ms55896, Author at Not Even Past

Time to Remember: Violence in Museums and Memory in Colombia, 2000-2014

During the summer of 2014 I had the chance to visit the Hall of Never Again (El Salón del Nunca Más) in the Department of Antioquia, in northwest Colombia. What started just as a tourist visit soon became a research interest. Growing up in a country overwhelmed by an ongoing armed conflict, the Hall made quite a huge impression on me due to the visual narrative it contained. Photographs of the faces of approximately180 victims of the violence are displayed on a wall to highlight a history in which the victim’s voices are privileged. It was quite different from the discourses shaped by state institutions such as the National Museum of Colombia that feature official histories about national identity and citizenship. These contrasting accounts of recent brutalities in Colombia made me want to explore the ways that individuals and communities remember their violent pasts. Grieving, as part of a remembrance process, has no handbook and no formulas; it is not a unilinear process. It is complex and ongoing. Grief and memories of violence are informed by history and culture and require to be understood as a social dynamic practice.

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

View of the wall with the pictures at the Hall of Nevermore. Courtesy of the author.

My interest in studying historical representations of violence was sparked when I realized that in Colombia, memories about the atrocities of the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s are quite diverse and do not appear in state institutions. I also came to understand that although grieving has a place for the reconstruction of facts and a search for “truth,” these are not the most important aspects for individuals and communities. After talking with community leaders and reading the scholarship on memory and museums, I can say that instead of truth quests people want to feel that their absent loved ones are not forgotten, that their lives meant something.

The Center for Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation, Colombia. Courtesy of the author.

Part of the attention that communities are devoting to the production of historical memories of violence is closely related to the diverse healing processes grounded in local cultures. The rural memory venues I am researching emphasize local traditions, beliefs, and patterns of behavior. Their displays illustrate how violence altered their way of life and how individuals and groups are coping with new realities, silences, and absences. Culture becomes a cohesive factor, the resource communities appeal to in order to heal and envision a future.

Therefore, my research has two major parts. First, it relies on ethnographic descriptions of the memory sites and the violent episodes they are representing. Second, these memories of violence help me analyze how contemporary citizenship is understood in Colombia, as rooted in these communities’ struggles with the violence past

And my research has a third component—public history. Writing and researching about memory venues in Colombia is my way of helping in the healing of local communities. My wish is that my work will help people feel that their histories are not forgotten and that they are an inspiration for generations to come.

I also want my writing about memory venues in Colombia to contribute to a new, more diverse, sense of national identity. I want the narratives portrayed in these venues to be incorporated into a national discourse. One of my hopes is that by reading about the testimonies and descriptions about recent Colombian violence in local memory projects, the general public can go beyond the gory details about violence and remember the victims as living family and community members, and as part of the Colombian community. My aspiration is that the diverse Colombian voices become part of the project of nation-state building. Everybody talks about the importance of respecting and understanding other ways of seeing the world, but when it comes down to concrete political actions, alterity is often ignored.

You may also like these articles by Jimena Perry on two museums that represent the Colombian violence since the 1960s: the Hall of Never Again, a community-led memory museum in Colombia, and The Center for Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation, Bogotá, Colombia

Review of The Anatomy of Fascism (2004), by Robert Paxton

When people think about fascism, two men come to mind: Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. However, as Robert Paxton shows in The Anatomy of Fascism, fascism was a practice that extended far beyond these two leaders. This is an original approach, as the majority of scholars focus on fascism as an ideology. Paxton instead examines fascism’s variations and focuses on fascists’ actions, and he compares them with other successful or unsuccessful versions of fascism. Paxton argues that fascism can be understood only through an examination at the local level. He builds his argument in stages by studying how these movements were created, how they were rooted in the political system, how they seized and exercised power, and if they were incorporated into the existing system.

Fascist propaganda in 1920s Italy. The text reads: "The misdeeds of Bolshesivm in 1919; the benefits of fascism in 1923." — Fascist propaganda in 1920s Italy. The text reads: “The misdeeds of Bolshesivm in 1919; the benefits of fascism in 1923.”
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Paxton argues that fascism is not like other political movements. It is not supported by any coherent philosophical system but is a product of mass politics invented only after the introduction of universal suffrage, the spread of nationalism, and the entry of socialist parties into coalition governments. Coalition politics disenchanted many workers and intellectuals, while many politicians did not have the skills mass politics required. After the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the foundation of an anti-leftist movement that could adopt elements of the Left’s mass organization was necessary. The aftermath of the First World War and, later on, the Great Depression were critical for fascism’s spread.

As it was not based on any political program, fascism used rituals and ceremonies to appeal to emotions. Paxton demonstrates that fascists were preoccupied with community decline and victimhood. They sought unity, purity, and nationalist mobilization and wanted unquestioned devotion to the community and its leader. Many fascists played an active role during the First World War, and they adored violence and sought to materialize the final victory of their chosen race or nation over what they saw as its inferior opponents.

