners at Villa Grimaldi, too.

Demonstration by members of the Association of the Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared (Photographer: Kena Lorenzini, via Wikimedia Commons)

María González said that, when her nephew started out at the DINA, he stopped wearing a uniform. They gave him a dark suit and black shoes. They picked him up in a car every day, a black Chevrolet Impala with tinted windows. Once, Rodolfo showed his military ID to his aunt. It identified him as a member of the DINA. That was a violation of protocol. The first one.

During the dictatorship, showing military ID was understood as a threat. It was a way to cut in line and get preferential treatment. But the DINA was different. You weren’t supposed to show that one anywhere, except at the door. They had several doors, actually, all of them, secret.

Rodolfo Valentín didn’t do well at the DINA. His own humanity betrayed him. Some days, he was sent to guard prisoners with bullet wounds, internal injuries, and broken bones at the Military Hospital. He would use his privileged access to tell to the prisoners what their respective situations were. Later, he contacted some family members, letting them know where their loved ones were and in what condition.

Rodolfo Valentín González Pérez (via Memoria Viva)

Maybe he wasn’t so clever. Maybe Rodolfo really thought that was how it was done. That was, after all, the Chilean way. But not in the DINA. One would think he had been thoroughly briefed. My suspicion is that our Rodolfo Valentín was very clever. If so, he was in open rebellion.

I don’t know if he really thought he had a chance of not getting caught. Maybe, like many others, he believed the military government would be over soon. Or, maybe, he was just very brave. Rodolfo was already a witness to the wildness of the DINA. If he wasn’t on board, then he was dangerous. The day would come when he would speak out.

He had an older brother who was a leftist militant. He had been given temporary asylum at the Argentine embassy.

Rodolfo was the third of ten. He had lived with his aunt since he was small. His father had died in ’64, leaving his mother more mouths than she could feed. His aunt had raised him to lighten the load. But someone had taught him very young that there are things one would never do to another human being. Perhaps that was his father.

He fell in step with the DINA at the beginning. Afraid, perhaps, or just following orders, as they say. And, maybe, he missed his father. That would leave any boy vulnerable to the military style. And maybe he was the favorite recruit of someone important. Military hierarchy works that way, believe it or not. And it just might be true that Rodolfo was momentarily tempted by the unlimited power of the DINA. It was naked, corrupt, clandestine, total power.

One thing we know for certain. His parents loved the cinema. That’s how he got the name Rodolfo Valentín. Perhaps, they were romantics, fans of Gardel, the tango singer. The cosmopolitan night life of Santiago in the ‘50’s ended, for them, abruptly. A heart attack, or an accident; I’m not sure. Rodolfo was ten when he went to live with his aunt.

The DINA caught him, of course. Communicating with the incomunicados. The next day, he was one of them. They took him from aunt’s home on the night of July 23, 1974. He could have met Inelia’s boy, Héctor, first as a DINA man, with infinite power over him, and, a few days later, as a comrade in the anonymous darkness at Villa Grimaldi.

During the Popular Unity years, Luz Arce had belonged to the Socialist Party. She was taken in June 1974. Rodolfo was her guard at the Military Hospital. He became too friendly. He even asked for her advice about how to get his brother out of the country.

Then, Luz Arce defected to the enemy. First, she became an informant and, later, a full-blown DINA agent. Stockholm Syndrome, that’s what they called it. When someone who is abducted begins to collaborate with their abductors. It’s what happened to Patty Hearst.

In 1990, when military rule was over, Luz Arce recanted. She told everything she knew to the Rettig Commission. She said she saw Rodolfo at Villa Grimaldi. He had his leg in a cast. Out of desperation, he had thrown himself from the tower. Maybe he thought he could escape, but no one ever escaped from the DINA.

They might have thrown him from the tower. The DINA agents were especially cruel with Rodolfo. For them, he was a traitor. Because of his brother, they figured he was a leftist infiltrator.

That wasn’t true. The other prisoners even said he was different. He had no political background. Leftist parties had training. Militants knew the drill. They knew what to expect when they were tortured. Rodolfo, they said, was “like a virgin.” An inexperienced, innocent boy.

Luz Arce said that the last time she saw Rodolfo alive, he was stripped naked and hanging from a beam at Villa Grimaldi. We don’t know if he was hanging by his hands, by his feet, or in some unimaginably painful stress position, barely breathing and wishing he could stop.

In 1977, two Air Force officials showed up at his aunt’s apartment in Santiago to confiscate Rodolfo’s military insignia. It seems they made a special effort to make sure that he never reappeared. Or maybe they did it just to be cruel. Why they waited so long was a mystery.

If all children had someone to teach them right from wrong; someone who would say that sometimes the authorities are evil; that power and goodness are not the same thing; then there would be no DINA, no CIA black ops, no My Lai massacres. There would be no cruelty, no abduction and no torture. I am surprised that there were so few like Rodolfo. Sometimes, in this world, there seem to be more cowards than heroes, more darkness than light. It doesn’t have to be that way.

There were nearly 2,000 who disappeared in Chile between 1974 and 1976. Most of them were convinced of an ideology. They had chosen to sacrifice their lives for the dream of a better world. But Rodolfo’s option was more primitive. He decided that he could not become a torturer, even if it meant he would be tortured. He chose solidarity, and it cost him everything he had.

For more on Chile’s disappeared ones, see www.memoriaviva.com.

