Raquel Torua Padilla, Author at Not Even Past

Pauliceia 2.0: A Collaborative and Open-Source Historical Mapping Platform

This article coincides with an upcoming public talk at UT on Pauliceia 2.0, January 28 at 4:00 p.m. For more details, please visit the event page.

While passing through Austin on vacation in 2015, Brazilian historian Luis Ferla went for a walk across the UT campus. He was mulling over new projects for the research lab he coordinates, “History, Maps, and Computers” (Hímaco), at the Federal University of São Paulo.

As he crossed the Forty Acres, inspiration struck: what if, he thought, we developed a digital mapping platform where a variety of people–researchers, teachers, students, even neighborhood residents–could create, explore, and share information about a city’s past? What if, he wondered, we made the underlying technical architecture of that platform openly and freely available for use in other urban contexts, in Brazil and beyond? Ferla’s vision–what Hímaco students would come to call a “Google Maps for the past”–was set.

In the ten years since that reflective walk, the initial idea has become a beta-stage reality: the collaborative, open-source historical mapping platform Pauliceia 2.0.

A screenshot of the Pauliceia 2.0 homepage.

Produced by historians, computer scientists, and software developers in Brazil and the United States, the platform focuses on the city of São Paulo between 1870 and 1940. Today, São Paulo’s nearly 20 million residents make it the most populous city in the Western Hemisphere. The city’s growth, however, only began in earnest in the late nineteenth century: from 30,000 residents in 1870, the city grew to over 1.3 million by 1940. In this seminal period, the city also gained the affectionate, poetic nickname (Pauliceia) that would inspire the name of the platform.

If Pauliceia 1.0 was the real, material city of 1870-1940, Pauliceia 2.0 is a digital reconstruction containing a selective, yet richly varied, collection of information about the city. The beta platform contains seven layers of georeferenced historical maps of São Paulo, stretching from 1868 to 1930, that provide cartographic context and allow users to trace the city’s development over time. This early release also contains many thematically-focused layers, most created and submitted by contemporary researchers, that display geographic information about a range of topics: from significant Catholic churches and the former streetcar network to the sites of visiting circuses and disease outbreaks. The result of this process–a collaborative reconstruction of São Paulo’s past–will, we expect, advance the central promise of historical mapping: to illuminate relationships in space and over time, including those that might not be visible otherwise.

Use cases for the project also reach beyond the academy. In the wake of disastrous floods in São Paulo in 2020, journalists at Brazil’s largest newspaper, Folha de S. Paulo, used a layer that Hímaco created about a massive 1929 flood to show how, despite advances in urban infrastructure over 91 years, flood-threatened areas in the city remained largely the same. Though created before the beta release of Pauliceia 2.0, these flood layers are now on the platform, available for investigation and downloading. Separately, a group called Cartografia Negra (Black Cartography) has used the platform to remap places that held special significance for African descendants in the city, which in the nineteenth century was the provincial capital of one of the final frontiers of slavery in the Americas.

The Pauliceia 2.0 team has begun to further expand its public-facing mapping activities and partnerships. The team is, for example, collaborating with São Paulo’s municipal archive and residents in two of the city’s most historic neighborhoods to facilitate a series of community mapping initiatives. In the summer of 2025, representatives from Pauliceia 2.0 participated in the NEH-funded Community Deep Mapping Institute (one of only two accepted teams from outside the U.S.) to strengthen their knowledge of best practices with participatory mapping.

A group of people inside a church. They are participating in mapping activities coordinated by the Pauliceia 2.0 team.

A group of people gathered on the street. They are participating in mapping activities coordinated by the Pauliceia 2.0 team.

Photos of recent participatory mapping activities coordinated by the Pauliceia 2.0 team in the São Paulo neighborhoods of Penha and Bom Retiro.

In addition to its historiographical contributions, the Pauliceia 2.0 team has also produced technical innovations. Most recently, the team developed an algorithm that facilitates the location of historic street addresses. This tool is essential for historical research about cities like São Paulo, where street numbering has changed over time, and primary sources about spatial change are severely limited. The source code for the geolocation tool, along with the code for the project as a whole, is freely and openly available, a reflection of Pauliceia 2.0’s commitment to the principles of Open Science.

Luis Ferla will return to UT in the coming weeks, where he and UNIFESP graduate student Luanna Mendes will give a public presentation about how Pauliceia 2.0 is helping to expand our understanding of the ways urban history can be produced and shared. The presentation brings together an array of constituencies across UT, including the co-sponsoring units: the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies, LLILAS Brazil Center, UT Open Source Program Office, and School of Architecture Community and Regional Planning program.

Banner/invitation to attend "Pauliceia 2.0", a talk by Dr. Luis Ferla and Luanna Mendes do Nascimento

While in Austin, Ferla and Mendes will also host a workshop in the interdisciplinary course “Bulldozed: Urban Destruction.” Cross-listed in African and African Diaspora Studies, the School of Architecture, and the School of Information, the spring 2026 version of the course will focus on São Paulo and Austin. Though they have many differences, of course, the cities also bear compelling similarities, especially a breakneck pace of urban transformation that involved widespread and much-debated demolitions. In addition to studying these cities’ histories, Bulldozed students will learn foundational skills of historical mapping and construct a layer to contribute to the Pauliceia 2.0 platform.

Andrew G. Britt is an Assistant Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. A historian of the Black diaspora with a focus on Latin America, his research centers on contemporary Brazil, digital humanities and emerging technologies, and spatial history.

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

Review of The Sewards of New York: A Biography of a Leading American Political Family (2025).

In The Sewards of New York, Thomas P. Slaughter offers a captivating exploration of the Seward family’s multifaceted place in the first half of the nineteenth century. Although not written as a traditional political biography, Slaughter emphasizes that “politics, and particularly the abolition of slavery” remains central to the Sewards’ collective story (p. 2). Slaughter looks beyond William Henry Seward’s political achievements in his roles as New York State Senator, Governor, U.S. Senator, and Secretary of State under Lincoln. Slaughter details a gendered history of a political family. He shifts the focus away from formal political record and toward the inner world of the Seward family, tracing the relationships, tensions, and experiences that shaped their lives.

Slaughter draws on newly rediscovered family correspondence and archival materials from the University of Rochester to illuminate the private world of William Henry Seward, his wife, Frances, their children, and broader family dynamics in Auburn, New York. Slaughter highlights that with the use of the “Seward family’s letters, we can look behind the curtain of the Victorian era’s private sphere to see life as it was experienced by other Americans” (p. 4). The book effectively argues that understanding the Seward family’s domestic life is essential to grasping the political landscape of their time. Through a rich tapestry of letters, the author connects the family’s personal experiences to significant societal changes, such as industrialization, expanding literacy, and evolving gender roles.

Book cover: The Sewards of New York (2025) by Thomas P. Slaughter

One of the strengths of the book is its accessibility. Slaughter combines scholarly rigor with engaging narration, making it suitable for both academic readers and general audiences. This is a testament to his deliberate effort to bridge the gap between academia and public readership, as evidenced by his recent transition to trade imprints. Reading through thousands of letters exchanged among multiple Seward family members over decades, Slaughter invites readers into the interwoven lives of a prominent political family navigating an intensely tumultuous moment in American history.

