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IHS Roundtable: The Foremothers of Women of Color Feminism

Institute for Historical Studies – Wednesday March 23, 2022

This roundtable discussion features four former members of the Third World Women’s Alliance, one of the largest and most influential women of color organizations of the 1970s. Founded by Black women in New York (1968), the TWWA expanded nationally to the West Coast and broadened its membership to include Latina, Asian, and Indigenous women. These women pioneered early iterations of intersectionality, which legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw later coined.

TWWA members provided an organizational framework and model for successfully building solidarity along different cultural, national, and ethnic backgrounds, nationally and internationally. These women of color’s freedom dreams and organizing efforts revolved around solving ethical issues like reproductive injustices and socioeconomic disparities. The panel is centered around former TWWA member Patricia Romney’s recently published book, We Were There: The Third World Women’s Alliance and the Second Wave (Feminist Press, 2021).

Sponsored by:
– Department of History
– Center for the Study of Race and Democracy
– Institute for Historical Studies
– John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies
– Center for Women’s and Gender Studies
– Black Women Radicals
– Asian American Feminist Collective
– Department of Africana Studies at Lehman College, CUNY
– Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Lehman College, CUNY
– The Department of English at Lehman College, CUNY

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

Review of Sex Among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730-1830 (2006)

The question “how revolutionary was the American Revolution?” has long animated academic inquiry into the American experience of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Historians have often sought to answer this question by examining political and economic effects of the War of Independence. Clare Lyons’ Sex Among the Rabble suggests scholars should spend less time studying revolutionaries in statehouses and more time looking under the sheets. Her study shatters popular preconceptions that colonial sexuality emulated Georgian notions of propriety and politeness. Lyons traces both radical changes and reactionary reforms in sexual mores of Philadelphia during the decades before and after the Revolution.

book cover for Sex among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730-1830 (Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American Histo): 9780807856758: Lyons, Clare A.: Books

Lyons’ study is not truly limited to the “rabble,” although one can understand the appeal of such a titillating title for this rousing monograph. Lyons looks at an array of sources ranging from popular print materials to court records to sordid sexual diaries compiled by voyeuristic men. Through these documents she “illuminates the interplay between sexual behavior and the cultural construction of early American understandings of sexuality” (p. 8). Furthermore, the broad temporal scope of her study shows how supple sexual behavior during the Revolution was eventually regulated along class and racial lines in the early antebellum period.

The book’s initial chapters examining discourses and sexual practices reveal a colonial society where the distribution of power between men and women was sharply contested both inside and outside of the confines of marriage. Far from depicting marital bliss, ditties in print suggested that the trope of marriage and misery has deep roots in American history. Lyons also shows how a pleasure culture that promoted promiscuity and prostitution emerged in the late 1760s and blossomed in the closing decades of the eighteenth century. This culture of casual sex suffused the entire social hierarchy of Philadelphia — although there was considerable variance in the types of liaisons sought by members of different classes.

Additionally, Lyons exposes how racialized attitudes about differentiated sexual appetites and cross-racial relationships profoundly impacted this sexual culture. African Americans were characterized as a “libidinal race” by none other than Thomas Jefferson, whose own family tree was shaped by his interracial desires (p. 230). Over time, concerns about cross-racial and cross-class sexual relations drove upper classes to seek to regulate sexuality and encourage restraint instead of lustful trysts. This elite-driven sexual culture was intricately linked to notions of republican motherhood that sought to portray women as key sources of morality and virtue. If sexuality experienced a radical transformation as the colonies broke away from Great Britain this later period represented a Thermidorian reaction to these rapid changes.

Title page and frontispiece of The Mother at Home or the Principles of Maternal Duty Familiarly Illustrated by John Stevens Cabot Abbott, published by the American Tract Society (New York, ca. 1834). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Lyons’ rich source material and scintillating subject matter make this book a riveting read. This study will appeal to both historians of early America and scholars of sexuality and gender. While Lyons’ own recent experiences in political activism inspired this work, she avoids presentist judgments or imposing present-day sexual attitudes on her subjects. Instead, she carefully considers the social ramifications of a series of practices, ranging from wife-sales to enforced child support in cases of bastardy. Given the centrality of race in her account it may have helped to structure her book to more clearly delineate the racial dimensions of her findings as distinct from the class-based differences she uncovers. This small revision and perhaps culling the copious excerpts from printed poems that she includes throughout would have strengthened her study. Nonetheless, Lyons has pulled back the covers on a fascinating facet of early American society that reveals social transformations on par with the political and economic revolutions debated by other scholars of this time period.

Jon Buchleiter is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He studies United States history with particular interest in US foreign policy of the Cold War. His current research examines the institutionalization of arms control and disarmament efforts and successive administrations approached and prioritized arms control initiatives. At UT, Jon is a Graduate Fellow with the Clements Center for National Security and Brumley Fellow with the Strauss Center for International Security and Law. Jon received his BA in Peace, War, and Defense and Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Statements and Resources on the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

Not Even Past associates itself with the following statements and thanks the The Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies for permission to reproduce these resources.

Statement from UT’s Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies

The Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies condemns the Russian Federation’s military invasion of Ukraine. We stand in support of the people of Ukraine who are fighting for their lives and sovereignty in the face of the unjustified invasion by Russian military forces.

Please see the statements made by our colleagues in these Slavic studies associations of which many of us are members.

UT’s Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies has developed a Ukraine Information & Resources Page that we highly recommend. Visit here:

Ukrainian Students at US Universities

IIE’s Emergency Student Fund will rush aid to Ukrainian students in need who are studying at U.S. colleges and universities. Support IIE’s Emergency Student Fund to rush financial assistance to these students.

Podcasts

Slavic Connexion Podcast (hosted by CREEES Graduate Students)

This is Democracy Podcast

This is Democracy – Renewing our democracy with serious conversation across generations.

Print Media

Global Disinformation Lab Director and CREEES Assistant Professor Kiril Avramov: “How the Letter ‘Z’ Fits Into the History of Russian Propaganda Efforts”

Professor Jeremi Suri, LBJ School of Public Affairs:“Ukraine and the Economy will Dominate Biden’s State of the Union Address, Voice of America (28 February 2022).

