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Not Even Past

This is Democracy – “The Eyes of Texas”

Guest: Richard J. Reddick is the inaugural associate dean for equity, community engagement, and outreach for the College of Education at The University of Texas at Austin. He is a professor in the Program in Higher Education Leadership in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy (ELP) at The University of Texas at Austin, where he has served as a faculty member since 2007. Additionally, Dr. Reddick serves as the Assistant Director of the Plan II Honors Program in the College of Liberal Arts. Dr. Reddick is a faculty member by courtesy in the Department for African and African Diaspora Studies, the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, and a fellow at the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis. Dr. Reddick co-chairs the Council for Racial and Ethnic Equity and Diversity (CREED), serves on the Signature Course Advisory Committee (SCAC), and was named to the inaugural cohort of the Provost’s Distinguished Service Academy.  Most recently, he served as Chair of the Eyes of Texas History Committee. The committee’s report is available at: https://utexas.app.box.com/s/5o2a1klri1htyhq3mziyxdjgxvegprjj. 

Jeremi, Zachary, and Dr. Richard Reddick discuss the racist past, and current controversy, of UT’s most popular song, “The Eyes of Texas”.

The lyrics to “The Eyes of Texas” are as follows:

The Eyes of Texas are upon you,
All the livelong day.
The Eyes of Texas are upon you,
You cannot get away.
Do not think you can escape them
At night or early in the morn —
The Eyes of Texas are upon you
Til Gabriel blows his horn.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “The Spirit Lives”

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.

NEP Author Spotlight – Micaela Valadez

Micaela Valadez - Author Spotlight

The success of Not Even Past is made possible by a remarkable group of writers, both graduate students and faculty. Not Even Past Author Spotlights are designed to celebrate our most prolific authors by bringing all of their published content across the magazine together on a single page. The focus is especially on work published by UT graduate students. In this NEP author’s spotlight, we feature the wide-ranging contributions to the magazine made by Micaela Valadez.

Micaela Valadez is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Texas at Austin. She is interested in the history of Chicanos/as and ethnic Mexicans in the U.S. and the history of grassroots organizations within those communities. She considers urban and metropolitan history an important lens to view racial capitalism’s impact on the relations between humans and the environment over time. In addition, she is passionate about learning the history of revolutionary opposition to structural oppression globally and how those revolutionary efforts may be applicable today.

Her dissertation analyzes the history of environmental racism and community organizing in San Antonio, Texas in the second half of the 20th century. She examines two organizations, Communities Organized for Public Service and the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s out of the Chicano/a movement with two different ideologies and strategies. Both take on the various effects of environmental racism over time that are produced by capitalism and the racialization of space in San Antonio. However, this project shows how the struggles and successes of these organizations are sometimes subsumed, or not, over time by neoliberal political and economic policies and decisions that continue to inflict environmental damage upon vulnerable spaces and communities in the city.

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

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

Read the full article here.

Dreaming with the Ancestors: Black Seminole Women In Texas and Mexico

Dreaming with the Ancestors argues that Black Seminole women held on to their African identities, which they melded with the Native American and Mexican cultures that the community encountered during their migration, slowly forming the culture and identity that survives to this day. From the plantations on the East Coast to present day Brackettville, Texas and Nacimiento, Mexico, Black Seminole women would have to deal with multiple adversities including discrimination, prejudice, warring, and the eventual loss of their future generations’ interest in their own history. What Boteler Mock does is provide these young Black Seminoles living in Brackettville, Texas, and to others who have moved on, with a precious piece of literature dedicated to the efforts, resilience, and incredible endurance of the Black Seminole people, especially the women. The authors’ ultimate purpose for this book, and the hope of her beloved friend and critical interviewee, Alice Fay, is that this work would revitalize the younger community to learn and appreciate their history and ancestors courage. I found that the motivation and the actual relationship Boteler Mock had with her interviewees, who would come to be more like family, really made me appreciate the work she did.

Read the full review here.

City in a Garden: Environmental Transformations and Racial Justice in Twentieth Century Austin, Texas

Austin is a global city, home to some of the most technologically advanced and successful corporations in the world as well as a renowned university system that provides highly trained and educated employees to those same top companies. All the while, Austin’s constant obsession with building a sustainable and environmentally friendly city contributes to the growth of a largely white upper-middle class demographic who can afford living in proximity to Austin’s finest and natural recreational spaces. A look at Austin’s past reveals a pattern of racial discrimination as the city constantly places the needs of white residents, boosters, developers, and investors above those of Black and Latino residents.

Read the full review here.

The King of Adobe: Reies Lopez Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement

One of the most challenging projects for historians of the twentieth century is producing biographical accounts of the heroes and heroines of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Historical biographies have been attacked because they muddy our positive view of popular leaders in movements that remain salient in the twenty-first century. Some historians, however, write narratives that are powerful and controversial simply because the historical subject was nowhere near perfect, even crossing boundaries that we consider violent and abusive. This is the case for one of the most influential figures in the history of the Chicano Movement, Reies López Tijerina. Evangelical preacher and prophet turned leader of the Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Land Grant Alliance], Tijerina’s life is chock-full of both violent and inspiring actions and decisions. Lorena Oropeza’s new book, The King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement, skillfully exposes the contradictions of a significant historical character as historians of the Chicano Movement seem to lose sight of his monumental importance in the fight for land rights in the U.S. Southwest.

Read the full review here.

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

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

By Micaela Valadez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article draws on the following sources:

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

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

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

This is Democracy – Asian American History and Exclusion

Guest: Madeline Y. Hsu is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and served as Director of the Center for Asian American Studies eight years (2006-2014).  She is president of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society and vice-president of the International Society for the Study of Chinese Overseas.  She was born in Columbia, Missouri but grew up in Taiwan and Hong Kong between visits with her grandparents at their store in Altheimer, Arkansas.  She received her undergraduate degrees in History from Pomona College and PhD from Yale University.  Her first book was Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South China, 1882-1943 (Stanford University Press, 2000).  Her most recent monograph, The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (Princeton University Press, 2015), received awards from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association, and the Association for Asian American Studies.  Her third book, Asian American History: A Very Short Introduction was published by Oxford University Press in 2016 and the co-edited anthology, A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered: U.S. Society in an Age of Restriction, 1924-1965 was published in 2019 by the University of Illinois Press.

This week, after the racially-motivated attacks in Atlanta, Georgia, Jeremi and Zachary talk with Professor Madeline Hsu about Asian American History and exclusion in the United States. Zachary reads his poem, “Like a Bullet.”

Yesterday, UT’s Department of History issued a statement in support of UT’s Asian & Asian American community. Read the full statement at http://bit.ly/3tGGQBA. Colleagues at the department website, NOT EVEN PAST, have compiled and are still currently collecting resources & information on the mass shootings in Atlanta: http://bit.ly/3f8yJK7.

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.

The Hijuelas Books: Digitizing Indigenous Archives in Mexico

By Matthew Butler and John Erard

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.

This article first appeared in Portal magazine, an annual publication of LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections at The University of Texas at Austin. The original can be accessed here.