Benito Mussolini in 1917, as a soldier in World War I. In 1914, Mussolini founded the Fasci d'Azione Rivoluzionaria that he led. Via Wikipedia — Benito Mussolini in 1917, as a soldier in World War I. In 1914, Mussolini founded the Fasci d’Azione Rivoluzionaria that he led.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Explaining the anatomy of fascism, Paxton deconstructs the myth that fascist movements seized power by force. It was liberals and conservatives, frightened not by fascism but by the Left, who accepted fascists into their coalition governments and gave them the opportunity to govern. In Italy, despite the fact that the pan-Italian fascist march into Rome turned into a fiasco, the conservatives gave Mussolini the chance to enter into a coalition government. What the Italian fascists had proved was that they could successfully crush the Left, as they did in North Italy, for the sake of the local great landowners and with the help of the local state apparatus. Similarly, other European fascists tried to convince conservatives and businessmen that only they could handle the communists and protect the social and economic order. German fascists were successful in that task and came to power in the early 1930s with the help of German conservatives and businessmen. In Romania, where the Left was not an actual threat, conservatives not only did not need fascists, but they crushed their three coups.

German fascists created a structure parallel to the state apparatus, while the Italians relied mostly on the existing bureaucracy. The problem that both faced was their radical party members, who did not want the reestablishment of the old authoritarian regimes but a “permanent revolution” that would succeed in maintaining radicalization in the fascist regimes. However, Mussolini never succeeded in gaining absolute control over his party; he chose normalization rather than radicalization. Hitler, on the other hand, personally controlled his subordinates and promoted competition between them as to who would prove the most radical. Fascist radicalization reached its ultimate stage in Germany, and the Holocaust is an example of what that radicalization meant. Nazi policy on “inferiors” evolved from discrimination to expulsion and to extermination. Hitler’s subordinates in eastern occupied territories competed with each other in implementing the Final Solution and came up with even more extreme actions than the Nazi leadership required, which led to a chaotic situation during wartime. Ironically, although the war was promoted as a means to benefit the nation, it was a war that destroyed the fascist regimes.

*Munich Marienplatz during the failed Beer Hall Putsch, 9 November 1923. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

Paxton offers a thorough guide to fascism. In addition to earlier fascism, he also discusses the presence of fascism inside and outside of post-war and post-1989 Europe and argues that in all democratic countries, some citizens flirt with the idea of denying established freedoms to fellow citizens and social groups. He also reviews the various, but mostly short-lived, fascist or proto-fascist movements and parties in the United States and what he considers the paradox of not having a fascist movement against the Civil Rights movements in the 1960s.

Paxton’s study is crucial now, in an era of major freedom setbacks, massive xenophobia, and openly neo-fascist movements and parties gaining momentum and entering European parliaments and governments. As Paxton says, “[f]ascists are close to power when conservatives begin to borrow their techniques, appeal to their ‘mobilizing passions,’ and try to co-opt the fascist following.” That’s important to remember.

Charalampos Minasidis is a European Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for War Studies at University College Dublin, working on “The Age of Civil Wars in Europe, c. 1914–1949” ERC Advanced Grant Project. His research explores Greek historical actors’ involvement in different European civil wars, the international influences on their thinking and actions, and their life trajectories from the early 20th century until the Greek Civil War. Charalampos completed his PhD in History at The University of Texas at Austin in 2023.

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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.

Painters, Pigments, and the Making of the Florentine Codex

When Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahagún arrived in New Spain (Mexico) in 1529, he embarked on an extraordinary project: the compilation of an encyclopedic compendium of the world of the Aztecs in the wake of the Spanish conquest a decade earlier.

Finally completed between 1576 and 1577 – essentially Sahagún’s life’s work – the result was the Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España (the General History of the Things of New Spain). Sometime between 1578 and 1584 the manuscript was taken to Spain and by 1588 Sahagún’s Historia found its way to Florence, part of the Medici family’s magnificent collections. How exactly the Historia came into Medici hands remains unclear but that is where it still resides today, in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, which explains how the Historia became more commonly known as the Florentine Codex.

Sahagún’s motivations for such an ambitious project can be found in his linked objectives to compose works in Náhuatl — the Aztecs’ main language — and to gain an understanding of the religious and cultural beliefs of the indigenous peoples in order to facilitate their meaningful conversion to Catholicism. Sahagún is often described as “the first anthropologist” or “ethnographer” because of the methods he employed in the collection and analysis of the information he gathered. His “ethnographic” practice included collaborations with indigenous elders as cultural informants from central Mexican towns. He also worked closely with Christianized young indigenous students and “grammarians” – indigenous scholars able to read and write in Latin, Spanish, and Náhuatl – and who Sahagún had taught in the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, a school established in 1536 specifically to educate the sons of indigenous elites in grammar, rhetoric, and theology.

Sahagún framed a series of questions for the indigenous elders on a wide range of topics that included their pre-conquest religion and rituals, natural history, education, and medicine, as well as on the Spanish conquest. The indigenous elders’ responses to Sahagún’s questions were recorded through their “paintings” — a pictographic and ideographic form of writing. The indigenous “grammarians” and scribes, in turn, translated their responses and transcribed them into Náhuatl written in the Latin alphabet. To complete the process, Sahagún provided abbreviated Spanish translations of the Náhuatl responses and indigenous artists or tlacuilo provided illustrations.