“What to Expect from Biden’s State of the Union Address,” Courthouse News Service (28 February 2022)

CREEES MA Alumnus Matt Orr: “Biden’s Comments on Ukraine Won’t Change Russia’s Calculus”

CREEES MA Alumnus Audrius Rickus: “Baseless claims of ‘denazification’ have underscored Russian aggression since World War II”

History PhD student Rebecca Johnston: “The Only Russian Official Angrier Than Putin at How Things Are Going in Ukraine”

TV Appearances

CREEES Professor Steven Seegel: “What’s at Stake for America as Tensions Soar in Ukraine/Russia Conflict”

Professor Robert Moser and Associate Professor Patrick McDonald (Government): “UT Austin Experts Break Down Russia/Ukraine Situation”

CREEES MA student Misha Symanovskyy: “US Imposes New Sanctions on Russia Over Ukraine Conflict”

CREEES MA Alumnus Matt Orr: “Things will continue to get worse: Analyst on Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine”

“Reflections on Resistance”: Memoria Abierta preserves the documentary legacies of heroes who faced down the junta

by Paula O’Donnell

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.

Few organizations have names that so poignantly express their general mission. Memoria Abierta, whose name means “open memory” in Spanish, works to prevent Argentina from forgetting its difficult history. Specifically, Memoria Abierta educates Argentines about the deadly crimes committed by the 1976-1983 military government and, more importantly, the heroic resistance of human rights activists who fomented its demise. Part archive, part tech firm, part research center, part advocacy group, this organization has undertaken a broad range of initiatives across the past twenty years, all directed to this aim.

Photo of Escuela de Guerra Naval, which now serves as the Archivo Nacional de la Memoria — Memoria Abierta is located at the Espacio Memoria y Derechos Humanos, formerly the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada. During the military dictatorship, the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada served as a clandestine detention center. Since 2004, the complex has served as a museum and human rights center. Source: Espacio Memoria y Derechos Humanos

Memoria Abierta is principally an archival project, first organized by eight human rights associations in 2000. A non-governmental organization (NGO), Memoria Abierta operates independently from state agencies and political influence. Memoria Abierta’s chief investigator Dr. Cecilia Flores clarified that this status, unusual for archives in Argentina, protects the institution’s autonomy in a political context where governmental transition can imply “drastic turns” in official attitudes towards collective memory. “We believe that our archives should remain within civil society,” she explained. Her view is understandable considering Argentina’s turbulent political history and the legacies of the military dictatorship that motivated Memoria Abierta’s work in the first place.

The brutal military regime that gave impetus for Memoria Abierta ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983. Although Argentines had already endured five military coups in the twentieth century, this new dictatorship was of a different kind. These new juntas detained, tortured, and killed an estimated 30,000 civilians for suspected “subversive” activity. State forces kidnapped and tortured these detainees before dropping them alive into the Atlantic Ocean. As their bodies were never found, the missing were hence known as los desaparecidos, or “the disappeared.”

Under these circumstances, family members of victims and their sympathizers mounted a courageous resistance against the dictatorship. Perhaps the most famous among them, Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, were middle-aged and elderly women who lost children and husbands to the military’s brutality. Beginning in 1977, these women met at the presidential palace every Thursday to hold vigil, wearing images of their missing kin on strings around their necks and plain white handkerchiefs on their heads.

*Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo holding weekly vigil in front of the Casa Rosada, ca. 1979. Source: Archivo General de la Nación*

Such censure of the junta’s atrocities, along with general dissatisfaction in Argentina over the failing economy, threatened the military state’s hold on power in the early 1980s. In a massive demonstration on March 30, 1982, activists demanded that the dictators step down and reinstate democratic elections. Three days later, the governing junta under General Leopoldo Galtieri invaded the Falklands/Malvinas islands in the South Pacific. They hoped the operation would rouse popular support. Initially, this worked: massive crowds celebrated the invasion in front of the presidential palace. However, when the Argentine garrison lost the islands to a dominant British taskforce in only two months, the humiliated and rebuked military regime abdicated power.

After the junta finally stepped down in 1983, there was much work for human rights activists to do. The family members of disappeared persons who integrated Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, Familiares de Desaparecidos y Detenidos por Razones Políticas, and other organizations still sought answers regarding the fates of their missing loved ones. The military continued to insist that they had no information about the disappeared, nor who was responsible for their disappearances. In response, the human rights organizations took to the streets, demanding that their former oppressors be held accountable in the court of law.

These “years of impunity,” in which the perpetrators walked freely while human rights organizers called for their arrest, would last for nearly two decades. The nine junta leaders who ruled between 1976 and 1983 were indeed brought to trial and some convicted in 1985—a historic achievement among Latin American post-dictatorial democracies. However, the still-powerful military establishment restrained the civilian administration of President Raul Alfonsín from prosecuting any officers besides the junta leaders. The Full Stop Law (Ley de Punto Final) and the Due Obedience Law (Ley de Obediencia Debida) officially shut down the transitional justice movement shortly after the junta’s convictions. To make things worse, President Carlos Menem eventually pardoned the few commanders who had gone to prison in 1989 and 1990. It was not until Argentina’s Supreme Course declared the Full Stop Law, Due Obedience Law, and amnesties as unconstitutional between 2005 and 2007 that the judicial process could take full course.

*Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo participate in protests in Buenos Aires over the Full Stop Law. Source: Archivo Hasenberg-Quaretti*

Memoria Abierta was established in 2000, just a few years before prosecutors reopened court cases against the perpetrators of the Dirty War. Eight human rights organizations, including Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo and Familiares de Desaparecidos y Detenidos por Razones Políticas, formed the NGO to systematize, catalogue, and index their individual collections, making them more accessible and legible to the public. These documents offer researchers “reflections on resistance,” according to Dr. Flores, emphasizing the experiences of those who bravely opposed the military regime.^[1]

Memoria Abierta was thus born as an archival project, but it soon adopted investigative and pedagogical missions as well. For example, Memoria Abierta immediately began assembling what became a groundbreaking oral history collection.Eager to document the life experiences of elderly human rights leaders, Memoria Abierta researchers decided to interview them. They started with the founders and members of the eight human rights organizations constituting Memoria Abierta but then expanded to include activists and victims of state violence outside the coalition. Today the archive consists of more than 962 interviews with individuals that include survivors of detainment, artists exiled during the military regime, and political leaders who bravely challenged the dictatorship.