The roads to Michoacán: Matthew Butler

It is said that the history of a Mexican pueblo is the history of its lands. What better way, then, to explore that history than through land records such as Michoacán’s hijuelas books? I first came across these nineteenth-century deedbooks––46,000 beautiful, handwritten folios in 190 leather-bound volumes––when researching the backstories of indigenous communities that fought in the 1920s cristero rebellion. The hijuelas record an earlier process: the privatization of common lands belonging to hundreds of pueblos in the western state of Michoacán from the early 1800s through the 1920s. More than notarizing agrarian subdivisions, these documents tell us how indigenous people navigated the transition to private property and citizenship under the Mexican republic, and how this process changed their lives, politics, and ideas of community. The collection is also invaluable because it records the experience for all five groups of indigenous michoacanos: Purépecha, Otomí, Mazahua, Nahua, and Matlatzinca.

With two Mexican colleagues and a former PhD student now working in Texas’s General Land Office, I devised a project to digitize the hijuelas, given their exceptional historical importance and fragile, bug-infested condition. Thanks to a British Library Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) grant, the digitized books––all 95,000 images––have just been uploaded to the EAP website, where they can be freely accessed.1 We hope they will be sought not just by historians but by the diaspora of michoacanos who are interested in exploring their roots and by members of Michoacán’s indigenous communities, which in recent years have begun to reassert an autonomous juridical identity in line with their historic “usages and customs” (usos y costumbres). There they will hear, as in no other source, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century indigenous voices talking (sometimes fighting) over who, what, and where the pueblo was.2

Hijuelas page, Ario de Rosales district. Here, Lino Núñez and others petition
the state government in 1872, alleging an injustice. The watermark and calligraphy are typical of hijuelas documents. British Library Endangered Archives Programme, Serie 2: Distrito Ario de Rosales, EAP931/1/2.

Here we only need look at the hijuelas of Churumuco, a farming and fishing community hidden behind the Jorullo volcano and nestled on the Balsas River separating Michoacán from Guerrero State. Defended by fumaroles and its surging river, Churumuco retained its lands in 1868, about half lying over the state line in Guerrero. The land division was promoted by Donato Orozco, a wealthy indigenous representative (apoderado) who rented Churumuco lands to mestizo ranchers. Yet Orozco’s account-keeping was murky, people alleged. Rents disappeared, except for money splashed on “useless things, like fireworks, rockets, and dances.”

Subsequently, the hijuelas record a twenty-year struggle involving not only land but incompatible concepts of pueblo and intergenerational conflict. Was the pueblo a patriarchy in which elite Purépechas administered land and labor for the government? Was something more democratic possible? Gender conflicts were folded in: with the controversial land division finally enacted (1878), all 250 Michoacán lots went to ex-comuneros (“members of the ex-community”) supporting Orozco. The Guerrero plots went to self-identifying indígenas (“indigenous people”) led by María Teresa Camacho. During the 1880s, she organized land invasions and demanded a new survey using an older, 1851 law, because, she told Michoacán’s governor, “we are tired of tolerance and suffering.” Indígenas’ “exasperated spirits” had been tested beyond the breaking point by their opponents’ “injustices.” Camacho’s rebellion was multiethnic: government spies in the 1890s reported alliances with Nahua villages in Guerrero and the Matlatzinca pueblo of Huetamo 70 miles away. In 1902, finally, Churumuco’s indígenas succeeded in having their lands resurveyed—bringing us to the eve of the Mexican Revolution.

Churumuco’s story, with its indigenous feminist heroine, is one of hundreds in the hijuelas. Although a snapshot, it is vividly removed from downtrodden indigenous histories of people passively victimized by liberal states. Instead, we see an indigenous resurgence, younger indígenas doubling down on a self-consciously ethnic identity and showing awareness of politics and different legal codes, their goal to steer liberal reforms and overthrow a conservative pueblo elite.

This pencil-drawn map from San Juan, Uruapan district (a center of Purépecha influence), shows the church, forests, and fields that were being marked out in lots. The writing at the bottom is upside down; everything is written concentrically around the center rather than vertically for the viewer’s convenience. The church is outsized, capturing the local Purépechas’ way of looking at their world.

An International Collaboration

One rewarding aspect of the project is the way it has created its own kind of community, linking students from Michoacán and Texas, librarians and archivists in three countries, Michoacán’s state government, three research universities, and a group of twenty researchers from Mexico, the United States, the UK, France, and Germany (the latter will conference the material in May 2021). That this was possible is very largely due to LLILAS Benson’s post-custodial archiving3 expertise, its regional outreach and recognition, and its strong commitment to the projection of indigenous memory beyond the physical archive through the use of digital methods.

To kickstart the two-year project, LLILAS Benson forged institutional relationships with the British Library, Michoacán’s Interior Ministry and state university, and deepened its relationship with Mexico’s Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS). This explains how a grant in sterling could be used by a Texas-based project to hire four students in Michoacán in compliance with Mexican labor law and to tender for digitization equipment in Mexico City.

Hijuelas project collaborators in Mexico. From left: Víctor Manuel Pérez Talavera (AGHPEM director), Yolanda Castillo Franco, Cecilia Bautista García, Ulises Romero Hernández (Poder Ejecutivo director of archives), Matthew Butler, Rocío Verduzco Sandoval, Marlen Alvarado González. Courtesy Matthew Butler.

In late 2016, LLILAS Benson post-custodial archivist Theresa Polk and digital processing archivist David Bliss spent a week in Morelia, Michoacán’s state capital, training our project hires in digitization and metadata creation techniques. The Michoacán Interior Ministry, as custodian of the hijuelas books, kindly conditioned a large workspace in the Governor’s Palace, an eighteenth-century ex-convent. Polk, who now heads LLILAS Benson digital initiatives, and Bliss led a similar workshop for the state archive’s permanent staff, drafted digitization workflows in Spanish, and performed quality controls on the resulting images.

LLILAS Benson has also helped to create digital discovery tools that make the material accessible to researchers, such as document-level, text-searchable metadata, meaning a detailed, descriptive database that makes it possible to navigate the collection using individual search terms. We purposefully recruited graduating history students from Michoacán’s state university who had the language, paleography, and historical skills to read the documents and create a detailed, descriptive finding aid. This greatly expands the functionality of the digital collection by allowing users to apply diverse filters to refine search results. These tools will allow users to research across the hijuelas far more easily than would be possible with the physical collection, for example, viewing all land titles recorded across all municipalities in Michoacán within a given year, or in relation to a given community. Digitization thus not only preserves the hijuelas books from physical decay, it enhances their informational value by allowing users to dynamically recontextualize each document according to their specific research interests. In the near future, LLILAS Benson plans to upload project metadata to its Latin American Digital Initiatives (LADI) portal (ladi.lib.utexas.edu).

In addition to showcasing LLILAS Benson’s support for digital archiving and institutional partnerships with the Mexican academy, the project relies on faculty-undergraduate research collaborations. The latest in the line of students who have contributed to the project is my co-author, Undergraduate Research Apprentice John Erard.

