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Not Even Past

Slavery World Wide: Collected Works from Not Even Past

Slavery and the slave trade transformed the world.  According to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 million African women, men and children were shipped across the Atlantic to North and South America as slaves.  As many as 2 million died in transit. In recent years, historians have started to investigate slavery in other contexts. While the Atlantic slave trade was vast, slavery was a truly global phenomenon appearing in diverse regions. Not Even Past offers a range of book reviews, articles, and podcasts related to slavery.  They engage issues as varied as capitalism, labor, race, gender, and love, among others.  We hope this collection can act as a resource for teachers looking to build their curriculum, and portal for all readers interested in new writing and scholarly debates

Books on Slavery

Blacks of the Land: Indian Slavery, Settler Society, and the Portuguese Colonial Enterprise in South America by John M. Monteiro (2018)
Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South, by Barbara Krauthamer (2013)
Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner on the Ohio by Nikki M. Taylor (2016)
Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World; Angola and Brazil during the Era of the Slave Trade by Roquinaldo Ferreira (2012)
Madeleine’s Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets and Lies in France’s Indian Ocean Colonies, by Sue Peabody (2017) 
Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert (2015)
Slaves and Englishmen, by Michael Guasco (2014)
Quilombo dos Palmares: Brazil’s Lost Nation of Fugitive Slaves, by Glenn Cheney (2014) – by Edward Shore
Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslin Uprising of 1835 in Bahia by João José Reis (1993) – by Michael Hatch
Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property (2002) – by Daina Ramey Berry and Jermaine Thibodeaux

Articles on Slavery

Love in the Time of Texas Slavery – by María Esther Hammack
White Women and the Economy of Slavery – by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
The Public Archive: The Paperwork of Slavery – Galia Sims
US Survey Course: Slavery
Slavery and Race in Colonial Latin America
Slavery and its Legacy – by Mark Sheaves
#Blacklivesmatter Till They Don’t: Slavery’s Lasting Legacy – by Daina Ramey Berry and Jennifer L. Morgan
Slavery in America: Back in the Headlines – by Daina Ramey Berry
Andrew Cox Marshall: Between Slavery and Freedom in Savannah – by Tania Sammons

Slavery and Freedom in Savannah – by Leslie M. Harris and Daina Ramey Berry
The Cross-Cultural Exchange of Atlantic Slavery – by Samantha Rubino
Visualizing Emancipation(s): Mapping the End of Slavery in America – by Henry Wiencek
Daina Ramey Berry on Slavery, Work and Sexuality
Great Books on Slavery, Abolition, and Reconstruction – by Jacqueline Jones
The Littlefield Lectures: The Van and the Read: Abolitionists Roots of Radical Reconstruction (Day 1)
The Littlefield Lectures: The Van and the Rear: Abolitionists Roots of Radical Reconstruction (Day 2)
The Price for Their Pound of Flesh – by Daina Ramey Berry
The Illegal Slave Trade in Texas, 1808-1865 – by Maria Esther Hammack 
Glimpsed in the Archive and Known no More: One Indian Slave’s Tale – by Sumit Guha
Mapping the Slave Trade: The New Archive (No. 10)  – by Henry Wiencek
The Emancipation Proclamation and its Aftermath
Work Left Undone: Emancipation was not Abolition – by George Forgie
“Captive Fates: Displace American Indians in the Southwest Borderlands, Mexico, and Cuba, 1500-1800” – by Paul Conrad

Film Reviews

“12 Years a Slave” and the Difficulty of Dramatizing the “Peculiar Institution” – by Jermaine Thibodeaux
Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) – by Daina Ramey Berry

Great Books on Enslaved Life and Labor in the US – by Daina Ramey Berry

Podcasts on Slavery

Episode 120: Slave-Owning Women in the Antebellum U.S.

Episode 114: Slavery in Indian Territory

Episode 105: Slavery and Abolition

Episode 98: Brazil’s Treatro Negro and Afro-Brazilian Identity 

Episode 88: The Search for Family Lost in Slavery

Episode 70: Slavery and Abolition in Iran

Episode 54: Urban Slavery in the Antebellum U.S.

Episode 42: The Senses of Slavery

Compiled by Jesse Ritner, updated by Adam Clulow

Panel: “From the May Fourth Movement to the Communist Revolution”

The year 2019 marks the 100th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement and the 70th anniversary of the ending of the Communist Revolution in China. Beginning with the unreserved embrace of Western values by “enlightenment” intellectuals, the three decades following World War I in China witnessed dramatic transformation on all fronts, ending in the establishment of a communist government that would rule China to the present day. To make sense of the impacts and legacies of these two historical events as well as the ironies and contradictions that were intrinsic to them, our panelists will discuss the impact of the May Fourth movement on social and intellectual life in Republican China, the opportunities and dilemmas that confronted Chinese women in their involvement in the Communist Revolution, and the strategy and tactics behind Communist success in the Civil War in 1949.