Memoria Abierta has also experimented with technological development, producing educational digital tools and platforms that have been used in classrooms, museums, and even as evidence during judicial proceedings. The first of these projects comprised a series of interactive CDs for public schools, produced in collaboration with the Department of Education for the city of Buenos Aires. Using these CDs, children learned about the dictatorship through TV news clips, oral history recordings, and other audiovisual sources

As part of their commitment to promoting sites of memory in Argentina, Memoria Abierta joined state-led initiatives to transform former detention centers into museums and memorials. These “sites of memory”, to use a term coined in the 1970s by French historian Pierre Nora, are spaces preserved or reconstructed to stimulate a community’s memory of the past. Visitors to these sites in Argentina walk through the spaces where state forces detained and tortured victims, learning about this horrifying history from trained guides. In situations where the outgoing military destroyed the sites, a reconstruction effort took place, often informed by documents, digital tools, and oral histories provided by Memoria Abierta.

Memoria Abierta's digital mapping project for the city of Cordoba. — *Memoria Abierta’s digital mapping project for the city of Cordoba. For more examples and interactive features, visit Memoria Abierta’s site.*

The NGO also developed pedagogical resources for many of these sites of memory. For example, Dr. Flores showed me a digital mapping project that geographically reconstructs the routes taken by detained victims between different clandestine centers. Once completed, the cartographical tool will be projected on monitors at the former clandestine torture center known as “El Olimpo.” This project is illustrative of Memoria Abierta’s emphasis on what it calls “memory-based topography,” a kind of site-based memory-work in which maps, volumetric representations, and animations are used to visually reconstruct the territorial dimensions of the military regime’s repression.

Over the past twenty years, Memoria Abierta has become a household name in Argentina. As an Argentine-born female historian of the regime, I have long been familiar with their high-profile projects, including the digitization of newspapers transcribing the 1985 Trial of the Juntas. The organization’s enormous influence can be attributed to the NGO’s principled dedication to broad public access. Memoria Abierta insists on making all its resources available for public use, online whenever possible. This prioritization of public pedagogy is a crucial aspect of the organization’s framework for transitional justice. And this approach is critical. If all Argentines have access to the documents, the audiovisual material, and the digital tools produced and curated by Memoria Abierta, the lessons in these resources become “the instruments for strengthening democracy,” as Dr. Flores eloquently puts it.^[2] In other words, by learning about the decades of struggles against state violence and impunity in Argentina, Argentines may be inspired to continue fighting for a just future in the present.

If you would like to learn more about Memoria Abierta, Dr. Flores represented the organization at the 2022 Lozano Long “Archiving Objects of Knowledge with Latin American Perspectives” Conference. Memoria Abierta participated in a panel entitled “’(Re)conociendo’: Community rights through archives and memory,” which is now available online.

^[1] Maria Celina Flores, “Conocer el movimiento de derechos humanos a través de sus archivos. Experiencias sobre tratamiento de fondos documentales, accesibilidad y usos en Memoria Abierta,“ in Archivos Para La Paz Seminario Internacional: Diálogos de la Memoria, Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica, Colombia, 2015, pg 11.

^[2] Ibid.

Paula O’Donnell is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History of UT Austin. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, her research interests include “Third World” discourses, gendered notions of citizenship, and military culture in Cold War Latin America. O’Donnell’s dissertation, “Defending La Argentina: Sovereignty and Honorable Citizenship in the Malvinas/Falklands War,” examines the Argentine military junta’s justifications for the 1982 conflict with Great Britain over the South Atlantic archipelago. The project, informed by social science, feminist, and postcolonial theory, offers new insights into right-wing authoritarian nation-building in Cold War Latin America. Archival research for this project, funded by the AHA’s Conference on Latin American History and the University of Texas Graduate School, is underway this year in Buenos Aires.

IHS Talleres y Debates: Sobre Talento, Objetos, y Colonias en la Exposición “Tornaviaje” del Museo del Prado

El Instituto de Estudios Históricos – Lunes, marzo 7, 2022

La reciente exposición “Tornaviajes” acoge por primera vez en el Prado objetos indianos de manera temporal. El Prado representa las joyas estéticas de las colecciones reales Habsburgo y Borbones, en el pasado y lo más valorado por hoy. Hubo sin duda un tráfico grandes de objetos indianos a los reinos de la monarquía, de Castilla a Nápoles a las varias principalidades del Sacro Imperio Romano, ya sea como pinturas de castas o imágenes religiosas u objetos suntuarios. Los autores de estos objetos, con pocas excepciones, fueron anónimos. “Tornaviaje” pone de manifiesto la naturaleza del tráfico de objetos de arte indianos a instituciones religiosas, colecciones privadas, y colecciones reales. ¿Llegaron estos objetos como curiosidades o como obras de arte, desde los cuadros y mitras de plumas a las obras concha nácar? ¿Qué nos dicen esos objetos y esas colecciones sobre la percepción en la corte y en los reinos de España sobre las Indias? ¿Fueron las indias reinos proveedores de talento e ideas en una monarquía compuesta y policéntrica, o fueron colonias? ¿Qué es lo que exposición “Tornaviajes” del Prado nos revela sobre la naturaleza de las jerarquías epistemológicas, estéticas, políticas en diferentes épocas del pasado y hoy?

Visita virtual y el catálogo del Tornaviaje: Arte iberoamericano en España. La serie “Talleres y Debates” se presenta íntegramente en español.