Mapping the Archive: John Erard

Michoacán, “the place of the fisherman,” has always been a region marked by exceptions in my mind. Derived from Nahuatl, its name conjures images of Lake Pátzcuaro and an aqueous horizon of flitting, butterfly-shaped fishing nets—the rich and distinctive heritage of the Purépecha. Purépecha, a language isolate, has stubbornly resisted easy linguistic categorization in much the same way that its pre-Hispanic speakers successfully resisted political incorporation by the Nahuatl-speaking Mexica. That spirit of defiance is littered throughout Michoacán’s history, and is often presented as a point of exception. Mexico has Malintzin, Michoacán has Eréndira.4

Cuadro de Indivíduos Purépecha (Painting of Purépecha Individuals). Antonio García Cubas, Atlas pintoresco é histórico de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos. México, Debray Sucesores, 1885. Library of Congress.

While physically located on Mexico’s periphery, Michoacán has been no small player in Mexico’s history. José María Morelos, after whom the capital of Morelia is named, was an important figure in Mexico’s War for Independence; michoacano Lázaro Cárdenas del Río was the president (1934–1940) who stood tallest among those engaged in post-revolutionary agrarian reform.

It was this sense of exceptionalism that led me to grasp the value of the hijuelas books as objects of historical inquiry. Though far from monolithic, land privatization was experienced all over Mexico during the mid-nineteenth century. The hijuelas documents, however, are unrivaled in their completeness and make Michoacán a uniquely good case study.

Visualizing the Reparto de Tierras

Given the potential impact that these documents would have on historians’ understanding of Mexican indigenous history, as well as the state’s complex agrarian history, I wanted to attach myself to the project in any way I could. My early meetings with Dr. Matthew Butler at the Department of History were punctuated by palpable excitement and a strong feeling of gratitude. After all, I was getting the opportunity to work with history, my passion, in a far more concrete way during my freshman year than I would have ever imagined for myself. Dr. Butler told me that my primary role in the collaborative, international research effort was to map the 228 communities that participated in the nineteenth-century privatization of indigenous land (officially, the reparto de tierras.) Tools of the nascent field of spatial history would eventually help me to produce a web-hosted map to aid in future research around the hijuelas documents.

Antonio García Cubas, Atlas Mexicano. México, Debray Suc’s, -86, 1884. Map. Library of Congress.

In taking the torch from my michoacano counterparts, I used a table listing the names of the hijuelas communities collated by the digitization team as a jumping-off point for my own stage of the project. Armed with funding and class credit from the Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program, I began to work on my set task of displaying the reparto spatially. Before the cartographic work could begin, I needed to compile the data that would constitute the meat and bones of the digital object. The land privatization process needed to be understood in its specifics before it could be figuratively and literally drawn.

Primary research in nineteenth-century geographical dictionaries and statistical informes indicated the number of individuals affected by the reform, while the 1895 census and an 1865 parish ethnography by Father José Romero illuminated dimensions of indigeneity and gender. Population and location data were obtained for communities as small as thirty persons, affording the clearest picture yet of the form and size of the reparto.

A modern view of Lake Pátzcuaro and the former seat of Purépecha power, Tzintzuntzan, taken from the hijuelas web map. The communities pinpointed in red participated in the reparto process. Map by John Erard.

The archival research allowed for the creation of a core data set that would contain all the information gathered on the hijuelas communities as organized by their nineteenth-century political divisions (elucidated by the earlier research process.) The murky nature of the historical reform was thus translated into the unambiguous language of cartographic software, yielding long tables of data.

Once the core data set was finalized, the more technical, cartographic phase could begin. I employed geographical information system (GIS) software to create an interactive map that could be manipulated by the user in several revealing ways. Using both the open-source QGIS and the proprietary ArcGIS Pro, I geocoded the location data of hijuelas communities in longitude and latitude, and layered that on top of the period-accurate district boundaries—drawn using geospatial data gleaned from georeferenced nineteenth-century maps.5

Not only does the resulting map6 provide an intuitive way to navigate the population and other attribute data of individual communities, it will allow for new inquiries into how physical geography, hydrological resources, and other environmental factors impacted the hijuelas reform. For those hoping to consult the digitized collection on the British Library’s website, the map will help to organize the collection.

I have seen firsthand how cartography turns space into place. Transforming the empty white canvas on a computer screen into a coherent medley of verdant patches of green, translucent bends of blue, and rusty ranges of burnt umber, I encountered the beauty and historical significance of Michoacán anew.

Matthew Butler is associate professor of the history of modern Mexico at The University of Texas at Austin and is director of the Hijuelas Project. He has written and published widely on Mexican agrarian and religious history, with special emphasis on Michoacán.

John Erard is a second-year undergraduate at The University of Texas at Austin. He studies history and geography along with participating in the Liberal Arts Honors Program. His interests lie in the history of Latin America, the spatial humanities, and the use of digital tools in historical research.

1. “Conserving Indigenous Memories of Land Privatization in Mexico: Michoacán’s Libros de Hijuelas, 1719–1929.” doi.org/10.15130/EAP931. Co-PIs: Antonio Escobar (CIESAS), Cecilia Bautista (UMSNH), Brian Stauffer (GLO).

2. For more information, see Matthew Butler and David Bliss, “Digital Resources: The Hijuelas Collection,” Oxford Research Encylopedia of Latin American History. Available at latinamericanhistory.oxfordre.com. DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.618.

3. Post-custodial archiving is a process whereby sometimes vulnerable archives are preserved digitally and the digital versions made accessible worldwide, thus increasing access to the materials while ensuring they remain in the custody and care of their community of origin.

4. Malintzin, also known as La Malinche or by her Spanish name, Doña Marina, was a Nahua translator and culture broker for conquistador Hernán Cortés during the Spanish-Aztec war of 1519–21. Eréndira, a Purépecha princess who was said to have militarily resisted Spanish colonization, is often put in opposition to Malintzin for their differing roles during the Spanish arrival.

5. Georeferencing is a digital process whereby real-world geospatial coordinates are assigned to various points on a map or aerial image. The georeferenced map or image can then be used by geospatial software.

6. This map will be visible alongside the metadata on the LADI page.

Support the Benson Centennial! Visit benson100.org to learn more.

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. 

2022 Lozano Long Conference: Archiving Objects of Knowledge with Latin American Perspectives

2022 Lozano Long Conference: Archiving Objects of Knowledge with Latin American Perspectives

In honor of the centennial of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, the 2022 Lozano Long Conference initiated a conversation on archives with Latin American perspectives and practices. The conference took place on February 24-25. Archives, broadly speaking, are sites where the collection, organization, and processing of documents and objects have preserved memories or silenced pasts. Archives also serve as repositories of knowledge and spaces of interpretation where we can uncover and reshape past and present power relations. The Benson Latin American Collection at The University of Texas at Austin offers a unique archival vantage point to study the colonial, republican, and modern histories of Latin America and the Caribbean. From that platform, this interdisciplinary conference explored evolving practices, philosophies, and politics of archival work; identified ways to improve access to cultural heritage; and fomented community engagement and empowerment. The conference brought together leading and up-and-coming scholars, archivists, social activists, and digital humanities practitioners. In assembling this diverse group, the organizers sought to strengthen archival networks while also activating dialogues between and among U.S., Iberian, and Latin American academic communities working on and with archival materials. While significant scholarly work has engaged in the “archival turn,” and pioneering scholarship has considered the role of archives for the North Atlantic world, relatively less consideration has been given to the early-modern Iberian Atlantic and subsequent Latin American and Caribbean worlds. This, despite the fact that Latin American archives have historically played critical roles in state-building processes, enabling academic research, safeguarding national memory creation, empowering communities, or even contributing to post-conflict reconciliation efforts. Furthermore, recent developments in the digital humanities as related to Latin America and the Caribbean are expanding and reformulating archival practices of display, outreach, and collaboration in ways that seek to democratize access. In short, centering the conference on Latin America allowed for a rethinking of archival practices and their ethical and political implications on a global scale.