The McFarland Cuban Plantation Records

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

The Benson Latin American Collection is a beacon for Latin Americanist scholars the world over. It has drawn researchers to examine its archival gems, particularly its strength in holdings that shed light on Mexico and Central America. Over the past few years, the Benson has further diversified its collection to better represent other parts of Latin America and strengthen its holdings on materials from the Caribbean as well as Latinx and African diasporas in the United States. Its well-deserved status as the top Latin American and Caribbean-focused collection in the United States is what drew me to UT Austin in the first place.

Before I was an Information Studies student at UT, I was a first-time graduate student diving into academia at the University of Florida. Having found employment in UF’s Latin American and Caribbean Collection, I was soon inspired by the wide variety of unique Cuban holdings present, such as autographed first editions of works by Cuba’s national hero and author José Martí. The mentorship of scholars of Cuba like historian Lillian Guerra further drew me into Cuban Studies. Five years and many trips later, Cuba continues to capture my interests, particularly now that I live and work in Miami, where the highest number of Cuban Americans in the United States reside.

It should come as no surprise that the collection I am reviewing relates to Cuba. With the assistance of the Benson’s Caribbean Studies liaison librarian Adrian Johnson, I came across the McFarland Cuban Plantation Records. It is a bilingual collection of correspondence, company records, legal documents, news clippings, and personal photos relating to the Cuban Plantation Company of Nueces County, Texas. The company was originally organized and incorporated in New York State by twenty Pennsylvanians who came together to buy a 1000-acre plantation near Holguín, a city in eastern Cuba. The date of the incorporation, October 1, 1902, is important, as it came less than five months after the end of the four-year U.S. military occupation of Cuba following the conclusion of the Cuban War of Independence. During this turbulent period, Cubans negotiated with the legacies of Spanish colonialism as well as the neo-imperial presence of the United States at all levels of society.^[1] Following the formal end of the occupation, U.S. interests did not disappear, but rather intensified, with 13,000 North Americans having bought land in Cuba by 1905.^[2]

Of those twenty Pennsylvanians mentioned previously, nineteen eventually stopped paying the interest on their loans and thus ceased to be a part of the Cuban Plantation Company. The only original investor who remained was one J.F. McFarland. McFarland would eventually pass ownership of the company to his two sons, and in 1953, they officially changed the business’s name to the Cuban Plantation Company of Nueces County, Texas. During this period, their landholdings became entangled with a brewing revolutionary fervor against the brutal dictatorship of military strongman Fulgencio Batista, who was backed by multiple U.S. public and private interests. However, the story of the Cuban Revolution and the eventual agrarian reform that would affect U.S. interests like those of the McFarlands is not a simple one.

*Postcard from Holguín, where McFarland noted details from his trip to Cuba.*

Agrarian reform was on everyone’s minds, both inside and outside of Cuba. In June 1959, then-Prime Minister of Cuba Fidel Castro told the U.S. Ambassador to Cuba Philip Bonsal that agrarian reform was “a matter of life and death.” U.S. landowners like the McFarlands’ and the United Fruit Company, which was the single-largest landowner in Cuba, found the prospect of agrarian reform worrisome. As the McFarland records show, they, like many others, assumed that Cuba’s revolutionary experiment would not last long. For example, in a 1959 letter from J.R. McFarland, the secretary-treasurer of the Cuban Plantation Company, to lawyer Dr. Pedro Ferrer y Coba, he said, “We also feel that the dictatorship of Castro will sooner or later terminate because of lack of finances, because he has alienated the people or governments from which he might have obtained finances.” In the same letter, McFarland also notes that the company felt they would be paid “a price below the actual worth of the land” or “in bonds of uncertain value.” As the years passed and Cuba found economic stability through a relationship with the Soviet Union, these assumptions turned into legal efforts to secure some form of compensation for expropriated properties. In the McFarland records, one can see that their efforts to receive compensation for their land continued as late as 1971.

Letter from J.R. McFarland to Dr. Pedro Ferrer y Coba, employee of the Cuban Plantation Company who was given power of attorney on the company’s behalf. The letter notes that the company considered the Cuban revolutionary project to be temporary.

The culture of the U.S. plantation in Cuba was one in which North American custom reigned supreme, with many plantations having their own police forces subject only to the laws set by the landowner.^[3] This detested system, and the poverty it created in the Cuban countryside, were so unpopular that agrarian reform was overwhelmingly supported by Cuba’s middle classes. As Lillian Guerra shows in her pivotal work on the first decade following the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, the Cuban middle classes supported agrarian reform via monetary donations, donations of agricultural machinery, and some even opening their homes to visiting guajiros (Cubans from the countryside) in a government PR initiative to open the luxuries of the city previously unavailable to them.^[4]

While agrarian reform was wildly popular at its initiation, certain instances during this period foreshadow what would become an authoritarian regime. Fidel Castro directly controlled the agency tasked with instituting agrarian reform, the Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria, or INRA, along with a host of other government entities.^[5] As he expanded his personal popularity and power, he also put his allies in positions that they were not always qualified for. For example, the medical doctor Ernesto “Che” Guevara was appointed as the head of the national bank. Urban underground activists, commonly known as “la clandestinidad,” who had fought on behalf of Castro’s 26th ofJuly Movement, were displaced by those of the Partido Socialista Popular, a covertly Stalinist party and the not-too-distant allies of Fulgencio Batista during his first presidency and later dictatorship.^[6]

Copy of letter sent to J.R. McFarland, then-Secretary/Treasurer of the Cuban Plantation Company, by Cuban company lawyer Dr. Pedro Ferrer y Coba. In the second-to-last paragraph on this page, Ferrer y Coba acknowledges the popularity of the then-provisional government.