Participantes:

Olga Isabel Acosta Luna
Profesora Asociada, Departamento de Historia del Arte, Facultad de Artes y Humanidades
Universidad de los Andes
Academia page: https://uniandes.academia.edu/OlgaAcosta

Jaime Genaro Cuadriello Aguilar
Doctor en Historia y Historia del Arte
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Encarnación Hidalgo Cámara
 Directora 
Museo de América

Ramón Mujica Pinilla
Academico de la Academia de Historia Nacional del Peru

Juan Pimentel
Investigador del Departamento de Historia de la Ciencia
Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales (CCHS – CSIC)

Sara Sánchez del Olmo
Conservatrice adjointe, Musée d’ethnographie de Neuchâtel (Suisse)
Chercheuse affiliée à l’IHAR, Université de Lausanne (Suisse)

Radical Collaboration: Brook Lillehaugen and the Ticha Project

by May Helena Plumb

A key thread running through Dr. Brook Danielle Lillehaugen’s career is access—to language, to history, and to education. She recognizes that linguistic research on Indigenous languages is insufficient if members of Indigenous communities cannot access it. Therefore, throughout her career she has sought to remove barriers to such access via creative, collaborative research that goes beyond traditional academic practice.

*Guza bgwe Dizhsa xtenu! Listen to this Zapotec encouragement on the online talking dictionary.*

I have been fortunate to know Lillehaugen since 2012, when she taught my very first linguistics class at Haverford College. As a former student and a current co-author, it’s a pleasure to reflect on Lillehaugen’s research in this review. My own academic path has been shaped by her leading example of collaborative research that reaches “beyond the academy.” I believe linguistics as a field and the broader academic world has much to learn from Lillehaugen’s style of scholarship.

At the center of Lillehaugen’s research are the Zapotec languages and the people who speak them. Zapotec is a family of languages indigenous to Oaxaca, Mexico. Today over 400,000 Zapotec people live in Oaxaca and in diaspora communities throughout Mexico and the United States. As Indigenous survivors of a colonialist and nationalist history (and present), Zapotec people face systematic marginalization. Anti-Indigenous sentiment, especially as manifested in discriminatory language policies—such as those banning children from speaking Indigenous languages in Mexican schools in the latter half of the 20^th century—has caused many Zapotec families to shift to Spanish as an act of self-preservation.

Regardless, many Zapotec people have and continue to actively resist this language shift. One useful tool for Zapotec scholars and activists has been the corpus of colonial-era documents written in Zapotec languages, which includes legal manuscripts as well as religious and descriptive linguistic texts. However, Zapotec people face numerous barriers in accessing these documents: the Zapotec language written during the colonial period is significantly different from those languages spoken today; the archives housing these documents are scattered throughout Mexico, the United States, and even Europe; and furthermore, many archives actively discriminate against Indigenous knowledge-seekers.

*Brook Danielle Lillehaugen examines Colonial Zapotec documents in the Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico. Source: Author*

Lillehaugen’s research program combines linguistic analysis of the grammar of Zapotec languages with tools from digital humanities to promote access to the Colonial Zapotec corpus, allowing stakeholders to engage more deeply with the history of Zapotec knowledge, culture, politics, and language. Her scholarship is expansive and radically collaborative—her co-authors include Zapotec scholars and activists, undergraduate students, historians, and librarians. Her publications range from traditional academic articles in the International Journal of American Linguistics and Language Documentation and Conservation, to pedagogical materials, digital dictionaries, and documentary films. Lillehaugen received her Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles, and she is currently an associate professor in the Tri-College Department of Linguistics at Haverford College.

*A Colonial Zapotec document in the Archivo General del Poder Ejecutivo del Estado de Oaxaca, Mexico. Source: Author*

Lillehaugen’s primary project—and the topic of her talk at the 2022 Lozano Long Conference—is Ticha, a digital explorer for Colonial Zapotec (ticha.haverford.edu). The core goal of the Ticha Project is to make Colonial Zapotec texts accessible to a diverse public, and in particular to Zapotec people. Lillehaugen leads a large team of linguists, activists, historians, students, and librarians, including Zapotec and non-Zapotec collaborators, to create resources that can support both community-based Zapotec initiatives and interdisciplinary scholarly research. Digital humanities has been a key component of realizing this goal: the Ticha website curates high-quality images of these texts with transcriptions, translations, and historical context. The website also features a Colonial Zapotec vocabulary list,^[1] which is integrated with audio recordings from living Zapotec speakers. This draws on another one of Lillehaugen’s projects: the Zapotec Talking Dictionaries.^[2] In order to address specific goals and needs of Zapotec community members, Lillehaugen and the rest of the Ticha team have also created pedagogical materials about Colonial Zapotec, run workshops for Zapotec people to learn about colonial Zapotec writing and history, and brought Zapotec people into archives^[3]—a radical act, given the historical and present-day exclusion of Indigenous people from these spaces.

Most recently, Lillehaugen led a 2019 ACLS Digital Extensions grant with Zapotec scholars Felipe H. Lopez (Seton Hall University) and Xóchitl Flores-Marcial (California State University, Northridge) and librarian Mike Zarafonetis (Haverford College Libaries) to expand the resources available on the Ticha site and write pedagogical materials helping new users explore and understand Colonial Zapotec texts. The result is Caseidyneën Saën — Learning Together,^[4] a digital volume of teaching modules on topics ranging from the Colonial Zapotec number system to how Zapotec people have used Colonial Zapotec texts to learn more about the languages they speak today. There is also a corresponding volume in Spanish, Aprendemos Juntos.^[5] The lessons are appropriate for self-study or for use in high school and college classrooms.

*A bill of sale, written in Zapotec in San Jerónimo Tlacochahuaya, 1675, as visible on Ticha (https://ticha.haverford.edu/en/texts/Tl675a/)*

The volume is directed toward a broad audience and assumes no experience in linguistics or Mesoamerican history, but the editors centered a Zapotec audience as primary. Ticha focuses on colonial-era materials, but Lillehaugen and her colleagues explicitly connect this research to Zapotec languages spoken today, actively combating false, harmful narratives that relegate Indigenous languages and cultures to the distant past. For example, the teaching modules in Caseidyneën Saën feature videos of Zapotec people, compare Colonial Zapotec grammar with that of languages spoken today, and explicitly encourage Zapotec readers to explore these topics in their own languages and communities.

