John Gleb, Author at Not Even Past

Black Women’s Academic Work is Not for the Taking

By Alaina Bookman

Note: This article was originally published by Life & Letters, the official magazine of the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Letters and Sciences, in January 2023. Some additional illustrations have been added by Not Even Past. The article is reprinted with permission from Life & Letters.

When Christen Smith attended a conference in 2017, she was shocked to see her work presented – plagiarized – by another academic. It was a painful experience of appropriation, and Smith looked for a way to overcome the feelings of erasure.

At a National Women’s Studies Association Conference in 2018, Smith took a stand against her work being used without proper citation by wearing and selling t-shirts printed with the simple phrase “Cite Black Women.” Those t-shirts quickly transformed into a social movement to honor the work of Black women across academia.

“Citing Black women means actually restructuring the way you think. It’s not like this is being built out of thin air. It’s built out of a legacy of struggle and exploration based on Black feminist thought. Citation is not just about bibliography citation; it’s not just about listing; it’s not just about acknowledgments,” Smith said. “Citation is about honoring genealogical legacies and honoring people’s labor. And so when we say cite Black women, we’re talking about honoring Black women’s labor, honoring Black women’s work, honoring Black women’s time and energy.”

*A photographic portrait of Christen Smith. Image courtesy of Christen Smith.*

Growing up in Washington, D. C., Smith’s family reinforced the value of Black culture and history. When she began her undergraduate studies at Princeton University, her advisor encouraged her to take classes about Black female literature. That introduction to Black feminism ultimately changed the trajectory of Smith’s intellectual and professional career.

Today, as an associate professor of African and African Diaspora Studies and Anthropology and the director of the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at The University of Texas at Austin, Smith’s work is largely influenced by the work of Black feminist authors and her research in Brazil (she donates the proceeds of her t-shirt sales to Brazilian community schools). Her work explores Black communities’ experiences with gendered violence, particularly state-sanctioned violence in Latin America, and how society simultaneously consumes and exploits Black culture.

Smith’s work with Cite Black Women has expanded far beyond t-shirts. The project is now a campaign to push people to honor Black women’s intellectual production as they would any other group, to cite them as is expected in academic practice, to critically reflect on their everyday practices, and to question how people from varying academic disciplines can incorporate Black women into the core of their work.

“Cite Black Women really grew out of my experiences with patriarchal violence in the academy. We as Black women are vulnerable and our ideas are thought of as viable territories to be colonized,” Smith said.

From its start at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference in 2018, Cite Black Women has developed into a movement that has expanded to social media, a podcast, and a blog. The Cite Black Women podcast features reflections and conversations about acknowledging and centering Black women’s ideas and intellectual contributions inside and outside of academia through citation. The episodes, hosted by Smith, feature conversations with Black women — with backgrounds varying from academia and scholarship to health and wellness — who actively engage in the Cite Black Women community by recognizing and acknowledging the works of Black women transnationally.

“Citation is truly ancestral invocation and refusing to forget those who’ve come before us by saying their names,” Smith said. “I’m not fighting to be on someone’s bibliography. I’m fighting to have my intellectual self respected, and the intellectual work of my foremothers respected, the intellectual work of my sisters and friends respected.”

The impact of Smith’s work is seen across borders as she speaks with women artists, scholars, authors and activists from Latin America about their experiences with appropriation, racial discrimination, and gendered violence within their fields. For Smith, the collaboration of Black women to create the podcasts represents a collective decolonization of their labor.

“The spike in popularity of Cite Black Women really forced me to take pause and say ‘this is no longer about me and my experience,’” Smith said. “We knew it was more than just a slogan.”

*Christen Smith and Cory Pierce Emah pose for a photograph while wearing Cite Black Women T-shirts. Image courtesy of Christen Smith.*

Smith’s future projects include creating digital repositories through a collection of oral histories from Black woman anthropologists about their own experiences with appropriation and citation. Smith and her team are building data analyses of citational rates and theoretical analyses of what it means to think about citation as a political and disciplinary practice.

“I’ve gotten emails from all over the country from people who have overhauled their syllabuses, or their library research tools or their classes to follow what Cite Black Women has been doing,” Smith said. “We’re partnering with different groups across many disciplines, way beyond liberal arts, to be able to think through what it looks like to enact change around citational politics in concrete, measurable ways.”

By partnering with other professors, librarians, archivists and activists, the Cite Black Women movement has expanded its reach to motivate people across disciplines to honor the intellectual property of those who historically have been overlooked and whose work has gone uncited.

Bridging the Gap over Uncharted Waters: An Interview with Kyle Balzer

From the editors:

Through our “Uncharted Waters” article series, Not Even Past has been exploring the history of U. S. international relations, examining understudied historical episodes in an accessible, engaging manner. Uncharted Waters taps into the wealth of knowledge produced by scholars affiliated with the University of Texas at Austin’s Clements Center for National Security. But what do these scholars actually do? What kind of research do they conduct, and to what end?

To find out, we interviewed Kyle Balzer, a postdoctoral fellow at the Clements Center and an affiliate of the America in the World Consortium, a grouping of like-minded institutions to which Clements belongs. In response to our questions, Kyle reflects on what it means to write history with an eye towards influencing the course of American national security policy; he also discusses his own policy-relevant research project.

Not Even Past: Both the Clements Center at UT Austin and the America in the World Consortium as a whole dedicate themselves to “bridging the gap” between academic scholarship and public policy: they facilitate conversations between scholars and policy professionals, and they also encourage scholarly endeavors policy practitioners find useful. As a historian, how do you think about your relationship with contemporary policymakers? How do you and your colleagues build bridges between past and present?

Kyle Balzer: I think that it is essential for historians to explore issues and questions of interest to policymakers. As a master’s student, I read The Power of the Past: History and Statecraft—a collection of essays edited by [historians] Hal Brands and Jeremi Suri. Contributors like [historian and former National Security Council member] William Inboden, [political scientist and former NSC member] Peter Feaver, and H. W. Brands [historian and father of Hal Brands] make clear that policymakers’ understanding of history shapes their conception of the world and America’s role in it. To make sense of a dizzying array of daily challenges, policymakers employ historical analogies. Since they barely have time to read historical works, policymakers must rely on the intellectual capital they enter office with. After reading this volume, I concluded that historical scholarship could strengthen policymakers’ historical awareness before they enter government.

Building a strong historical sensibility among the next generation of practitioners will be critical. I think historians are great at diagnosis and asking the right questions, which is probably the most important part of policymaking and strategic analysis.

NEP: You recently chaired a panel of historians at AWC’s annual Young Scholars’ Conference. Officially, the conference theme was “What Now? Updating Great Power Competition After the Russian Invasion of Ukraine”; several speakers focused on contemporary U.S.-China rivalry, which also loomed large over the conference as a whole. It was therefore interesting to note that your panel covered far more than just Russia and China. Presenters focused, for example, on the history of industrial raw materials and on antecedents to Brexit.

All of this raises an interesting question: how big is the “gap” between academic interests and policy priorities? How do you reconcile the differences between them? Do those differences cause friction, or do they serve to broaden perspectives on both sides?