The narrative is not merely biographical; it highlights how private life was intertwined with the public sphere, especially during pivotal moments of life in the antebellum period and the Civil War. Slaughter’s exploration of Frances Seward is particularly striking in its engagement with a broader perspective on 19th-century gender roles and women’s leadership in the household. Slaughter emphasizes the sacrifices that the Seward family experienced as William Henry’s political career evolved; the Seward family began to “excuse his domestic limitations as son, sibling, husband, and father for the better part of another decade as prices they all had to pay for his dedication to the public interest” (p. 169).

Often overshadowed by her husband’s accomplishments, Frances emerges as a formidable force within the family, passionate, politically aware, and more progressive in her beliefs than her public persona suggests. Her correspondence sheds light on domestic ideals, gender constructions, and even spiritual movements of the era. While William Henry may have been the most famous Seward in Slaughter’s book, Frances’ story effectively takes center stage.

William Seward, Secretary of State, bw photo portrait circa 1860-1865

William Seward, Secretary of State of the U.S. Photo portrait ca. 1860-1865. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The book’s structure, supplemented by a detailed table of contents, allows readers to easily navigate through the family history from the 1820s to the early 1860s, making it ideal for those interested in case studies of political families. Each chapter covers a distinct period in the Sewards’ political and domestic lives. The themes of family ties, emotional resilience, and moral convictions are woven throughout, offering insights into how the Sewards navigated the complexities of their era, including issues of slavery and political upheaval.

A central theme in the Seward household is the private disconnect between Frances and William Henry. Slaughter’s detailed account restores Frances Seward’s agency, largely absent from the historical record for nearly two centuries. “Frances realized that it was not just his political ambition that kept her husband from home but rather his disdain for family life” (p. 239). Slaughter opens the reader to the perspective of life as a wife and family member of a significant political figure, and to the spiral of family issues that comes with it.

Portrait of Frances Adeline Miller Seward in 1844, by Henry Inman. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Slaughter’s The Sewards of New York is a poignant and enriching examination of a notable American political family. The author invites readers to engage with the Sewards not just as historical figures but as complex individuals whose lives reflect the broader societal transformations of their time. Unlike many political biographies, The Sewards of New foregrounds the domestic world that shaped nineteenth-century political life. Slaughter offers an example of how other authors may contribute by examining significant political families, focusing on how the historiography may shift depending on which figures are highlighted. It will undoubtedly serve as a valuable resource for anyone interested in early American history, political families, or the interplay between private life and public action.

Alec Ainsworth is a graduate student from Southern California in the Department of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He received a bachelor’s degree in American Studies and English at California State University, Fullerton.

Cold War Chronicles

What does a Catholic Cardinal sequestered in the US embassy in Budapest and the dead body of an American found in Prague’s Vltava River in the 1960s have in common? Characters in a true crime podcast? No, at least not yet. Instead, these are examples of lives (and lives lost) whose stories are buried in the voluminous files of the Lyndon B. Johnson Library on the University of Texas campus. In addition to a fantastic museum, the Library contains an extensive archive of over 45 million pages of documents from the LBJ administration, providing a unique insight into America’s global reach during the momentous 1960s. For those who don’t have time to visit the wonderfully Cold War modern building and its peaceful reading room, there is also a considerable digital collection. Substantial as it may be, at last count, the percentage of digitized material was still well under 1%, a figure that is understandable given the scope of the collection and the resources required to scan and process materials for public online access. I experienced firsthand these challenges when I initiated and managed Cold War Chronicles, a decade-long (and ongoing) digitization project of the LBJ materials related to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

The Cold War is best studied and researched as a deeply transnational phenomenon, in which both sides were constantly observing and directly or indirectly engaging the other side. If we study Eastern Europe only from its own sources, we miss half of the conversation. With that in mind, I began to explore the vast collections housed in the LBJ library over 15 years ago, mining it for documents related to my own research on Cold War-era Eastern Europe. I recall, for example, researching US-Eastern Bloc competition and engagement at Cold War trade fairs as part of my broader interest in consumption practices and patterns under socialism. I found a fascinating memo written by Anthony Solomon, LBJ’s influential financial policy advisor, who pushed for increased trade with the Bloc at a time when many Americans opposed it: “It is clear to me that it is in our best interest to take actions which help bring about a diversion of their resources from military and space programs to consumer goods…Who among us wouldn’t rather have Soviet workers making passenger cars instead of missiles?”^[1] Solomon seemed delighted by the idea of the Soviet citizens having to deal with traffic, parking issues, and their kids asking for the keys to the car. Indeed, new exchanges that exposed Eastern Bloc citizens to American consumer culture mushroomed under the LBJ administration, which led the Eastern Bloc to try (and fail) to “keep up.” I integrated this and other discoveries into my research as well as teaching on Cold War Eastern Europe, which foregrounds the permeability of the Iron Curtain, but also the East-West mutual preoccupations.

My research discoveries coincided with my assuming a new role as Director of the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (CREEES) in 2010. As director of CREEES, I had the pleasure of hosting and interacting with visiting scholars from Russia and Eastern Europe, many of whom were fascinated with the LBJ materials related to the former Eastern Bloc (and ex-Yugoslavia). These materials were cataloged in a rough guide created in 2009, which I still regularly consult. In 2014, I faced the daunting task of applying for a US Department of Education grant that would give CREEES the status of a National Resource Center (NRC). In preparing our proposal, we needed to think creatively about projects that would utilize the resources of UT relevant to the Eastern Bloc and ideally make them accessible to a much broader audience. We consulted with LBJ library archivists, who informed us that the repository’s documents are in the public domain, allowing us to digitize and post them on our site as desired. An LBJ documents digitization project was featured in our successful grant proposal, which gave CREEES the status of a National Resource Center (NRC) from 2014-2018, and again in 2018-22, and 2022-2026. The Cold War Chronicles project slowly but surely came to fruition.

Okay, but where to begin? The files related to the former Eastern Bloc were significant, and most of them were scattered among disparate collections, including those of Foreign Policy advisors like McGeorge Bundy and Walt Rostow, as well as collections on agriculture, trade, space, etc. There were also communications from heads of state, White House central files, and the list goes on. In the very beginning of the guide, however, there was an easy answer – the Country Files of the National Security collection. Given the concentrated nature of this set of documents, it made sense for us to digitize whole folders and boxes on each country of interest, as opposed to cherry-picking documents of interest. Thus, the online collection would be complete, allowing users to have a similar experience to being in the archive. Federal funds supplemented UT resources, which supported a (revolving) team of UT students and staff at CREEES and the UT libraries to scan, crop, tag, process, and post in Texas Scholar Works. By far the largest of these country collections was the USSR, with 15 boxes full of some 10,000 documents! Due to its sheer size, we decided to complete that collection last. As of fall 2025, it is still not available for public use, but it will be soon!