Throughout her career Lillehaugen has also prioritized support for educational spaces where Zapotec people can engage with their languages and history. In earlier projects, she has helped create social media networks that support Zapotec people writing their languages^[6] and has run workshops in Oaxaca on reading Colonial Zapotec documents. As part of the development of Caseidyneën Saën, Lillehaugen, Lopez, and Flores-Marcial designed virtual workshops for Zapotec people to learn about Colonial Zapotec using these teaching modules.^[7] Participants in the workshops, who came both from Oaxaca and from Zapotec diaspora communities in the United States, formed a new transnational community of Zapotec activists who can support each other’s work moving forward. Lillehaugen and her collaborators also provided a framework and financial support for participants to run their own workshops in their communities, building the foundations for continued education in the future.

As I pursue my own graduate research on Zapotec languages, I’m lucky to count Brook as a teacher, a mentor, a colleague, and a dear friend. My collaboration on Ticha and Caseidyneën Saën has deeply shaped how I view my research and my progress through academia. In writing Caseidyneën Saën and pursuing other Ticha initiatives, Brook models a radically collaborative method of work, one which prioritizes Zapotec perspectives and brings together scholars from a variety of institutions, disciplines, and stages of their career to create projects that are deeply rooted in community, reciprocity, and resistance.

May Helena Plumb is a Ph.D. candidate in Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. Her graduate research investigates the expression of temporal-modal semantics in the Zapotec languages of Oaxaca, Mexico, with a particular focus on Tlacochahuaya Zapotec. Her broader interests extend to digital humanities, the preservation of language data, and supporting intellectual infrastructure for Indigenous people doing language work. She is a co-author on the Ticha Project, a digital text explorer for Colonial Zapotec documents (ticha.haverford.edu), and a co-editor of Caseidyneën Saën – Learning Together, a collection of pedagogical materials on Colonial Valley Zapotec.

^[1] https://ticha.haverford.edu/en/vocabulary/A/

^[2] In collaboration with the Enduring Voices Project; http://talkingdictionary.swarthmore.edu/zapotecs/

^[3] https://twitter.com/xochizin/status/1449064042593726469

^[4] http://ds-wordpress.haverford.edu/ticha-resources/modules/

^[5] http://ds-wordpress.haverford.edu/ticha-resources/recursos-de-ticha/

^[6] See Lillehaugen, Brook Danielle, 2016. Why write in a language that (almost) no one can read? Twitter and the development of written literature. Language Documentation and Conservation 10: 356-392. Online: http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24702

^[7] See Lillehaugen, Brook Danielle, Xóchitl Flores-Marcial, May Helena Plumb, George Aaron Broadwell & Felipe H. Lopez, 2021 Recovering Words, Reclaiming Knowledge, and Building Community: Ticha Conversatorios. Paper presented at the LASA2021 Virtual Congress: Crisis global, desigualdades y centralidad de la vida. Online: https://youtu.be/ k5QZkyjsvHQ

Archives beyond Intention: The Readings and Writings of Dr. Kelly McDonough

by Claudio Eduardo Moura de Oliveira

I first met Dr. Kelly McDonough as most graduate students meet professors: I emailed her and stopped by her office hours. We bonded over our favorite Zen tea, and she generously encouraged me to talk through aspects of my work with her. This meeting inspired me to add a whole new component to my project, the field of Indigenous Rhetorics, which is now central to my academic work.

Through her mentorship, I have come to learn and admire the many facets of Dr. McDonough’s work. At its core, her work revolves around a silence that is so loud and gets harder and harder. This is the deafening silence that resonates from the stolen land we now live in. In an academy centered around the written word and archives maintained by the dominant culture, Dr. McDonough transforms conspicuous historical absences into visible narratives that help us better understand our present.

The Learned Ones
Nahua Intellectuals in Postconquest Mexico

Specifically, Dr. McDonough documents Nahua intellectuality over the course of the past five hundred years. Her first book, The Learned Ones: Nahua Intellectuals in Postconquest Mexico, introduces us to the intellectual worlds of Nahuatl-speaking peoples. She tells the story of the Nahuas’ long relationship with the written word since the introduction of the Roman alphabet at the start of Spanish colonization in the Americas. The book is part of the ‘First Peoples: New Directions in Indigenous Studies series,’ a collaborative initiative of The University of Arizona Press, the University of Minnesota Press, the University of North Carolina Press, and Oregon State University Press to publish significant scholarship related to the First Nations.

The book introduces Nahua knowledge and writing through five chapters, each focusing on a different Nahua writer. Dr. McDonough examines a selection of 16th-century Nahuatl intellectuals that include: the first indigenous person in the Americas to write a grammar of their native tongue, a polymath, a historian, a playwright, and the only published female Nahua prose writer. The book also addresses –and seeks to change – the invisibility of past Nahuatl intellectuals not just among the Spanish and English-speaking population but also contemporary Nahuatl speakers. Interspersed within the chapters there are narratives of exchanges between the author and current Nahuatl native speakers learning for the first time about past Nahuatl-speaking intellectual production. In doing so, Dr. McDonough helps us draw connections between 16th-century Nahua written production and the contemporary production of indigenous knowledges by native peoples in collaboration with non-indigenous scholars.

For her next book project, Dr. McDonough has been drawn to the 16-century Relaciones Geográficas of New Spain (now Mexico) due to the central role that tlacuilos, or Nahuatl scribes played in their production. Titled Indigenous Science and Technologies of Mexico Past and Present: Nahuas and the World Around Them, Dr. McDonough’s book seeks to engage with past and present Nahua natural and technological knowledges. In the chapter dedicated to the Relaciones Geográficas, Dr. McDonough read silences and, in her own words, makes a collage of snippets from these documents. A methodological exploration, this chapter refuses to accept the limitations of a colonial archive and reads the Relaciones Geográficas’ records well beyond their intentions. Turning from illness to cure, Dr. McDonough reads the answers to the Spanish Crown’s questionnaire (the Relaciones Geográficas) and transforms the findings into a reflection on how to read lacking archival sources and use a creative reimagination in order to produce scholarly work. Dr. McDonough uses this methodological approach to look at the Relaciones Geográficas in order to find indigenous plant science and technologies not only in the few fragments one gets of indigenous presence in the Relaciones Geográficas–where they are often obscured–but also to highlight the intentionality of this knowledge and its practitioners.