KB: I think the gap is certainly closing, or has already been closed, as [historian] Francis Gavin recently wrote in Texas National Security Review. There are communities popping up like the America in the World Consortium and Bridging the Gap that are championing the study of policy-relevant history. As a graduate teaching assistant, I sensed undergraduates’ excitement for issues of policy, strategy, statecraft, and diplomacy. There just needs to be a forum for students excited about diplomatic and military history to pursue their interests. Places like the Clements Center are filling that role for the next generation of practitioners and academics.

Regarding the conference, Ayumi [e. g., Ayumi Teraoka, Kyle’s colleague and an AWC postdoctoral fellow at the Clements Center] and I wanted to organize it around a big question, one that had many layers and components. As to the conference’s theme, we certainly can’t provide a definitive answer to the question of “What Now?” But scholars can help illuminate the questions that need to be examined. So, the historical competition over industrial raw materials—we read in newspapers every day about the struggle for access to rare earth minerals—will be a lasting policy issue but will have a degree of novelty to it. Something like Brexit, which will impact London’s capacity to implement “Global Britain,” is a pressing matter considering Britain’s historical position as a vital maritime ally of the United States. The United States and Britain have traditionally served as a maritime combination to check continental powers. The contest between maritime powers and land powers is enduring.

NEP: Your own research focuses on nuclear warfighting, a topic with obvious (and ominous) contemporary significance. Friction between the U.S. and China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea—all of which possess or are developing nuclear weapons—frequently serves to remind us that we still live in a nuclear-armed world. To what extent have current events influenced your project? Do you find yourself compelled to look for lessons for today, or do those lessons seem obvious to you when you conduct research or scan headlines?

KB: I do think there are lessons that can be drawn from our nuclear past. The historian Marc Trachtenberg wrote as early as 1990 that American society exhibited a kind of nuclear amnesia. Even then, with the Cold War just winding down, he already sensed that Americans’ image of Cold War nuclear dynamics was deeply flawed—reflecting the false assumptions that nuclear war was always unthinkable and nuclear weapons were never considered usable.

Thirty or so years later, I think Trachtenberg’s initial fears have only grown amongst historians working on the nuclear past. It’s essential that we draw the right lessons from Cold War nuclear history, as we have already seen President Biden rely on his understanding of the Cuban missile crisis to make sense of deterrence and nuclear signaling in regards to Russia’s brutal assault on Ukraine.

NEP: Recent U.S.-China rivalry (and, to a lesser extent, U.S.-Russia rivalry) has encouraged some scholars and policymakers to draw comparisons between current events and the Cold War past. As a historian of the Cold War, can you explain why the second half of the 20th century has become the focus of so much policy-relevant historical research? Is there value in the suggestion that we’re living through a second Cold War?

KB: The Cold War was probably America’s most intense experience with long-term competition, certainly its most recent, so I think that is why scholars frequently draw from that history. I think there are enduring features of great-power rivalry that transcend time, space, and specific actors. The Soviet-American strategic arms competition underscored a fundamental trait of long-term competition that shows up throughout history: competitors will abide by distinctive strategic logics that clash with each other in striking ways. The form in which their strategic approaches diverge reflect the unique national styles and historical legacies of the actors involved. American and Chinese strategic analysts will mirror-image each other at their own peril, as U. S. estimators did in assessing the Soviet strategic nuclear posture in the first half of the Cold War. It took some time for people like James Schlesinger [who served as CIA director under Richard Nixon and then as Secretary of Defense under both Nixon and Gerald Ford] to come along and improve our analytic methods, providing better strategic forecasts and actionable diagnoses of Soviet behavior.

*Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger (left) speaks with General George S. Brown, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in 1974. Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

A second fundamental trait of great-power competition—which the Cold War underscores—is the pressing need to understand your opponent’s behavioral dispositions so you can array your comparative strengths against the opponent’s distinctive vulnerabilities. An understanding of historical legacies and geography is crucial to assessing an adversary’s strategic outlook.

NEP: In another article recently published in the Texas National Security Review, Francis Gavin urged policy-oriented scholars to question long-held assumptions, citing as an example a case in which he had questioned some of his own. “Was I annoyed I had to update my beliefs, change my priors? You bet,” he wrote. “Was I smarter for it? Also, you bet. Good scholarship,” Gavin concluded, “can often be vexing.”

Have you ever been confronted by an unexpected discovery or a new interpretation that forced you to “update your priors”? How and why did this happen, and what insight did you gain as a result?

KB: In my own work on James Schlesinger and nuclear strategy, I did not anticipate arriving at my final conclusions at the outset of the dissertation process. As a masters student, I found the work of the theorists of the “nuclear revolution” convincing. Essentially, these theorists argue that the Cold War strategic nuclear balance was stalemated once the Soviets had built a survivable posture by the mid 1960s, and that the increasingly aggressive U. S. nuclear warfighting strategies in the latter half of the Cold War were not only wastefully expensive, but destabilizing and reckless. I initially agreed with their findings that building a strategic edge was futile, and escaping nuclear stalemate was a futile pursuit. However, once I dove into the archives and reviewed what American, Western European, and Soviet policymakers and strategic planners believed, I reassessed my initial assumptions.

President Gerald Ford (center) talks to James Schlesinger (third from right) during a meeting of the National Security Council in 1974. Seated next to Schlesinger, opposite Ford, is Deputy Secretary of Defense William P. Clements (second from right), the namesake of the Clements Center for National Security. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

I concluded that since deterrence lives in the minds of American adversaries (not to mention Western allies and partners when it comes to extending deterrence and maintaining alliance cohesion), nuclear warfighting strategies were essential to shoring up the overall American military posture and far-flung Western security architecture. American strategic logic, or American notions of strategic stability and fears of spiraling arms races, did not count for much if Washington was trying to shape the Soviet Union’s and Western Europe’s distinctive perceptions. Schlesinger’s big contribution to American strategic thought was the understanding that unique national cultures and organizational proclivities had upended the notion that the deterrence balance functioned as a self-regulating system. He understood that the Soviets were competing, they believed in this notion of strategic superiority, so the United States must compete efficiently and effectively in the strategic nuclear balance. In a period of relative decline like the 1970s, U. S. strategic planners had to prioritize the areas of the nuclear deterrence balance where they could turn momentary strengths into lasting advantages. In the second half of the Soviet-American strategic arms competition, American comparative advantages included the nascent precision-guidance revolution, the gradually emerging reconnaissance-strike complex, and the budding capacity to conduct limited nuclear operations. Schlesinger understood that nuclear-arms stability was just one goal among many—planners would have to make tradeoffs with the equally important goal of imposing disproportionate costs on the Kremlin. I argue that Schlesinger’s strategic sensibility, which emphasized locking in a nuclear edge over the Soviets, illuminates the way the Reagan administration achieved the negotiated surrender of the Soviet Union.

Kyle Balzer is an American in the World Consortium postdoctoral fellow at the Clements Center for National Security. He received his PhD from Ohio University (2022), studying diplomatic and military history.

