ms55896, Author at Not Even Past

Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction

If I paint a milk bottle red, does this mean I have “deconstructed” it? This is an example of deconstruction provided by Niall Lucy in A Derrida Dictionary and it makes a good starting point for us to discuss deconstruction. According to Lucy, the painted bottle has a different appearance than the original. This simple change in appearance does not deconstruct the milk bottle as a milk bottle. However, painting a milk bottle red can become deconstructive when taking into consideration its context. If the bottle’s colorlessness was taken for granted by people as the default nature of milk bottles, painting it red deconstructs this prevailing perception.

Painting a milk bottle red can be both deconstructive and not at the same time, which is quite complex by itself. The complexity of deconstruction, however, is still far beyond this. First of all, it is difficult to define deconstruction. As the originator of deconstruction, Derrida published more than forty books and hundreds of articles through his life, but he failed to give deconstruction an authoritative definition. One obstacle for this is that deconstruction actively criticizes the very language needed to explain it. Language structure has already been the target for deconstruction to argue against, which shuts down the possibility of defining deconstruction with language. Another interesting feature of deconstruction is that it refuses an essence. Derrida writes, there is nothing that could be said to be essential to deconstruction in its differential relations with other words. In other words, deconstruction has to be understood in context. This kind of fluidity also prevents the possibility of defining deconstruction.

Since deconstruction lacks a fixed definition, grasping its characteristics is an essential way to help understand the concept. On one side, deconstruction begins from a refusal of the authority or determining power of every “is,” or simply from a refusal of authority in general. This helps explain the deconstructive meaning for the milk bottle. Painting the milk bottle red is revolutionary in the sense that it demonstrates the non-essentialness of what a milk bottle “is.” On the other side, Derrida also writes, “Deconstruction takes place. It is an event that does not await the deliberation, consciousness, or organization of a subject, or even of modernity.” If things are deconstructible, they are deconstructible already — as things. This means the deconstruction has already been there even before Derrida created the theory of deconstruction.

Another potential route to understanding deconstruction is to figure out what it is not, which has been summarized at length by Derrida himself. First, deconstruction is not reducible to an attitude of nonconformity, oppositionality, or principled resistance. All of these actions imply the risk of unconsciously reproducing the original structure. Lucy writes, “If I wear nail polish, I won’t have deconstructed my sexuality. If I vote conservative in protest at the failures of the parliamentary left, I won’t have deconstructed politics.” In addition, deconstruction is not a form of critique. It is not a method or a theory. It is not a discourse or an operation. It’s not that deconstruction prefers or chooses to deconstruct a thing. In other words, it is impossible to apply deconstruction, for deconstruction has already been there.

The most mysterious part of deconstruction is why it has such great influence on humanities and social sciences, but itself is not a method or a theory. Since the 1980s deconstruction has designated a range of theoretical enterprises in law, anthropology, historiography, linguistics, sociolinguistics, psychoanalysis, political theory, feminism, and LGBT studies. It even influences architecture, music, art and art criticism. The great influence of deconstruction may lie in its revolutionary explanation of the world, society, and the knowledge. Derrida claimed that deconstruction was not a theory or a method, but it has been turned into a theory and a method. At the root of this method is Derrida’s concept of the reciprocity of signs.

Derrida states, “From the moment that there is meaning there are nothing but signs. We think only in signs.” Any given concept is constituted in terms of its reciprocal delimitation. And it is a violent hierarchy that we are dealing with in a classical philosophical opposition. One of the two terms always governs the other, for example, speech over writing. The first task of deconstruction is to find and overturn these oppositions inside a text or a corpus of texts. Deconstruction also marks their difference and the eternal interplay between the concepts in opposition.

These specific tasks allow deconstruction the possibility of constantly contributing post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy without an obvious definition. When we are talking about deconstruction, it is certainly much more complicated than painting milk bottles red. But Derrida started the journey for a lot of academic fields to find the deconstructive meanings even in minor actions like painting the milk bottle red.

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Could a Supreme Court justice be president?

By Lewis L. Gould

Bill Kristol, whose major political contribution to American public life is the national career of Sarah Palin, has another bright idea to free the Republican Party from the looming prospect of a Donald Trump presidential candidacy. The GOP, he writes, should turn to a dark horse from an unlikely source. After naming several long-shot contenders such as Mitch Daniels and Paul Ryan, Kristol essays the presidential equivalent of a two-handed shot from half court. Why not, he inquires, Justice Samuel Alito from the Supreme Court? Never mind that Justice Alito has never expressed interest in the White House and would have to give up his seat to make the race. A man of Alito’s intellect would save the party from the oafish Trump whose slogan on his hat embodies his program to make America great again. Has this potential departure from the Court ever happened before or is the gadfly Kristol innovating again?

The Republicans faced such a dilemma once before in American history. Against President Woodrow Wilson’s campaign for a second term in 1916, the GOP lacked a strong presidential nominee to counter the resurgence of former president Theodore Roosevelt who hated Wilson, advocated for intervention on the Allied side in World War I, and seemed an unpromising candidate against the sitting president. Several Republican hopefuls pressed to be nominated, but a motley assortment of senators, governors, and also-rans caused no excitement comparable to what the charismatic Roosevelt stirred.

Salvation seemed at hand on the Supreme Court. Justice Charles Evans Hughes, appointed to the Court by William Howard Taft in 1910, seemed the ideal solution. Formerly a reformist governor of New York (1907-1910), Hughes had no baggage from 1912, when Taft and Roosevelt fractured the party. He was a man with no personal blemishes who could lead the Republicans back to the White House against the unpopular Wilson. Republicans of the era hated Wilson with a venom reminiscent of how modern GOP members hate President Barack Obama.

How to convince Hughes to leave the Court? He disclaimed all interest in the presidency and ordered his name removed from primary ballots in the spring of 1916. However, unauthorized advocates kept his name before the party. Meanwhile, Roosevelt’s candidacy struck few sparks; his bellicose positions toward World War I attracted some but alienated many, especially in the Middle West, on which the Republicans counted for victory. When the Republican National Convention met in June 1916, the Hughes candidacy was poised for success. It came on the third ballot. Hughes was nominated and he promptly resigned from the bench. Republicans had their savior and they anticipated the ouster of Wilson and a prompt return to power. A reporter with the New York Times visited Hughes’ headquarters a week after his selection and observed, “The casual visitor would think it was all over except the inauguration.”