Instead, we started with Czechoslovakia, the largest and most significant of the Eastern Europe collections, because of the notable 1968 event, the so-called “Prague Spring” in which state reform snowballed into a popular movement for change to “socialism with a human face.” The result was a Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion of the country to crush the liberalized regime and its enthusiastic population. Indeed, our first iteration of a public website was on the Scalar platform, entitled “The Prague Spring Archive,” put together by Ian Goodale, who is currently the European Studies Librarian for the University of Texas Libraries. The LBJ documents shed light on day-by-day developments on the ground, the decision-making process around the US response, and the global reaction to this consequential set of events as the “Czechoslovak crisis.”

The Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia. Tanks burning. People carrying flags

The Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Source: Wikimedia Commons

After Czechoslovakia, we went country by country across the region–Yugoslavia, Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, and finally the USSR and East Germany. As of fall 2025, most country files have been digitized, and only the Soviet and East German files remain to be fully processed and posted online. The cache of digitized documents is permanently housed in the Texas Scholar Works (TSW) repository, a massive open-access collection of materials that UT faculty and students have authored, digitized, or collected. In addition to its ample storage capacity, the repository provides convenient features for its collection, such as author and date searchability. However, its interface is not particularly flexible or user-friendly, and it does not allow for any curation of our collection. For that reason, I spearheaded the new Cold War Chronicles website, which we launched this fall in collaboration with a team of CREEES staff and students.

Cold War Chronicles offers a user-friendly portal and guide to our entire TSW collection, designed for researchers, teachers, or enthusiasts of Cold War history. For researchers, we provide a detailed guide with clear instructions on the scope of the collection and how to navigate, access, and cite the documents. The site also includes country-specific landing pages with general overviews of the sub-collection contents and links to folder-by-folder descriptions. I have also included a link to other English-language online archives for Cold War research, with direct links to search pages and short notes on navigation in cases where usability is not intuitive.

These other archives are also linked to through the “teaching resource” page, which includes a series of assignments that I created while teaching my “Cold War Eastern Europe” course at UT in spring 2025 (note: the Soviet Union was not a focus of the course, and the materials reflect that). In these assignments, students are asked to work in “country” groups on in-class activities that require them to dig into various online archives to find answers to prompts on discrete phases in the Cold War. The teaching resources also include a link to a list of English-language memoirs related to communist Eastern Europe and a sample assignment for using them in a course. These teaching materials are flexible and appropriate for higher education, as well as high school curricula.

Returning to the Catholic Cardinal stuck in the Budapest embassy, one of the most interesting collections of country files in our archive is Hungary. The Hungarian Cardinal Josef Mindszenty, designated “venerable” by Pope Francis in 2019, is a famous and revered figure in Hungary today. He spoke truth to power against Fascism and Communism, and as a result was imprisoned by both wartime and postwar regimes in Hungary. Released from prison during the famous Hungarian Revolution of 1956 against Soviet domination, he took refuge in the US embassy when the Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest and remained there until 1971! During the LBJ years, he wrote frequent letters, such as the one to LBJ, who responded through the local chargé d’affaires. The complete set of letters offers a rich Cold War chronicle of this episode in history, in which the US was harboring an enemy of the state in Hungary while trying to broker detente with the Eastern Bloc.

Cardinal Mindszenty giving a public speech

Cardinal József Mindszenty, 1956. Source: Wikimedia Commons

As far as the body in the Vltava River, it was Charles E. Jordan, executive vice president for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), who was found on August 20, 1967. Jordan was reported missing five days prior while vacationing in Prague, a side trip from his JDC work in neighboring Romania. Although it was reported as a suicide by Czech authorities at the time, there has long been speculation as to the cause of death, and it is considered an unsolved murder by the JDC.

Stories such as Mindszenty’s and Jordan’s are just a select few that were once buried among the millions of documents in the carefully kept boxes under lock and key in the LBJ Library. Now, at least some of these chronicles are online for all to access, although there is so much more to discover for those who can make it to the nearly windless white tower perched on a hill on the east end of our campus. Cold War Chronicles will continue to evolve over the coming years. This has truly been a labor of love for me and the CREEES team, and we sincerely hope teachers and researchers make use of this unique collection!

^[1] Personal Papers of Anthony M. Solomon, East–West Trade, Box 1, file 1, p. 36. Lyndon Baines Johnson Library.

Mary Neuberger is the Mildred Hajek Vacek and John Roman Vacek Distinguished University Chair in Russian and Slavic Languages; Director of CREEES; and Chair of the Slavic & Eurasian Studies Department at UT Austin. Her research interests include urban culture, consumption, commodity exchange, and the history of truth at the intersection of science and religion in modern Eastern Europe, with a specialization in southeastern Europe.

Tapancos and Tradition: Remembering the Dead in Northwestern Mexico

When people outside of Mexico think of Día de Muertos, they often imagine something very specific: altars with multiple levels, covered in bright orange cempasúchil flowers, decorated sugar skulls, candles, and photos of the departed. It’s a beautiful image—one made globally familiar by films like Disney–Pixar’s Coco and even the opening sequence of the James Bond movie Spectre. These images have turned Día de Muertos into a global symbol of “Mexicanness,” blending heartfelt remembrance with cinematic spectacle. But they also tell only part of the story. Mexico is a vast and diverse country, and its ways of honoring the dead vary dramatically from one region to another.

There’s a common saying that “in the north, culture ends and the carne asada begins.” It’s usually meant as a joke, but it reflects how many people conceive of northern Mexico as less culturally developed when compared to the Indigenous and colonial legacies of the center and south. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. The north, and particularly the Yaqui and Mayo territories in Sonora and Sinaloa, hold some of the most fascinating and enduring traditions, especially concerning the remembering of the dead.

The Yaqui (or Yoeme) and Mayo (or Yoreme) peoples are two of the largest Indigenous groups in northwestern Mexico, living mainly along the Río Yaqui and Río Mayo valleys. Though distinct, they share close linguistic and cultural ties. For centuries, both groups have endured waves of encroachment—from colonial missions to persecution and extermination campaigns, and modern struggles over land and water rights.

Among the Yaqui and Mayo peoples, Día de Muertos has deep roots that blend Catholicism with Indigenous spiritual elements. The Jesuits, who arrived in the seventeenth century, left a long-lasting missionary legacy in the region. They introduced the Catholic calendar of saints, masses for the dead, and prayers for souls in purgatory—but these ideas intertwined with preexisting Indigenous understandings of the spirit world. The result is a complex, layered ritual cycle that lasts several weeks, involving tapancos (wooden altars built high above the ground), offerings of food, candles, and water, and collective gatherings and prayers in homes and cemeteries.

Yaqui cemetery. Source: author

When a Yaqui or Mayo person dies, a long spiritual process begins. Family members choose padrinos––often translated as “godparents,” though the term refers more broadly to ritual kin who sponsor key life events–– to help organize the funeral and the novenario—nine days of prayer that follow the burial. A year later, they hold the luto pajko, a ceremony marking the soul’s final passage into the Sewa Ania, or “Flower World.” During the year between death and the luto pajko, the spirit is believed to remain close to the living, not yet fully at rest. If Día de Muertos arrives before the luto pajko has taken place, the recently deceased are not yet included in the offerings, as inviting them too soon could prevent their soul from completing its journey.