Bloody History, Historical Recovery: Monica Muñoz Martinez and the Work of the Historian

By Imani Evans

From the Editors: It’s been a remarkable few years for Monica Muñoz Martinez, an award-winning author, teacher, and public historian based in the History department at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2021, Dr. Martinez’s groundbreaking work was recognized when she became a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. The Foundation praised her work “bringing to light long-obscured cases of racial violence along the Texas-Mexico border and documenting descendants’ efforts to commemorate and seek justice for the lives lost.” In 2023, Dr Martinez was one USA TODAY’s Women of the Year, “a recognition of women who have made a significant impact in their communities and across the country.” In addition to her many achievements, Dr Martinez is also an inspiring teacher, an extraordinarily generous colleagues and a key voice for Public History. To help celebrate these remarkable accolades, Not Even Past is delighted to republish this profile, which originally appeared in Life & Letters, the official magazine of the UT Austin’s College of Letters and Sciences, in January 2023. Some additional illustrations have been added.

An image near the beginning of Monica Martinez’s book, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas, tells a story of visual dehumanization. It’s a 1915 New York Evening Telegram cartoon by Nelson Green depicting a grinning Uncle Sam shoveling a pile of sombrero-wearing “Mexican revolutionists” into a trash receptacle labeled “International Rubbish Can.” It was a nativist take on a complex conflict, the Mexican Revolution, and one that found it convenient to blur distinctions between refugee and criminal, migrant and marauder.

*The 1915 cartoon by Nelson Green featured in Monica Martinez’s book. Source: Library of Congress.*

This treatment of Mexicans in the popular imagination was typical for the time. There was a voracious public appetite for scenes of border mayhem that was served by photographers-turned-entrepreneurs like Otis Aultman (1874–1943), who found they could make a killing taking such pictures for the booming postcard market. This phenomenon will already be familiar to those who are aware of the violent history of the Jim Crow South, with its some 4,000 lynchings of Black men and women between the end of Reconstruction and 1950.

The Injustice Never Leaves You, published in 2018 by Harvard University Press, documents the disturbing history of anti-Mexican violence during a period of rapid growth and economic transformation for the Lone Star State. Between 1910 and 1920, vigilantes and law enforcement, including the famed Texas Rangers, killed Mexican residents with impunity. The chapter “Idols,” which documents the racial postcard boom, tells us something important about this period: anti-Mexican violence was not just tolerated but glorified.

In reconstructing this brutal history, Martinez, an associate professor of history at the The University of Texas at Austin, relies upon a combination of traditional public and private archives, oral histories, and descendant testimonials. The full extent of the violence was known only to the relatives of the victims.

“It recovers a history of anti-Mexican violence at the hands of vigilantes, law enforcement, and also U.S. soldiers, in the early 20th century,” said Martinez about her work. “What it helps to document is a history that has really been obscured or misrepresented.”

Dr *Monica Muñoz Martinez. Photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.*

The 1918 case of Florencio Garcia was typical. When he didn’t come home from his cattle herding job one day, his father, Miguel, feared the worst. Over the ensuing weeks—weeks that saw Miguel and others literally scouring the brush in search of Florencio’s remains—his fears were confirmed. Florencio’s remains were found just outside of Brownsville. There were bullet holes in his jacket. Evidence from both eyewitnesses and a Mexican consulate investigation suggests that Florencio was arrested by Texas Rangers just before his disappearance. Three Rangers were arrested, but an all-Anglo grand jury ultimately refused to indict.

Families like the Garcias had a lot working against them. The power structure at all levels sought to minimize the violence. Perpetrators operating in remote rural areas could deal violence and death without scrutiny. Elites on both sides of the border were often more concerned with public perception than helping victims. The need to protect the farming economy gave an incentive to cover up the ugly truth. And the endemic racism of the time naturally made the pursuit of justice both slow-going and perilous.

The political rhetoric of the time, which constantly stoked fears of Mexican banditry and deviance, was eerily similar to today’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, said Martinez. This was one more barrier for victims and their families. “What you see from this period,” she said, “is that people who were victims of lynchings or police homicides or massacres, when those events were called into question, those victims were criminalized.”

The story that Martinez tells is also one of generational trauma. The memory of anti-Mexican violence lives on in communities down to the present.

“The title of the book comes from an interview with Norma Longoria Rodríguez, who spent years of her life, on weekends and in between working and raising children, trying to document the double murder of Jesus Bazán and Antonio Longoria, her great-grandfather and grandfather,” said Martinez. “And when I asked her why she had spent so much time trying to recover this history, she said, ‘It’s an injustice. It never leaves you. It’s inherited loss.’”

Mapping Violence

Martinez’s research on this period gave rise to the Mapping Violence Project, an ambitious work of historical recovery. Leading a research team of graduate and undergraduate students, Martinez began Mapping Violence in 2015 to document cases of racist violence from 1900 to 1930.

“Initially when I was doing the research for The Injustice Never Leaves You,” said Martinez, “I unfortunately came across too many cases of violence in the archive. I couldn’t write about them all. But realizing that those deaths, those cases, had not been reported elsewhere, I saw the need to start collecting those names and the sources that are available to start learning about those events.”

*A prototype version of the Mapping Violence map tool. Image courtesy of the Mapping Violence Project.*

Mapping Violence uses a mix of traditional historical research and digital humanities methods to generate its data. The research will be used to support a wide range of scholarly activity that will include books, peer-reviewed journals, and an interactive digital map where users can research and learn about individual cases. There is also a strong emphasis on public outreach, with plans for historical essays, digital tours, and teaching materials for educators.

Mapping Violence is also broader in scope than many other projects of its kind, said Martinez. Grounded in the assumption that early 20th century terror had an omnipresence in American life, the project brings in cases of racist violence across a range of classes of perpetrator and victim, and modes of violence.

“Some recovery projects will try, for example, to only cover lynchings,” said Martinez. “But if we’re really trying to think about how people lived in a climate of racial terror, we have to think all kinds of different violence.” Martinez notes that Texas Rangers also killed Black people, Indigenous people, and even those, such as Jewish Texans, who are often coded as white now but were not earlier in the nation’s history.

“There are patterns that only expose themselves if you think comprehensively and comparatively about these histories,” said Martinez.

Tragedy and Restoration at Home

Martinez is a native of Uvalde, Texas. Like many in her community, she was deeply affected by the tragic Robb Elementary School shooting of May 2022. In response, she is working with several other UT Austin faculty to develop Recover Uvalde, a grant proposal that, if funded, would address a number of pressing community needs, including mental health, public health, and restorative justice. Her vision for Uvalde shares certain qualities with her historical work: a focus on justice and restoration, an emphasis on community memory and well-being, and a desire to collaborate with others to make things happen.

A memorial to the victims of the Uvalde mass shooting, photographed during an official visit by Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas on June 6th, 2022. Source: Flickr/Department of Homeland Security/Benjamin Applebaum.

Just as Mexican communities of the past were not just passive victims but seized opportunities to try to change their condition, so too are Uvalde residents trying to set their community on a healing, self-determining course.

“There’s a need for thinking about Uvalde as potentially being the first restorative city in Texas,” said Martinez. “Uvalde has a long history of neglect by the state and federal government. There’s a conversation to be had about not just meeting immediate needs, but thinking about what restorative transformation means for a community that is still reeling from the aftermath of this massacre.”