The Florentine Codex (folio 80) by Bernardino de Sahagún (1499-1590) . Via Wikimedia Commons.

This process is embodied in the characteristics and physical appearance of the Florentine Codex. Composed of twelve books, a total of some 2,400 pages of text accompanied by a staggering 2,468 ink and color illustrations, and organized by individual topic (e.g. “Book I. The Gods,” “Book VII. The Sun, Moon, and Stars and the Binding of the Years”), the result is a bilingual codex with its pages divided into two parallel columns of Náhuatl and Spanish text.

Although scholars have long acknowledged the inestimable value of the textual descriptions contained within the Florentine Codex, less attention has been paid to the illustrations in their own right. Fortunately, that is changing thanks to Diana Magaloni Kerpel’s innovative research and her insistence that we need to think about the Florentine Codex “as a work of art.” Her study illuminates the creative processes at work in the Florentine Codex and the indigenous artists behind them.

Sahagún identified by name the four indigenous “grammarians” and three scribes with whom he worked, but his illustrators remain anonymous. With meticulous attention to different artist’s techniques such as treatment of line, profiles and proportions of human figures, and how clothing was painted, Magaloni Kerpel identifies the hands of twenty-two painters at work in the Florentine Codex. Included in this number are four “well-trained” master painters. Based on their individual signature styles, Magaloni Kerpel names them Master of Both Traditions, Master of the Three-Quarter Profiles, Master of Long Noses, and Master of Complex Skin Coloring. In the case of the Master of Both Traditions, for example, Magaloni Kerpel argues that his figures show his mastery of both pre-Hispanic painting traditions and Renaissance techniques. But, even more tellingly, she observes how he used the two traditions to denote time and space – “indigenous past or the colonial present.” She also speculates that the painters may have represented themselves in the depictions of artists that appear in the Florentine Codex in Book XI, giving us an even more intimate sense of their individuality. Equally significant is her analysis (in collaboration with conservators) of the artists’ use of what she terms “symbolic colorants.” Colorants were made from both organic (plants, flowers, insects) and mineral pigments and both could be used to make similar colors. What mattered to the artists, however, were not just the colors but also their sources – from above the earth or below it –which endowed them with particular symbolic power. As Magaloni Kerpel argues, the images in the Florentine Codex should not be considered “as mere illustrations to the texts, but as self-contained visual narratives that sometimes revealed and sometimes concealed a world of their own.”

With a nuanced appreciation for the actual fabrication and materiality of the Florentine Codex, Magaloni Kerpel’s research is an outstanding example of scholars’ new approaches to the Florentine Codex. Paying attention to the illustrations as works of art and thinking about the codex as an artifact and not just as a text to be mined for information, helps us to understand in provocatively fresh ways not only its creation but also the cultural exchanges and collaborations unleashed by the Spanish conquest and its aftermath both locally and globally.

Works referred to and additional sources:

Diana Magaloni Kerpel, “Painters of the New World: The Process of Making the Florentine Codex” in Colors Between Two Worlds: The Florentine Codex of Bernardino de Sahagún, edited by Gerhard Wolf and Joseph Connors (Florence, 2011)

A video of a lecture by Diana Magaloni Kerpel

A digital version of the Florentine Codex can be accessed here and here.

An English translation of the Florentine Codex is available as Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, trans. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, 12 volumes (Salt Lake City, 2012).

On Sahagún as an ethnographer, see Miguel León-Portilla, Bernardino de Sahagún: The First Anthropologist (Norman, OK, 2002).

Killing a King, by Dan Ephron (2015)

By Emily Whalen

Yigal Amir has never denied assassinating Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Days after he publicly shot Rabin at close range after a peace rally, the young extremist calmly recreated the event for police officers at the crime scene in Tel-Aviv. When police interrogating him informed Amir that Rabin had died from his wounds, Amir was “ecstatic,” asking for liquor to toast his accomplishment. Yet, to this day, conspiracy theories about Rabin’s death abound, with many on the Israeli extreme right suggesting that Shin Bet (or Shabak, the Israeli intelligence agency) orchestrated the killing to drum up sympathy for the Palestinian peace process. With an eye to understanding this surreal state of affairs, Dan Ephron interweaves two narratives: the story of Yitzhak Rabin’s efforts toward building a sustainable peace with the Palestinians and the story of Yigal Amir, whose interpretation of Jewish law and radical conservatism led him to plan and carry out the killing of a prime minister.

After Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat signed the first Oslo Accords in 1993, the divisions already splintering Israeli society cleaved even deeper, pitting liberal, secular Israelis against a conservative, religious right. By 1994, when Rabin and Arafat signed the Cairo Agreement, those divisions had widened into chasms. The Cairo Agreement initiated the second step in the Oslo Process, limited Israeli withdrawal from the Palestinian territories. Withdrawal further fueled the already blazing anti-Rabin rhetoric in Israel. Ephron writes in lucid detail about anti-Rabin protesters “burning pictures of the prime minister, chanting ‘Death to Rabin’…’Rabin the Nazi’ and ‘In blood and fire, we’re drive Rabin out.’” The right wing of the Israeli political class, Ephron insinuates, took advantage of the charged rhetorical atmosphere to score electoral points. As one particular protest roiled in the streets of Tel Aviv, Benjamin Netanyahu and other Likud leaders silently watched from a hotel balcony—perhaps not actively complicit, but lending an air of legitimacy to violent, angry rhetoric.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, left, shaking hands with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, with U.S. President Bill Clinton in the center at the Oslo Accords signing ceremony, Sept. 13, 1993. (Vince Musi / The White House)

Yigal Amir, a charismatic young activist from a Yemeni Jewish family, believed the Cairo Agreement amounted to treason. His roots in the extreme religious right and connections to the settler community had already placed Amir on Shabak watch lists by 1995, though the agency never scrutinized him individually. Shabak, designed to respond to threats from Palestinian terrorist groups, shifted clumsily to meet the rising menace of Jewish extremism in the years between Oslo I and Rabin’s assassination. Ephron’s book provides sensitive insights into the inner workings of the agency, exploring how bureaucratic inertia supported a series of questionable policy choices. For example, in the aftermath of the assassination, it came to light that a well-known right wing agitator close to Amir, Avishai Raviv, had in fact been an undercover Shabak agent. Questions regarding Raviv’s foreknowledge—and possible encouragement—of the assassination plot, plagued the agency for years (Raviv successfully defended himself against legal charges in 2000 for failing to prevent the assassination – he claimed that he had been operating under Shabak orders and that events spun out of control).

Binyamin Netanyahu speaks at the infamous “Rabin the Traitor” rally in Jerusalem, October 1995

Controversially, Amir justified his desire to assassinate Rabin within the parameters of Jewish law. Ephron explains din rodef, the law of the pursuer, a Talmudic principle permitting extrajudicial killing under extremely specific circumstances. Under din rodef, a Jew may kill a rodef—that is, someone who pursues another with an intent to kill—if absolutely no other means will stop the would-be murderer. Amir openly argued that Rabin’s concessions to Arafat and the Palestinians led to Jewish deaths, thus making Rabin a rodef. Most rabbis agree that din rodef doesn’t apply to public figures, but in Ephron’s interviews, Amir’s brother Hagai suggested the assassin “received at least an implicit confirmation [from right-wing rabbis] that din rodef applied to Rabin.” Confusion over din rodef, Ephron claims, and the rampant conspiracy theories surrounding Rabin’s death have allowed the religious extreme right in recent years to both justify Amir’s act and absolve the assassin of blame.

The latter part of the book develops a third narrative: Ephron’s own efforts to debunk conspiracy theories about Rabin’s murder. Ephron’s certainty about Amir’s sole responsibility wavers in the final chapters as the author attempts to identify a mysterious hole in the shirt Rabin wore the day of the assassination. The hole, troublingly, does not align with bullet wounds described in Rabin’s autopsy—not even Dalia Rabin, the prime minister’s daughter, can say with certainty if Amir was the only shooter. Ephron’s willingness to entertain all possibilities makes for a gripping conclusion.

Since the Rabin assassination, Israeli social and political culture has undergone a fundamental transformation—and a profound polarization. Violent rhetoric, it appears, does have consequences. After Amir murdered Rabin, the seemingly inexorable—although shaky—Palestinian peace process ceased, ushering in the Benjamin Netanyahu era of extreme-right politics. Killing A King offers a provocative perspective on how quickly the world around us can become unrecognizable. Dalia Rabin admits that now, “I don’t feel I’m a part of what most people in this country are willing to do.” Even the recent past, Ephron suggests, is another country.

You may also like Itay Eisinger’s NEP article published on the 20th anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.

A Gold Mine in a Silver Edition: Jim Hogg County, March 9, 1939

Browsing through the online finding aids for the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, I was stunned to discover that they housed an original copy of a 1939 newspaper from Hebbronville, my hometown in South Texas. The curiosity quickly got the better of me and I was at the repository the next day calling up this item. Two thoughts running ran through my mind: “How funny that it ended up here” and “What is so special about March 9, 1939?”

The archivist brought me a larger than usual box that held newspapers from towns all across Texas beginning with the letter “H.” The archivist looked at the box, said “Good luck,” and left me to my searching. To my delight and relief, the newspaper I was looking for sat at the top of the pile, bound in its own cover.

I soon found what made this issue of the newspaper so unique. The March 9, 1939 issue of the Jim Hogg County Enterprise was the “Silver Anniversary Edition,” commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the county. The anniversary issue is compiled of articles ranging from brief histories of the local churches and schools to the railroad’s impact on the town, but section two had something that caught my attention.

Image of the front page of Jim Hogg County Enterprise (Hebbronville, TX), March 9, 1939. — Jim Hogg County Enterprise (Hebbronville, TX), March 9, 1939.

During Jim Hogg County’s now more than 100-year existence, the ranching industry has played a prominent role, economically and socially. Featured on the front page of the second section of the Enterprise was a detailed article about the industry’s place within the area. The headlines are stacked upon each other, perhaps to grab the reader’s attention and preview the two main articles on the page. The only other element on the page is a photograph of a bull surrounded by mesquite trees and chomping on some cactus. The front page of this newspaper boasted that it was the largest edition to ever be printed in the county and the ranching industry’s highlight within it underlines its importance in the community.