To consult specific conference sessions, use the links below:

Thursday, February 24
Archival Politics, Philosophies, and Practice

Opening Ceremony and Keynote Address

Opening Remarks by Adela Pineda Franco, Director, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS); Melissa Guy, Director, Benson Latin American Collection; and Lina Del Castillo, Associate Professor, LLILAS and Department of History

Opening Keynote by Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, University of Chicago, CIDE
On History and Monuments

Respondent and Q&A moderator: Lina Del Castillo

Estampa: Mauricio Tenorio by Rodrigo Salido Moulinié

Panel 1 – Histories of Collecting and Stories

This panel centered on collecting, understood as the process of categorizing things as similar and then bringing them together into the same space, be it in physical or virtual forms. Each process of collecting has a history, and the collectibles themselves each also have stories to tell. The case studies explored here include tangible objects, such as documents or artifacts, as well as intangibles, such as literary narratives. By opening an interdisciplinary dialogue on narratives of collecting and collecting narratives in Latin America, we hope to highlight diverse ways of understanding processes behind the creation of archives.

Moderator: Lina Del Castillo, Associate Professor of Latin American History, The University of Texas at Austin
Discussant: Sylvia Sellers-García, Professor of History, Boston College

Zeb Tortorici, New York University
Erotic Archival Imaginaries: Collecting, Archiving, and Destroying Pornography in Mexico

el insulto
view presentation

Miruna Achim, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Cuajimalpa
Jade drawers and speculative cartographies: collecting, storing, and configuring Mesoamerica since the nineteenth century

Conversations with Dr. Achim by Camila Ordorica
view presentation

Adriana Pacheco, Founder/Producer, Hablemos Escritoras Podcast
Escritoras que no existen. Repensando la función del archivo frente a la producción literaria contemporanea

Community Building by Ashley Garcia
hablemos, escritoras
view presentation

César A. Salgado, The University of Texas at Austin
Boom and Bust: Locating Revolution in the Benson Collection’s Julio Cortázar Papers

Boom and Bust by Bianca Quintanilla
view presentation

José Manuel Mateo Calderón, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Los papeles y los días (terrenales) de José Revueltas

Introducing Dr. José Manuel Mateo
view presentation

Spotlight on the Benson

Evocación de Genaro García: coleccionista, historiador y maestro
José Montelongo, John Carter Brown Library, Brown University

Panel 2 – Public, Access, and the Archival Dimensions of Digital Humanities

The expansion of digital humanities has started to redefine how we think of, and with, archives — not only in terms of provenance, selection, and preservation of documents, but also in terms of accessibility and use. Big-data tools have also streamlined ways of tracing how users interact with online collections — often informing the digital projects themselves. This panel seeks to identify the archival dimensions of select public-facing digital humanities projects by centering the user. All projects developed here have made real-world objects and documents that are not necessarily located in one physical space available for broad public access via virtual space. Questions to explore include the ethical, political, pedagogical, and technological considerations and challenges that have gone into making these collections available to a broader, engaged public.

Moderator: Camila Ordorica, PhD student in History, The University of Texas at Austin
Discussant: Christina Wasson, Professor of Anthropology, University of North Texas

Archival Dimensions of Digital Humanities by Eden Ewing

Alex Borucki, University of California Irvine
In Search of Captives and Slave Ships: Reflections on the Spanish American Archives of the Slave Trade Routes (related: The Slave Voyages Database)

An Interview with Gregory O’Malley and Alex Borucki by Clifton Sorrell III
slave voyages database
view presentation

Jaime Borja, Universidad de los Andes
Archivos visuales y minería de datos. El proyecto Arca y la cultura colonial como espacio digital

ARCA arte colonial
Coding Viceregal Art by Haley Schroer
view presentation

Carolina Villarroel, University of Houston
Latina/o/x Perspectives in the Digital Archive

Counter Archives and Archives of Resistance by Anahí Ponce
arte público press, recovery program
view presentation

Brooke Lillehaugen, Haverford College
The Ticha Project: Digital Approaches to Pedagogy and Language Activism through Colonial-era Zapotec Language Manuscripts

Radical Collaboration by May Helena Plumb
Ticha project
view presentation

Inez Stampa and Vicente Arruda Câmara Rodrigues, Centro Memórias Reveladas
Memórias Reveladas: A reference center for the archives of the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964–1985)

Archiving the Brazilian Military Dictatorship by Timothy Vilgiate
Memórias Reveladas
view presentation

María de Vecchi, Artículo 19
Camino a la verdad: La experiencia de Archivos de la Represión y Archivos de la Resistencia en México

The Right to Truth and Memory by Janette Núñez
Archivos de la Represión
view presentation

Closing Keynote

Cristina Rivera Garza, Author, Translator, and Critic / Distinguished Professor in Hispanic Studies, University of Houston
The Liliana Rivera Garza Archive: The Afterlives of Femicide

Respondent and Moderator of Q&A: Adela Pineda Franco, Director, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies

Writing Through the Body by Ana Cecilia Calle

Friday, February 25
Inter-Institutional Archival Networks, Social Justice, and Community Memory

Opening Keynote

Gustavo Meoño Brenner, Guatemala, ex-director, Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional
El Archivo Histórico de la Policía Guatemalteca y los Derechos a la Verdad y la Justicia

Respondent and moderator of Q&A: Lina Del Castillo

An Archival School for Latin America by María José Pérez Sián

Panel 3 – ‘(Re)conociendo’ Community Rights Through Archives and Memory

Different communities in Latin America have sought to have their political rights recognized through the gathering of documentation and the collection of memories. The presentations in this panel demonstrate how communities have documented their experiences of human rights abuses, their territorial claims, or their right to exist as a distinct cultural group. These stories do not often sit comfortably with dominant narratives. The process of recognizing — or el proceso de “(re)conocimiento” — matters precisely for that reason. Being cognizant of challenging truths as they have played out in the region may help us create more nuanced understandings about the ways communities and individuals can assert their right to have rights.