For the Yaqui, the ritual cycle of the dead begins on October 1, when it is believed that souls begin their return to the world of the living. Members of the cofradía—local religious leaders who guide ceremonies in the absence of priests—build an altar draped in black cloth with a human skull placed on top. They then carry it from house to house, praying in what is called “the procession of the priest’s head”. This solemn procession happens every Monday throughout the month until the cycle concludes on November 30^th.

Among the Mayo, the cycle begins a bit later, on October 24, when families start building their tapancos. A tapanco is simpler than the elaborate altars most may imagine—it’s placed outside on the patio and built high above the ground, about 1.5 to 2 meters tall. Four posts of mesquite wood support a mat or plank where offerings are placed. The four posts symbolize the padrinos who once carried the coffin, while the height of the altar reflects the belief that souls descend from above to receive their offerings.

This elevated structure echoes pre-Hispanic funerary practices, when both the Yaqui and Mayo bid farewell to their dead on raised platforms before eventual cremation. When the Jesuit missionaries arrived, they prohibited cremation, but Indigenous communities found a compromise: they kept the vertical structure and the symbolic presence of fire, now represented by candles burning beneath the tapanco. Food, water, and flowers are placed on top. However, unlike the popular imagery seen in films like Coco, photographs of the deceased are rarely used— mainly because photos have historically been difficult to obtain.

Tapanco Yaqui in Torim. Source: author

On November 2, Día de Muertos, the cofradía makes its rounds from home to home, praying and reciting aloud the names written in each libro de las ánimas, a sacred family book kept by Yaqui and Mayo households, that records the names of deceased relatives. When the prayers conclude, they receive the offerings as a token of gratitude for their work throughout the month. The tapanco remains standing for several weeks afterward, until November 30, when it is believed that the souls return once more to the Sewa Ania.

These are the only Indigenous groups in northwestern Mexico with such deep traditions surrounding Día de Muertos. This distinctiveness can be explained, in part, by the Jesuit presence in the Yaqui and Mayo valleys, where evangelization took root more firmly than among other Indigenous communities of the north. Even for mestizo families in northwestern Mexico, for much of the twentieth century, it was rare to celebrate Día de Muertos in this way. My parents, for example, grew up more with Halloween than with altars. Living close to the U.S.–Mexico border meant that American culture seeped in easily—pumpkins, trick-or-treating, and dressing up often replaced alebrijes and cempasúchil. Most families would go to mass or visit the cemetery, but altars were rare.

This started to change around the turn of the century, when the Mexican Education System began promoting school projects in which children built altars modeled after those from central Mexico. Suddenly, Día de Muertos aesthetics appeared in classrooms, civic plazas, and even shopping malls. It was part of a broader national effort to “standardize” cultural practices and promote a shared sense of Mexicanness.

These new practices didn’t erase local customs in indigenous territory, but they did reshape how younger generations of mestizos in the north think about Día de Muertos. My generation grew up making altars at school, learning the symbolism of each level, and memorizing the meaning of every element—from salt and water to papel picado. In a sense, we learned a nationalized version of the celebration, one that connects us to a broader Mexican identity but sometimes distances us from our own regional histories.

“Ofrenda del Norte” (Northern Offering). Source: Wikimedia Commons

The projects of the Mexican education system did not affect the Yaqui and Mayo, largely because these communities tend to be reserved and resistant to outside cultural interventions, and because the policies were primarily aimed at mestizo populations to counter U.S. cultural influences rather than reshape Indigenous traditions. However, there has been little reflection or critique from the northern mestizo population itself, despite their pride in regional identity.

In places like the Yaqui and Mayo towns along the Río Yaqui and Río Mayo valleys, older traditions persist. There, the ceremonies remain community-centered, intimate, and deeply spiritual. The tapancos are still built. The souls of the dead are still awaited and welcomed home. And these practices remind us that the north has always been a region of cultural richness, adaptation, and resilience.

So perhaps there is culturally more to Northern Mexico than carne asada. The north is not a cultural void—it’s a crossroads. It’s where Indigenous, missionary, and transborder influences coexist, sometimes uneasily, sometimes harmoniously. Día de Muertos in the north may not always look like the ones in Oaxaca or Michoacán, but it carries the same essence: remembering, honoring, and reaffirming the ties that bind the living and the dead.

Raquel Torua Padilla is a doctoral student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She holds a B.A. in History from the Universidad de Sonora and is currently a CONTEX Fellow. Her research focuses on the history of the Yaqui people in the 19th and 20th centuries.

“How Did We Get Here” Panel

On Wednesday, September 10th, I moderated a webinar with notable immigration historians who situated the current presidential administration’s policing, detainment, and deportations of marginalized immigrants in conversation with the past.

  “How Did We Get Here? U.S. Immigration Historians Respond” brought together leading scholars of U.S. immigration history to reflect on the current environment of fear among immigrant communities in the United States. Panelists traced the evolution of immigration law and enforcement from the late 19th century to the present, highlighting the structural forces that have shaped the experiences of economic migrants, political and environmental refugees, and asylum seekers. As one presenter, Dr. Kang, asserted, “We have always been here.” Immigrant communities–both authorized and unauthorized–have always lived under constant fear that a change in administration and policy could upend their lives.

In the week leading up to the webinar, three significant events underscored the intensifying pressures on immigrant communities. On September 4th, 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) carried out the largest immigration raid in U.S. history at the Hyundai electric battery plant in Ellabell, Georgia, arresting 475 people–most of them South Korean nationals. Many reportedly had legal permission to work in the United States, yet ICE operations separated families, and children returned from school to find their parents had disappeared.^[1] The next day, the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals ruled that immigration judges no longer had authority to grant release on bond.^[2] This decision made detention mandatory for immigrants awaiting hearings, vastly expanding incarceration in already overcrowded detention centers and funneling even more public money to private prison companies.

Days later, on September 8th, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a federal ruling that had barred roving immigration stops in Los Angeles. In a 6-3 decision, the Court held that race, ethnicity, or speaking Spanish could be considered “relevant factors” in such stops, alongside factors such as where people work or congregate.^[3] The ruling appeared to sanction racial profiling, granting ICE wide discretion to detain individuals based on appearance, language, and perceived class. In her dissent, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned that this decision entrenches a system in which “the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low-wage job.”^[4]

The webinar featured Professors Maddalena Marinari (Gustavus Adolphus College; President of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society); Deborah Kang (University of Virginia); Sergio González (Marquette University); and Carl Lindskoog (Raritan Valley Community College) to speak to the UT Austin community. Each scholar spoke from their own expertise, such as 20th-century immigration policy (Marinari), the growth of immigrant policing (Kang), the rise of detention prisons (Lindskoog), and the resistance efforts by immigrant communities and their citizen allies in what is known as the U.S. Central American Sanctuary Movements (González).

The event was co-hosted by the Frontera Scholars Collective, the Department of History, the Department of American Studies, the Center for Asian American Studies, and the Latino Studies program. The event was also organized in collaboration with Dr. Cortez’s course, “Immigration and Ethnicity.”