The principal church of Acapistla with its atrium and water well is centered on the map and is surrounded by the smaller communities of Texcala, Atlitiqui, Suchitlan, Zuquiapa, Ayapanco, Itlacan, Tecaxiqui, Tecocuzpa, Zahuatlan, Tetliculuca, Calalpa, Ecatepeque, Zacatepeque, Atlahuymulco, and Pazulco. In addition, four different toponyms are visible along with depictions of mountains and rivers. — Visual representation of the administrative capital of Acapistla and its surroundings located within the Archdiocese of Mexico. Created by an unknown indigenous artist, the map illustrates the local water sources and the roads connecting the economic and political center of Acapistla to sixteen surrounding communities. Created in response to question ten listed within the relación geográfica questionnaire for Acapistla. Source: Relaciones Geográficas of Mexico and Guatemala, Benson Latin American Collection, LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections, The University of Texas at Austin

Dr. McDonough is also a leading scholar in the Digital Humanities realm: a commitment that organically has emerged from her determination to making past indigenous knowledge relevant for our present and our possible futures. She currently is contributing to not just one but two inter-institutional and international Digital Humanities projects. The first is the digitization of the Fondo Real de Cholula judicial archive in Mexico, the only surviving colonial archive of judicial documents in one of the few Ciudades de Indios in New Spain. The second project, “Unlocking the Colonial Archive: Harnessing Artificial Intelligence for Indigenous and Spanish American Historical Collections,” is developing a tool to read “unreadable” indigenous archival resources through a collaboration between the LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections, the Digital Humanities Hub at Lancaster University, and Liverpool John Moores University. In fact, Dr. McDonough’s work perhaps has its greatest reach via the Digital Humanities realm. My own interest in Digital Humanities led me straight to her work via the recommendation of my friend and colleague, Hannah Alpert-Abrams.

Dr. Kelly McDonough participated in the 2022 Lozano Long Conference as a commentator in the panel entitled “Modern Institutional Networks Visualize Early Modern Archives: The Case of the Relaciones Geográficas y Topográficas.” The Conference took place on February 24^th and 25^th, 2022, and celebrated the centennial of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection.

IHS Roundtable: The 1619 Project: A Continental, Afro Latiné Perspective

Institute for Historical Studies – Monday February 28, 2022

Notes from the Director

Drawing on the expertise of historians who specialize on the history of slavery, emancipation, and race in the Caribbean and the south Atlantic, this panel seeks to explore the 1619 Project within a wider continental and Atlantic perspective. In which ways would the 1619 Project benefit from a dialogue with the history of the Afro Latiné, Afro Caribbean, and South Atlantic? Does the history of slavery, emancipation, empire, and democracy in the Caribbean and Latin America offer alternatives to the undercurrent pessimism of the 1619 Project? Is American exceptionalism at its core a history of the exceptional enduring power of White Supremacy in one nation?

Featured Panelists:

Herman L. Bennett
Professor of History
The Graduate Center, CUNY

Dr. Michelle McKinley
Bernard B. Kliks Professor of Law; Professor of History and Latin American Studies; and
Director for the Center for the Study of Women in Society
University of Oregon

Danielle Terrazas Williams
Lecturer in History of the Global South
University of Leeds (United Kingdom)

Miguel Valerio
Assistant Professor of Spanish
Washington University in St. Louis

Five Books I Recommend from Comps – Empire and Nation in Modern Eastern Europe

By Jonathan Parker

Empire is not dead. The previous twenty or even ten years have shown that imperial legacies continue to infuse political thinking and cultural discourse. Moscow has invaded Ukraine to bring the latter back into the ‘fold’, restoring so-called ‘all-Russian unity’.[1] Beijing pressures developing countries not to recognize Taiwan’s independence, so that it too might ‘reclaim’ Taiwan. The United Kingdom clings to fond memories of empire in “splendid isolation” as it disengages from the European Union and seeks trade deals with former colonies. These imperial pasts are often bound up with national identities, and these identities remain fraught and contested themselves. After all, what does it mean to be a “real American” in the U.S. today? Is the U.S. a Christian, English-speaking country or a cosmopolitan land of opportunity for all? And what kind of empire is it anyway? In the course of my graduate studies and preparing for my comprehensive exams, I have had the opportunity to read widely on these themes. Here I recommend several volumes, which I have found especially helpful or thought-provoking. My research specialization is nationalism and empire in eastern Europe, and this is reflected in my choice of books. In part thanks to its turbulent history over the past two centuries (from absolute monarchy to “illiberal democracy” via nationalism, fascism, socialism, and capitalism), eastern Europe is a particularly fruitful setting in which to contemplate questions of power and identity. Here then are five books I recommend from my reading for comps.

1. Beneš, Jakub. Workers and Nationalism: Czech and German Social Democracy in Habsburg Austria, 1890-1918. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Workers and Nationalism explores how ordinary workers and autodidact intellectuals sought a greater role not just in shaping their society politically, but also culturally. Previous scholarship has focused on how nationalism was unimportant to most ordinary people, with a special emphasis on rural areas of the Habsburg empire. Beneš makes the case for working class agency and activism in nationalist discourse in the industrial cities and suburbs of Habsburg Austria and Bohemia. Czech and German workers did in fact actively participate in nationalism. What’s more, they often articulated their own sense of nationality independently from and even in opposition to the middle-class activists who have dominated earlier works on nationalism. While workers also imagined nations in non-voluntarist, ethnic terms, they still felt excluded from middle-class forms of nationalism. Socialism, in the form of Social Democracy, empowered workers not just to demand a greater role in government, but also in defining their respective national cultures. These demands were often couched in adversarial language, influenced by Christian Millenarianism, which presented political and cultural democratization as redemption for long-suffering workers. This book is admirable for bringing working class perspectives back into view in a complex and highly nuanced way.

2. Brown, Keith. Loyal unto Death: Trust and Terror in Revolutionary Macedonia. New Anthropologies of Europe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.