Moderator: Janette Núñez, LLILAS and iSchool master’s student, The University of Texas at Austin
Discussant: Kirsten Weld, Professor of History, Harvard University

Archives and their Afterlives by Ilan Palacios Avineri

Daniel Arbino, Benson Latin American Collection
“Una herida abierta”: The Anzaldúa Archives as a Nepantla Space for Healing

The Archive as Nepantla by Ana López H.
publications by Dr. Arbino
view presentation

Cecilia Bautista, Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo
Los indígenas michoacanos frente a la privatización de la propiedad comunal a través de la digitalización de la colección de los Libros de Hijuelas, 1719-1929

Conserving Indigenous Memories of Land Privatisation on Mexico
view presentation

María Paz Vergara, Fundación de Documentación y Archivo de la Vicaria de la Solidaridad, Chile
El archivo de la Vicaria de la Solidaridad y su aporte al derecho a la verdad, justicia y reparación en Chile

En las urgencias de la realidad by Lucy Quezada Yáñez
view presentation

Celina Flores, Memoria Abierta, Argentina
Conocer el movimiento de derechos humanos argentinos a través de sus archivos: la experiencia de Memoria Abierta

Reflections on Resistance by Paula O’Donnell
memoria abierta
view presentation

Tatiana Seijas, Rutgers University
Waiting for Freedom in Mexico’s Black Pacific, a story from 1597

A Conversation on Slavery and Freedom by Gary Leo Dunbar
view presentation

Panel 4 – Modern Institutional Networks Visualize Early Modern Archives: The Case of the Relaciones Geográficas y Topográficas

The 16th-century Relaciones Geográficas y Topográficas allow us to delve into archival interdependence then and now. The Relaciones endeavored to describe and map hundreds of municipalities in the Spanish Empire in response to a standard questionnaire. The project was remarkably successful in gathering information. Although we have yet to fully grasp how this information was put to use, we do know that it circulated throughout imperial archival networks. As such, the Relaciones become a representative case study for understanding archival networks as mechanisms to make knowledge possible and visible in both the past and the present. Invited scholars and archivists discuss the challenges involved in gathering vast amounts of documentation hosted by dozens of archives worldwide. They do so to highlight the processes behind reconstructing the archival and epistemological networks that this corpus evidences, and showcase the pedagogical and research potential of digital tools that necessarily must be developed through inter-institutional collaboration.

Moderator: Rafael Nieto-Bello, PhD student in History, The University of Texas at Austin
Commentator: Kelly McDonough, Associate Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, The University of Texas at Austin

Bringing Together the Relaciones Geográficas and Topográficas by Rafael Nieto-Bello
Unlocking the Colonial Archive by Eduardo H. Gorobets Martins
Archives Beyond Intention by Claudio Eduardo Moura de Oliveira

Rosario I. Granados, Associate Curator, Blanton Museum of Art
Mapping the Memory of an Exhibition: The Relaciones Geográficas at the Blanton

mapping memory exhibition
view presentation

Mackenzie Cooley, Hamilton University
Knowing Nature, Knowing Empire in the Relaciones Geográficas

The New World and Beyond by Shery Chanis
new world nature project
view presentation

Nadezda Konyushikhina, Universidad Estatal M.V. Lomonósov de Moscú
Aplicación de GIS en la reconstrucción del régimen señorial en España en la segunda mitad del Siglo XVI (a partir de las Relaciones Topográficas de Felipe II)

view presentation

Mariana Favila, Digging into Early Colonial Mexico
Explorando el México colonial temprano: estudio de caso sobre redes de conectividad en las Relaciones Geográficas utilizando un gazetteer del siglo XVI

digging into early colonial Mexico project
view presentation

Closing Keynote

Arndt Brendecke, Professor of History, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
Unreadable Things

Respondent and Moderator of Q&A: Rafael Nieto Bello, The University of Texas at Austin

Knowledge and Power are Not the Same by Rafael Nieto-Bello

The 2022 Lozano Long Conference is grateful to the following organizers, sponsors, and collaborators.

Organizers

LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections — A partnership between the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection and the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, LLILAS Benson raises awareness of past and current issues that affect Latin America and US Latina/o/x communities through its world-class collections, globalized higher education, research, international exchange, and public programs.

Sponsors

Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies

Latin America Initiative, School of Law, The University of Texas at Austin — The Latin America Initiative promotes and consolidates the relationship between Texas Law and law schools throughout Latin America.

Collaborators

Institute for Historical Studies, The University of Texas at Austin — Established by the Department of History at The University of Texas at Austin in 2007, IHS provides a dynamic space for scholarly inquiry and exchange. The Institute organizes international conferences, fosters scholarly presentations and roundtables, promotes critical discussion of historical themes and methods, and encourages reflections on the origins and legacies of historical events.

Not Even Past — This digital magazine, published by the Department of History at The University of Texas at Austin, serves as a robust platform for public history.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

IHS Book Talk: History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000

The History Faculty New Book Series presents:

History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000
(University of Washington Press, 2019)

A book talk and discussion with
SUMIT GUHA
Professor of History
The University of Texas at Austin
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/faculty/profile.php?eid=sg7967

With discussant:
ANUPAMA RAO
TOW Associate Professor of History,
Barnard College and Columbia University
https://history.barnard.edu/profiles/anupama-rao

In this far-ranging and erudite exploration of the South Asian past, Sumit Guha discusses the shaping of social and historical memory in world-historical context. He presents memory as the result of both remembering and forgetting and of the preservation, recovery, and decay of records. By describing how these processes work through sociopolitical organizations, Guha delineates the historiographic legacy acquired by the British in colonial India; the creation of the centralized educational system and mass production of textbooks that led to unification of historical discourses under colonial auspices; and the divergence of these discourses in the twentieth century under the impact of nationalism and decolonization.


Dr. Guha brings together sources from a range of languages and regions to provide the first intellectual history of the ways in which socially recognized historical memory has been made across the subcontinent. This thoughtful study contributes to debates beyond the field of history that complicate the understanding of objectivity and documentation in a seemingly post-truth world.

  • “Dr. Guha’s expertise in early modern Indian history allows him to explore “social structure and historical narration in western India” in great depth.
    – Journal of Asian Studies
  • “Guha brings together sources from a range of languages and regions toprovide the rst intellectual history of the ways in which socially recognized historicalmemory has been made across the subcontinent. This thoughtful study contributes todebates beyond the eld of history that complicate the understanding of objectivity and documentation in a seemingly post-truth world.”
    – New Books in South Asian Studies

Dr. Sumit Guha is holds the Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professorship in History at the University of Texas at Austin. Educated at St Stephen’s College, Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and the University of Cambridge, he has taught at St. Stephen’s College, the Centre for Development Studies in Trivandrum, the Delhi School of Economics, and Rutgers University. Among his numerous books and co-edited volumes he is the author most recently of Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present (Brill, 2013), and Health and Population in South Asia (Permanent Black, and C. Hurst and Co., 2001). Read more about Dr. Guha’s publications on his faculty profile page, and on his Academia page, and read more of his work on Not Even Past.

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. 

NEP Author Spotlight – Tiana Wilson

NEP Author Spotlight - Tiana Wilson

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

Tiana Wilson is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at UT Austin with a portfolio in Women’s and Gender Studies. Her broader research interests include: Black Women’s Internationalism, Black Women’s Intellectual History, Women of Color Organizing, and Third World Feminism. More specifically, her dissertation explores women of color feminist movements in the U.S. from the 1960s to the present. She is writing the first comprehensive study on the Third World Women’s Alliance, tracing their intellectual and organizing legacy in the US and abroad. Centering Black women and other women of color as leading thinkers, Wilson’s dissertation excavates the making of successful multiethnic and multiracial solidarity practices. Her project has been supported by the Sallie Bingham Center, Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics, Smith College Libraries, and the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice.