Jonathan Cortez, Ph.D. is currently an Assistant Professor of History at The University of Texas at Austin. Their current manuscript, A Nation of Immigration Camps, details the history of vernacular and federally funded immigration camps along the U.S.-Mexico border from the late 19^th century to the late 20^thcentury.

^[1] Lydia DePillis and Hamed Aleaziz,”Georgia ICE Raid Netted Workers With Short-Term Businness Visas,” New York Times, September 12, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/12/business/economy/hyundai-raid-worker-visas.html#:~:text=Hyundai%20ICE%20Raid%20Detained%20Workers,raid%2Dworker%2Dvisas.html

^[2] Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney, “Immigration appeals court expands mandatory detention for millions,” Politico, September 5, 2025.

^[3] Lawrence Hurley, “Supreme Court lifts limits on roving immigration patrols in Los Angeles area,” NBC News, September 8, 2025. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/supreme-court-immigration-stops-los-angeles-rcna223845

^[4] American Immigration Council, “How the Supreme Court’s Latest Decision Clears the Way for Racial Profiling During Immigration Raids,” September 9, 2025. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/supreme-courts-decision-racial-profiling-immigration-raids/

Hidden Children and the Complexities of Jewish Identity

My grandmother, Ewa Janik, was born in late August 1942 to a Jewish family in the heart of Nazi-occupied Poland. As the Gestapo approached her family’s ghetto, her parents arranged for her to be smuggled away by members of a local underground organization opposing Nazi rule. From two weeks old, my grandmother was raised by a Catholic adoptive family, and she remained unaware of her true origins until the age of sixteen, when her surviving relatives hired a lawyer to contact her. Over the following decades, she reunited with her original family, eventually moving to the California Bay Area to live near her birth mother, who had escaped there after the war.

Ewa Janik’s story fits into the general category defined by Holocaust researchers as Hidden Children. At the onset of World War II, approximately 1.7 million Jewish children under the age of 16 were living in Europe, and would become major targets of Hitler’s genocidal agenda.^[1] As anti-Jewish policies were increasingly enforced in Nazi-occupied Europe, these children and their families adopted various strategies to evade German forces, and a significant portion survived by living in hiding. Those who were young or fair enough to blend in with the wider European society were able to hide “in plain sight,” sheltered by Christian families or religious organizations. After the war, these children often found themselves caught between two worlds, with conflicting cultural and familial ties to both their adopted Christian upbringings and their Jewish family heritage.

Janik with her adoptive mother Zosia, ca. 1945. Source: Zofia Graham

My grandmother has recorded her life story in several oral history interviews, both through the Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project in 1997 and in recent interviews with me. A major tool used by historians and memorial organizations, oral testimonies can help convey the personal and emotional experiences of Holocaust survivors in ways that written history often cannot. Analyzing individual stories provides insight into how survivors respond to their circumstances and how these effects can persist throughout their lifetimes. The topic of personal identity is a major theme throughout the testimonies of former Hidden Children, such as my grandmother, revealing the psychological impact of their shared childhood experiences on future self-conception.

My grandmother’s interviews reveal complex and changing attitudes toward her personal and cultural identities throughout her lifetime. Upon first learning of her history and original family as an adolescent, she describes feeling intense fear and instability, stating in her account of that time, “I always [felt] like I don’t have a ground under my feet. Something will happen and everything will collapse.” Due to the pain of this revelation, she expressed that she wished both sets of parents had taken greater pains to make sure she would not find out her history. These feelings reflect many Hidden Children’s experiences of alienation due to the fracturing of their childhood identities, as demonstrated by historical and psychological research on the subject. For example, a 2005 study by psychologists Marianne Amir and Rachel Lev-Wiesel revealed that child Holocaust survivors who lost their prewar identities faced significantly higher rates of depression and anxiety compared to those who knew their birth families.

After discovering her Jewish identity, my grandmother faced additional difficulties due to the resistance from her adoptive parents. Even after the secret was revealed, her parents refused to acknowledge or speak about the topic, viewing such questions as an affront to the effort they put into raising her. As she began communicating with her birth relatives, she had to proceed in secret, and she shared the great pain this brought her, stating, “I felt like both my mothers would cut me in half.” Even as an adult in 1997, she expressed shame for hurting her adoptive family by moving to the United States, stating that “no matter what I do and where I am, I’m here and my mother in Poland is hurting.”

Cultural and religious identifications presented another source of strain. Unlike many Hidden Children, my grandmother was not raised in an antisemitic environment. Still, she had little knowledge of Judaism as a child, and what little she knew was influenced by the society around her. In our recent interview, she described an instance from her childhood when another child called her Jewish in a derogatory way, and she didn’t understand what he meant or why he was saying it. Once she learned of her true heritage, she had to become newly acquainted with Judaism as a member of the community, and with new traditions and practices which were completely foreign to her.

Janik with her biological mother Irene, 1978. Source: Zofia Graham

These cultural differences brought on struggles when trying to reconnect with her biological family. She describes the difficulty of her first visits to the United States, when she finally met with her American-born siblings, but had no language with which to communicate or the ability to understand their vastly different life perspectives. Such experiences of separation led her to speak negatively about her divided identities in her 1997 interview, stating, “What else is painful, that I belong to two cultures, and I don’t belong anywhere really.”

However, despite these challenges, my grandmother has more recently emphasized the positive aspects of her mixed cultural identities. She has become more comfortable claiming her Jewish identity along with her Polish one, largely through the help of her American Jewish family, who she has always described as supportive and accepting of both their cultural differences and commonalities. She celebrated her ability to traverse and learn from multiple cultural and religious communities, reflecting that this perspective has allowed her to see the value in multiple traditions and beliefs without becoming attached to dogma. These constructive takeaways are also reflected in the academic literature. While much research studying Hidden Children has rightly focused on their trauma and pain, there is also significant evidence for the resilience and success of this group. Psychiatrist and researcher Robert Krell describes the “enduring mystery” of how child Holocaust survivors have been able to find general success as adults despite their immeasurable trauma in early development.^[2] Perhaps the influence of distinct cultures and life perspectives in the development of Hidden Children has played a part in their lasting psychological fortitude.

Janik (third from left) with her siblings, 2024. Source: Zofia Graham

This past summer, my entire extended family returned to Poland, where my grandmother led us through sites from our family’s history: her birth parents’ apartment in the Jewish Ghetto, the work camp where her mother was held during the war, and the memorial site where Nazi soldiers shot her biological father at the start of the occupation. These recollections brought back pain and trauma for all involved, but my grandmother reflected with surprise that her loved ones’ care and interest in these stories helped to ease her mental toil. For someone who felt alone for much of her life, the ability to share the burden of the past with all of her diverse family members has been an essential element in healing.

Zofia Graham is a 4th year undergraduate student at UT Austin. She is majoring in Linguistics and Plan II Honors, with a minor in Law, Justice, and Society. Her research mainly focuses on Latin American linguistics and language policy, but she has enjoyed diving more into her family history through this project.

^[1] Greenfeld, Howard. The Hidden Children. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1993, p. 2.