“Charles Evans Hughes campaigns in Winona, Minnesota on the Milwaukee Road’s Olympian”. Via Wikipedia Commons.

Hughes was a brilliant jurist, which he later proved as Chief Justice. Alas for the Republicans, he proved an inept candidate. Certain he would win the presidency, he gave dry discourses that stressed familiar GOP themes about the protective tariff and prosperity. On issues of war and peace, he indicted Wilson’s performance but said little about what he would do instead. Democrats called him Charles “E-vasion” Hughes. Audiences arrived at events enthusiastic, but left deflated and disappointed. A reporter concluded that “Hughes is dropping icicles all over the west and will return to New York clean shaven.”

Though the election was close, Democrats boasted that Wilson had “kept us out of war” and those sentiments won the president a second term. Wilson carried the crucial state of California and won 277 electoral votes to Hughes’ 254. Republican Party members disavowed “smart” candidates like Roosevelt, Taft, and Hughes, which won Warren G. Harding favor in 1920. Hughes returned to private life, but years as Secretary of State and Chief Justice of the United States lay ahead of him. No viable candidate has emerged from the Supreme Court since Hughes (unless we consider the feckless antics of William O. Douglas). Given the cavalry-charge nature of the current Republican presidential race—and the prospect of a campaign against Trump—it would not be surprising if Justice Alito, a smart man, considers Hughes as precedent and ignores the aggressive punditry of Bill Kristol for the lifetime security of a seat on the Supreme Court.

This post originally appeared on the OUPblog

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A Narco History: How the United States and Mexico jointly created the Mexican Drug War, by Carmen Boullosa and Mike Wallace (2015)

By Christina Villareal

The “war on drugs” originated in the late nineteenth century when the United States and Mexico began to combat the narcotics industry. By 1914, the Harrison Act criminalized non-medicinal use of opiates and cocaine in the United States. Likewise, with the ratification of the 1917 Constitution, Mexico tried to terminate the distribution of drugs with strict bans on the production and importation of opiates, cocaine, and marijuana. Before 1920, both countries had declared war on drugs. In A Narco History, Boullosa and Wallace explain how the battle against drugs has enriched narcos, escalated violence, and increased the demand for illegal substances.

Boullosa and Wallace begin by recounting the events of 2014 that led to the horrific murder of 43 students from Ayotzinapa in the state of Guerrero. Although the truth about this case remains obscure today, the authors suggest foul play rooted in collaboration between the federal government, local politicians, and drug-related gangs. The remainder of the book details the convergence of federal and local politicians with drug dealers since the late nineteenth century. Spanning from Mexico’s Porfiriato to Obama’s administration, the twelve chapters explore how the actions of one government, typically those of the United States, resulted in the expansion of the drug trade. For instance, Boullosa and Wallace argue that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which favored U.S. agribusiness, forced thousands of Mexican farmers to turn to marijuana and cocaine production. This deepened the local dependence on the drug market and provided a greater supply for the insatiable demand in the US. Similar instances of cause and effect, which typically benefited the United States to the detriment of Mexicans, occurred throughout the century.

Cempasuchil petals form human-shaped outlines on the ground beside lit candles and a placard during an event held in remembrances of the 43 missing student teachers from the Ayotzinapa. Via REUTERS/Henry Romero

A Nacro History will get any interested reader up-to-speed on the history of this oft discussed “war on drugs.” Beyond a simple timeline, Wallace and Boullosa spell out the implications of political corruption, neoliberalism, the arms trade, and American exceptionalism. U.S. drug policies and pressures on Mexico to squelch the trade ensured the proliferation of “cartels” and the movement of narcotics. The elimination of one “drug lord” inevitably led to the fissuring of cartels and the increase in “collateral criminality,” like kidnapping, rape, extortion, and murder. The authors end the history with a few suggestions for both countries on how to ameliorate the situations for the victims of the drug war violence. Considering the attention given to US-Mexico border issues in the upcoming presidential elections, readers will find their propositions useful.

Courtesy of The Denver Post

The clear writing style and the absence of intimidating footnotes makes A Narco History extremely accessible (even if it might raise questions for academic readers seeking its sources). The lively vignettes on individuals ranging from corrupt politicians and extravagant narcotraficantea to opportunistic agriculturalists and heroic victims, will prove especially interesting to undergraduates and nonacademic audiences. A Narco History will leave many readers eager to embark on research of their own, which they can begin with the book’s excellent bibliography.

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Remembering the Iran-Iraq War

By Shaherzad Ahmadi

Thirty five years ago today, Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein made a dangerous gamble that did not pay off: with Iran vulnerable after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Hussein attacked the oil-rich province of Khuzistan, inhabited mostly by Arabs. Since its independence in 1932, Iraq was critical of the Pahlavi monarchy for fashioning Iran as a Persian nation, and had disputed Iran’s right to a province so heavily populated by Arabs. Hussein’s early successes on the warfront compelled Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran’s new leader, to deploy an enormous number of recently, and often poorly, trained soldiers to the front. By 1982, Khomeini had forced Hussein’s hand. Retreating to the internationally recognized borders, Iraq’s President offered Khomeini peace. An emboldened Khomeini went on the offensive. The war reached a fever pitch in 1986 when Iran overtook Iraq’s al-Faw Peninsula. Western governments, until then satisfied with funding both sides, stepped in to resolve the conflict, which finally ended in 1988.

A helpful map for visualizing the demographics of the Iran-Iraq border. Via Daily Kos.

The Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), largely overshadowed in the United States by Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, cost roughly one million lives. While Iran drew the attention of the West to Hussein’s illegal use of chemical weapons, Iraq paraded before the international press Iranian child soldiers (under the age of fifteen), who constituted a staggering 100,000 of Iran’s casualties. Hussein and Khomeini, both egregious violators of human rights, caused Iranians and Iraqis tremendous trauma.

Iranian child solider on the front-line of the war. Via Wikipedia.