The McFarland records provide little insight into life on their farm, but the collection includes a brief memoir about a family/company trip to Cuba written by J.R. McFarland, son of J.F. The farm is romanticized as a quaint country estate, but the tenants, like other facets of Cuba in the eyes of the author, are portrayed as primitive. Furthermore, racist imagery is present throughout, with most Cubans encountered labeled as “negroes.” This label also does not take into consideration the diversity of racial identifications in Cuba, where like other parts of Latin America and the Caribbean, a variety of racial identifications exist apart from the dichotomy of “black” and “white.”^[7] These instances provide important context for the plethora of social ills that arise when foreign entities control the land and people of an independent country. The agrarian reform in its infancy was a noble cause that enjoyed support from the Cuban masses and was a glimmer of hope for those seeking a more independent and egalitarian nation. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to dismiss what came after this period of hope.

The principal crop of the Cuban Plantation Company was sugar, a hugely important product in Cuban history. Early revolutionary ideals of crop diversification and self-sufficiency were displaced for more of the same. Instead of supplying the bulk of its sugar harvest to the United States, Cuba would instead provide its cash crop to the USSR. In the Soviet era, Cuba functioned as a quasi-colony of the USSR in the Western Hemisphere. Additionally, failed agricultural initiatives like the Ten Million Ton Harvest (Zafra de los Diez Millones), which emptied other professional sectors of personnel in the name of carrying out a hefty sugar harvest, created ration shortages and the corruption of the ration system itself.^[8] With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, Cuba faced a massive decrease in food supply, with a 50% decrease in overall food production within its own borders.^[9] This food insecurity has not been overcome to this day, with increasingly difficult U.S. economic sanctions, failed state agricultural policy, dependence on a limited supply of imports, and a stagnant economic structure where success is often determined by race, gender, lucrative familial connections abroad, and geographic location.^[10]

*Postcard of a home characteristic of the Cuban countryside. On his family trip to Cuba, J.R. McFarland thought that the image closely resembled that of a home on his company’s farm.*

My time at UT Austin taught me much about amplifying voices that have been historically absent from the archive. At the Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab of Florida International University, we are seeking to do just that, with strategic community partnerships around South Florida to document oral histories and create a more all-encompassing archive of the region and how different groups have experienced it. About archiving Cuban themes in South Florida, the tradition has been to almost exclusively preserve the stories of pre-1959 Cuba, prominent members of the exile community, and dissidents. While these stories are important, they should nonetheless be complemented by those of individuals who were brought up in Cold War-era and post-USSR collapse Cuba, as well as the more quotidian stories of Cuban exile life in South Florida from recent decades. As someone who has lived in and researched Cuba, I learned early on that the hyper-politicization of the subject of Cuba leads to anyone willingly diving into post-1959, in-country themes being met with suspicion. However, for the sake of engaging research, preservation, and ultimately positive change in Cuba, these themes must not be pushed to the side. While the situation I have described is unique, the Benson nonetheless offers a great example for these goals. The Benson’s historic holdings like the Genaro García Collection and the Joaquín García Icazbalceta Manuscript Collection are being supplemented by newer, digitally based initiatives like the Voces Oral History Archive and post-custodial digitization in the region with partners like the Colombian Proceso de Comunidades Negras, or PCN. My hope is that one day, the archives in South Florida that more closely resemble the McFarland Collection can be complemented by those of Cubans who lived through the turbulent decades of the Revolution, and those who came to Florida in later decades seeking libertad.

Throughout my professional and personal life in Florida and Cuba, I have seen both sides of the partisan battles surrounding Cuba and its contested future. On one side are those academics and activists that celebrate the successes of the Cuban Revolution without acknowledging the extent of its failures. On the other side, many in the Miami exile community, as well as some U.S. politicians, are unable to see the dire human costs of the trade embargo and toughening U.S. sanctions. The lack of room for critique leads to Cubans being nothing more than symbols to justify one view or the other, while also leaving Cubans–to borrow the words of cultural anthropologist Noelle Stout–“to make the long, hot walk back to their normal lives” when they are no longer on the radar of foreigners or the exile community.^[11] In this moment, a climactic and potentially transformative one for the people of Cuba, they must be seen as more than props in a partisan battle, but agents in their own destiny.

Katie L. Coldiron, a native of Kentucky, moved to Florida in 2016 to pursue a master’s degree at the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies, where she worked alongside Dr. Lillian Guerra for her thesis research. She was also introduced to library and archival work at UF, and parlayed different roles held during her time as a student into a position digitizing Cuban Judaica items and periodicals on the ground in Havana, all part of a post-custodial digitization project undertaken by the UF George A. Smathers Libraries. Following this experience, Katie enrolled in a library and information science master’s program at the University of Texas at Austin. During her time at UT Austin, Katie served as a graduate research assistant for digital projects at the UT Libraries, where she assisted area studies librarians on various facets of their digital projects. She also was a FLAS fellow at the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies. Katie is currently working as the Digital Archivist and Project Manager for the Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab at Florida International University. She can be found on Twitter: @katielcoldiron.

^[1] Iglesias Utset, Mariel. A Cultural History of Cuba During the U.S. Occupation, 1898- 1902. Chapel Hill (NC): The University of North Carolina Press. 2011.

^[2] Pérez, Louis M. On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture. Chapel Hill (NC): The University of North Carolina Press. 1999.

^[3] Ibid.

^[4] Guerra, Lillian. Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance, 1959-1971. Chapel Hill (NC): The University of North Carolina Press. 2012.

^[5] Ibid.

^[6] Ibid.

^[7] Spence Benson, Devyn. Antiracism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution. The University of North Carolina Press. 2016.