IHS Workshop: “Whose Decolonization? The Collection of Andean Ancestors and the Silences of American History” by Christopher Heaney, Pennsylvania State University

A discussion on Dr. Christopher Heaney’s article “Skull Walls: The Peruvian Dead and the Remains of Entanglement,” American Historical Review, 2022.

Christopher Heaney’s “Skull Walls” offers a new history for the foundations of American anthropology and scientific racism, locating their paradigm of collecting Indigenous ancestors in early US encounters with Peruvian and Andean colonial and republican knowledge practices. These more entangled histories imply complex discussions of museums and their decolonization, as well as sensitivity on the part of scholars towards affected collectives. This discussion engages with the article’s ideas as well as the necessarily long period of research, reflection, submission, re-submission and revision that its publication entailed.

Christopher Heaney is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at The Pennsylvania State University. A historian of Latin America, with research interests in the history of science, indigeneity, museums, race, and deathways in the Andes, Americas, and the World, he is the author of Cradle of Gold: The Story of Hiram Bingham, a Real-Life Indiana Jones and the Search for Machu Picchu (2010), published in Peru as Las Tumbas de Machu Picchu: La historia de Hiram Bingham y la Busqueda de las últimas ciudades de los Incas (2012). He is currently at work on two monographs, both informed by research in museums and archives in Peru, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Spain. Empires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Origins of American Anthropology (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) is a history of the collection, circulation, study, and display of Inca mummies and ancient Peruvian skulls in the Americas, focusing on the 19th century but spanning the 16th century to the present. His third book, Grave Openings, will be a history of the colonial laws regulating grave-robbing in the Anglo-Iberian Atlantic World, and their assault upon Indigenous sovereignty. At Penn State, Dr. Heaney trains undergraduate and graduate students in Colonial and Modern Latin American history, the history of Peru and the Incas, the history of science, and the cultural history of United States-Latin American relations. His approach to teaching presumes a Latin America that has always been modern, and an Americas and Atlantic World shaped by movements, infrastructures, and knowledges of Native peoples. In 2012, he co-founded and was the Editor-in-Chief of The Appendix, a journal of narrative and experimental history. From 2016 to 2018 he was the Barra Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. His writing has been featured by The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times.

Dr. Heaney earned his PhD in Latin American History in 2016 at The University of Texas at Austin, where he worked with Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Seth Garfield on his dissertation “The Pre-Columbian Exchange: The Circulation of the Ancient Peruvian Dead in the Americas and Atlantic World.” Read more about his work, publications, and projects at: https://history.la.psu.edu/directory/christopher-heaney/.

Discussants

Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante
C.B. Smith, Sr. Centennial Chair in United States-Mexico Relations #3 Associate Professor
Director, Program in Native American and Indigenous Studies
Founding Member of the Comunidad de Historia Mapuche
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
The University of Texas at Austin
Profile | NAIS | Comunidad de Historia Mapuche

R. Alan Covey
Professor, Department of Anthropology
The University of Texas at Austin
Profile

Lina del Castillo
Associate Professor, Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin
Profile

Megan Raby
Associate Professor, Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin
Profile | Website

Bearing the Nation: Eugenics and Contentious Feminism in Post-Revolutionary Mexico

By Daniela Sánchez

We need new men, normal children, strong workers, and loyal soldiers . . . , and much of this can be achieved by cultivating Mexican women, showing them horizons that they have not contemplated.

-Dr. Carmen Alarcón, 1942[1]

In 1922, socialist feminists such as Elvia Carrillo Puerto and Esperanza Velázquez Bringas organized eugenic campaigns promoting anti-natalism in Yucatán, México. These campaigns encouraged poor women to stop reproducing in an effort to “make a selection of individuals for the good of the race.” [2] How can we explain the relationship between eugenics and political positions such as feminism and socialism in post-revolutionary Mexico? To modern eyes such connections seem strange or counterintuitive. While contemporary feminism demands access to abortion and contraceptives, it does so in the name autonomy and voluntary motherhood. To the contrary, eugenics proposes the regulation of reproductive functions by the State and for its benefit. The anti-natalist discourses enunciated by a variety of socialist feminists did not revolve around increasing individual rights for women but around their role in the reconstruction of the nation.

*A Mexican woman carries an anarcho-syndicalist flag in this 1928 photograph. Source: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.*

In the wake of the Mexican Revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century, several political imperatives—including anticlericalism, state-building, science, and unifying myths around race—created a fertile ground for eugenics to flourish in the ideals promoted by Mexican intellectual and political elites, as well as in the minds of socialists and feminists. Perhaps not surprisingly class played a significant role here. Among feminists, social class determined who participated in the implementation of eugenic programs. Upper middle-class people made the speeches and executed policy. As Buck (2001) states, lower-class women were the primary targets. For example, when Esperanza Velázquez Bringas addressed a meeting of the Rita Cetina Gutiérrez Feminist League (LRCG), she declared that the number of children poor women had should be restricted so, she claimed, “the product is good.”

Although its history remains underexplored in the public sphere, the relationship between eugenic and feminist discourses in Mexico during the early 20th century has been the subject of an important and growing body of international scholarship. Researchers such as Zoraya Melchor (2018) and Nancy Stepan (1991) have explored the relationship between gender, eugenics, public health, and state building in Mexico and Latin America. Cecilia Alfaro (2012) and Alexandra Stern (2002) delve into childcare and concerted motherhood as a means to cultivate a “fitter” population. Gabriela Cano (1990), Verónica Oikón (2017), and Beatriz Urías (2003) describe the contentious politics of abortion in Mexico in the 20s and 30s, while Sanchez-Rivera (2022) and Stern (2011) specifically explore sterilization as a product of eugenics. Sarah Buck’s (2001) article about the reactionary origins of Mother’s Day provided particularly useful examples of the eugenic actions I will describe below.

The Emergence of Eugenics in Mexico

Eugenics is a medical-hygienic set of beliefs and practices that reached its peak in the first half of the 20th century in the United States, Europe, and parts of Latin America, including Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. It calls for a “selective management of human reproduction” to “maintain or improve the genetic potential of the species.” Eugenics sought to prevent “abnormal” and “unfit” people from reproducing, an intervention it justified through pseudoscientific arguments related to disciplines such as demography, medicine, psychology, and sociology. Eugenicists considered conditions such as alcoholism, mental health issues, STIs, sexual “deviations,” and drug addictions to be hereditary. To stop these conditions from spreading, they promoted anti-natalism for those who had them. According to the doctors of the time, the inheritance of these traits was related to the perpetuation of “primitive” racial types and disadvantaged social classes.[3]

Mexican eugenics were echoed in the post-revolutionary ideals of state-building, unification, and fervent anticlericalism. After the Revolution, Mexican political and intellectual elites saw science as their closest ally in their quest to “modernize,” “civilize,” and reconstruct Mexico for the betterment of the nation and in efforts to keep up with the West.[4] In the post-revolutionary years, unifying racial myths were popularized to achieve national integration, such as José Vasconcelos’ celebration of mestizaje (indigenous and Spanish mixedness)and Manuel Gamio’s indigenism.[5] While Indigenous people were discursively recognized, they continued to be relegated and stigmatized, to the point of relating them, along with poverty, to social degeneration.