Featuring:

“Rethinking of the May Fourth Discourse: Family, Marriage and Women in the Chinese Revolution”
Xiaoping Cong
Professor of History
University of Houston

“The Making of “Youth” in Modern China: Reflections on the May Fourth Movement”
Iris Ma
Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer, Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs
University of Texas at Austin

“From 1919 to 1949: The May 4th Movement and Communist Strategy and Tactics in China’s Civil War”
Harold Tanner
Professor of History
University of North Texas

Huaiyin Li, moderator
Professor of History
University of Texas at Austin


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.

Love in the Time of Texas Slavery

By María Esther Hammack

An earlier version of this story was published on Forth Part of the World.

I wasn’t looking to find a story of abounding love when researching violent episodes of Texas history. Then I ran across a Texas newspaper article that shed a brief light on the lives of a Black woman and a Mexican man who had lived as husband and wife in the 1840s, twenty-five miles northeast of Victoria, Texas. She was a woman forced to live in bondage in Jackson County, near the town of Texana, in present day Edna, Texas. Her husband was a Mexican man who was likely indentured, employed, or a peon in that same vicinity.

The report, unsurprisingly, did not fully document their lives, experiences, or bonds of intimacy. It did, however, document a glimpse of two lives whose stories and relationship often go untold in the archive. This glimpse and the many questions the source delivered compelled me to further explore this couple’s relationship and harrowing flight to freedom. As a historian whose work investigates the experiences of enslaved and free Black women, men, and children who sought freedom across transnational frontiers, I wanted to learn more about this couple. I was interested in knowing more about the woman and her origins. Was she born enslaved in Texas? How long was she held in bondage near Texana? Had she tried to run to freedom before? What was her trade? How many languages did she speak? The archive has a history of silencing the Black experience and Texas has historically engaged in a disconcerting suppression of its Black past. Answers to my many questions, therefore, proved daunting tasks that led me to creative ways to study this couple’s narrative. I turned to investigate the environment and history of the geographic localities where this woman was held in order to learn more about her life, what she may have witnessed, and her tragic journey to freedom.

A 1856 map of Jackson County, Texas depicting Texana, Texas
1856 Jackson County TX Map showing Texana. Texas General Land Office.

The region where this courageous Black woman was held enslaved had been largely inhabited by Tonkawa and Lipan Apache tribal communities up until the 1830s, when they were unsettled by a group of Anglo colonizers who arrived as part of Stephen F. Austin’s Old Three Hundred colonization program. In 1832, these Anglo-settlers led the Sandy Creek assault against the native communities living in the area and destroyed remaining Tonkawa and Lipan Apache settlements. Six slave holding families, originally from Alabama, consolidated power over the area. These six families redeveloped the region’s agricultural, cattle, and trading industries through the labor of the people they held in bondage. Was this fearless Black woman brought enslaved from Alabama? Was her family forced to move to Texas alongside her? How did she come to meet the Mexican man? It is likely that she was forced to toil in both sugar and cotton crops, staples that turned high profits in Jackson County during that time. Perhaps she may have worked in any of the many groups of enslaved people who packed, prepared and carried the products of said crops to the local port on the Lavaca River. She may have played a central role in the trade that was sent out weekly on the steamboat that ran from Texana, through the pass of Matagorda Bay, to other parts of Texas, Louisiana and the Gulf South.

This daring woman was one of hundreds of enslaved individuals who turned this locality into a successful trading hub. In the early 1850s, Texana was made the seat of Jackson County, a place that became an important military and trading center that linked Texas to the rest of the US South. During that period, 34% of its population was enslaved, and only a decade later, in the 1860s, the enslaved population had risen to be half of the total population because cotton and sugar drove the land’s economic affluence. After the Civil War, when slavery ended, this prosperous area, developed by enslaved people, became a ghost town. Yet, in 1848, when this story takes place, the region was booming and welcoming of visitors and settlers, except Black and Brown. The people governing the county were certainly hostile to enslaved and free Blacks and expressly militant against settlers of Mexican descent. Interestingly, the Mexican man in this story, by 1848, had managed to live across that county for several years. Why? What was his experience upon arrival? How did he end up living in Jackson County, Texas?  Where did he come from? How did he come to meet his wife? While we may never know where this couple met, how their lives intertwined, or how their plan to run away was devised and developed, we do know that this couple ultimately fled together. It is imaginable that both desired a future where they were free. A future far removed from Texas slavery.