^[8] Guerra, 2012.

^[9] Pérez, Louis M. Rice in the Time of Sugar: The Political Economy of Food in Cuba. The University of North Carolina Press. 2019.

^[10] Garth, Hanna. Food in Cuba: The Pursuit of a Decent Meal. Stanford (CA): Stanford University Press. 2020.

^[11] Stout, Noelle M. After Love: Queer Intimacy and Erotic Economies in Post-Soviet Cuba. Durham: Duke University Press. 2014.

IHS Podcast: Apache Diaspora in Four Hundred Years of Colonialism vs. “Toltec Antiquities” Diaspora in Early Republican Mexico”

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 previews a roundtable discussion that will be held on Monday, September 20 at 12 pm. More information on the roundtable can be found here. It features Dr. Miruna Achim (Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana-Cuajimalpa Mexico City), Dr. Paul Conrad (UT Arlington) and co-hosts Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Sheena Cox (UT Austin).

Introduction

Our two guests are the authors of two recently important books. Paul Conrad is the author of The Apache Diaspora Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival (2021) and Miruna Achim of From Idols to Antiquity: Forging the Nation Museum of Mexico (2017). The two book appear unrelated, but they are connected in ways that are relevant to the interests of Sheena Cox, whose essay we will be discussing on Monday, Sept. 20 at noon.

Sheena explores Iturbide’s imperial new practices of indigenous diplomacy that relied on Tejano-Comanche exiles. She also explores the discourse “civilization” that forced casta leaders like the pardo Vicente Guerrero to consider indigenous nomadic peoples as potential citizens of the polity only if civilized. Sheena explores the Imperial new diplomacy in borderlands as a project of local exiled Tejanos whose families were Comanche in Natchitoches. The whole of colonial wars in the borderlands, from Nuño de Guzman‘s “Chichimec” Wars to the Battle of Medina, had this peculiar mestizo-indigenous characters at its very center.

Conrad explore the Apache Diaspora under three different polities: the Spanish Monarchy, the Mexican Republic, and the US Empire of settler colonialism. The changing Apache Diaspora yield different human experiences as these polities engaged with the Apache differently over time.

Conrad offers a history of monarchy, nation and empire from the perspective of the Apache, radically decentering chronologies, geographies, narrative of institutional and political continuity and discontinuity between Mexico and the USA. Conrad begins at the micro local level (the palace of the governors of New Mexico that operated largely using Apache captives) only to expand gradually the Apache Diaspora into larger geographies (New Mexico as whole; the mining districts of Coahuila, Durango and Central Mexico; Mexico City; the Caribbean island as prisons, and the US continental empire of scattered reservations). In Conrad’s hands the Apaches de paz, settling along the presidios of Texas, Coahuila, New Mexico, Nueva Vizcaya in exchange for commodities, become the prefiguration of the US reservation.

Conrad’s Spanish Monarchy, like Sheena’s First Mexican Empire of Iturbide, is an amalgamation of peoples, including the Pueblo, Tlaxcalan settlers, and mestizos who accompanied Oñate and created New Mexico. These were the peoples who raided Navajos and Apaches. It was also the raids of the Wichita and Comanche that created the Apache relocation to Texas and the creation of multiple Apache identities around presidios and diasporas. Is Spanish a misnomer?

Achim’s Mexican republic is partly a creature of continuities that inherited the Spanish monarchy’s practices, institutions, collections, and personnel. But is also a “failed” state, utterly incapable of disciplining anyone into supplying the National Museum of Mexico with collections. Neither the governors in Chiapas and Yucatan nor local communities (Palenque) acknowledged the authority of the Museum directors and relinquished objects to the Museum collections. European and US traveler collectors paid no attention to the laws the Museum’s directors had the Mexican Congress pass to protect “antiquities” either. Neither legal restrictions nor the institutionalization of the museum could prevent the massive “diaspora” of collections and manuscripts that began with Iturbide’s Empire. It took the creation of a form of national populism under Benito Juarez for the central state to finally come of age and stop the plunder.

Yet ideas mattered. Achim explores the ways the various directors of the museum did engage with the collections in meaningful ways, particularly through the publications of cluttered objects in small spaces via their publication in newspapers (as museums of paper: museos de papel). Achim also honors the intellectual prowess of one of the Museum directors: José Fernando Ramirez whose insights have remained very much silenced and forgotten, eclipsed by scholarship on the likes of Humboldt and William Prescott.

Achim demonstrates Ramirez’s precociousness and depth and his radical new ways of interpreting ‘Mexican” antiquities via their contextualization through colonial and precolonial documents and their Nahua names. For Ramirez the Museum was about collecting an archive of paper and documentation.

Achim describes a republic that actively manufactured a sense of the past that had room for stuff birds but not for three centuries of the colonial past. How a republic created a sense of history that saw the deep antiquity of Mexico as the only aspect of its past worth remembering? The manufacturing of ignorance of the colonial past is an aspect of her work that is worth exploring in the future.

~ Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Guests

Dr. Miruna Achim is an Associate Professor of Humanities at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana-Cuajimalpa Mexico City. Her research centers on the material cultures of science and technology, the history of medicine, and the history of antiquarianism and collection building in nineteenth-century Mexico. Her more recent publications include From Idols to Antiquity: Forging the National Museum of Mexico (Nebraska UP, 2017), Museum Matters: Making and Unmaking Mexico’s National Collections (edited with Susan Deans-Smith and Sandra Rozental, University of Arizona Press, 2021); Piedra, papel y tijera. Instrumentos en las ciencias en México (edited with Laura Cházaro and Nuria Valverde, UAM, 2018); and Museos al detalle: colecciones, antigüedades e historia natural (edited with Irina Podgorny, Prohistoria, 2014). Presently, she is researching the post-conquest lives of Mesoamerican jades between the sixteenth through twenty-first centuries, a project which brings together studies on Mesoamerican cosmogonies and material cultures, European pharmacopeias, curiosity cabinets, and commercial routes between the New World, China, and New Zealand.