*Three Indigenous women, including a mother with an infant, appear in this 1911 photograph of a street in Mexico City. The Mexican Revolution had begun the previous year. Source: Library of Congress.*

Anticlericalism was also central to post-revolutionary ideals, which sought to use science on behalf of the State to intervene in the hitherto sacred laws of nature and finally be able to “improve the race.” While the Church urged people to accept their God-given social roles, socialism and feminism struggled to reject such resignation and claim new spaces that challenged traditional gender and class positions. Homogenizing eugenicist discourses also resonated with socialists for their efforts to eliminate social classes by purging the unfit population and keeping those individuals who could successfully integrate into a more egalitarian and “superior” society.

The Revolution also created conditions that focused the attention of political elites on public health. Armed conflict, epidemics, and increasing migration to the United States caused the national population to decrease by 5%; the infant mortality rate exceeded 20%. To deal with the above, Article 73 of Mexico’s 1917 constitution instituted a “health dictatorship.”[6] In 1929, the staff of the Child Hygiene Services founded the Mexican Society of Childcare, and two years later, several of its members founded the Mexican Society of Eugenics for the Improvement of Race(SEM). The society included doctors, psychologists, and lawyers. There were five women among its 20 founding members.[7]

Eugenic Policies Implemented

In 1928, Mexico made prenuptial exams mandatory by law, and marital licenses were prohibited for individuals with chronic and contagious diseases, with health conditions that could be genetically transmitted, or with “vices” that would supposedly endanger their offspring.[8] In the 1930s, different state health and education departments began to apply IQ tests and anthropometric studies to boys and girls, mostly among poor and indigenous people.[9] Under the slogan “Temperance: for the country and the race,” the Department of Public Health launched an anti-alcoholism campaign in 1936 and agreed to form a women’s league that would combat alcoholism at home and promote the prohibition and the regulation of alcohol. The campaign was also launched in schools, employing slogans such as “alcoholic parents give rise to degenerate children” and “out of every hundred crazy people, ninety are children of alcoholics.”[10]

In 1930, the Department of Public Health decreed that “every woman residing in Mexican territory had the duty to contribute, within the law and per the principles of eugenics, to the good and health of the country’s population.”[11] The national newspaper El Universal called for mothers to send portraits that evidenced the good condition of their children to put them in the “Gallery of Robust Children.”[12] In this sense, the bodies and practices of women became an arena for state intervention, especially concerning maternalistic eugenics linked to childcare and natalism. Mothers were in charge—within the domestic sphere—of helping to reform the population’s alleged bad habits and degenerate practices.

Esperanza Velázquez Bringas, a journalist, pedagogue, and feminist from Veracruz, envisioned different measures for different social classes. Her articles in El Universal were aimed at middle-class women and revolved around childcare, with advice on how to better care for children. On the other hand, the measures she proposed for lower-class women were related to the restriction of their reproduction. As Buck (2001) recounts, Velázquez organized birth control campaigns in Yucatán in collaboration with Felipe Carrillo Puerto and the Rita Cetina Gutiérrez Feminist League. In 1922, Carrillo Puerto authorized the distribution of Margaret Sanger’s pamphlet “Birth Regulation or the Compass of the Home: Safe and Scientific Means to Avoid Conception” in the Civil Registry and Yucatecan socialist newspapers. Sanger was a U. S. pioneer in the promotion of birth control and the founder of the first clinic for this purpose, which later became Planned Parenthood. Her pamphlet proposed that regulating births was the responsibility of the State but that it was also necessary to make knowledge available to prevent newborns from “degenerate” or sick parents.

Historian Sarah Buck has called attention to a 1922 cartoon (see below) that reveals exactly who the campaign and pamphlets targeted.[13] The cartoon shows a man handing out the Sanger pamphlet to a woman in rustic, rural, lower-class dwellings. She has many children, who are depicted as disheveled and bad-tempered. On the other hand, the man carries a vaginal douche. The image satirizes the gendered efforts to “save” the country through hygiene and birth control campaigns.

*“¡Se salvó la patria!”, a cartoon published in* Chispas *272 on March 12th, 1922.*

Despite the classist overtones of the campaigns, they incorporated a discourse of liberation from the burden that perpetual motherhood represented. They demanded that women “stop being incubators and be women who have a child whenever they want, but only when they have the economic conditions to support and educate their offspring.”[14] News of protests led by Yucatecan mothers who opposed the distribution of the pamphlet were published in the newspaper Excelsior. Later, on April 13th, 1922, the newspaper launched the proposal to consecrate May 10 as a day to honor mothers since, in Yucatan, “a suicidal and criminal campaign against motherhood has been started.”[15]

One year after the first Mother’s Day, anti-natalism resurfaced on the feminist agenda at the Pan-American Conference of Women, where Mireya Rosado and Elizabeth McManus from the United States suggested that the State carry out campaigns to convince proletarian families to limit their reproduction. The profile of the congress attendees reveals that they were mostly women from Mexico City or large cities, mostly professors and a significant minority of doctors. These were educated, urban, middle- or upper-middle-class women, and there was no representation of those whose birth rate they sought to control.

*Delegates attending the Pan-American Conference of Women gather for a tree-planting ceremony in Baltimore, Maryland. Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

A decade later, similar ideas took root in Veracruz, where the only eugenic sterilization law in Latin America was passed in December 1932.[16] But in practice, the law probably resulted in few or no surgeries. Contrary to the way events unfolded in countries such as the United States, Sweden, and Germany, it is unlikely that sterilizations were carried out continuously, mainly due to a lack of infrastructure and agreement about the specific places where they were allowed. [17]

Eugenics and Abortion

Abortion was a contentious issue between feminist and non-feminist eugenicists. For the latter, it was unacceptable because it contradicted “the fundamental function of the female, which is to procreate,” in addition to the fact that in abortion it is unknown if the “product” (e. g., the child) “was good or bad.”[18] For this reason, non-feminist eugenicists focused on sexual education and restrictive policies meant to “improve” national progeny. Some feminists, however, advocated for abortion on a socioeconomic basis.

In 1936, Dr. Rodríguez Cabo presented the paper “Abortion for social and economic reasons,” where she proposed the abolition of abortion as a crime if related to economic and social reasons and to make contraceptive methods available to poor mothers.[19] While non-feminist eugenicists solely centered on the procreating “function of the female,” Rodríguez Cabo and those who supported abortion for socioeconomic reasons challenged the natural connection between womanhood and motherhood. Even so, both stances denied women’s individual choice, favoring the control of their reproduction instead of autonomy. Rodríguez Cabo spoke in favor of birth control and abortion. Her feminism had a eugenic, maternalistic, and welfarist vision. However, she planted the seeds for actions in favor of the decriminalization of abortion. [20]

Contentious Feminism in Post-Revolutionary Mexico

The feminist eugenicist discourses around anti-natalism revolved around women’s role in rebuilding Mexico. Upper-class women played the part of a “social mother,” where they tried to help less favored women by imposing their worldview. These feminists showed sympathy for poor people but from an urban, middle-class mentality and morality. Through them, they sought to impose their conceptions of family planning and reproduction on women who did not necessarily share their ideals. Eugenicists thus “juxtaposed democratic demands for individual freedom with authoritarian prescriptions addressed to their recipients (poorer Mexican women), in an effort to make their ideals of development a reality.”[21]