^[2] Glassner, Martin Ira, Robert Krell, and Holocaust Child Survivors of Connecticut. And Life Is Changed Forever: Holocaust Childhoods Remembered. Edited by Martin Ira Glassner and Robert Krell ; Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006, p. 8.

Additional bibliography:

Amir, Marianne, and Rachel Lev-Wiesel. “Does Everyone Have a Name? Psychological Distress and Quality of Life Among Child Holocaust Survivors with Lost Identity.” Journal of Traumatic Stress 14, no. 4 (October 2001): 859–69.https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1013010709789.

Janik, Ewa. Interview by Author. April 3, 2025.

Janik, Ewa. “Oral history interview with Ewa Janik.” By Liz and Peter Ryan. The Bay Area Holocaust

Oral History Project. March 23, 1997. https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn508375 Libicki, Henry. Remembering my Parents. Self-published. 2010.

Long Before the Field: Community, Memory, and the Making of Public History

This article is part of the series: History beyond Academia

The term “public history” entered my vocabulary only after I moved to the United States, where it designates a well-defined professional field. In Latin America, by contrast, similar practices have long existed without requiring a defined institutional/formal designation. Communities have always engaged in the making and sharing of history through oral traditions, local museums, memory collectives, and neighborhood archives, public talks, among so many others. People have narrated their pasts, not necessarily within academic frameworks, but as acts of survival, resistance, and belonging. These longstanding traditions invite reflection on when and why the need emerged to name such practices “public history”, and what it means when collective forms of remembrance become institutionalized as fields or disciplines.

Public history, as a professionalized field, took shape in the 1970s in English-speaking countries, particularly the United States, as a means to bridge academic research and broader social engagement. As James Gardner and Paula Hamilton note, it encompasses both university-based training and work across museums, heritage sites, government agencies, and digital initiatives. Early definitions emphasized historical practice conducted “outside the ivory tower” for public audiences, but the field has since diversified to include participatory, activist, and civic-oriented approaches. Its growth has been shaped by national contexts, memory politics, and the expansion of heritage industries—each underscoring the social, political, and ethical stakes of historical work in public life.^[1]

This institutionalization of public history resonates with ideas articulated much earlier by Carl Becker in his 1931 address to the American Historical Association, Everyman His Own Historian. Becker argued that all humans interpret the past through memory and imagination, and that historical understanding is not the exclusive domain of professionals but part of a shared human effort to make sense of experience^_.[2] Recognizing this broader agency calls for humility rather than gatekeeping—a lesson that resonates with practices in Mexico, where the work of cronistas—local historians and chroniclers devoted to preserving the histories of towns and municipalities—has long been central to civic and cultural life.

An aerial view of Guelatao de Juarez, Oaxaca and its surroundings

An aerial view of Guelatao de Juarez, Oaxaca. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Within Latin America, scholars and historians—especially those working in public institutions—often see their research as part of a reciprocal relationship with the communities that ultimately fund and sustain their work. This reciprocation, and therefore responsibility, reflects a broader understanding that history is not produced solely by, and for, academic peers but also for the publics who inhabit and inherit its narratives. Such accountability offers an important lesson for public history internationally: that historical practice flourishes when it remains responsive to the people and places it seeks to represent.

This ethos is not unique to Latin America. Across the world, long before “public history” entered academic vocabulary, communities across the world were already generating their own forms of historical knowledge. The telling of history was never confined to universities or formal institutions. It lived in plazas, churches, community centers, and homes; it was sustained through storytelling, ritual, and collective memory. These practices were often carried forward by teachers, activists, Indigenous elders, and neighborhood leaders who understood history as a means of continuity, belonging, and survival.

Even within the United States, some of the earliest public history initiatives originated outside academia. African American museums such as the DuSable Black History Museum in Chicago, founded by Margaret Burroughs in 1961, or the African American Museum in Philadelphia, grew directly out of the civil rights movement and the effort to preserve histories neglected by mainstream institutions. These projects—grassroots, activist, and often underfunded—demonstrate that engagement with the past has long served as a form of political work as much as cultural expression. In many ways, it is the later institutionalization of public history—its adoption and formalization within universities and professional associations—that represents the anomaly. Yet this framework has been embraced, sometimes uncritically, in countries where community-based and independent initiatives had long flourished, often to the detriment of those same grassroots efforts and the pluralism they sustained.

The first home of the DuSable Museum of African American History was located in this house, built for Chicago contractor John W. Griffiths in 1892 and purchased by Charles and Margaret Burroughs in 1959, who opened part of their home for the public museum

The DuSable Museum of African American History began in this 1892 house, purchased by Charles and Margaret Burroughs in 1959, who opened part of their home to the public as a museum. Source: Wikimedia Commons

When the field of public history was formalized in the 1970s within U.S. universities, it offered institutional recognition, professional pathways, and a common language for collaboration. These developments were invaluable for advocacy and training. Yet they should not obscure the longer, global genealogies of community-based historical practice. The move to define and credential public history can, unintentionally, overshadow the traditions that preceded it—traditions that continue to challenge academic hierarchies and broaden understandings of who can produce and interpret history. Recognizing these antecedents reminds us that public history, at its best, is not an invention of the academy but an extension of longstanding efforts to remember, interpret, and claim the past.

In recent years, universities and cultural institutions have increasingly embraced public-facing projects—exhibitions, digital archives, oral history collections, and outreach programs designed to engage wider audiences. These initiatives have expanded access to historical knowledge and reinforced the social relevance of scholarship. Yet they often remain shaped by institutional logics: funding cycles, curatorial frameworks, and professional protocols that determine how stories are told and what counts as legitimate evidence. Their tone is often careful and curated, designed to invite participation while maintaining institutional authority.

Community-based projects, in contrast, frequently emerge from lived experience and collective need. They are sustained by urgency rather than funding, by care rather than formal mandate. Small local museums, cronistas municipales, and memory collectives exemplify such work. Their exhibitions may be improvised and their archives incomplete, yet they possess an immediacy and intimacy that make them vital spaces of historical continuity. They assert the right to self-representation and challenge the notion that only institutions can authorize history. These practices are not merely nostalgic; they are acts of preservation, repair, and political presence.

Our Famous people display at the Northeast Texas Rural Heritage Museum

Northeast Texas Rural Heritage Museum. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Acknowledging these distinctions is not about opposing the academic and the communal, but about recognizing that they operate through different epistemologies and responsibilities. Academic public history often interprets the past for the public; community-based projects tend to interpret it with the public—or, more precisely, as the public. This difference shapes not only the narratives we construct but also the relationships of trust and authority embedded within them.

The term public history has opened many doors. It has enabled scholars to frame their work through collaboration, to reach broader audiences, and to affirm the social value of history within institutions that often privilege theory over practice. The label provides visibility, resources, and a shared vocabulary for those working at the intersection of history, education, and engagement. These are invaluable contributions, and the growing community of public historians has helped redefine what it means to be accountable to the public.

At the same time, it is worth remembering that the impulse behind public history—the desire to connect the past with everyday life—is not new. Long before it became a field, people around the world were already practicing it: telling stories, preserving memories, teaching, and caring for their histories in ways that were collective and deeply local. To name these practices public history is not to claim them as new inventions, but to acknowledge and learn from those who have sustained them all along.