Dr. Paul Conrad is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington where he teaches courses on Native American history and literature. His research focuses on Indigenous peoples’ confrontations with the colonialism in North America across the long durée, with particular interest in questions of captivity, forced migration, and enslavement. This research has been supported by grants and fellowships from organizations such as the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Phillips Fund for Native American research, and the Clements Center for Southwest Studies. His book, The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival, was recently published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

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

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.

IHS Workshop: The Mexican Empire and Indigenous Texas, 1821-1823

Workshop: "The Mexican Empire and Indigenous Texas, 1821-1823" by Sheena Cox, University of Texas at Austin

Monday September 20, 2021 • Webinar

12:00 PM – 1:30 PM

With the arrival of Iturbide’s Mexican Empire in Tejas, the alliance of Apache with Comanche and with patriot-exile-Tejano raiders became the temporary victors. The creation of Empire led to the return of diplomatic negotiations between Comanches -Apache-Tejano raiders and Iturbide’s Empire. The new Empire relied on defeated, exiled Tejano patriots to reconstitute peaceful alliances with Comanche and Apache. In Central Mexico the triumph of Iturbide’s empire signified the triumph of casta insurgents’ irregular armies led by pardo leaders like Vicente Guerrero. The Empire’s Plan de Iguala secured radical new notions of citizenship, one in which rights were no longer linked to special packages of racial privileges or lack thereof. The triumph Empire linked the center of Empire and Tejas in new ways. When the Empire triumphed, Iturbide, who had neglected Tejas as general of the of armies of northern provinces, appointed Tejano allies of Comanches and Apaches to invite the indigenous raiders to the capitol to reestablish diplomatic relations. Iturbide and Guerrero did not want Tejas to be controlled by Anglo settler’s bent in bringing slavery across the Sabine River into Mexico. Sheena studies these few months of radical novel possibilities and their ultimate undoing. This Imperial project ultimately collapsed as the ideas of Eurocentric civilization in the discourses of radical pardo liberals like Guerrero never considered Apaches and Comanches as more than potential citizens to civilize.

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

Respondents:

Dr. Miruna Achim
Associate Professor of Humanities,
Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Cuajimalpa, Mexico City

Dr. Paul Conrad
Associate Professor
University of Texas at Arlington

Dr. Catherine Andrews
Secretaria Académica
Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE), Mexico City

Read about the IHS Graduate Research Fellows this Year:
https://notevenpast.org/institute-for-historical-studies-race-and-caste-research-theme-2021-22/

About the “Race and Caste” Theme in 2021-2022:
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/historicalstudies/theme/overview.php

Please register at this link in order to receive the pre-circulated paper and link to access the event: https://utexas.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_96QRVTaCSyydpp2jZMWuwg.

This is Democracy: Shadow Docket and Abortion

Guest: Stephen I. Vladeck holds the Charles Alan Wright Chair in Federal Courts at the University of Texas School of Law and is a nationally recognized expert on the federal courts, constitutional law, national security law, and military justice. Professor Vladeck has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, the Texas Supreme Court, and various lower federal civilian and military courts; has testified before numerous congressional committees and Executive Branch agencies and commissions; has served as an expert witness both in U.S. state and federal courts and in foreign tribunals; and has received numerous awards for his influential and widely cited legal scholarship, his prolific popular writing, his teaching, and his service to the legal profession. Vladeck is the co-host, together with Professor Bobby Chesney, of the popular and award-winning “National Security Law Podcast.” He is CNN’s lead Supreme Court analyst and a co-author of Aspen Publishers’ leading national security law and counterterrorism law casebooks. And he is an executive editor of the Just Security blog and a senior editor of the Lawfare blog.

Jeremi and Zachary, with special guest, Professor Stephen Vladeck, discuss the Shadow Docket in response to the recent controversial Texas Law that largely restricts access to Abortion.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “The Right to Choose”.

About This is Democracy

The future of democracy is uncertain, but we are committed to its urgent renewal today. This podcast will draw on historical knowledge to inspire a contemporary democratic renaissance. The past offers hope for the present and the future, if only we can escape the negativity of our current moment — and each show will offer a serious way to do that! This podcast will bring together thoughtful voices from different generations to help make sense of current challenges and propose positive steps forward. Our goal is to advance democratic change, one show at a time. Dr. Jeremi Suri, a renowned scholar of democracy, will host the podcast and moderate discussions.

This is Democracy: Cuba and Democracy in the Caribbean

This is Democracy – Episode 157: Cuba and Democracy in the Caribbean

Guest: Dr. Alan McPherson is a professor of history at Temple University, where he directs the Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy. He is the author of numerous book on U.S.-Latin American relations and U.S. foreign relations. His most recent book is: Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: How a Washington Assassination Brought Pinochet’s Terror State to Justice.

Jeremi and Zachary, with guest Alan McPherson, discuss what we can learn from the long history of democratic efforts in Cuba, and how many of them were caused by America’s foreign policy.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem titled “Certainly Probable”.