Remote Reflections: Writing a Dissertation during a Pandemic

It’s been nearly a year since COVID-19 forced many states to shut down and more than a year since I last stepped into an archive. As a fourth-year PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, I am writing a dissertation on late 20th-century women of color feminist organizations in the United States. My archives include university collections housed at Smith College and Duke University; public repositories located in New York, Alabama, and Washington, DC; and local museums such as the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco. These diverse research facilities vary in degrees of funding and technical resources, which has made it extremely challenging to access certain materials during the pandemic. Despite this disruption in my research plans, I found ways to make progress on my dissertation. In order for me to stay on schedule and graduate on time, I had to prioritize flexibility, creativity, and collectivity in this new phase of dissertating.

Read the full article here.

Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All

As we rapidly approach the 2020 US presidential election, Kamala Harris’ acceptance of the Democratic party’s nomination for Vice President offers great hope to a variety of marginalized communities who have been historically underrepresented in the national political arena. Harris, who identifies as a Black woman, is the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants. Her initial presidential campaign and then her announcement as Vice President led different media outlets to portray her as the first Black woman and first candidate of Indian descent to be named on a major U.S. party’s ticket. Yet, this narrative is not complete and it obscures the great strides made by Black women that paved the way for Harris. Nearly five decades ago, in 1972, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman to seek a major party’s nomination for the US presidency. For anyone interested in contextualizing the current political climate, historian Martha S. Jones’ most recent work, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (2020), is a must read. She provides us with a sweeping narrative of how Black women struggled for political power and how this galvanized a broader movement for human rights.

Read the full review here.

Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World

Many recent studies on chattel slavery in the Atlantic World have decentered the voices of the colonizers in an effort to creatively reimagine the inner lives of Black people, both enslaved and “free.” However, narrating the complex ways race, gender, and sexuality played out in a colonial setting beyond violence has proven difficult due to the brutal, inhumane conditions of enslavement. At the same time, the drastic imbalance of power raises questions about consent within sexual and intimate relationships. While most scholars of slavery have tended to shy away from such a contentious and messy topic, historian Jessica Marie Johnson presents a compelling analysis of how African women and women of African descent used intimacy and kinship to construct and live out freedom in the eighteenth century.

Read the full review here. 

Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive

Dispossessed Lives provides a portrait of eighteenth-century urban slavery in Bridgetown, Barbados from the perspective of multiple black women. This includes black women’s experiences in public executions and violent punishments, their involvement in the sex economy, and their efforts to escape slavery. Fuentes makes two interventions into the scholarship on slavery in the Atlantic world. First, she challenges the narrative that plantation slavery was more violent than other forms of bondage, and argues that urban slavery was just as brutal. Second, with a focus on the centrality of gender, Fuentes’ study reveals how black women experienced constructions of their sexuality and gender in relation to white women. The main questions guiding this work were: how did black women negotiate physical and sexual violence, colonial power, and female slaveowners in the eighteenth century, and how was freedom defined and what did freedom look like in a slave society?

Read the full review here. 

King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop

As we approach the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. on the 50th anniversary of his death, April 4, 1968, it is crucial to appreciate King entirely. Beyond his push for nonviolent direct action and racial integration, we should recognize his expansive human rights activism, anti-war advocacy, and ground-breaking thinking.

Harvard Sitkoff’s biography of King shows him as a heroic but flawed leader and emphasizes his radicalism rather than his pacifism. Sitkoff does not shy away from King’s shortcomings. He brings attention to King’s adultery and highlights the criticism he faced from others within the movement. His portrait of King shows him to be a man who made mistakes, feared death, belittled women, gambled, partied, and often compromised. However, it was also clear that King was intelligent, strategic, pious, courageous, radical, well spoken, passionate, and loving at heart. Sitkoff argues that King’s view of the civil rights movement shifted. At the beginning of the movement, the goal was to end Jim Crow and obtain voting rights. However, after King’s experience in the urban north, he knew that the civil rights movement needed to expand to include economic and job security as well as housing reform. By the end of King’s life he was a firm advocate of anti-colonialism and opponent of war and he took a global perspective: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Read the full review here.

Play Review: Monroe

On September 15, 2018, I attended Monroe, winner of the Austin Playhouse’s Festival of New Texas Plays, staged at the Austin Playhouse. The playwright, Lisa B. Thompson based the piece on her family’s history prior to their move to California in the 1940s. Situating the narrative in 1946 Monroe, Louisiana, Thompson places the story in broader histories of the Great Migration and southern black people’s experiences in the United States after World War II. Monroe begins with the aftermath of the lynching of a young man that affects his family and friends as they struggle to come to terms with his death. The man’s younger sister, Cherry, confronts her belief that God is telling her to leave the South, while her grandmother, Ma Henry, dismisses the idea. However, Clyde, a friend of Cherry’s brother, takes her dreams seriously and invites her to come along with him to California. Cherry must decide whether she is going to stay in her hometown where she is familiar with the people and cultural traditions or if she is going to risk moving to a location where she does not know what to expect. Overall, Monroe explores how the threat and aftermath of racial violence haunts the lives of African Americans as they imagine different futures.

Read the full review here.

Latin American and Caribbean History: Collected Works from Not Even Past

Banner image for Latin American and Caribbean History: Collected Works from Not Even Past

Since its creation in 2010, Not Even Past has published a huge range of articles connected to Latin American and Caribbean History. To mark our new partnership with the Benson Latin American Collection, we have collected all these articles in one compilation page organized around 17 topics. These articles (156 in total) are a testament to the remarkable research conducted by faculty and graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin but they also draw more broadly from the work of groundbreaking scholars across the world. Together we believe they constitute an important resource for the field.

Topics

  1. Conquest and Empire
  2. Indigenous History
  3. Slavery
  4. Race and Identity
  5. Religion in the Americas
  6. Gender and Sexuality
  7. Key Figures
  8. History of Science
  9. Environmental History
  10. Cold War
  11. Digital Archives and Resources
  12. Memory and Museums
  13. Material Culture
  14. Music and Film
  15. Crime and Law
  16. Latinx History in the United States
  17. Migration Studies

Conquest and Empire

 The Radical Spanish Empire focuses on an early modern empire of paper, Spanish America, that experienced radical forms of social mobilization and governance that today we associate with “modernity.” Yet these very new forms of radical modernity led paradoxically to the constitution of hierarchical ancien regimes unlike any other in Europe.  Paperwork created Spanish America by first encouraging massive political participation in the business of government, collapsing through mediation and alliances European and Amerindian power elites. This same participation, however, led to the creation of top-down archives that not only slowed down the pace of change but also created a peculiarly resilient new ancien regime, neither indigenous nor European. By the late sixteenth century any individual who had royal favor, a robust personal archive, and money could secure status and generally overcome challenges about their status and ancestry. Our book seeks to explain this paradoxical trajectory of the early modern Spanish American polity, poised between radicalism (cultural, political, social and epistemological) and the immobility which we associate with societies of orders.

By  Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters

Indigenous History

I began to realize that the transition of this set of very consistent attributes – closed eyes, swollen lids, and puffy faces – from small-scale ceramics to monumental stone sculptures spoke volumes. These changes in sculpture, and the contexts in which they were used, were related to the other key social dynamics that characterized this period, such as state formation. Late Preclassic rulers appropriated the imagery and themes previously used in the domestic sector in the form of figurines and their associations with ancestors and moved them into the large, public plazas where they could proclaim their power as rulers and lay claim to their own privileged history and lineage. This imagery, which was ancient and powerful and about kinship, became a formidable tool when moved out of the hands of all and into the domain of rulers alone. The jowly facial features, the bloated bodies, and the closed eyes invoked not only dead or long-gone ancestors, but potent lineage.