If public history offers one enduring lesson, it is humility. Historians do not possess the past; we share it with everyone who remembers, narrates, and imagines. Our task is not only to speak, but to listen—to build spaces where many histories can coexist. Whatever name we give it, public history is ultimately about relationships rather than audiences, collaboration rather than outreach. Perhaps the most meaningful contribution scholars can make is to remember that we are joining a much older conversation. Public history did not begin with us; it began with the understanding that memory itself is a form of care. Our responsibility is to help sustain that care into the future.

^[1] Gardner, James B., and Paula Hamilton, editors. The Oxford Handbook of Public History. Oxford University Press, 2017.

^[2] Becker, Carl. “Everyman His Own Historian”, American Historical Review 37, no. 2, p. 221–36: https://www.historians.org/presidential-address/carl-l-becker/

History Beyond Academia: Series Announcement

Banner for history beyond academia.
Features a collage image with a sculpture of Herodotus head on a National Park ranger body, with a microphone beside it and a painted field in the background.

We are excited to announce the upcoming History Beyond Academia series, curated by Associate Editor Raquel Torua Padilla. This series explores how history reaches people outside universities, showing how it is transmitted, shared, and sustained through public projects, community initiatives, and oral traditions.

Contributors will reflect on a range of projects and practices that reveal the impact of engaging with history in non-academic settings. Taken together, these essays highlight the creative and varied ways history connects with communities and shapes collective memory.

History Beyond Academia presents history as a living practice that moves beyond classrooms and archives into neighborhoods, stories, and daily life. It invites readers to consider how history is shared, who carries it forward, and why it continues to matter.

Watch this space for new feature articles coming soon.

Review of Surgery and Salvation. The Roots of Reproductive Injustice in Mexico 1770-1940 (2023).

Banner for Surgery and Salvation (book review)

In Surgery and Salvation, O’Brien traces the history of reproductive injustice in Mexico, taking a longue durée approach extending from the late colonial period through post-revolutionary state formation. She focuses on reproductive surgeries and how women’s bodies—particularly those of poor and Indigenous women—became laboratories for medical experimentation, religious morality, and eugenic population control.

Much historical scholarship on reproductive control focuses on eugenics, a pseudo-scientific movement that flourished in post-revolutionary Mexico in the 1930s. It sought to “improve” the population for nation-building purposes by promoting the reproduction of the “fittest.” During this time, medical authority over the body was already well consolidated. O’Brien broadens the chronological scope and focuses on periods where claims of authority over definitions of citizenship, personhood, life, and death were being contested, such as the process of secularization during the Liberal Reform of the 1850s and state-making post-Revolution (1921-1940).

Structured in five parts, the book argues that surgical technology was seen as a means for salvation in three distinct and chronological ways: saving unborn souls under the Church’s rule during the late 18^th and early 19^th century; saving the honor of elite unwed women during the reform in the 1850s and the Porfiriato (authoritarian military dictatorship from 1876 to 1911); and saving the nation from the reproduction of “ undesirable” citizens in the aftermath of the revolution, from 1921 to 1940.

O’Brien shows how reproduction was stratified along lines of race and class, resulting in marginalized women disproportionately subjected to coercive reproductive practices. She traces the performance of cesarean operations on dead and dying women to salvage the soul of the fetus, ovariotomy as a medicalized solution for hysteria, and experimental ‘therapeutic’ abortions (those performed for medical reasons). She also examines hysterectomies for unwed elite women, obstetric violence, vaginal bifurcation, tubal ligation, and eugenic sterilization to manage the size and composition of the population. Notably, she challenges the prevailing notion that state-led eugenic forced sterilizations were not widespread in Mexico.

The concept of reproductive governance—the entanglement of social, economic and political structures that produce and regulate reproductive practices— serves as a framework to understand how different powerful actors across centuries tried to control and surveil reproduction. Throughout the book, she traces a throughline that links women’s bodies to modernization, development, and state-building, showing how women were cast as the bearers of the nation, their bodies tasked with producing and embodying national aspirations. Accordingly, the fetus also underwent shifting symbolic meanings, from a religious subject in the hands of the Church in the late colonial period to a biological object as seen from the eyes of secularized technocratic elites to potential citizens that would build postrevolutionary Mexico. At each stage, women’s bodies were the tools, but their needs, desires for autonomy, and sheer personhood were rendered an obstacle—something to be managed, medicalized, and intervened in service of state goals.

Hospital de San Andrés. 1905. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The book draws from an impressive range of sources, from ecclesiastical and mission records to medical students’ theses and hospital records. When describing her sources, she reflects on the voices they contain and the silences they produce, critiquing the fact that most represent the perspectives of elite men. In line with feminist history and methods, she relies on creative pathways to access patients’ voices and the “resistance echoes,” as she calls them, contained in her sources. In this case, resistance materialized in complaints women submitted about medical malpractice. She approaches these stories with care, empathy, and a historical sensibility that reminds us of these people’s lives beyond being reduced to patients of these surgical interventions. Her focus on resistance, pain, grief, and the harms of scientific racism—pseudoscience used to justify racial hierarchies—prevents the reader from becoming desensitized to the injustices she describes.

Challenging the assumption that Mexico was a mere receptacle of European scientific knowledge, practice, and ideologies, the author argues that powerful local actors crafted idiosyncratic yet transnational theories, techniques, and networks, particularly around race. For instance, she traces continuities between American anti-Black medical racism and anti-Indigenous discrimination in Mexican healthcare. This racist logic was not strictly biological. Mexico’s ethnic history and categorization made for medical epistemologies that had a slippery, flexible notion of race. It drew not only on biologized difference but on more diffuse notions of hygiene, class, culture, education, and language. In this context, it was not contradictory to romanticize indigenismo—a political ideology that seeks to celebrate Indigenous legacy while assimilating Indigenous peoples into the nation-state—as a cultural heritage while mistreating Indigenous women.

Class and its entanglements with race emerges as another powerful stratifying line in O’Brien’s narrative. The growth of ‘therapeutic’ abortion, artificial premature birth, and hysterectomies for elite unwed women in the Liberal Reform period illustrates how women’s reproductive lives and medical intervention were enmeshed with gendered notions of middle-class feminine respectability. When these elite women asked for sterilization, they were met with refusal, while poor and Indigenous women were coercively sterilized. Doctors became gatekeepers of gender and agents of the state, using their expert authority to morph the population in line with the racial and class-based desires of the nation.

Indigenous woman walking down the street

An Indigenous woman walking in Mexico. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Surgery and Salvation’s focus on technology illuminates how surgical knowledge developed hand in hand with racist, classed, and gendered notions of women’s bodies as sites of intervention. Technology became a means to turn subjective biases into objective, quantifiable “evidence” with the help of techniques such as craniometry or pelvimetry, giving social hierarchies the veneer of science.

O’Brien ends the book by taking us to the present day, where reproductive injustice is still a reality with a history that stretches back well over 200 years. At the same time, she highlights how contemporary feminist advocacy and long-standing activist efforts have contributed to a tremendous wave of abortion legalization throughout Latin America. This transformation is currently afoot and redefining the reproductive justice landscape in the region.