A few scholars in the West, most notably Dina Khoury, Amatzia Baram, and Hamid Dabashi, have seriously contended with the effects of the devastating total war. Most historians have instead emphasized the political revolutions that shaped the two nations. For Iraqi studies, much ink has been spilt on Abd al-Karim Qasim’s Republican Revolution of 1958 and the Bathist coup led by Hasan al-Bakr and Saddam Hussein in 1968. Iran too has had its important political upheavals, including the CIA-backed 1953 coup that ousted democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh as well as the 1979 Islamic Revolution that finally resulted in the end of monarchy, and the rise of a fundamentalist Shi‘i government, in Iran. Other scholars and commentators are concerned with the pressing questions of today’s Middle East. As Iraq now falls apart along ethnic and religious lines after over a decade of US intervention and Iran emerges from decades of painful sanctions, many rightfully preoccupy themselves with lamenting or celebrating present circumstances.

The Iran-Iraq War, however, serves as both a portent for the violence that awaited Iraq in the coming decades and as evidence that Iraq did not have to collapse as it so tragically has. It could have arguably survived its colonial foundation. The French and the British had, after all, invented a country, causing many today to dismiss Iraq’s territorial integrity. One might be compelled to agree with the pessimistic forecasts of political analysts, especially as violence continues to grip Iraq. The Iran-Iraq War, however, demonstrates the legitimacy of these questionably drawn borders.

Iraq’s invasion of Khuzistan, premised on Iran’s illegitimate claim to Arab populations, failed to resonate with Iranian Arabs. Not only that, Iran’s bid for the hearts and minds of Iraq’s Shi‘a also failed. The idea that people would prefer to belong to nation-states that reflected their ethnic makeup or religious values proved incorrect. In fact, it was the support of the Shi‘a for the Iraqi state and the Arabs for the Islamic Republic that gave credibility to territorial boundaries. No longer could the Iranian and Iraqi states speak of their national borders as the result of malicious colonialists drawing lines to maximize conflict: the people had spoken and they had supported their nations.

Iraqi soldiers celebrate after recapturing the Faw Peninsula in Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War. Behind them is a bullet-ridden portrait of Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

That Iraq should fall apart as it has was not an inevitable result of post-colonial borders; it was the result of the American invasion in 2003. Shi‘i and Sunni Iraqis believed in the nation-state project, they fought alongside each other to defend their nation during a bloody eight-year battle with Iran, and now they flee together from Iraq with Syrian refugees as their nation, and state, collapses. Iranian political influence, though negligible during the Iran-Iraq War, has now consumed Iraqi society, resulting in heightened suspicion of Iraqi Shi‘a. Although the Bath Party expelled over 300,000 Iraqis, assumed to be of Iranian heritage during its rule, the fear among Sunnis of widespread Shi‘i loyalty to Iran runs deep. Largely due to the poor governance and eventual ousting of Iranian-backed Iraqi President Nouri al-Maliki, ISIS has captured the support of Sunnis and former Bathists, who were alienated from government since the American invasion of 2003. This, has resulted in the mass murder, rape, and exile of Iraq’s Shi‘a and the disintegration of the country.

Ali Khamenei (right), the future Supreme Leader of Iran, in a trench during the Iran-Iraq war. Via Wikipedia

Not only does the Iran-Iraq War demonstrate the lost possibility of Iraqi unity, but it was also a harbinger of the region’s fraught future. Students and observers of today’s Middle East must study the war in order to understand the nature of violence in Iraq, a country that has struggled with horrific violence since its founding; Iranian influence in Iraq, which international actors, especially the United States, unwittingly strengthened by causing humanitarian crises; human exchange between multiple nations, where travel across porous boundaries caused dangerous conflict; and the role of the international community in the Middle East, as human rights organizations, journalists, and state actors all presented, and contributed to, the Middle East in ways quite familiar to us today.

The bloodshed in Iraq never did end. Many Iraqis describe living in a war zone or in poverty due to crippling sanctions practically their entire lives, beginning in the 1980s. When Hussein invaded Khuzistan, thirty-five years ago today, he provoked a war that would test the loyalties of Iraq’s Shi’a and Iran’s Arabs. Both communities fought alongside their compatriots in order to protect their nations. As we witness ISIS tear the nation apart by fomenting and exploiting sectarian discord, studies of the Iran-Iraq War allow us to appreciate how far Iraq has strayed from earlier Shi‘i-Sunni unity. Neither medieval disputes nor colonial history may bear the full burden of responsibility for causing sectarian violence; it took the intervention of several powerful countries, including our own, over the course of several decades to finally divide Iraq so deeply along ethnic and religious lines.

Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World, by Hajimu Masuda (2015)

Few topics in history have produced a larger literature than the origins of the Cold War. Since its onset, historians, rightists or leftists, have hotly debated whether the United States or the Soviet Union initiated the mutual antagonism, culminating in the Korean War. After decades of controversy, the scholarly tensions have now died down, though the issue is far from settled, as most Cold War historians moved on to a myriad of other issues. One may, therefore, well ask: Do we need yet another book about the making of the Cold War? Hajimu Masuda says yes. Contrary to the dominant notion of the Cold War as geopolitical and ideological struggle between the capitalist and communist states, Cold War Crucible depicts it as a social construct that local peoples consciously or unconsciously created from the bottom up. For Masuda, the Cold War was a popular fantasy, not an objective reality.

Masuda begins by explaining how Cold War perceptions took shape in the United States, China, and Japan before the Korean War. After WWII, American labor unions, women, and Black people openly called for more rights; Chinese students with vivid memories of WWII opposed U.S. reconstruction of Japan; Japanese workers and students demanded liberal reforms. These social movements, though not caused by communist conspiracies, met a growing backlash from conservatives in each country, who adopted Cold War language, such as “un-American,” “Commies,” and “Reds,” to denounce liberals.

Cover of Red Channels, a pamphlet-style book issued by the journal Counterattack in 1950. Via Wikipedia.

He goes on to analyze how popular discourse distinguishing “us” from “them” during the Korean War consolidated the Cold War realities in the United States and China. Despite deep uncertainty within Harry Truman’s administration about crossing the 38^th parallel on the Korean Peninsula, public enthusiasm and Republican pressure for victory against communists emboldened American policymakers. Likewise, despite ambivalence within the Communist Party toward the Korean War, Chairman Mao Zedong decided to send the People’s Volunteer Army because of popular outcry that connected the war against U.S. imperialists to the domestic struggle against landlords and bourgeoisies. Public support for the war, fueled by widespread fear of WWIII, translated local particularities into a monolithic reality of the Cold War.