About This is Democracy

Conversations with Dr. Miruna Achim

by Camila Ordorica

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

En el marco del homenaje al centenario de la Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, la Conferencia Lozano Long 2022 propició un espacio de reflexión sobre archivos latinoamericanos desde un pensamiento latinoamericano con el propósito de entender y conocer las contribuciones de la región a las prácticas archivísticas globales, así como las responsabilidades éticas y políticas que esto implica. Pensar en términos de archivística en tiempos de COVID-19 también nos brindó la imprevista oportunidad de re-imaginar la forma en la que se llevan a cabo conferencias académicas internacionales. Como parte de esta propuesta, esta publicación de Not Even Past se junta a las otras de la serie escritas por estudiantes de posgrado en la Universidad de Texas en Austin. En ellas los estudiantes resaltan el trabajo de las y los panelistas invitados a la conferencia con el objetivo de socializar el material y así descolonizar y democratizar el acceso a la producción de conocimiento. La conferencia tuvo lugar en febrero de 2022 pero todas las presentaciones, así como las grabaciones de los paneles están archivados en YouTube de forma permanente y pronto estarán disponibles las traducciones al inglés y español respectivamente. Las grabaciones de la conferencia y los artículos relacionados se pueden encontrar aquí.

Dr. Miruna Achim will be one of the contributors to the 2022 Lozano Long Conference which will be held in honor of the centennial of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection. The conference, entitled “Archiving Objects of Knowledge with Latin American Perspectives”, will take place online on Thursday February 24 and Friday February 25 2022. The following is a presentation and overview of Dr. Achim’s work that was written in the hopes of bringing the reader closer to some of her ideas and key concepts in preparation for the conference.

I first met Dr. Miruna Achim this past March in Mexico City. In the months since, I have met with her a handful of times. Her research topic and mine overlap, and I was fortunate enough to be introduced to her by a professor through e-mail which is undeniably the platform where most academic meetings take place.[1] After a couple of exchanges, she said we could meet at the entrance of the Museum of Anthropology at 5pm, where she was going to be doing research. We can walk and talk, she told me. As historians, we often study how intellectual networks functioned in the past and much like our research subjects, we also create and embody them in the present. My conversations with Dr. Miruna Achim together with my readings of her work have helped me better understand how, in the sometimes strange world of academic sociability, not everything is—nor should it be—job market related. This short piece offers a picture of an ever-changing process of knowledge production through community building. When I first contacted Dr. Achim, I was only looking for some guidance with my research project, but through our conversations I have found that talking with the authors of the books we like and the ideas we respect humanizes and demystifies both the research process and the researcher.

*The Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. Source: Ziko van Dijk*

No object or person is ‘inherently’ anything, Dr. Achim told me over coffee a rainy afternoon of July, while kindly answering my most pressing question: how had she ended up in Mexico? Her response was honest. She only become interested in the Spanish-speaking world after having finished her bachelor’s and in the same way that most things happen, by chance. Born in communist Romania, she arrived at the United States by way of Austria, where she spent some time as a refugee. After having finished her bachelor’s degree at Harvard University in Art History, she met someone with Mexican heritage and became interested in the region, eventually enrolled in a Ph.D. program, traveled to Mexico City as the first stop in a research project that involved many cities in Latin America, and never left. Her dissertation entitled Fractured Visions. Theaters of Science in Baroque Mexico, became what she calls a “blueprint of her future research projects.”

Dr. Achim’s research focuses on the construction of objects—antiquities, scientific instruments, animals, climate, and minerals—into epistemic, aesthetic, and political categories by employing multi-scale analysis. Her research ranges from the sixteenth to the twentieth century and seeks connections between Global North, Global South, Western Europe, the Americas, and the Pacific. She is currently an Associate Professor of the Humanities Department at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM) Campus Cuajimalpa as well as a graduate teacher at the Institute for Philosophical Studies of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). There she teaches courses on cultural history of colonial science, and modern museums and collections. She has also been a Visiting Researcher at Cambridge University as well as a Visiting Professor at the École des Hautes Études-Paris.

While looking into Dr. Achim’s CV in preparation for this piece, it was striking to see the extent of listed collaborative works. It was also quite evident that Dr. Achim collaborates extensively with women, whom she calls her friends. She has edited and co-edited 7 volumes published both in Mexico and in the United States, in Spanish and in English, has written 20 contributions to edited volumes, and has published 11 journal articles. This next January 2022, the prestigious French journal Annales. Histoire. Sciences Sociales, will publish her co-authored articled with Stefanie Gänger (Universität Heidelberg) entitled “Pas encore classiques. The making of American antiquities.” The piece promises to call into question many assumptions that the discipline of archeology holds today. As told by Dr. Achim, the writing and editing process of this piece took 10 years. Her most recent collaborative book is entitled Museum Matters: Making and Unmaking of Mexico’s National Collection and was just published this past August 21. This publication is co-authored with Dr. Susan Deans-Smith (UT Austin) and Dr. Sandra Rozenta (UAM Cuajimalpa). In Museum Matters, the featured authors explore the histories of objects that have become part of the collection of the National Museum.

Dr. Achim has also written two monographs and is currently writing her third. Her first book Lagartijas medicinales: remedios americanos y debates ilustrados (Medicinal Lizards: American Remedies and Illustrated Debates) was published by Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM) and Conaculta in 2008. It presents the scientific debates that developed about the medicinal uses of a specific kind of lizard found in Guatemala and Chiapas in the eighteenth century said to cure ulcers and blisters in the skin and situates them in their context.[2] Her second book, From Idols to Antiquity: Forging the National Museum of Mexico (Nebraska University Press, 2017) delves into the history of the creation of the collections of the National Museum of Mexico—today’s Museum of Anthropology—in the early nineteenth century. By zooming in on the objects of the National Museum at this early time, Achim’s book shows the “evident profound crisis of meaning” behind the entire national project. Her current book project, The Breath of Green Stones: The Post-Conquest Lives of Meso-American Jade reconstructs the trajectories of Mesoamerican jade between the sixteenth and twentieth century as a remedy, mineral, archeological, and aesthetic object. In this research, Achim questions the meanings attributed to jade as well as how the Americas were collected, displayed, and imagined. While the broad questions Dr. Achim explores in her work are of similar nature, whether what changes is the object and its context.