Surgery and Salvation. The Roots of Reproductive Injustice in Mexico 1770-1940 is an outstanding book that reminds us that reproductive injustice is not a thing of the past. It shows the dangers of thinking about women’s bodies as tools for science and state-building in a history that should serve as a cautionary tale for contemporary debates about fertility decline and shifting legal landscapes around reproductive rights in Mexico, the U.S., and around the globe.

Daniela Sánchez is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at The University of Texas at Austin. She is a Mellon/ACLS and Fulbright-García Robles fellow. Her research examines reproductive governance around abortion in contemporary Mexico. Before joining the department, Daniela was a consultant for UN Women-Mexico.

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.

The Forgotten Spanish-Cuban Contribution to American Independence: Francisco de Saavedra and the Silver of Havana

When British forces surrendered at Yorktown in 1781, few would have imagined that the decisive blow had been financed not from Paris or Philadelphia, but from Havana. Behind this unexpected twist stood Francisco de Saavedra, a Spanish official whose name is absent from most American textbooks but whose actions helped change the course of the war.

Though he never set foot on the battlefield, Saavedra played a key role in securing the American victory. His contribution was strategic and financial, and it unfolded in the colonial capital of Cuba—a city that, by the late 18th century, had become the financial and military nerve center of Spain’s Caribbean empire.

Siege of Yorktown. 1781. Source: Wikimedia Commons

An Empire Without Liquidity

By the summer of 1781, the War of American Independence was reaching its climax. The American revolutionaries, aided by France and Spain through the Bourbon Family Compact, were preparing for a final strike. General Washington and his French counterpart, the Comte de Rochambeau, were planning a coordinated assault against British General Cornwallis at Yorktown, with naval support from Admiral de Grasse.

But there was a problem: France had no money. The French state, deeply indebted and fiscally strained, could not supply the fleet in the Caribbean in time. De Grasse needed funds to sail north, transport troops, and maintain the campaign. Without immediate financing, the entire operation—and perhaps the independence movement—would collapse.

Enter Saavedra in Havana

At this critical moment, Spain’s Caribbean presence proved decisive. In June 1781, following a desperate request from Admiral de Grasse, the Spanish authorities in Havana organized an extraordinary fundraising effort. In just a few days, half a million silver pesos were collected from merchants, landowners, and colonial officials—a sum that allowed the French fleet to sail north and support the allied siege of Yorktown.

Although Francisco de Saavedra was not yet in Havana during this crucial episode, his name would soon become central in the broader logistical and strategic coordination that followed. Saavedra had earlier been captured by the British while on a secret diplomatic mission in Jamaica. After his release and return to Spain, he gained prestige within the court of Charles III and held several important metropolitan posts. In 1782, he was appointed Royal Commissioner to the Caribbean, with broad powers to oversee Spain’s military and financial contributions to the war effort.

Francisco de Saavedra by Goya (1798). Source: Wikimedia Commons

A close ally of Bernardo de Gálvez, Saavedra established himself in Havana as a key figure in maintaining and expanding Spain’s support for the allied cause. He coordinated the flow of silver, troops, and supplies between New Spain, Cuba, Louisiana, and Venezuela—a complex imperial logistics network that kept the pressure on British positions in the Gulf and the Atlantic. Though not present for the initial fundraising that made Yorktown possible, he ensured that this type of transatlantic mobilization could continue throughout the final stages of the war.

Havana: A Hub of Empire

By the late 18th century, Havana had become one of the most important cities in the Spanish Empire. It was a strategic port, a fortified military bastion, and the financial capital of the Caribbean. Silver from New Spain (now Mexico), goods from across the Atlantic, and fleets bound for Spain passed through its harbor. Its local elite was wealthy, loyal, and deeply embedded in imperial networks. It was in this setting that Saavedra found both the material resources and the political support to act quickly and decisively.

Map of Havana 1798. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Why We Should Remember Saavedra

Saavedra’s name rarely appears in English-language accounts of the American Revolution. Yet his story reminds us that military victories often rely not only on generals and battles, but also on the invisible work of diplomacy, imperial logistics, and financial coordination. As Royal Commissioner in Havana and trusted envoy of the Spanish Crown, Saavedra helped sustain the momentum of allied operations during the final phase of the war—and exemplified a model of enlightened statecraft that deserves to be remembered.

More broadly, Saavedra’s intervention points to a neglected truth: the American struggle for independence was not only transatlantic but also transimperial. Cuba, as part of the Spanish Empire, played an indirect but essential role in this history. By recovering figures like Saavedra, we begin to see how interconnected the revolutionary era really was—not just through battles and declarations, but through the flow of silver, the logic of empires, and the resolve of men who could see beyond the moment.

It is worth noting that while other Spanish figures involved in the American Revolution have received significant recognition—such as Bernardo de Gálvez, who was granted honorary U.S. citizenship and has a portrait hanging in the U.S. Capitol — Francisco de Saavedra remains virtually unknown. This silence is striking given Saavedra’s extraordinary contributions to King Charles III and, later, to Charles IV and Ferdinand VII.

Bernardo de Gálvez. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Saavedra was a product of the Spanish Enlightenment. A native of Seville, he was not only a soldier and diplomat but also an intellectual deeply involved in reformist Bourbon politics. He served the Spanish Crown in various high-ranking positions, including Minister of Finance, Secretary of State, and a member of the Council of Regency. His long career reflected both competence and trust from the monarchy across successive reigns.

He was also appointed Royal Commissioner for the Americas, a role that attests to his influence and the responsibility he was given over the Spanish colonial world. His close involvement in the expulsion of the British from the Gulf of Mexico and his role in the financial support to the North American insurgents show his strategic vision and loyalty to Spain’s imperial interests.

Why has his name faded into obscurity? Part of the answer lies in the geopolitical caution of the Spanish crown at the time. Spain supported the American rebels with discretion, avoiding overt declarations that might incite revolutionary sentiments within its own American territories. The fear that Britain could exploit discontent in the Spanish colonies was not unfounded. Indeed, just a few decades later, British influence would play a substantial role in the fragmentation of the Spanish Empire in the Americas, encouraging the emergence of independent republics rather than a unified post-imperial federation. In many ways, Spain’s restrained involvement in the American Revolution was both a show of imperial strength and a prelude to the anxieties that would define its own age of revolutions.

The marginalization of Saavedra’s legacy also reflects the broader persistence of Anglo-American historical narratives that have long characterized Spain’s imperial role through the lens of “Spanish misrule.” In such accounts, Spanish governance is often portrayed as backward, despotic, or inefficient—especially when contrasted with the supposed rationality and liberty of the Anglo-American tradition. Yet Saavedra’s actions in Havana, his administrative competence, and his vision of imperial coordination reveal a more complex and capable form of statecraft than the caricature suggests.

José A. Adrián is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Málaga (Spain), specializing in language as a cognitive phenomenon and in its oral and written disorders. In addition to his academic work, he maintains a strong interest in history and the role of Spain in the Americas.

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