This fascinating work combines anthropology and history in order to study how insurgencies organize themselves and carry out violent actions against the government. Loyal unto Death examines how the Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Organization (MRO) organized and equipped itself to launch the Ilinden Uprising of 1903 with 20,000 armed peasants against the Ottoman authorities. While the uprising ultimately failed, its sheer scale is impressive given the poverty and illiteracy of most of the people involved. Brown attributes the effectiveness of the MRO to what he calls “circuits of exchange.” First, continuous migrations of peasant laborers between villages and major Ottoman cities put disparate villages in contact with each other while also bringing in much needed money and other resources. Second, the MRO used a variety of oaths to induct and organize its membership. These oaths codified the person-to-person relationships which made up the MRO while also producing a subjective sense of belonging to a wider community of insurgents. Explicit rules and regulations were also developed for specialized armed bands, who in turn were dependent on civilian “receivers” for supplies and information. Third, while most of its members were illiterate, the MRO did produce its own written record, especially in the form of “death sentences” left on those killed by its terrorists. In doing so the MRO sought to both make itself legible and legitimate to others, including potential recruits and foreign observers. These circulations of things, Brown argues, made up the “sinews” of the MRO, in turn making organized, deliberate action possible.

3. Jezernik, Božidar. Wild Europe: The Balkans in the Gaze of Western Travellers. London: Saqi in association with the Bosnian Institute, 2004.

Wild Europe works like a series of vignettes into its subject, each dealing with a specific fixation of westerners who wrote about the Balkans. This impressionistic approach not only makes the book an interesting and engaging read, but also makes Jezernik’s overarching argument more accessible. One chapter focuses on the geopolitical contestations over Macedonia around 1900, while others scrutinize myths about “men with tails” and headhunting. One especially fascinating chapter discusses the dramatic change in westerners’ perception of coffee, which spread to western Europe from the Ottoman Empire. The focus here is not so much on the people and practices in the Balkans themselves, but on how westerners imagined the Balkans through specific myths and stereotypes. The main thrust of this book is that westerners came to have a more negative view of the Balkans as time passed from the 16^th to the 20^th century, and these views were often connected to the relationship between the Ottoman Empire (which ruled over most of the Balkans in this period) and western European empires. More specifically, westerners increasingly distanced themselves from the Ottomans and the Balkans, seeing themselves as more “civilized” and finding “evidence” for barbarism in practices (both real and imagined) in the Balkans.

4. Kivelson, Valerie A., and Ronald Grigor Suny. Russia’s Empires. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Russia’s Empires is not just a fascinating examination of empire in Russian history specifically, but also a broadly useful discussion of what an empire is in general. This general discussion frames the book’s chronological narrative of Russian history, focusing on the different ways in which empire has manifested in Russia’s history (i.e. Russia’s empires). The authors begin with a discussion of the stateless societies in what would later constitute the core of imperial Russia, and how the Mongol invasion in the 13^th century provided a model of rulership to Russian princes. Subsequent chapters develop and support the author’s theoretical framework for thinking about empire. Specifically, they argue that empire consists of four key characteristics. Empires are (1) ruled by a supreme sovereign, answerable to no one, (2) rule over a wide range of disparate lands and people, and (3) are based on a strict hierarchy between metropole and provinces, clearly demarcating superiors and inferiors. This relationship is often internalized by its participants, making subject populations active participants in subtle and symbolic ways. Consequently, (4) rule is exercised through the maintenance of difference rather than homogenization. The authors emphasize the first and last of these points, arguing that the Russian state has oscillated between authoritarianism and diversity over time.

5. Lower, Wendy. Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

In Nazi Empire-Building, Wendy Lower brings back into view the colonial dimensions of the Nazi campaign to subjugate Soviet Ukraine during the Second World War. She demonstrates that Nazi officials explicitly saw themselves and their subordinates as colonizers on the model of the British in India, with inspiration also taken from the United States. Conversely, they also compared Ukrainians and other Slavs to the indigenous peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The Nazis planned to enslave and gradually exterminate Slavic populations (as well as Jews more immediately) while resettling their lands with German settlers. To this end, 2.3 million forced laborers were deported from Ukraine to Germany during the war. The Nazi colonial project failed, Lower points out, not just because they lost the war, but also because of their own grand and incoherent fantasies of empire. Nazi subordinates were often presented with vague or conflicting orders, and policy was usually made up on the spot. Eager to please and willing to adapt radical policies to local conditions, these subordinates conducted campaigns of extreme violence in their local jurisdictions.

Jonathan Parker is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. Born in England, Jonathan grew up in Scotland, Denmark, and Texas. He received his undergraduate degree from UT Austin in 2016 and completed a double Master’s degree at the University of Glasgow and Jagiellonian University, in Cracow, in 2018. His PhD dissertation examines the role of the police in state- and nation-formation in interwar Czechoslovakia, while considering how that role varied among the state’s regions.

[1] For more historical context on this issue, I also recommend Lost Kingdom by Serhii Plokhy, who is director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, among other things.

Archiving the Brazilian Dictatorship: Dr. Inez Stampa and the Memórias Reveladas Reference Center

The 2022 Lozano Long Conference at UT Austin brought together historians from the United States and Latin America for conversations around the “archival turn” in history, a reflexive movement to examine how traces of the past in the form of documents and other artifacts arrive in the archives. In line with this theme, Dr. Inez Stampa of the Brazilian National Archives presented about her work with the Memórias Reveladas Reference Center, a critical node for an international network of non-governmental organizations and research institutions, including both historians and members of other disciplines, interested in interrogating the legacy of Brazil’s 1964-1985 military dictatorship. A social worker by training, Dr. Stampa understands her work with archives in relation to a broader process of transitional justice–a term referring to the judicial and political measures put in place “to redress legacies of massive human rights abuse” (International Center for Transitional Justice, 2021). This process is especially important in Brazil, as many continue to downplay or deny the atrocities committed under military rule.