The industry had notable involvement within the economic structure of the county, as well as Hebbronville, the county seat. This is evident by the headline “Once Largest Cattle-Shipping Point In World; Still Flourishes.” Though some historians argue the cattle boom ended by 1900, almost forty years later, it was still a viable way of life in Jim Hogg County.

Welcome sign for Hebbronville, 'The Vaquero Capitol of Texas and the USA.' Photo from 2011. Via Wikipedia. — Welcome sign for Hebbronville, ‘The Vaquero Capitol of Texas and the USA.’ Photo from 2011. Via Wikipedia.

It is interesting that the sub-articles in the section are solely about ranches owned and operated by Anglos, not the Hispanic workforce, which made up the majority of the population of Jim Hogg County. The Yaeger and Jones Ranches are specifically mentioned, as are their owners H.C. Yaeger and W.W. Jones. Both men acquired land to build their ranches from previous Mexican land grants in the area. These men, one could say, were the examples to men like Hellen who later followed in their footsteps, moving south and establishing ranches for the profitable business of raising cattle. The only Hispanic mentioned in these articles is Don Hipolito Garcia, the original inhabitant of this area.

These men profited from the cattle industry and breeds of cattle that descended from the longhorn. The article recounts the rise of longhorn drives to Kansas and the shift away from sheep raising, giving a sense of the economy before the introduction of the now famous cattle drives. Though almost synonymous with South Texas, the longhorn was not always the most prominent livestock of the area.

The only photograph featured on the page tells us a lot about the environment of area. It is mostly arid. Cactus and mesquite are common due to their ability to withstand little, if any, rainfall. The bull, marked by its horns, is another common sight. Obviously, the cattle industry relied on the animal pictured and it is not surprising that they used this image.

Unfortunately, the Briscoe does not keep record of who donates original newspapers, as they do with more formal collections. Unlike a collection, where it can be further analyzed by researching the donor, I may never find out why a newspaper from a small South Texas town ended up here. It would be interesting to know who thought this newspaper had value to archive it. Being a historian in a digital age definitely has its benefits. Though the newspaper is not digitized, the internet still led me to a great archival find.

Source: Jim Hogg County Enterprise (Hebbronville, TX), March 9, 1939, Newspaper Collection, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin, Box H.

More digitized Texas newspapers can be found in The Portal to Texas History.

“Mapping Texts,” a collaboration between the University of North Texas and Stanford University, offers tools for advanced searching and analyzing newspapers in the collection.

For more on the ranching industry in South Texas a few notable books are worth mentioning:

Armando Alonzo, Tejano Legacy: Rancheros and Settlers in South Texas 1734-1900 (University of New Mexico Press, 1998)

David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (University of Texas Press, 1987)

Andrés Tijerina, Tejano Empire: Life on the South Texas Ranchos (Texas A & M University Press, 1998)

My Life on the Road, by Gloria Steinem (2015)

By Megan Seaholm

Gloria Steinem’s eighth book is part feminist memoir, part autobiography of personal growth and change, part invocation to the adventure of living in the present, and part story book. Her style is relaxed and conversational but never random or sloppy. She presents four purposes of the book in the Introduction, but I found two recurring themes: the joy of serendipitous discovery while traveling to new places and the value of listening, the power of groups talking and listening, that she learned from the talking circles while in India.

The life on-the-road theme begins as she recalls that until she was ten years old her family spent most of each year travelling around the country as her father bought and sold antiques. Though she longed for a “real home” when she was a child, she is grateful for her father’s “faith in a friendly universe” and credits him with her tolerance for a life of relative insecurity. She writes with sadness about her lonely mother who worked as a journalist before she married. This migrant life ended when her parents divorced and she lived in Toledo with her clinically depressed mother. She went to Smith College on a scholarship—Government major, Phi Beta Kappa—and, then, spent two years in India on a fellowship. She studied at the University of Delhi and spent several months with a Gandhi-inspired group who walked from village to village after terrifying caste riots in east India. The walking group invited villagers to meet with them, and with each other, to share their grievances and to provide reassurance after the riots. She credits this experience with teaching her the value of listening and the amazing things that happen when people share with each other in groups.

Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes, circa 1970. Photograph by Dan Wynn. — Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes, circa 1972. Photograph by Dan Wynn.

She returned to the U.S. to work as a free-lance journalist and an avid participant in political campaigns, the first being the 1952 Adlai Stevenson campaign for president. She became aware of the women’s rights-women’s liberation movement in the 1960s. In 1971, after New York Magazine published her article “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation,” she began to receive invitations to speak about feminism. Terrified of public speaking, she enlisted the help of her friend Dorothy Pitman. As a bi-racial team, they spoke at community centers, in union halls, and school gyms. As Steinem gained skill and confidence, this duo was soon traveling to college campuses, to meetings of the National Welfare Rights Organization, to speak with United Farm Workers chapters, lesbian groups, and antiwar activists. Steinem saw her job as helping the audiences become “one big talking circle” — there was always discussion after she and Pitman made their presentations. Later, she would work and travel with the inimitable Florynce (Flo) Kennedy.