When I met Dr. Achim, I thought it would be a one-time chat with a professor that would perhaps be too busy for a graduate student. Fortunately, I was wrong. I have come to really value my small afternoon encounters with Dr. Achim beyond the professional dimension. We meet, I talk to her about my research on the history of the National Archive of Mexico, and she talks to me about collections, science, and jade, and points me to primary sources and bibliographic items that have been very useful. Over coffee or a walk, we have begun sharing things from our personal lives and have come to see some non-academic interests we share, like hiking. I may be getting ahead of myself, but I think there may be a friendship brewing. In any case, no doubt academic collaboration remains an important aspect of this relationship.

My conversations with Dr. Miruna Achim have allowed me to see an underappreciated dimension to the life of the mind. She has made it easier for me to appreciate how we need to creating lasting and meaningful bonds with the people who might potentially collaborate with us on mutually fulfilling projects down the line. Furthermore, we also need to recognize the emotional aspect of our research. Academic and intellectual work is not an individual endeavor, nor one that is devoid of emotions. It takes a village to go through a Ph.D. program and to follow an academic career thereafter—if we can even find a job, that is. Thus building professional networks and communities of care in the process is a practice that goes hand in hand. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can find both elements in the same person.

Perhaps this brief introduction might convince you to get acquainted with Dr. Achim. As previously mentioned, she will be one of our virtual contributors to the 2022 Lozano Long Conference in honor of the centennial of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, entitled “Archiving Objects of Knowledge with Latin American Perspectives” at UT in February 23-24, 2022. The conference will be held in hybrid format, with pre-circulated papers and prerecorded presentations of the panels with live Q&A sessions. Dr. Achim’s panel, titled “Histories of Collecting and Collecting Stories,” aims to open an interdisciplinary dialogue on what it means to collect narratives in Latin America, highlighting diverse ways of understanding the creative processes behind the historical consolidation of archives, museums, and collections. As it turns out, her participation will take place in Austin, TX since she will also be presenting Museum Matters at the Institute for Historical Studies during the same dates.

[1] I extend my thanks to Dr. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra for having rightfully recognized how Dr. Achim’s work and my own research interests intersect.

[2] Achim, Miruna. “Lagartijas medicinales. Remedios americanos y debates científicos en la ilustración.” Ciencias 97, no. 097 (August 18, 2010). http://www.revistas.unam.mx/index.php/cns/article/view/18031

Republics of Knowledge, Democracy, and Race in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America (2020) by Nicola Miller

banner image for Republics of Knowledge, Democracy, and Race in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America

Professor Nicola Miller’s research on intellectual history, knowledge, and modernity in nineteenth-century Spanish America has informed my own work in several meaningful ways. In her recent book Republics of Knowledge: Nations of the Future in Latin America (2020), Miller understands Spanish American republics as “communities of shared knowledge,” rather than as “imagined communities” à la Anderson. By focusing on “republics of knowledge,” Miller illuminates how the historical processes of nation-building and the creation of collective identities intersected and were negotiated in the realm of public knowledge during the nineteenth century. This helps us to better understand how an extraordinary array of historical actors, networks, institutions, and settings contributed to crafting these political communities. As Miller argues, knowledge, however imperfect or fragmentary, is more substantial and evidence-based than imagination.

book cover for Republics of Knowledge: Nations of the Future in Latin America

Miller proposes the term localized transnationalism to analyze the multitude of exchanges, connections, and comparisons that took place between the countries of the region. I found this analytical category particularly productive. By highlighting those transferences of knowledge within the region’s borders, so often overlooked by scholars, Miller counteracts well established understandings of Spanish American knowledge as derivative and mimetic and challenges the traditional approaches to the directionality of knowledge in the region. Through this concept, Miller’s work transcends historiographical binomials—such as global and local, modernity and tradition, center and periphery—that have structured both the practice of intellectual history and the ways we understand the relations between Latin America and the world until recent times.

Miller’s approach goes beyond analyzing how knowledge is produced and circulated in Spanish America. Her work delves deep into the fundamental question about how certain forms of knowledge acquire greater legitimacy and status than others, adding methodological breadth to the field. By bringing the problem of the recognition and validation of knowledge to the center of Spanish American intellectual history, Miller underscores how knowledge is deeply entrenched in global hierarchies of power, while at the same time it cannot be reduced to its imperial and colonial dimensions. Knowledge has its own dynamics and is not merely subsidiary to wider economic, political, and social processes.

*Portrait of Alexis de Tocqueville by Theodore Chasseriau, ca. 1850. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

Building upon Miller’s methodological contributions and engaging in conversation with her work, my paper analyzes the ways Spanish American intellectuals envisioned the creation of social and political knowledge from the region as the main path to achieve political modernity and respond to entrenched global hierarchies of democracy, empire, and race. Like Miller, I am interested in the creation, validation, and recognition of knowledge. U.S. democracy became “universal” at the expense of rendering alternative knowledges in Spanish America as “local.” I study how Tocqueville’s ideas about Spanish America were received, deployed, and contested in the Atlantic world. While some Spanish Americans endorsed Tocqueville’s diagnosis of the region as a self-evident reality, others claimed his interpretation was the product of racial prejudice and eagerly refuted his ideas.