Anti-natalist campaigns aimed to respond to severe cases of infant mortality and malnutrition by imposing on women not represented in the movement what others perceived as a desirable way of life. These policies centered on a state-building project rather than in the advancement of women rights. These efforts paved the way for the creation of institutions that did help working-class women, such as childcare in factories, public kitchens, contraception, and the legalization of divorce. However, “they subordinated the position of women to the domestic and social sphere [and fixed] a morality that circumscribed female sexuality to marriage and procreation.”[22]

*A contemporary photograph of the Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City. Source: Isaac Jero/Pexels.*

The relationship between eugenics and post-revolutionary feminism is complex and paradoxical. On the one hand, in addition to being profoundly discriminatory on a race and class basis, eugenics perpetuated the reduction of women’s social functions to their reproductive capabilities and the domestic sphere. On the other, it fostered dialogue on fundamental issues on the feminist agenda, such as abortion, contraceptive methods, and public policies regarding maternal health and childcare. It allowed, in a secondary and circumscribed way, the participation of professional women, mainly doctors and professors, in public discussions and government positions relevant to state building. Feminist and socialist militants participated in these discussions, concerned, if perhaps condescendingly and from their class position, about the precarious living conditions of women and proletarians and about influencing the spaces where the material and symbolic reconstruction of a troubled nation was being configured.

Recognizing this complicated history in the face of contentious reproductive rights reminds us to be vigilant of class consciousness and intersectionality when defending bodily autonomy and, as Gloria Steinem states, “question any tactics that fail to embody the ends we hope to achieve.”[23]

Daniela Sánchez is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at The University of Texas at Austin. She is a Fulbright-García Robles Scholar and a ConTex Doctoral Fellow. Her research interests lie at the intersection of gender, inequality, reproductive labor, and wealth. Before joining the department, Daniela was a consultant for UN Women-Mexico. She holds a BA in Sociology from UNAM, a BA in Communications from ITESM, and a MA in Gender Studies from El Colegio de Mexico.

Bibliography

Alfaro, Cecilia. “Puericultura, higiene y control natal. La visión de Esperanza Velázquez Bringas sobre el cuidado materno-infantil en México (1919-1922).” Historia Autónoma 1 (2012): 107-119.

Buck, Sarah. “El control de la natalidad y el día de la madre: Política feminista y reaccionaria en México, 1922-1923.” Signos históricos 5 (2001): 9-53.

Cano, Gabriela. “Una perspectiva del aborto en los años treinta: la propuesta marxista.” Debate Feminista 2 (1990): 362-372.

Melchor, Zoraya. “Eugenesia y salud pública en México y Jalisco posrevolucionarios.” Letras Históricas 18 (2018): 93-115.

Oikón, Verónica. “Un atisbo al pensamiento y acción feministas de la doctora Mathilde Rodríguez Cabo.” Relaciones Estudios de Historia y Sociedad 149 (2017): 101-135.

Sánchez Rivera, R. “From Preventive Eugenics to Slippery Eugenics: Population Control and Contemporary Sterilisations Targeted to Indigenous Peoples in Mexico.” Sociology of Health & Illness, accessed October 5, 2022.

Steinem, Gloria, “Margaret Sanger,” Time, April 13, 1998.

Stepan, Nancy, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America. New York: Cornell University Press, 1991.

Stern, Alexandra. “’The Hour of Eugenics’ in Veracruz, Mexico: Radical Politics, Public Health, and Latin America’s Only Sterilization Law.” Hispanic American Historical Review 91/3 (2011): 431-443.

–. “Madres conscientes y niños normales,” in Cházaro (ed.), Medicina, Ciencia y Sociedad en México, Siglo XIX (2002) 293-336.

–. “Mestizofilia, biotipología y eugenesia en el México posrevolucionario: Hacia una historia de la ciencia y el estado, 1920-1960.” Relaciones: Estudios de Historia y Sociedad 21/81 (2000): 59-91.

Urías, Beatriz. “Degeneracionismo e higiene mental en el México posrevolucionario (1920-1940).” Frenia: Revista de Historia de la Psiquiatría 4/2 (2004): 37-67.

–. “Eugenesia y aborto en México (1920-1940).” Debate Feminista 27 (2003): 305-323.

[1] Carmen Alarcón, “¿Qué ha hecho usted por la mujer?”, Asistencia: Órgano de la Secretaría de la Asistencia Pública, II/5 (1942), 13.

[2] Sarah Buck, “El control de la natalidad y el día de la madre: Política feminista y reaccionaria en México, 1922-1923,” Signos históricos 5 (2001), 11.

[3] Beatriz Urías, “Degeneracionismo e higiene mental en el México posrevolucionario (1920-1940),” Frenia: Revista de Historia de la Psiquiatría 4/2 (2004), 305, 307.

[4] R. Sánchez Rivera, “From Preventive Eugenics to Slippery Eugenics: Population Control and Contemporary Sterilisations Targeted to Indigenous Peoples in Mexico,” Sociology of Health & Illness, accessed October 5, 2022, 2.

[5] Urías, “Degeneracionismo e higiene mental,” 39.

[6] ibid., 58.

[7] Alexandra Stern, “Madres conscientes y niños normales,” in Cházaro (ed.), Medicina, Ciencia y Sociedad en México, Siglo XIX (2002), 302.

[8] Nancy Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (New York: Cornell University Press, 1991), 123.

[9] Robleda, “Biological characteristics of proletarian schoolchildren,” cited in Nancy Stern, “Mestizofilia, biotipología y eugenesia en el México posrevolucionario: Hacia una historia de la ciencia y el estado, 1920-1960,” Relaciones: Estudios de Historia y Sociedad 21/81 (2000), 86-87.

[10] Archivo General de la Nación, Secretary of Public Education, Memoirs, 1936, 35, 37.

[11] Zoraya Melchor, “Eugenesia y salud pública en México y Jalisco posrevolucionarios,” Letras Históricas 18 (2018), 100.

[12] “Gallery of robust children,” El Universal, January 26, 1919, front page, quoted in Cecilia Alfaro, “Puericultura, higiene y control natal. La visión de Esperanza Velázquez Bringas sobre el cuidado materno-infantil en México (1919-1922),” Historia Autónoma 1 (2012), 109.

[13] Buck, “El control de la natalidad,” 18.

[14] El Popular, March 3rd, 1911, 3; and March 10th, 1922; both cited in Buck, “El control de la natalidad,” 18.

[15] Excelsior, April 13th, 1922, 10, quoted in Buck, “El control de la natalidad,” 3-4.

[16] “Vera Cruz to Adopt Birth Control Today,” New York Times, November 1st, 1932, 5.

[17] Alexandra Stern, “’The Hour of Eugenics’ in Veracruz, Mexico: Radical Politics, Public Health, and Latin America’s Only Sterilization Law.” Hispanic American Historical Review 91/3 (2011), 432.

[18] Hemeroteca Nacional Digital de México, Escontria, “Eugenics and birth control,” Gaceta Médica de México, p. 417

[19] Gabriela Cano, “Una perspectiva del aborto en los años treinta: la propuesta marxista,” Debate Feminista 2 (1990), 372.