Chinese Propaganda poster during the Korean War

Worldwide purges of liberals transformed such fears into political realities. In the United States, conservative offensives against African Americans, homosexuals, labor leaders, and immigrants, as well as gender struggle against working women, gave birth to McCarthyism. Similarly, Britain’s crackdown on labor unions, Japan’s Red Purge, Taiwan’s White Terror, and the Philippine’s suppression of “un-Filipino” activists, though all reflecting social divides at the local level, reinforced the Cold War illusion. Masuda concludes that, “the reality of the Cold War materialized in the crucible of the postwar era… leading to the rise of a particular mode of Cold War fantasy that ‘fit’ well with social needs of populations around the world.”

So, was the Cold War simply a fantasy? Of course not. Masuda does not intend to ignore the actual geopolitical and military conflicts in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. Instead, he argues that the Cold War was a product of complex interactions between international and local leaders and the populace. Although the Korean War was no doubt a military reality for U.S. and Chinese policymakers, ordinary peoples interpreted it through local lenses, which turned the foreign war into a factor in domestic social conflicts. Readers, however, may wonder if Masuda slightly overemphasizes the local agency, as he often cites emotional letters by ordinary citizens, while paying relatively little attention to strategic concerns of top-level policymakers.

Reality of Korean War: A G.I. comforts a grieving infantryman. Via Wikipedia

Such a caveat aside, Cold War Crucible is a welcome addition to the rich historiography on the origins of the Cold War, as well as the burgeoning literature on the role of popular perception in international relations. Using primary sources from sixty-four archives in ten countries and regions, Masuda offers a truly international history. Although it is clearly too much to ask for more language sources, his research begs further study on Europe and the Soviet Union to examine whether the same reality-making mechanism was in place in the European front of the Cold War, where geopolitical and ideological confrontation was more intense than in Asia.

Hajimu Masuda, Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World (Harvard University Press. 2015)

Foucault on Power, Bodies, and Discipline

By Charles Stewart

Discipline and Punish, subtitled The Birth of the Prison, is Michel Foucault’s reading of the shift in penal technologies from torture to imprisonment that took place in Europe beginning in the eighteenth century. Foucault dramatizes this transformation by opening the book with two penal schemes separated by 80 years. The first, in 1757, is the grisly public execution of Damiens, convicted of attempting to kill Louis XV— he was tortured, drawn, quartered, and finally burned. The second is little more than a time-table regulating the daily life of young prisoners in Paris. For Foucault, this change signals not “a quantitative phenomenon: less cruelty, less pain, more kindness, more respect, more ‘humanity,’” but “a displacement in the very object of the punitive operation” from the body to the soul. More than anything, Foucault is interested in how external structures (like institutions of power) produce subjects. It is in this way that we can characterize Foucault as a post-humanist. He investigates the “conditions of possibility” for thought in any given period or domain of knowledge. That is, what can be thought at all in a given context and how did it come to be that way? The measure is not man, but discourse.

Foucault offers a genealogy of the development of the modern regime of social control; that is, how power controls bodies. The nineteenth century brings about a seemingly “gentler” sort of punishment, rhetorically aimed at the correction of the soul, which is nevertheless a highly structured regulation of the body that produces docility. Foucault calls this new system “discipline,” and his careful archeology of the discourse around punishment as the modern prison emerges leads him to conclude that the move away from torture was “not to punish less, but to punish better; to punish with an attenuated severity perhaps, but in order to punish with more universality and necessity; to insert the power to punish more deeply into the social body.” Discipline, Foucault argues, shifts the emphasis away from results, wherein Damiens is brutally punished for his attempted regicide, and onto processes of regulating the body not as a whole but in its parts, rendering the body docile, a prison for the soul. This process has pervaded modern society beyond the prison, and, for Foucault, we presently live in a carceral world.

The Panopticon design of Jeremy Bentham, drawn by Willey Reveley in 1791. Via Wikipedia

Three technologies enable the production of docile bodies: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and examination. The first is represented in the classic example of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, a circular prison where all of the cells can be monitored by a single watchtower in the center into which the prisoners cannot see. What is essential to this scheme is that the possibility of being watched, the uncertainty of whether or not a watchman is in in the tower, is enough to control the prisoners. The second technology, normalizing judgment, is compulsive and pervasive ranking and rating: the notion, for example, not that children need to learn to read, but that each child’s skill at reading must be compared to children of the same age in a quantifiable manner. The final technology, examination, combines the first two into a “normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish….in it are combined the ceremony of power and the form of the experiment, the deployment of force and the establishment of truth.” For Foucault, the formation of knowledge and the exercise of power are one and the same. , Nevertheless, there is no single nexus of power; we are all variously constructed as subjects by dispersed loci of power. A sort of useful, pedestrian example of this power of knowledge is the proverbial “permanent record,” that mysterious instrument schools use to record your faults that threatens to permanently marginalize you if you do not behave properly. Its normalizing force is enacted invisibly—has anyone ever seen a permanent record?—by making you visible as a written “case.” This decentralized and invisible technology of knowledge resembles a prison-like, one-sided power-knowledge relation, a relation that for Foucault is deeply coercive.

Presidio Modelo prison in Cuba, an example of a Panopticon penitentiary.

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The Seldoms Bring LBJ and the 1960s Into the Present in Their Investigation of How Power Goes

By Michael J. Kramer

History & American Studies, Northwestern University

Dramaturg, The Seldoms

“I can see them now, Clio and Terpsichore…I can feel them spinning, lurching, sidling and smashing up against one another, laughing knowingly as they wipe the sweat of foreheads and from the skin between lips and nose; in a standoff, carefully calculating each other’s weight and flexibility, careening toward one another, rolling as one body and then falling apart, only to circle around for a fast-paced repartee, trading impersonations…. This duet rejuvenates itself endlessly. It has an insatiable appetite for motion.” Susan Leigh Foster, “Choreographing History”

“It is all here: the story of our time with the bark off…” Lyndon Johnson at the dedication of the LBJ Presidential Library, 1971

Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon at the White House in 1968. Via Wikimedia Commons.