Most of the stories that Steinem shares are stories from the road as she became “a public speaker and a gatherer of groups” and one of the best-known feminists in the U.S. She refers to these campus speaking engagements as the “largest slice of my traveling pie.” One of her best stories is about the often-tense 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston. This account features Bella Abzug, co-founder of Women Strike for Peace in 1961, three-term Congresswoman from New York, and tireless activist. Abzug, Congresswomen Shirley Chisholm and Patsy Mink asked Steinem to help them organize the National Women’s Political Caucus, which they did in 1971 with a diverse group of notable women. There are other stories from the feminist trenches, but this book is only part feminist memoir. There is a curious and very fun chapter titled “Surrealism in Everyday Life,” and there is a chapter about her time in “Indian Country” by which she means her relationships with Native Americans, including Wilma Mankiller, deputy chief of the Cherokee Nation. Speaking of “Indian Country,” I was troubled when she confidently asserted the popular, but erroneous, notion that that the U.S. Constitution was modeled on the Iroquois Confederacy.

Steinem shares these stories in the most-unassuming way as if you were a long-time friends visiting over a cup of coffee after having not seen each other for a while. She talks (writes) about covering Eugene McCarthy after Robert Kennedy’s assassination in 1968 and about the Clinton-Obama contest in 2008. My favorite chapter, “Why I Don’t Drive,” is an account of conversations she has had with taxi drivers. Oh, the stories!

Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes in 2014.

But, of the lessons that she has learned and that she shares, my favorite is this: “One of the simplest paths to deep change is for the less powerful to speak as much as they listen, and for the more powerful to listen as much as they speak.”

Sowing the Seeds of Communism: Corn Wars in the USA

By Josephine Hill

Today we often associate hybrid or genetically modified corn with agricultural monopolies, big business, and capitalism, in the early Cold War some feared that the rise of hybrid corn would sow the seeds of Communism in the United States. Daniel Robert Fitzpatrick’s editorial cartoon, “Alien Corn,” published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on April 28, 1948, shows Henry A. Wallace grinning at a corn plant, whose leaves bear hammers and sickles and whose tassel sports a Soviet star –- the fruits of Communism.

Alien Corn (04-28-1948), by Daniel Robert Fitzpatrick. The cartoon is held at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editorial Cartoon Collection. Courtesy of The State Historical Society of Missouri.

Wallace was the founder of the Hi-Bred Corn Company (today owned by the Dupont Corporation). He was also vice president to Franklin Roosevelt, Secretary of Agriculture (1933-1940), Secretary of Commerce (1945-1946), and 1948 presidential nominee of the Progressive Party. Appearing during the 1948 election season, the cartoon most directly reflects contemporary suspicions about Wallace’s possible Communist sympathies, which were fueled by his endorsement from the U.S. Communist Party, his progressive platform that included universal health care, voting rights for African-Americans, and an end to segregation, and his interest in Eastern religions. Here, the fear of the “alien” seems to have stronger political than environmental implications, yet this title presciently describes the many ways in which these two concerns would become more and more closely intertwined.

Daniel Robert Fitzpatrick at work. Courtesy of The State Historical Society of Missouri, Photograph Collection.

The cartoon also seems to reference concerns about the role that Wallace originally envisioned for hybrid seeds in the American agricultural landscape. During his early experiments in western Iowa in the late 1920s, Wallace invented and distributed hybrid corn seeds to farmers across sixteen counties. He imagined that the seeds could provide a means of developing a non-profit, quasi-cooperative agricultural model, that would allow many farmers to contribute a consistent product to a common pool, keeping fifty percent for themselves and donating the other half towards research that would in theory improve the quality of their future crops. Wallace’s model, therefore, for some evoked the ideological spirit of Soviet collectivism. However, in “Alien Corn,” Wallace’s hammer and sickle-laden corn stalk is ironically enclosed by a cement wall and a spiked iron fence, perhaps intended to portray Wallace as a personal profit-seeking hypocrite.

Henry Agard Wallace, 1888–1965. Via Wikipedia

The fence also points towards Pioneer Hi-Bred’s rising profitably and increasing corporatization. In 1949, a year later, it would sell one million units. Much of this expansion had occurred due to the environmental and economic events of the twenty years since Wallace began distribution. During the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, the Department of Agriculture bought and regulated the drought-resistant hybrid seeds in order to stabilize food prices, a program that proved popular and contributed to Wallace’s rising political success. This remarkably rapid growth, combined with the marriage of hybrid seed companies with the chemical companies Dupont and Monsanto (who would provide the pesticides and fertilizers compatible with hybrid seeds), accounts for the major ideological shift in political conceptions of the role of hybrid seeds between the early 1920s and mid-century. Originally envisioned as lynchpins in a cooperative agricultural model, under control of the government, the seeds became essential to the success of a regulated capitalism that would position itself as an antidote to Soviet Communism.