*The Revealed Memories database cooperatively gathers information on the archival collection related to political repression in the period from 1964-1985*

In 1985, military rule in Brazil gave way to a civilian government, ending a period of censorship and political repression that restricted access to the archives and threatened dissenting voices in the Brazilian academy with imprisonment or exile. The documents from Brazilian national security organizations from the dictatorship remained protected under the custody of the Brazilian Intelligence Agency (ABIN). Dr. Stampa, who completed her undergraduate degree in sociology in 1988 at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, described an absence of information about the history of the dictatorship in her early education, along with an atmosphere of fear surrounding discussions of the recent past in her university classes. This was despite growing agitation by victims of dictatorship-era human rights violations for justice. After the closure of the Brazilian Social Assistance League (LBA) in 1995, she pursued a position with the National Archives, cognizant of the importance of reckoning with the past for society writ large and of the silences surrounding the recent past.

The 2002 electoral success of the Partido Trabalhista (the Workers Party) brought many victims of imprisonment and torture under the dictatorship to power, strengthening cries for accountability and the release of documents from the period of military rule. After nine months of legal and logistical meetings concerning the release of the previously classified material, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ordered the transfer of documents from three now extinct national security organizations to the National Archives in 2005. Four years later, a presidential decree established the Centro de Referência das Lutas Políticas no Brasil (1964-1985) – Memórias Reveladas (The Reference Center for Political Struggles in Brazil (1964-1985) – Revealed Memories). This center was later directed by Dr. Stampa and her husband Dr. Vicente Rodrigues, with the goal of processing the documentation and facilitating public engagement with the material, housed at the National Archives.

*The Brazilian National Archives. Source: Agência Brasil*

With more than 18,000,000 documents from the National Information Service (SNI), the Brazilian National Security Council (CSN), and General Investigation Commission (CGI) and other agencies of the dictatorship, the collection offers a look at the nerve center of the 21-year authoritarian regime. However, Dr. Stampa and Dr. Rodrigues both noted in our conversation, documents from the branches of the military themselves as well as provincial organs of the regime still remain unaccounted for. Moreover, even the documents themselves include distortions of their own. For this reason, Dr. Stampa and her colleagues interviewed victims of the regime and their relatives to help fill in the gaps in the archival record.

Both academic and popular discourse tends to construct the Brazilian military dictatorship as less violent and more restrained than the regimes in Argentina and Chile. Dr. Stampa traces this conception to the regime’s sophisticated organization and pervasive intelligence apparatus, in addition to the low number of casualties relative to Brazil’s neighbors in the Southern cone. On this latter point, she stressed that, “The people doing the calculations don’t include the more than 8000 indigenous victims of the regime, since their deaths occurred for ‘non-political’ reasons–they weren’t communists, they just happened to stand in the way of development.” Faced with a general lack of awareness of the human rights violations occurring under the dictatorship, the goals of the project go beyond simply storing, indexing, and digitizing material. The reference center provided documents to the National Truth Commission established in 2011, distributes a biennial prize for researchers making innovative uses of the archival material, and coordinates with a diverse network of 171 national and international partners to maximize the projects usefulness for transitional justice and engagement with Brazilian history.

Members of the National Truth Commission delivers its final report to President Dilma Rousseff in 2014 — *The National Truth Commission delivers its final report to President Dilma Rousseff in 2014. Source: Isaac Amorim*

Dr. Stampa’s work with the National Archives intersects with her work as a professor at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, a position that connects her with both other academics and students interested in engaging with the archival collection at the Memorias Reveladas reference center. In her own research, she examines the condition of workers under the dictatorship, a complex issue with ongoing resonance today as neoliberal reforms oriented at privatization have undermined protections dating back to the Vargas era, from 1930-1945. Despite efforts under Worker’s Party governments in past decades to establish welfare programs like Bolsa Familia, the position of workers in the service industry and the informal sector have grown especially precarious. The instability of their employment renders things that more well-off Brazilians might take for granted, like healthcare and housing, inaccessible. Dr. Stampa understands the contemporary circumstances as continuing the policies created during the dictatorship, whose understanding of development saw maximizing profits for corporations and the wealthy as the key to national prosperity.

My own research focuses on the transnational history of psychedelic plant science and its intersections with nationalist state-building projects in the late 20th Century, specifically in Brazil and Mexico. The Brazilian military dictatorship occurred in the context of a hemisphere-wide campaign of authoritarian repression and capitalist development projects spearheaded by the United States to prevent the spread of communism. Reactionary elements came to use the word “communism” as a catch-all term for seemingly deviant or non-conforming behavior more generally, particularly drug use. The CIA funded research into hallucinogens like lysergic acid amide, psilocybin, and atropine, all derived from plants found in Latin America, through the MKULTRA program, and numerous governments in the Western hemisphere used the substance as an aid to interrogation. While not knowing of any similar programs in Brazil, Dr. Stampa noted that the Brazilian government also invoked substance use by alleged subversives to discredit them, sometimes planting drugs in their homes or personal belongings to provide grounds for an arrest. The hypocrisy of their rhetoric on drugs manifests in the archival documentation collected by the reference center–one torturer with the federal police later admitted to conducting his interrogations, which sometimes involved violent sexual abuse, under the influence of cocaine.

The work of Memorias Reveladas today unfolds against the backdrop of a challenging political context. Since the 2015 impeachment of Dilma Rousseff (described by many of her supporters as a coup), subsequent administrations have reduced funding for the project. Moreover, current President Jair Bolsonaro, vehemently opposed to the creation of the National Truth Commission in 2011 and today vocally defends and praises the 1964-1985 dictatorship. With the national press focused on his disastrous handling of coronavirus, he overturned the 2005 decree authorizing the transfer of documents from ABIN to the National Archive on May 11, 2020. Buried in a superficially administrative revocation of more than 300 other decrees, Dr. Stampa and Dr. Rodrigues explained that the order had little impact on their work since ABIN already concluded the transfer of documents. However, they noted that, “If the agency uncovered any more documents that belong in the collection, we’d need another decree to receive them,” drastically limiting the project’s ability to receive and incorporate new documentary material. To learn more about the project, consider watching the recording of Dr. Stampa presentation at the LLILAS Benson Conference, which took place February 24-25, 2022.

Timothy Vilgiate grew up in Colorado and earned his BA and MA in History at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Currently in the 2nd Year of the History PhD program at UT Austin, he studies the intersections between hallucinogenic plant research, national development projects, and discourses about indigeneity in Brazil and Mexico. In his spare time, he enjoys astrology, hiking, and recording music.

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