In the contemporary dance theater work Power Goes, which arrives at McCullough Theatre on the campus of the University of Texas on September 16th and 18th, courtesy of Texas Performing Arts, the Briscoe Center for American History, and the LBJ Presidential Library, the Chicago-based dance ensemble, The Seldoms, propose that we can dance our way deeply into the historical past. So too, they stake out the claim that the past, arriving through dance performance, has important work to do in the present. Presiding over Power Goes is the figure of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who serves as a guiding spirit for an exploration of physicality, power, and social change. Using videography, spoken text, distinctive lighting, sound design, and, most of all, dynamic, innovative movement, The Seldoms ask audiences to join them in drawing upon LBJ’s legacy and his times to consider what power is exactly and how, as the work’s title suggests, it goes.

Power Goes relies significantly upon archival sources to pursue this investigation. In this sense, it is a work of public history, except that it adds the body, movement, and performance to text, image, and sound as means for discovering and communicating its findings. History is all over this piece. Even the title of Power Goes comes from an oft-cited saying coined by Johnson, “Power is where power goes,” meaning that he could exercise political influence and control in any office he occupied. The Seldoms take this line and run—or better said (of course) dance—with it. Power Goes refers to everything from Johnson’s childhood in Texas Hill Country to his political prowess as an intensely physical leader to the broader civil rights and social movements for equality in the 1960s to Johnson’s tragic political demise after his decision to escalate US military involvement in the Vietnam War. But this is no biography of Johnson, and it is certainly not hagiographical. Power Goes is certainly not history in the conventional sense. By presenting history in dance, it asks us to reconsider what public history is and what it can be.

At a time when scholarly historians are working to make academic history more accessible to broader audiences, looking to other fields that confront similar issues might be stimulating. Contemporary dance faces oddly parallel issues to academic history. Both have typically been made for smaller, specialized audiences even though both history and dance are important activities for a far broader swath of the population. To witness how The Seldoms use innovative choreographic tactics, cross-disciplinary collaboration, sustained studio practice, ongoing self-scrutiny, continued public dialogue, and, most importantly, the body itself, as avenues to deeper interpretive understanding of both the past and the present (and perhaps as a way to imagine the future) is to consider new areas of possibility for public history as well.

The choice of Lyndon Johnson as subject matter brings history and dance together quite directly. Johnson, as a character, is no stranger to the stage. Bryan Cranston, of television series Breaking Bad fame, took on the role of LBJ in the recent Broadway play All the Way (soon to be an HBO biopic), which tells the story of Johnson’s efforts to push through civil rights legislation in the aftermath of his landslide Presidential victory in 1964. Johnson also turns up as an opponent of civil rights legislation on screen in the recent film Selma, directed by Ava DuVernay. In the 1960s themselves, LBJ was even placed in the villainous position of Macbeth in Barbara Garson’s satirical and angry radical theater work MacBird!

In Power Goes, however, he is more like Banquo’s ghost. He haunts the piece, looms over it, even gives it the infamous “Johnson treatment” that he was renowned for when he leaned his six foot four frame over allies and adversaries alike to get them in line for his legislation. The Seldoms are less interested in retelling Johnson’s story than allowing it to work its way into the present moment. This is not historical reenactment or naturalistic dramatic realism. Instead, The Seldoms demand that audiences enter into a version of history that is lively, weird, uneven, palpable. No one member of The Seldoms alone plays the role of LBJ, for instance, or remains in the position of any other specific historical person consistently. Stable identities give way to the porous flow of power as it courses through the bodies of the dancers.

Similarly, The Seldoms do not stick to one historical time period or level of historical action. Past and present blur. Official and informal intermix. Access to haircut stylists and self-help audio tapes become issues of power relations right alongside pressing issues of national import. The micropolitics of everyday life interweave with public spectacles of political theater. History jumps around, we cut between and across time periods, and between fantastical interactions (a conversation between LBJ and Obama) and realpolitik (Johnson intimidating a segregationist business owner into hiring African-Americans).

History pulsates here. Sometimes it pummels bodies with trauma. At other times, we witness the power of bodies that are massed in stillness and endurance. Sometimes these bodies are vulgar. At other times, they are quite tender and vulnerable. History disappears into the bodies onstage, but the dancers also become historical vessels, bringing the past into the present moment. Power Goes does not offer a “history of the body,” as historians have done in the past decades; rather, it presents history through the body. LBJ’s physicality is the beginning of a much larger inquiry into how history surfaces through skin and bones, exertion of muscle and tangle of nerve.

But what a perfect starting point LBJ is. Whether it be something as crass as taking aides into his bathroom while he urinated or something more kindly such as wrapping his arms around friends to show his fondness for them, LBJ’s physicality was crucial to his politics. He was often awful on television, but a master of face-to-face glad-handing. Johnson’s body was, in some sense, his politics. Presidential bodies are significant anyway, beyond LBJ alone. As Ernst Kantorowicz wrote of Medieval political theology in his classic study The King’s Two Bodies, and as Michael Rogin translated into the American context, leader’s bodies have always borne a close relationship to the body politic. We think about the larger nation-state, sometimes, through linking the literal body of a leader to the metaphorical social body. The President is not called the head of state for nothing.

A leader’s body, however, is not the only one that matters, particularly in a democracy. When The Seldoms pivot from LBJ to other people from the 1960s—civil rights protesters, antiwar demonstrators, everyday citizens, fearful political adversaries, potential political allies—the range of the dance piece’s exploration of physicality and power grows dramatically as well. Scales and sizes, individual bodies and masses of bodies, stillness and motion, duration and action, all contrast with each other. Varying tones and intensities of assertion, rejection, conflict, and concordance register. The Seldoms loosen history from its moorings, embodying its implications and giving them a physical presence. Power Goes enlarges historical awareness through embodiment. The company even hold a workshop, “Bodies on the Gears,” in which participants explore the historical gestures with their own physical being; these workshop attendees then join in the performance itself.