By Julie Guernsey

Slavery

The destruction of Palmares failed to stem the emergence of hundreds, perhaps thousands of smaller quilombos throughout Brazil. Nor did it prevent countless other acts of resistance that undermined planter domination even after the abolition of slavery in 1888. Cheney describes how the legend of the Quilombo dos Palmares inspired a 1988 constitutional amendment that extended land rights to the descendants of fugitive slaves. Thousands of “modern quilombos” have petitioned for government recognition while organizing mass movement in the countryside that has won concessions from local landowners and pressured elected officials to implement affirmative action policies in other areas. In 2015, the specter of Palmares looms large over Brazil.

By Edward Shore

Race and Identity

Historically, racism in Brazil has not been legally-sanctioned or discursively explicit, but it can be observed in statistics on education, health, and job employment, as well as life expectancy. Today, the numbers are undeniable: more than 50,000 people die violently in Brazil in a country without wars, and the majority are Black males under thirty. João Alberto Silveira Freitas, in this sense, was already a survivor of systemic racial violence and social exclusion until he met his death at the hands of security guards while buying groceries.  Despite such grim numbers, however, conservative groups have sustained and defended  a lasting idea of racial democracy that far outlived Brazil’s military dictatorship.  For those reasons, the Vice President’s proclamation of the absence of racism in Brazil, on the occasion of a Black man’s murder on the Day of Black National Consciousness, is both  unforgivable but also sadly entirely predictable.  

By Marcelo José Domingos

Religion in the Americas

In Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean, Kristen Block explores the role of religious doctrines as rational, strategic discourses in the seventeenth-century Caribbean. Certainly, Christianity shaped inter-imperial diplomacy, economic projects, and “national” identities. Yet, Block argues that powerless and disenfranchised individuals embraced or denied religious doctrines at will, in order to obtain advantageous political outcomes. Block illustrates that religion was not only a force of social inclusion and exclusion, but also a persuasive tool that allowed ordinary people to shape allegiances, perform Catholic or Protestant identities, and pursue justice and opportunity.

By Ernesto Mercado-Montero
Photo by Adriana Lestido

Gender and Sexuality

As a historian, I was impressed with the visual symbolism inherent in the handkerchiefs. I was immediately reminded of the photographs many of us have seen of elderly Argentine women defying a murderous military dictatorship. Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo were middle-aged and elderly women who lost children and husbands to the military junta that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983. At great personal risk, these women met at the presidential palace every Thursday, beginning in 1977, to hold a vigil, wearing images of their missing kin on strings around their necks and plain white handkerchiefs on their heads.

It is reasonable to speculate that most of Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo would not have considered themselves feminists, and it is even less likely they would have supported abortion rights. The historian Diane Taylor has pointed out that these women mobilized to defend their roles as mothers and wives, and they exploited traditional representations of femininity (purity and subservience to male family members) to mobilize shame. Even so, they remain national icons of feminine resistance in the public sphere.

By Paula O’Donnell

Key Figures

History of Science

Early republican experiments in Spanish America occurred at a time when there were no models to follow. While republicans in Europe battled monarchists and the clerical old regime, while they increasingly imagined their republics as colonial empires of racial inferiors, and while republicans like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the United States built their republic on white supremacy and industrialized slavery in cotton plantations, a generation of Spanish American sociologists, economists, anthropologists, and political philosophers became the world’s republican vanguard.

One of their most resilient inventions was rhetorical. Spanish Americans consistently portrayed the period of Spanish rule as obscurantist, tyrannical, and corrupt. This discourse of Latin America’s “colonial legacies” is pervasive today. During the early nineteenth century, Spanish Americans invented distinct “colonial legacies” to legitimize their intellectual and political work in rejecting Spanish rule. They believed science could diagnose, treat, and excise those pernicious colonial legacies. Their radical new form of political modernity required they take a systematic approach to understanding and changing their society, their economic structures, and their political processes. As perceived obstructions changed over time, so did proposed solutions, which in turn contributed to the invention of new philosophies, anthropologies, sociologies, geographies, and sciences.

By Lina del Castillo

Environmental History

At the end of 1960, near Cienfuegos, Cuba, on the Soledad estate of a U.S.-owned sugar company, the American Director and Cuban staff of Harvard’s Atkins Institution began packing up their scientific equipment. The Cuban Revolution had caught up with them. Director Ian Duncan Clement, his wife, Vivian, and lab technician Esperanza Vega worked quickly to put the station’s herbarium, library, and lab “in stand-by condition.” The station’s horticulturalist, Felipe Gonzalez, and his assistants pruned the trees in the station’s arboretum, preparing them “to withstand a period of neglect.”

By Megan Raby

Cold War

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

By Ilan Palacios Avineri

On January 2, 1959, Fidel Castro, the rebel comandante who had just overthrown Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, addressed a crowd of jubilant supporters. Recalling the failed popular uprisings of past decades, Castro assured them that this time “the real Revolution” had arrived. Castro’s words proved prophetic not only for his countrymen but for Latin America and the wider world.

The political turmoil that rocked a small Caribbean nation in the 1950s became one of the twentieth century’s most transformative events. Initially, Castro’s revolution augured well for democratic reform movements then gaining traction in Latin America. But what had begun promisingly veered off course as Castro took a heavy hand in efforts to centralize Cuba’s economy and stamp out private enterprise. Embracing the Soviet Union as an ally, Castro and his lieutenants, Che Guevara and Raúl Castro, sought to export the socialist revolution abroad through armed insurrection. Chairman Khrushchev’s early support aided the Cuban revolutionaries in defeating of the CIA invasion of Cuban émigré fighters at the Bay of Pigs. However, he subsequently lost his job over the 1962 Missile Crisis that pushed the superpowers to the brink of nuclear war.

By Jonathan C. Brown

Digital Archives and Resources

Memory and Museums

The Colombian violence of the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, the subject of my work, left many victims. It also left many survivors of atrocities who needed some kind of closure in order to continue with their lives. During these decades, civilians found themselves caught among four armed actors: the National Army, paramilitaries, guerrillas, and drug lords, who were fighting over the control of land and civilians. These groups committed brutalities such as kidnappings, disappearances, forced displacement, bombings, massacres, and targeted murders. In order to cope with and overcome the trauma caused by all this violence, diverse communities set up museums and displays. These acts of memory and reconciliation demonstrate that people and communities remember and represent the past differently. Some exhibitions portray violence, others focus on personal histories and others turn to the strength their cultural traditions give them. They contain different meanings and intentions, and take a variety of forms including traveling museums, murals, houses, kiosks, and even cemeteries devoted to remembering the ones who are gone. But they all work towards the same goal: never again.