[20] Verónica Oikón, “Un atisbo al pensamiento y acción feministas de la doctora Mathilde Rodríguez Cabo,” Relaciones Estudios de Historia y Sociedad 149 (2017),131.

[21] Buck, “El control de la natalidad,” 13.

[22] Alfaro, “Puericultura, higiene y control natal,” 118.

[23] Gloria Steinem, “Margaret Sanger,” Time, April 13, 1998.

IHS Workshop: “Einstein in World War I: How He Loved the Wrong Woman, Suffered a Fugitive Soldier, and Helped an Assassin” by Alberto A. Martínez, University of Texas at Austin

Professor Martinez’s historical novel reveals true stories that are missing in Albert Einstein’s biographies. The present excerpt brings to life fifteen months during World War 1, when Einstein became so disabled by illness that he was living with his cousin Elsa, who wanted to marry him. Instead, Einstein became interested in her daughter. But suddenly, an escaped soldier crashed the love triangle: a former prisoner and fugitive from a German military base who arrived to hide in Elsa’s apartment.

Some novelists say that they use fiction to tell the truth. Yet biographers sometimes use or misuse fiction too, but without admitting it. They misstate incidents and disorganize chronologies in order to paint the imagined histories they wish to tell. The present historical novel challenges traditional historiography by rejecting biographers’ common practices of breaking chronology, feigning a person’s consistency, and of misconstruing the subject as the center of the action. Einstein himself complained that biographers missed or omitted aspects of his life: the inconsistent, the funny, the irrational, and even the insane.

Einstein commented that his enormous fame was undeserved and was the awful consequence of mob psychology. He complained that publications circulated scores of “brazen lies and utter fictions” about him. Most biographers portray him as a saint-like genius, a deeply religious pacifist who dared to speak truth to power. Since many biographers disbelieve some of Einstein’s notions of himself, Prof. Martinez asks: how does the history change if we believe Einstein’s claims and those of the persons around him? The novel portrays Einstein as he saw himself: not a genius, but a stubborn, fallible, and funny guy, who distrusted religion, technology, medical doctors, authorities, reporters, and historians, and who deeply believed that no person is ever really free.

Alberto A. Martinez is a Professor in our Department of History at The University of Texas at Austin, where he has worked since 2005. He is the author of seven books, with topics ranging from Einstein to history of mathematics, myths in science, political news, and the trials of the Inquisition against cosmologists. For example, he is the author of Kinematics: The Lost Origins of Einstein’s Relativity, published by Johns Hopkins University Press, and, the author of Science Secrets: The Truth about Darwin’s Finches, Einstein’s Wife, and Other Myths, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Respondents:

Thomas Levenson
Professor of Science Writing
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Thomas Palaima
Robert M. Armstrong Centennial Professor of Classics
The University of Texas at Austin

IHS Book Roundtable: Enlightenment and Geopolitics of Knowledge

A Roundtable Inspired by
The Invention of Humboldt: On the Geopolitics of Knowledge
(Routledge, December 2022)
Co-Edited by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (University of Texas at Austin) & Mark Thurner (University of London)

Simon Schaffer, Kapil Raj, Miruna Achim, and Jimena Canales will engage with the argument of The Invention of Humboldt: On the Geopolitics of Knowledge, an edited collection just published in December 2022. The Invention of Humboldt makes a number of arguments about the history of knowledge and science and modernity. It goes beyond Kapil Raj’s, Sebastian Conrad’s, and James Poskett’s models of a global co-creation of the Enlightenment and modern science in general.

Behind the invention of Humboldt lies a world of knowledge making that challenges our models of the origins of modern science. In the book, some essays offer a critique of Latour’s immutable mobiles by showing that mobiles are far from immutable. Objects, manuscripts, images are repurposed, misfiled, mis-attributed, as they move to emphasize both north Atlantic originality and empirical prowess. Some essays offer an archeology of how “local” ideas and collections are incorporated without citation while acknowledging “locals” and praising their support. Some simply explore the painstaking work that goes into the creation of ignorance as much as knowledge. Some essays show how local geopolitics explain why “locals” often promote their own silencing in north Atlantic print culture.

Cañizares-Esguerra’s explores Humboldt’s four volume history of geography as an artifice on transforming Columbus as a Humboldt avant la lettre. This exercise on self-fashioning and the history of global physics, however, drew extensively on massive archival and interpretative work by “others” whose work Humboldt renders totally invisible.

Dr. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is the Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History in the Department of History, University of Texas at Austin, and Director of the Institute for Historical Studies. He is the author of Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford University Press, 2006) amongst numerous other publications. He is editor of Entangled Empires: The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic, 1500-1830 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

Discussants:

Miruna Achim
Associate Professor of Humanities
Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Cuajimalpa (Mexico City)
https://cua-uam.academia.edu/mirunaachim

Jimena Canales
Faculty of the Graduate College
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
https://www.jimenacanales.org/

Kapil Raj
Directeur d’études (Research Professor)
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France
https://www.ehess.fr/fr/personne/kapil-raj

Simon Schaffer
Professor of History of Science
University of Cambridge
https://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/directory/schaffer

IHS Workshop: “‘Honest, Clean, Industrious’: Working Class Respectability,” by Stefanie Shackleton, University of Texas at Austin

Through a case study of a working-class woman in Victorian London, this paper explores ways that working-class Britons expressed ideas of respectability both within their own communities, and with those who sought to influence those communities. Rather than emulating the ideas of middle classes and elites, workers created their own parallel concepts.

Stefanie Shackleton is a cultural historian of class, labor, and gender in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the settler colonies of Australia in the long nineteenth century. She earned her Ph.D. in History at The University of Texas at Austin in 2022 and is currently a 2022-2023 Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Historical Studies, where she is expanding her work on the role of recreational learning in the shaping of working-class culture. Read more about her work at www.stefanieshackleton.com.

Respondents:

Carol MacKay
J. R. Millikan Centennial Professorship in English Literature
Distinguished Teaching Professor
Department of English
The University of Texas at Austin

Woodruff D. Smith
Professor of History Emeritus University of Massachusetts Boston, and
Senior Research Affiliate Alumnus, Institute for Historical Studies, University of Texas at Austin

IHS Workshop: “Contested Customs: Reinventing Indigenous Authority in Ubaque, New Kingdom of Granada,” by Santiago Muñoz Arbeláez, University of Texas at Austin

This paper explores the changing forms of Indigenous authority in Ubaque, a highland Andean valley of the New Kingdom of Granada (present-day Colombia), in the sixteenth century. According to Hispanic law, caciques were local nobilities who enjoyed a right to rule their communities keeping to their customs. As such, they were recognized as part of the imperial administrative organization; they were designated by the Crown to lead their communities, which would maintain their structure and goods for tribute. However, the imperial administration also expected to make Indigenous peoples into Catholic vassals of the monarchy, who lived pious lives. With this aim, clerics and civil authorities outlawed the practices, ceremonies, and symbolic languages that created bonds between caciques and their communities. This presented a challenge for caciques, who had to figure out how to play this dual, conflicted role maneuvering between Indigenous political cultures, Catholicism, and colonial demands. In this paper, I explore the ways in which two caciques of Ubaque grappled with this ambivalence, absorbing the contradictions of Hispanic colonialism. I argue that in sixteenth-century Ubaque, the Hispanic monarchy’s ambivalent approach to Indigenous customs and cultures led Indigenous authorities in a quandary over aligning with the traditions of their communities or the monarchy’s requirements. I place the emphasis in the structures of colonialism, rather than individual choices.