The oscillations in Power Goes between bodies then and now—the way that The Seldoms move from the 1960s and the present, the archives to the stage, a straightforward retelling of the past to something far more adventurous, even delirious—also raise questions about history and memory. Aligning physical exploration with evidence, argument, and interpretation, The Seldoms create a deeply intellectual investigation that is also a sensorial séance. Ghosts from the past shoot through the bodies of The Seldoms into the present moment, but they never settle into place. Instead they mutate and change as their stances and positions get reworked, abstracted, reconfigured, re-physicalized, redistributed, redirected, and recontextualized by the dancers. Memory itself becomes alive, suddenly happening now, a tailwind that must be negotiated in the moment, a highly charged experience in which structures of power grow fluid and unruly.

The Seldoms have created a piece that allows audiences to experience history, with a thrilling combination of visceral immediacy and meditative contemplation. LBJ oversees this affair, and protesters and others from the 1960s show up to play their parts, but it is the relationship between history and power, between what things persist and how things change, between what gets remembered and how we remember it, that ultimately takes center stage in Power Goes. As a kind of epic duet choreographed between dance and history, Terpsichore and Clio, this is a version of public history that has got serious moves.

Watch a one minute trailer or the entire piece (80 minutes).

All photographs by William Frederking

Cited Sources:

Susan Leigh Foster, “Choreographing History” in Choreographing History, ed. Susan Foster (1995).

Lyndon Johnson, Dedication of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, May 22, 1971, http://www.lbjlibrary.org/page/library-museum.

Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (1957).

Michael Paul Rogin, “The King’s Two Bodies: Lincoln, Wilson, Nixon, and Presidential Self-Sacrifice,” in “Ronald Reagan,” The Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (1987).

Notes from the Field: From Feasts to Feats (or Feet) on the Coals

This summer, I conducted research in, but also beyond, my regular haunts, namely the dusty old libraries and archival reading rooms of Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. After several days in Sofia, I took to the mountains to follow the paths of ethnographers, tourists, and pilgrims who have written about this distant borderland of Europe over the past 200 years. To this day, Bulgaria has remained a kind of distant terra incognita, beckoning “adventure” travelers to the edge of the European continent. All the more reason for travelers – foreign and Bulgarian – to record their journeys, to map the remote physical and cultural recesses of this Balkan periphery, always seemingly “backward,” in transition, and “off the beaten track.”

The veritable sea of travelers’ accounts are among the sources that inform my current book project, a cultural history of food and drink in the Eastern Balkans, with a focus on Bulgaria from the 1860s -1989. Bulgarian foodways were clearly imprinted by the Empires that ruled or influenced the region, from the Ancient Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, to the Soviet.

Some of these travelers were Bulgarians, mapping their own homeland and defining their own nation as they went, with the culture of food and drink as important components. But many more were foreigners who consumed and assessed food and drink as sources of pleasure and anxiety. They mapped patterns of restraint and gluttony, as well as the connections of food with identity, healing, and magic. They often used practices of food and drink—production, preparation, and etiquette—as a way of forming or confirming their own opinions about locals as savage and barbaric or alternatively as vigorous and sensible. Such accounts include mouth-watering descriptions of home-cooked meals and local inn or restaurant fare from the days of treks on oxen-drawn carts. The denouement of the story is the 1960s and 1970s when cities of leisure grew out of the snake-infested sands of the Bulgarian Black Sea coast to accommodate millions of visitors from both sides of the Iron Curtain. My interest is in the ways that food and drink fit into old and new rituals surrounding leisure and pleasure. As critical to this story, I explore how foreign travelers and local tourists were part of the transformation of such patterns over the last century. I am also particularly interested in patterns of restraint and abstinence, whether they were intellectual movements of the interwar period or state-directed patterns of pleasure and leisure under communism.

One of my plans for this summer was to follow the well-worn paths of my traveller-authors. This led me to one particularly remarkable place, namely to the village of Bulgari in a spectacular mountainous region called the Strandja, which borders Turkey and spills down to the Black Sea coast in southeastern Bulgaria. I planned my visit to Bulgari carefully, so that I would be there on the feast day of Constantine and Elena, June 4 by the Julian calendar, the day when the nestinari or fire-dancers perform their well-known ritual. Numerous foreigners and locals have chronicled their observations of the nestinarstvo — the ritual of waking on hot coals — which reportedly dates back thousands of years to ancient Thracian times. Locals claim that the originally pagan ritual has been practiced more or less continually since that time. Eventually Christianized, nestinarstvo was also passed on to successive waves of Greek and eventually Slavic residents who moved into the region. The practice was once much more widespread, but Bulgari is one of the last places one can still see the practice in its most elaborate enactment.

1The Nestinarka or coal-walker (in white head scarf) swirls a small urn of burning embers in the air at the beginning of the procession with holy icons into the woods. (Village of Bulgari, in Southeastern Bulgaria, June 2015). — The Nestinarka or coal-walker (in white head scarf) swirls a small urn of burning embers in the air at the beginning of the procession with holy icons into the woods. (Village of Bulgari, in Southeastern Bulgaria, June 2015).

The morning of June 4, 2015 began with a series of prayers in the main church and the ceremonial removal of the icons depicting St. Constantine and Elena (The Byzantine Emperor, Constantine and his mother, Elena). The icons were taken in a solemn procession to the tune of a mesmerizing beat from a drummer and gaida (Bulgarian bagpipe) player. First, the local priest and a number of important participants, including the head nestinarka, or female coal-walker, led a small crowd to a chapel across the main square. There a series of rituals were performed, including a kurban or sacrifice of a sheep by the local priest. The procession continued, with the nestinarka carrying a vessel with burning embers, down a wooded path to a glen where a well and a small chapel were nestled. While blessings took place around the well, icons were placed in a small structure for those assembled to file pass, view, and kiss. Eventually the gathering dissipated until noon, when a huge bonfire was lit in the village square, with an accompanying horo (circle dance) to drumming and bagpipes. By evening folk singers and dancers were featured on an adjacent stage and the square begin to fill with hundreds of people, mostly Bulgarians. As live Bulgarian folk music was pumped over a loudspeaker, a line of hundreds of people snaked around the village square while the bonfire burned down to glowing coals.