The cartoon also foreshadows an important political moment that occurred about ten years later, as tensions with the Soviet Union escalated. Wallace’s head salesman, Roswell Garst, hosted Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s 1959 visit to Iowa. There, the two powers exchanged ideas for agricultural innovations and the Soviet Union acquired U.S. patented seeds to be planted on Russian soil. Described in a newsreel as one of the “most folksy and jovial days” of an otherwise fraught diplomatic visit, Garst’s and Hi-Bred’s participation signaled the importance of hybrid seeds as geopolitical instruments, through which the United States could assert its technological and ideological power.

“Alien Corn” highlights the ambiguous position of United States agricultural products as both public and private resources in a moment that in many ways represented a turning point in American agriculture. Today, while agricultural industries are intensely corporatized, they also receive state subsidies and the protection of the FBI, which is becoming increasingly invested in patented seeds as geopolitical bargaining chips to be used in diplomatic relations with national powers such as India and China. At the same time, there is mounting public concern over the environmental and health effects of the widespread cultivation and consumption hybrid seeds. The cartoon then prompts us to think about how the environmental conditions inherent to hybrid seeds –including their ability to thrive as monocultures and their dependence on chemical pesticides— affect their local and transnational ideological implications.

“What is African Literature?”: Uncovering One Woman’s Answers

By Mackenzie Finley

In 1963, Dennis Duerden of the Transcription Centre in London and Henry Doré of the National Educational Television Centre in New York collaborated with prominent South African writer Lewis Nkosi to develop a television series featuring leading African artists and writers of late-colonial and early-independent Africa. As part of the project, Duerden corresponded with Kenyan writer, Grace Ogot—the only woman writer whose life and work the series intended to explore. The documents exchanged between Duerden and Ogot (currently housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin) offer glimpses into the intent of the television project, the relationship between Anglo-American and African personalities in the early 1960s, and the intellectual lives of Duerden and Ogot during the period of their exchange.

Painting of Grace Ogot, by Joseph Nyagah. Courtesy of the Daily Nation, Kenya.

On June 22, 1963, Duerden initiated a series of letters with Ogot regarding the proposed television series. Duerden’s first letter was accompanied by a questionnaire, which Ogot was requested to complete. The questionnaire, developed by Nkosi and Duerden, was intended to gather biographical information about the writer before Duerden and his team began production on the film series. Ogot returned the questionnaire with reticent answers.

Lewis Nkosi at the Centre for the Study of Southern African Literature and Languages (CSSALL) at the University of Durban-Westville (UDW), 2001. Via Wikipedia

Consequently, Duerden wrote a follow-up letter to Ogot, requesting that she include greater biographical detail in her answers. In his letter, Duerden endorsed the value of the television project, hoping its worth would inspire Ogot to be more forthcoming. Whether or not Ogot was convinced of the project’s value, she filled out the questionnaire the second time with significantly more revealing information.

In Ogot’s second set of answers, we encounter glimpses of her values, interests, and intellectual life. For example, we learn that her primary literary influences included the short story “How Much Land Does a Man Require” by Leo Tolstoy, The Dark Child by Camara Laye, Mary Slessor of Calabar by William Pringle Livingstone, and Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. Ogot elaborated on the significance of these works in her life. Tolstoy’s short story, for instance, prompted her to write: “If the whole world read this story, perhaps there would be no war.” Regarding the biography of Mary Slessor by Livingstone, Ogot explained, “If anything at all, this book had a lot to do with the shaping of my life and the choice of my career.” Seeking to emulate the positive impact that Slessor had on African society, Ogot “became a nurse … I regarded this as an expression of that feeling of gratitude in me towards Mary Slessor of Scotland who did so much for my Africa.”

The television project as a whole intended to help a burgeoning African literary scene develop parameters for what might be called “African literature.” To this end, the fifth question on the questionnaire is perhaps the most illuminating. “WHAT DO YOU CONSIDER TO BE SPECIFICALLY AFRICAN INFLUENCES IN YOUR LIFE …?” The question presumes the existence of a tangible “Africanness” which is also reflected in the discourse of late-colonial and early-independent Africa, where African identities and trajectories of peoples, nations, and the continent were all being negotiated. Duerden’s second letter to Ogot unpacks the intention of this question further: “What we want to do is to establish how far the background of your people’s traditions have affected the texture of your life.” The question arises: What does it mean to the author of the questionnaire to be “African” in texture and influence?

Initially, Ogot offered very little in terms of a response to the fifth question. In fact, she chose to write, “NIL.” Yet when Duerden begged for more elaborate answers, Ogot disclosed what she considered to be the “African influences” coloring her life:

“Looking back now, I think that there were some African influences that affected my marriage. An English friend of mine asked me once, “After all these years of Education, you still want to be married according to African customs?” My answer was simple. “There is something terribly African in me that school education has not touched.” The negotiations about my marriage were done according to Luo tradition, and full dowry was paid.”