Dr. Santiago Muñoz Arbeláez (Ph.D., Latin American History, Yale University, 2018) is Assistant Professor of History at The University of Texas at Austin. His research and teaching focus on the interactions between Indigenous peoples and European empires in the early modern Atlantic world, combining material culture, agrarian history, and the history of books and maps. His book Costumbres en disputa. Los muiscas y el imperio español en Ubaque, siglo XVI (Bogotá: Ediciones Uniandes, 2015) reframed the history of the encomienda—one of the most contentious institutions of the Spanish empire—through an ethnographic look at everyday interactions between Muiscas and Europeans. His current book project, tentatively titled “Empire’s Fabric: The Making and Unmaking of New Granada,” examines the making of a centralized political entity (a “kingdom”) among the ethnically and geographically diverse landscapes of the northern Andes. He has published widely on the history of Colombia’s map, from the earliest Indigenous and European depictions of the New World to the early 20th Century. In 2015, he cofounded Neogranadina—a Colombian non-profit organization devoted to making digitization and digital tools available to local archives and community groups in Latin America. He also developed the bilingual digital history project Paisajes coloniales: redibujando los territorios andinos en el siglo XVII | Colonial Landscapes: Redrawing Andean Territories in the 17th Century, which explores the transformation of Indigenous homelands into colonial landscapes through the analysis of a 17th-century painting of the Bogota savannah. This project is part of a broader engagement with new pedagogical resources in Colombia and Latin America.

Respondents:

José Carlos de la Puente Luna
Professor of History & Director of Graduate Studies
Texas State University
Profile

Cristina Soriano
Associate Professor of History, Villanova University, and
(Future) Associate Professor of History, The University of Texas at Austin
Profile

NEP Author Spotlight – John Gleb

The success of Not Even Past is made possible by a remarkable group of faculty and graduate student writers. Not Even Past Author Spotlights are designed to celebrate our most prolific authors by bringing together all of their published content across the site together on a single page. The focus is especially on work published by UT graduate students. In this article, we highlight the many contributions made to the magazine made by John Gleb, who has served as Associate Editor and Communications Director of Not Even Past since August 2022.

John Gleb is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin and a Graduate Student Fellow at the Clements Center for National Security. John earned his BA at the University of California, Berkeley, from which he graduated with High Honors and Highest Distinction in 2017, and received an MA from UT Austin in 2020. John is fluent in French, and between 2017 and 2018, he worked as an assistant language instructor at the Lycée Carnot in Dijon, France. He has also appeared as a guest on The Slavic Connexion, a podcast affiliated with the UT Austin’s Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies.

John’s research examines on the development of the U. S. national security state, exploring the relationship between security and democracy. Focusing on the period between 1880 and 1920, when the United States began its rise to world power, his dissertation project examines early attempts to prepare democratic government for new global responsibilities. John argues that in the United States, where political power is both highly decentralized and accountable to the people, national security institutions have sought to compensate for their formal weakness by forging a broad policy consensus inside and outside government. He also calls attention to the danger inherent in consensus politics, which can engender hostility to social and political diversity.

“Although State Department officials have long believed that American diplomats should ‘look like America,’ they have also struggled to reconcile this conviction with the reality of American social and cultural diversity. For decades, Department officials posited the existence of a single American national identity manifested uniformly throughout the United States. Their insistence on securing authentic diplomatic representation for an imagined, supposedly homogeneous American people did nothing to promote diversity. Instead, it worked to exclude members of historically marginalized communities—including women, people of color, and LGBTQI+ Americans—from the Foreign Service.

“Exclusionary nationalism was certainly not the only barrier that confronted marginalized individuals who tried to find space for themselves inside the Department. Throughout the twentieth century, chauvinistic masculinism, white supremacy, and homophobia played key roles in shaping both the institutional culture of the American foreign policymaking establishment and the political culture of the United States more broadly. Nevertheless, an examination of the State Department’s unique history reveals an ironic truth: the conviction that American diplomats should ‘look like America,’ now the driving force behind diversification, once justified discrimination.”

Read the full article here.

What role has racism played in the history of U. S. national security? In this article, the first installment of Not Even Past‘s “Uncharted Waters” article series, John found an answer in the hateful career of Richmond P. Hobson, a virulent anti-Asian racist who became a prominent advocate of American naval expansion during the early 1900s. John’s article explains how two closely-related aspects of Hobson’s worldview—his faith in the benevolence of American power and his ugly, racist fear of the so-called “Yellow Peril”—combined to determine how he thought about national security. As John put it, Hobson’s racist fantasies mattered “both in spite and because of the way they warped the world around him”: “Not only did they condition his responses to political events both at home and abroad; in doing so, they also performed important intellectual work, reinforcing and eventually transforming the underpinnings of his outlook on foreign affairs.”

Read the full article here.

In July 2022, Not Even Past‘s partner podcast This Is Democracy recorded a landmark 200th episode. To mark the occasion, John sat down for a conversation with podcast hosts Jeremi Suri and his son Zachary. Suri is the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Global Leadership, History, and Public Policy at UT; 17-year-old Zachary is an award-winning poet who recently became Austin’s Youth poet Laureate. John’s article sheds light on how this intergenerational duo try to model on air their vision of democracy itself: “an endless, boundless conversation carried on outside the constricting halls of established institutions, always changing and never beholden to external authority.”

Read the full article here.

In this contribution of “Picturing My Family,” a digital archive curated by Not Even Past, John presented a photograph of his paternal grandfather, Borys Gleb, whose life was radically transformed by World War II. The photograph helps illuminate the war’s sweeping global context; the accompanying texts tells a moving family story.

View the photograph here.

On 24 February, 2022, Russia shocked the world by dramatically escalating its longstanding war with Ukraine. Since then, numerous experts—including students, faculty, and alumni of the University of Texas at Austin—have performed a vital public service by commenting directly on the Ukraine crisis, unpacking its complicated origins and exposing its devastating impact. Inspired by their work, and hoping to enrich it further, graduate students enrolled in UT’s History PhD program prepared the following list of recommended books by leading scholars, all of whom have analyzed historical events and processes relevant to the war in Ukraine. None of the books included in the list are about the war itself. Instead, they provide readers with background information that will help illuminate the war’s broader historical contexts.

John joined his fellow UT Austin graduate students in submitting a book recommendation. His essay reviews German Atrocities 1914: A History of Denial (2001) by John Horne and Alan Kramer.

Read John’s recommendation, alongside those of fellow graduate students, here.

“Lanctot’s book reminds us that the seemingly inevitable transformation of the United States into a great military power was not, in fact, inevitable at all. Between 1914 and 1917, American leaders could have steered their country down a very different path, committing themselves to forging world peace without fighting [Woodrow] Wilson’s ‘war to end all wars.’ Today, as shifts in the global balance of power make American military supremacy increasingly difficult to maintain, that’s something worth thinking about.”

Read the full review here.

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