2The kurban or sacrificial ram hangs from a hook, while being blessed by an Orthodox priest. The ram’s head is in the foreground on a chopping block. Village of Bulgari, in Southeastern Bulgaria, June 2015). — The kurban or sacrificial ram hangs from a hook, while being blessed by an Orthodox priest. The ram’s head is in the foreground on a chopping block. Village of Bulgari, in Southeastern Bulgaria, June 2015).

Finally, at a little after ten o’clock, the red hot coals were raked out into a starfish shape in the center of the square, with the crowd on all sides pushing against a protective rope. Suddenly the only music was the single drum and bagpipe and three women and three men began to dance across the burning embers. In a trance-like state they moved rhythmically back and forth across the coals to the drumming and bagpipes, icons in hand – held high overhead—a large crown oohing and ahing.

It may be possible to explain how people can walk on hot coals, but I am more interested in the layers of historical sediment that surround the event. First there is the notion that this ritual has been practiced for thousands of years and the current commitment to honor, if not partially reinvent, that tradition. But even more interesting for my current work is the ways in which the event became a site for the intrepid tourist pilgrimage. By the interwar period it is featured in numerous travelogues, and a form of the practice was featured at Black Sea tourist hotels in the communist period. As a site for local tourist observation and participation, the nestinarstvo was and still is deeply connected to food and drink. For example, as chronicled in Ikons and Oxen, Philip Thornton and his resolute party, traveling in 1938, bring to Bulgari a cook from their Black sea hotel and, “Ten pounds of lamb, a gallon of red wine, five bunches of onions and two of carrots, a bottle of butter, a three-pound bag of rice, and a pound of salt.” The salt, the cook explained to Thornton, was to trade to locals for use of their hearths to cook the hearty lamb stew, which they washed down with tasty local wine.

Food and drink were more than just sustenance and pleasure for the traveling visitors. They were (and still are) deeply implicated in the day’s events and rituals. Food was always central in pagan religious rituals and feasting and fasting were deeply embedded in Orthodox Christianity. St. Constantine and Elena Day was a feast day, in which locals pitched in to purchase the kurban, or animal for sacrifice, that was later eaten by the nestinari and others in attendance. Bread has also historically been part of the day’s ritual, and this time pieces of a large loaf were offered to all present at the morning ceremony. Today, a whole street of food vendors catered to tourists and pilgrims who ate and drank throughout the whole day. The ritual feasting included a lamb roasting all day on a spit, a range of other grilled meats, breads, traditional local salads of cucumber, tomato and feta, and generous amounts of local wines, plum brandy, and beer.

Wine has been produced in this region of Bulgaria, which is part of the larger region of Thrace, since ancient times. This is, in fact, the land of the cult of Dionysus (or Bacchus), the Greek (and Roman) God of wine and pleasure. Even more so than food, alcohol consumption is the subject of enjoyment, but also intense scrutiny by foreigners and locals in the period I study. In addition to the cult of Bacchus, this region was also the source of the 11th century Bogomil heresy – one of the first “Proto-Protestant” rebellions against the decadence of the established Christian church. Among other things, the Bogomils practiced temperance and vegetarianism, and as such were a cult of restraint in all manners of consumption. Eradicated by the Byzantines in the 13th century, the “Bogomil legacy” seemed to live on, according to foreign travelers, among other Slavic “fanatics,” including the largest Tolstoyan movement established outside of Russia in early twentieth century. In fact, the Bulgarian village of “Yasna Polyana,” was not far from Bulgari in the Strandja region. Bulgarians set up a commune here in 1908, naming it after Tolstoy’s commune and estate in Russia, Yasnaya Polyana and where they published many of Tolstoy’s works that were banned in Russia. This summer I visited Yasna Polyana, where a recently consecrated bust of Tolstoy presides on the main square.

Bulgari and Yasna Polyana serve as different kinds of markers on what Ivan Hadzhiiski, the founder of Bulgarian sociology, called the “moral map of Bulgaria.” His copious writings from the 1930s, charted the contours of Bulgarian everyday life.. As he rightly notes, the morals of “gastronomy” were defining features of Bulgarian tradition, as well as its transition to modernity. Of course this is not just for Bulgarians. As my favorite historian of food, Felipe Fernández-Armesto notes in his Near a Thousand Tables, food “matters most to most people for most of the time.” The words of Armesto, like Hadzhiiski, accompanied me on my tour, from town to town, from table to table.

You may also like:

Mary Neuburger on Tobacco and Smoking in Bulgaria and on Cigarettes during the Cold War

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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.

Five Books on the End of Empire, by Wm. Roger Louis

By Wm. Roger Louis

The Men Who Lost America, by Andrew O’Shaughnessy (Yale University Press, 2013)

It is a pleasure to read a full account of the British side of the American Revolution. In Andrew O’Shaughnessy’s “The Men Who Lost America,” we see the beginning of the story through the eyes of George III, who was still physically strong and mentally robust. He proclaimed, in words that Churchill might later have uttered, “We are contending for our whole consequence whether we are to rank among the Great Powers of Europe or be reduced to one of the least considerable.” Two dates were crucial: In October 1777 at Saratoga, N.Y., Gen. Burgoyne surrendered more than 6,500 men; four years later almost to the day, Lord Cornwallis was forced to surrender at Yorktown, Va., effectively ceding victory to the new United States. Britain’s fundamental mistake was the assumption that most American royalists would remain loyal. Many were ambivalent about rebellion but not suicidal. What also swung the balance was that, after Burgoyne’s capitulation, France and Spain began to support the American patriots. In this myth-shattering book, Mr. O’Shaughnessy drives home the point that, despite losing America, the British saved Canada, the West Indies, Gibraltar and India, securing the foundations of a global empire.

The Empire Project, by John Darwin (Cambridge University Press, 2009)

“The Empire Project” relates in engaging style the rise, decline and fall of the British Empire, which at its height extended over a fourth of the earth’s surface. The downfall was not a linear descent. The empire revived in spirit and purpose before finally collapsing in the 1970s. John Darwin’s chronicle is an exhilarating read, above all because of the pen portraits of the proconsuls, including Lord Curzon in India, Lord Cromer in Egypt and Sir Alfred Milner in South Africa, as well as Cecil Rhodes, who “offered a winning combination of imperial patriotism and colonial expansion.” In the empire’s last phase, Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy, presided over the “ruthless” partition of India and the creation of Pakistan. In Mr. Darwin’s judgment, at least one million people died in the “mass madness” of communal violence. But “Mountbatten was lucky”: British forces emerged from the upheaval virtually unscathed.

Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope, by Judith M. Brown (Yale University Press, 1989)

A book written a quarter of a century ago, “Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope” has stood the test of time. Judith Brown is by no means uncritical of Gandhi, pointing out, for example, his egregious mistake in advising the Jews in Nazi Germany to adopt methods of nonviolent protest. He could be quirky, unpredictable and contradictory. At first he believed that India’s independence could be achieved by keeping faith with the British, but he changed tactics in the interwar years to nonviolent resistance. Ms. Brown argues that civil disobedience never made British rule impossible. Its aim, for India’s nationalist movement, was a “quest for legitimacy.” As for Gandhi’s legendary fasts, they provided an opportunity for “theatre and symbolism.” Gandhi envisioned an anarchic utopia that would be self-regulating, with a non-industrialized economy based on agriculture. India today is a far cry from his vision. Yet as a figure of moral principle, Gandhi expressed to many, then as now, “eternal truths in a changing world.”

The Viceroy’s Journal, by Archibald Wavell (Oxford University Press, 1973)

Field Marshal Archibald Wavell’s diary is stunning in its honesty and clarity and in its incisive criticism of British rule in the Subcontinent. In 1941, Churchill sacked Wavell for failing to defeat Rommel in North Africa, then appointed him Viceroy of India in 1943 as a stopgap, hoping that he would hold the line politically. Churchill first realized his mistake when he discovered that Wavell was at heart a poet (and in 1944 published a famous anthology, “Other Men’s Flowers”). In his diary Wavell recorded, shortly after his appointment, that Churchill “has always disliked me and mistrusted me, and probably now regrets having appointed me.” Wavell wrote that Britain’s wartime cabinet, when it came to Indian affairs, was characterized by “spinelessness, lack of interest, opportunism.” He was sympathetic to Indian nationalism and got on well with most of the Indian leaders—except Gandhi, whose “one idea for 40 years has been to overthrow British rule and influence and to establish a Hindu Raj; and he is as unscrupulous as he is persistent.” Wavell proved to be one of the few who could stand up to Churchill, and he did so time and again, though their last meeting ended on a whimsical note. After his defeat in the 1945 election, Churchill asked Wavell to “keep a little bit of India.”

A Prince of Our Disorder, by John Mack (Harvard University Press, 1976)

In this probing and compassionate biography of T.E. Lawrence, John Mack, a psychiatrist, merges history and psychology. The picture here is of Lawrence as one of the leaders of the Arab revolt that took place during World War I—a role in which he operated as a British intelligence officer, advising Feisal (later to become king of Iraq), rather than as the mastermind of the insurrection against the Ottoman Empire. One point that has baffled biographers is the capture and rape of Lawrence by the Turks. Mack believes that Lawrence underwent “psychic trauma” of such “depravity and horror” that it helps explain his later compulsion to be flagellated. Mack offers vivid insights into the reason that Lawrence renounced his own “legend” and enlisted after the war in the ranks of the RAF. Despite all, he concludes, Lawrence remained, in his future roles, a creative force, “an enabler.”

This article was originally published in the Wall Street Journal on June 19 2015.

You may also like:

Dharitri Bhattacharjee’s review of Judith M. Brown’s Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope

Jack Loveridge recommends The Viceroy’s Journal by Archibald Percival Wavell, ed. Penderel Moon

Mexico-US Interactions

By Mark Sheaves

When Donald Trump launched his Presidential bid in June he trumpeted “I will build a great wall on our Southern border” to stop the influx of “drugs”, “crime”, and “rapists”. Portraying Mexicans, and Hispanics in general, as a dangerous invading Other has a long history in the USA and the question of increasing security along the Rio Grande will certainly dominate debate as the election draws closer.

Based in a border state, the historians at UT Austin are in a good position to offer historical perspectives on the Mexican-US borderlands. Below we have compiled a selection of articles on this topic previously published on NEP. These insights add much needed context to counter the clear-cut separation of the US and Mexico evident in Trumpian political rhetoric.

To start, Anne Martínez contextualizes the economic ties between the United States and Mexico during the twentieth century and discusses the ways Salman Rushdie and Sebastião Salgado conceptualize the US-Mexico borderlands.

The Mexico-US border is often talked about as a religious frontier dividing the Catholic South from the Protestant North. However, as Anne Martínez shows, Catholics on both sides of the border were very much part of the history of Mexico-US interactions. Read more about the Catholic borderlands between 1905 and 1935 and a list of recommended further reading.

The Mexican Revolution knew no borders. People quite freely moved between Texas and Mexico as Lizeth Elizondo highlights in her review of Raul Ramos’ War Along the Border: The Mexican Revolution and the Tejano Communities.

The “War on Drugs” often dominates discussions about Mexican-American relations. UT graduate student Edward Shore broadens the discussion to a global level arguing that the violence, disorder, and political, social, and economic instability associated with the drug trade has a long history with repercussions across the world.

While relations between Mexico and the United States are commonly discussed in negative terms, this has not always been the case. Emilio Zamora’s book Claiming Rights and Righting Wrong in Texas highlights the most cooperative set of relations in US-Mexican. Could this serve as a model for what is possible?

On 15 minute history, Miguel A. Levario from Texas Tech University (and a graduate of UT’s Department of History) discusses Mexican immigration to the US, and helps us ponder whether there are any new ideas to be had in the century long debate it has inspired—or any easy answers.

Over the past few years the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA) has increasingly focused on the history of Mexican Americans living in the state. History Professors Emilio Zamora, University of Texas, and Andrés Tijerina, Austin Community College, are co-editing the forthcoming Tejano Handbook of Texas. And Dr Cynthia E. Orozco discusses the increased presence of Latinas and Latinos at the 2015 meeting of the TSHA.

Policing the Mexican-American border is not a new issue. Christina Salinas discusses the Texas Border Patrol and the social relations forged on the ground between agricultural growers, workers, and officials from the U.S. and Mexico during the 1940s.