Ogot went on to summarize her wedding day and highlight some of the specific Luo rituals to which she adhered. Interestingly, Ogot had begun to write that the negotiations regarding her marriage were done according to “African” tradition; however, at “Afri” she stopped and scribbled out the word, replacing it with “Luo”, as quoted above. In the struggle against colonialism, which necessitated a certain unity among African peoples, Ogot’s response displays her active negotiation and mediation of her identity, imagined somewhere in between “Luo” and “African.” Her initial dismissal of the question might also suggest that “Africanness” to her was something embodied rather than something that could be divorced from context, defined, and analyzed. Indeed, in her response, she defines “African influences” as “something terribly African in [her].”

Following her participation in the television series, Ogot went on to publish short stories and novels, including The Promised Land (1966) and a collection of short stories entitled Land Without Thunder (1968). Luo history and tradition saturated her fiction. Yet, Ogot is also remembered for her prominent role in Kenyan national politics. Thus her life’s work reflects the plurality of identities—local, national, and continental—that confronted African literary elite in the wake of African independence. Rather than conclusively answering the question, “What is African Literature?,” the television series on prominent African writers served to expose the tensions underlying such plurality.

Sources:

Box 17, Folder 21, The Transcription Centre Records, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas, Austin.

Digital Teaching: Blending the Old with the New: In-Person Studio Attendance

Every year thousands of students take introductory courses in U.S. History at UT Austin. This spring Prof Jeremi Suri is experimenting with an online version of the U.S. History since 1865 survey course. He and his teaching assistants, Cali Slair, Carl Forsberg, Shery Chanis, and Emily Whalen will blog about the experience of digital teaching for readers of Not Even Past.

By Cali Slair

Students typically watch our online course from home, a local café, or at various locations on campus. In order to make the course more interpersonal, each student is also assigned two dates when he or she is required to attend class in the video production studio in Mezes Hall, where we film the live lectures.

Students attending a lecture. Courtesy of the Author.

Studio attendance is similar to taking a course in a classroom or lecture hall, but it is also quite different. Similar to a traditional lecture course, the students listen to a live lecture and take notes surrounded by their classmates. They also arrive to the studio approximately thirty minutes before the course begins which gives them time to ask questions and interact with their classmates, teaching assistants, and Professor Suri before class starts. A great feature of the in-studio attendance dates is that the twenty to twenty-three students who are assigned to each date are all in the same TA group. This allows the students to meet and interact with peers whose weekly response essays they have access to read online. The TA in charge of going over the studio rules and taking attendance for that day is also the TA for the students who are assigned to attend in person. This allows the studio TA to put faces with the names of his or her students, and vice-versa. While some students feel more comfortable taking the course through the online setting, there are also many students who feel more comfortable in the studio and prefer meeting and interacting with their TA and classmates in person. We have even had a few students request to attend more than the two required in-person studio attendance dates.

A main difference between our online course and courses held in a classroom or lecture hall is that having access to a computer is integral to being successful in this course. Despite being in the studio, the students cannot raise their hands and ask questions like in a typical lecture hall. The students still use their laptops to communicate through the Chat and Ask the Professor functions. The Ask the Professor button still functions as the equivalent to raising a hand during lecture. The Pings are another reason the students still need laptops for their in-person studio attendance dates. Students watch the lecture live, and at the same time keep the lecture video open on their laptops to watch for and respond to Pings. This allows the students to earn their attendance grades by demonstrating that not only did they show up to the studio, but they have also been actively listening to the lecture.

Cali Slair in the studio. Courtesy of Joan Neuberger.

We have found the students’ ability to multitask during lecture especially impressive. This is a generational phenomenon that our online course taps into and utilizes for rigorous learning purposes. While the in-person studio attendance dates are based on some traditional classroom learning styles, the studio still requires students to use technology in their learning. The technology encourages active participation during attendance, encouraging students to listen closely to the lecture and integrate what they hear with their reading.

Early in the course some students found the in-studio attendance dates to be a little challenging. Some students had difficulty finding the studio and others found the studio itself to be somewhat distracting. At this point in the course, the number of students who have difficulty finding the studio has declined significantly. For the students who find the studio itself distracting, one of the great things about this course is they can watch the recorded lecture online. As a TA, I value the opportunity to meet all of the students in my group in person. I hope these meetings help students feel more comfortable asking their TAs and Professor Suri questions and attending office hours online or in person. The in-studio experience is an innovative component of our course that helps us achieve our goal of making the course as participatory, engaging, and stimulating for students as possible. Come visit sometime!

The Public Historian: Quilombola Seeds

By Edward Shore

Quilombola Seeds is the second in a three-part series produced by the Instituto Socioambiental (ISA). It explores quilombola agricultural systems in São Paulo’s Ribeira Valley, the last reserve of endangered species and wildlife in Brazil’s most heavily industrialized state. Quilombos are rural black communities descended from fugitive slaves in Brazil. Onerous environmental restrictions have prevented quilombos in the Atlantic Rainforest region of São Paulo from planting subsistence garden plots that their ancestors maintained for centuries. As a result, quilombos have last many rare varieties of beans, rice, and corn. Malnutrition has skyrocketed. Communities faced food shortages. Now, with the assistance of researchers and the Instituto Socioambiental, the region’s quilombos are fighting back! This video includes English subtitles produced by our public historian, Edward Shore, and ISA anthropologist and videographer Alexandre Kishimoto.

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