The alternative sociological knowledges these Spanish Americans created have remained buried and ignored. In the North Atlantic, meanwhile, Tocqueville’s ideas provided a political rationale for US expansion into Spanish America. Tocqueville’s ideas were not only validated and recognized in the North but also became fundamental to proclaim the historical teleology of US racial exceptionalism. The problem of the recognition of the political and social knowledge produced about democracy and race in Spanish America is at the heart of these discussions.

Alexander will present his paper “Democracy and Race in the Americas: Readings of Tocqueville’s ‘Democracy in America South of the Rio Grande'” on Monday, September 13. Dr. Nicola Miller (University College London), Dr. Lina del Castillo (University of Texas at Austin), and Dr. James Sidbury (Rice University) will offer comments. More information on this event can be found here.

IHS Podcast: From Republic of Letters and Imagined Communities to Republics of Knowledge: Knowledge in the Making of 19th Century Radical Republics in Latin America

This podcast previews a roundtable discussion that will be held on Monday, September 13 at 12 pm. More information on the roundtable can be found here. It features Professor Nicola Miller (University College London) and co-hosts Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Alexander Chaparro-Silva (UT Austin).

Introduction

Historians are very familiar with the categories “Republic of Letters” and “Imagined Communities.” Republics of Letters, we have been told, created modern science and the ideals of a technocratic public sphere, that is, truth-telling experts. Imagined Communities, we have also been told, were originally communities of readers connected vicariously through print capitalism who in the process created emotionally charged reified communities that led to the establishment of the new nation-state,. Nicola Miller takes on these two historiographical traditions to explain the rise of 19th-century democratic republics in Latin America. She presents them as “Republics of Knowledge” committed to the radical idea of an informed and knowledgeable citizenry. This podcast explores Professor Miller’s ideas on the new Spanish American republics that, since the wars of independence, embraced the ideas of the Enlightenment, creating libraries, colleges, schools, newspapers, markets of books, and lithographic images to get a critical public, fully engaged in the making of democracies. The new knowledge created in these republics constantly questioned Northern European knowledges. Miller questions the dichotomous local-global interpretations of knowledge, from engineering to political economy to linguistics to pedagogy and beyond. She also suggests that the most important aspect of knowledge is not its creation but is classification as either local or universal, positioning North Atlantic societies as those that get to decide whose knowledge matters and whose is forgotten and ignored.

~ Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Guests

Dr. Nicola Miller, professor of Latin American history at University College London. Dr. Miller joined UCL in 1990. She became Professor of Latin American History in 2007 and was Head of the Department of History from 2007 to 2012. Her research is focused on the intellectual, cultural, political and international history of the Americas, in comparative and transnational perspectives; and in nationalism and national identity, especially in the Americas. Her recent research has been on the history and politics of knowledge. In 2020 she published “Republics of Knowledge: Nations of the Future in Latin America. An enlightening account of the entwined histories of knowledge and nationhood in Latin America—and beyond.

Alexander Chaparro-Silva is an intellectual historian and doctoral student here at the University of Texas at Austin. His dissertation analyzes how Latin American intellectuals came to the US, offered a sophisticated comparative reflection on democracy and race relations in both Americas, and crafted racialized continental differences during the nineteenth century. His research is supported in part by The Conference on Latin American History and The Tinker Foundation. He coedited a book about print culture in Spanish America during the Age of Revolutions and has published several peer-reviewed articles in the U.S., Colombia, and Argentina.

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.

From Huehuetenango to Here

From the Editors: From There to Here is a new series for Not Even Past in 2021. It builds off a past initiative but expands its focus to document the journeys taken by individual graduate students to Garrison hall and the University of Texas at Austin. In this powerful first article in the series, Ilan Palacios Avineri, who is completing his PhD in History, shares his story with us. For more about Ilan, see his spotlight here.

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

When I was a kid growing up in Los Angeles, my father never told us this history. Instead, I occasionally followed this familiar stranger to work and watched him demolish drywall. He would hold his sledgehammer tightly and swing with precision. His hands would often bruise, scab, or scar. We would break for tamales and he would make me promise never to do construction. He would then quietly return to demolition. Even so, I would watch his body as though it were my own.

*Family home. Huehuetenango (City), Guatemala.*

Our collective forgetting continued until I arrived at university. There I finally uncovered a usable past. I found books about the dispossession and militarization of his country. I read that the Guatemalan army routinely monitored, terrorized, and murdered people in Huehuetenango with impunity. I learned that they did so with the support of the United States, the country whose flag I was compelled to pledge allegiance to as a child. And I learned how people in Guatemala resisted in ways both small and large.

I returned to Los Angeles and started speaking to my father’s silences. He began unearthing the stories of his war. He trusted me with the memories etched in his skin, the trauma buried between his bones. He recalled the fear he felt when soldiers placed a muzzle to his back. He described being extorted by the Mexican police on his way to the US. This familial unforgetting was deeply painful and, at the same time, sustaining. Our lack of funds, our family’s struggles, our very condition was given cause. Our collective shame dissolved in the process. The dialogue set us free.

*Ilan and his father. Los Angeles, California.*

Through these conversations, I learned that love, justice, and understanding were one and the same. Each could only be realized when suffering was allowed to speak. Speaking truth required listeners. I arrived at UT, principally, to hear the histories of Central Americans. To listen to stories not only of suffering and despair, but of joy, happiness, and triumph. To participate in the healing dialectic.

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