By Jimena Perry

Material Culture

Music and Film

National identity has been both a dream and a nightmare for historians. When they attempt to historicize the concept, it becomes a thick web of actors, motives, and unintended consequences. Exploring the “invention of tradition” underlying modern national identities proves an appealing but extremely difficult task. In Hello, Hello Brazil, Bryan McCann offers a suggestive method to master this process. By tracing the emergence of Brazilian popular music, he successfully shows how the “traditional” samba was composed in an unequal exchange between regional musicians and composers, state officers, recording managers, radio producers, and radio broadcasters. The history of modern Brazilian music must be understood, then, within the broader debate on “Brazilianness.”

By Franz D. Hensel Riveros

Crime and Law

Judicial records usually provide the empirical grist underpinning historical studies of crime, but journalism is the lifeblood of the field.  The efforts of reporters, editors, photographers and illustrators have allowed researchers to resurrect bygone crimes, often in forensic detail.  In the more recent Latin American past, for instance, the intrepid sleuthing of journalists—whose “narco libros” populate the Spanish-language shelves of book retailers—has spared academics from treading on paths far more perilous than graduate school could have ever prepared them for.  Their revelations pertaining to the inner-workings of criminal syndicates and their state cohorts have deepened our information trove, making it possible for researchers to formulate more comprehensive analyses of the underworld.

By Diego A. Godoy

Latinx History in the U.S.

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

By Micaela Valadez

Migration Studies

In October 1937, Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered his troops to slaughter Haitians living in the Dominican frontier and the Cibao. The horrific violence left as many as 15,000 dead. Trujillo apologists managed to justify the action nationally, but the massacre created an international public relations nightmare for the regime. Newspapers cited Trujillo’s ruthlessness and compared him to Hitler and Mussolini. Trujillo quickly moved to restore his credentials as an anti-fascist ally of the United States by offering refuge to 100,000 European Jews fleeing Nazi Germany.  In Tropical Zion, Allen Wells tells the story of the establishment and decline of the small Jewish agricultural colony at Sosúa in the Dominican Republic and illustrates the significance of the colony in the international sphere. While only a handful of Jews migrated to the Dominican Republic during the Holocaust, Wells argues that ultimately, Sosúa saved lives and that its history uncovers the complex intersection of Zionism, U.S.-Dominican relations, American and Europe anti-Semitism, and the racism of the Trujillo regime.

By Lauren Hammond

Gabrielle Esparza is a Ph.D. student in the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a historian of Latin America, with a focus on twentieth-century Argentine history. Her current research interests include democratization, transitional justice, human rights, and civil military relations.

Digital Archive Review: Age of Revolutions and the Newberry French Pamphlet Collection

These reviews discuss two different but connected digital resources: the Age of Revolutions and the Newberry French Pamphlet Collection. Both are important resources for the study of revolutions.

Review: Age of Revolutions  

The Editors of the Age of Revolutions website describe it as “an Open-Access, Peer-Reviewed Academic Journal,” but the breadth of its features and thematic coverage extends beyond the realm of a traditional journal. Revolution is the central concept of the site, and its main contributions relate to the American Revolution, Atlantic revolutions, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and Latin American revolutions. The site publishes blog posts, analytical essays, book reviews, bibliographies, and links to other valuable online resources. 

The fundamental objective of Age of Revolutions is the exploration of humanity’s experience and fascination with “revolutions.” Although it now operates with a nine-person editing team, it was co-founded by Dr. Bryan Banks of Columbus State University and Dr. Cindy Ermus of the University of Texas, San Antonio. It aims to “survey revolutionary changes in history, encourage the comparative study of revolutions, and explore the hopes imbued in the term.” These broad goals pull the site in many directions. 

Users can search for blog posts and essays by upload date or via a thematic search. Age of Revolutions publications range from cultural history and material history, to class, agriculture, and religion. Each category functions as a tag, which once selected, displays other posts that fall under its purview. The site also provides the approximate reading time for each article. They range from 10 to 60 minutes, reflecting the varying length and level of intricacy of the articles.  

An essay entitled “‘Thrown into this Hospitable Land:’ Saint-Dominguans in Virginia, 1796-1870” has a reading time of 46 minutes 

Although the site produces a great variety of essays, it also aims to host regular virtual “roundtables:” collections of posts based on a theme. Past roundtables have included “Bearing Arms in the Age of Revolutions” and ”Faith in Revolution.” As with the previously mentioned categories, the title of each roundtable operates as a searchable tag. 

The homepage features a drop-down menu of all past roundtable topics 

Two features are particularly valuable for students and teachers: the thematic bibliography section and the ‘Teaching Revolutions’ section. Site editors provide and frequently update reading lists for its five major sections: American, Atlantic, French, Haitian, and Latin American. Along with a steadily expanding group of contributors, they have also created a series of fifteen posts on teaching strategies for various aspects of historical revolutions. They include “Feel the Fear and Teach the Revolution Anway: Notes from a Historian of post-1945 France” and “Texas and the Great White-Washing of the American Revolution.” 

The two most recent “Teaching Revolutions” posts are “Teaching Chile’s Road to Socialism: Topics, Questions, and Assignments” and “Hamilton and the Bibliographical Revolution in the Classroom” 

In their introductory remarks about the website, its creators ponder why the concept of revolution has remained so popular. They conclude that “the word ‘revolution’ is a human tool” for understanding change, and that over the course of history, “its meaning has shifted to accommodate those wielding it.” The extensive thematic and geographic reach of this site helps users zig and zag across historic and contemporary studies of the elusive concept. 

Review: Newberry Library French Pamphlet Collection 

The French Revolution has remained a pivotal point for studies of monarchy, despotism, democratic rule, and nation-state formation on a global scale. The Newberry Library in Chicago houses key sources related to this period, and its online repository is helping to increase the accessibility of these documents. Its extensive French Pamphlet Collection (FPC) contains 38,000 items. 

Although the FPC has expanded its thematic contents over the years, the Newberry Library originally aimed to collect documents related to the revolution. Most of its contents originate from the period between 1780 and 1810 and represent “the opinions of all the factions that opposed and defended the monarchy.” Published online beginning in 2014, the number of visitors to the virtual FPC has steadily grown over time, with 60,000 page views in October 2020. 

The site offers a streamlined user experience with multiple search options. Visitors can peruse documents via keyword search, or within any of the following categories: year, topics and subjects, creator, and publication language. Another option is filtering the search results based on views, that is the number of people who have clicked on that particular source in the past. 

A keyword search for “political clubs” yields 296 results 

Once the user selects a specific document, the site navigates to a page designed for easy reading. Visitors to the site can read through page by page, with the option of zooming in and out on the images. They can also download the work for later viewing. Each work also displays a list of related items below the reader view. 

Screenshot of the reader view for a document entitled “Discours prononcés à la fête de la fondation de la République” from 1798 

One interesting feature that the FPC site offers is the creation of sub-collections. By selecting and saving a group of documents, any user can create and name that collection. The groupings created by private users can contain hundreds of items, or a small amount, based on the user’s preference. This allows individual scholars to save works relevant to their own research, or it could provide the opportunity for teachers to prepare a selection of documents for a course or project.  

Dozens of individuals have created subcollections, as this list illustrates  

The overall ease of access of the online French Pamphlet Collection of the Newberry Library makes it a rich resource. Its thousands of documents provide users the opportunity to explore a critical period of French history and its global implications in high resolution.  

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