In the summer of 1848, and perhaps for years before, these two lovers carefully planned their escape, surely detailing every trail, bend, and river they would encounter and need to traverse on their journey to freedom. In early July of that same year, they took two horses and rode them southward, hoping to leave Texas behind and reach safe havens beyond the Mexican border.

Image of the painting A Ride for Liberty by Eastman Johnson from the Brooklyn Museum
Eastman Johnson. A Ride for Liberty. Brooklyn Museum.

They made their way towards Mexican territory, but as they reached the Lavaca river they were intercepted and pursued by a group of slave hunters, unscrupulous employees of a highly profitable profession. They were quickly surrounded. They stood no chance and received no mercy. The Romeo of this story was lynched. His body was returned to the place where authorities claimed he had “stolen” his enslaved wife. His body was then hung and displayed as a public reminder and threat to all others who hoped, braved, or even thought to run away. In this story, Juliet faced an unimaginable fate. Tortured and robbed of the freedom she almost secured for herself across a Mexican frontier, she was forcibly returned to her ruthless enslaver. The rest of her story remains hidden, silent, until it is found, and told.

The report of this couple’s story is but a fragment, a tiny visible thread in the vast unknown tapestry of the lives and experiences of thousands of women, men, and children who faced, fought, resisted and survived (or failed to survive) enslavement in Texas. It offers us a window into the vibrant, diverse and porous composite that was Texas, during a time when the institution of slavery thrived and consolidated on this side of the border, and freedom existed just a few miles south, on the other side.

Theirs was a story of bravery, of life and death: a harrowing tale of sacrifice, impassioned desire for freedom, and heartbreak different from any I have ever encountered in the archive. We know very little about their relationship. Did they have children? How did he envision freedom at their destination? Was family waiting for them in Mexican territory? Although reconstructing their background and the extent of their intimacy may not be possible, we do know that in their story love was empowering, death was swift and its perpetrators vicious. They sought freedom, yet instead they found a macabre ending committed by Texas vigilantes and sanctioned by laws that protected and promoted the institution of slavery in Texas. Theirs was a story raw, fleeting, and heartbreaking; one where freedom was worth the most violent “‘til death do us part.” Their lives and death are a love story shaped by slavery, freedom, and resistance; marked with blood and violence and no happily ever after. This record documents a rare biography of a couple’s partnership existing amongst a burning desire for freedom. It is a memoir of love in time of Texas slavery.

Other Articles by María Esther Hammack:

The Illegal Slave Trade in Texas
Textbooks Texas, and Discontent 

You May Also Like:

The Paperwork of Slavery
Slavery in America: Back in the Headlines
Slavery and Freedom in Savanna 


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.

Mother is a Verb: An Unconventional History by Sarah Knott (2019)

By Jesse Ritner

The easy correlation contemporary American and British cultures build from sex to pregnancy, pregnancy to birth, and birth to childrearing within a nuclear family is far from uniform throughout history.  Mother is not an identity.  Not all women will mother during the course of their lives.  In Sarah Knott’s words, “mother is a verb,” and it is a deeply ambiguous and sometimes ambivalent one at that.

More than any historian I have read, Knott writes for herself.  Her book is driven by self-reflection and personal memory.  She does not create her questions simply out of academic interest or a curious piece of archival evidence, but out of a need to make sense of her own experience.   Knott eschews the conventions of historical writing.  Gone is any pretense to objectivity.  And she sees no need to discuss the historical development of mothering chronologically or genealogically.  Rather, she writes within a genre of self-help and maternal memoir.  Her history reflects experiences like the realization of “the glimmer of novelty… the sheer peculiarity of adding reproduction to sex.” And the “privilege of relative stillness” that allows her to sit reflexively with her hand on her stomach, waiting for the baby to move.  Her book is complex and expansive, covering twenty-two stages of mothering. Each addresses a particular discomfort, anxiety, or hope.

Knott draws her questions from personal experience, but her archival explorations are diversified outside of her race, class, and gender identities.  As she notes early on, certain developments over the past half century or so – capitalism’s low valuing of caregiving, the emergence of queer families, and more egalitarian parenting amongst some working partners, to name but a few – demand a history that pushes beyond the idea that there is a single labor of mothering in any historical period.  Biologically producing a baby and mothering were not always synonymous historically.  Black enslaved women and children often did the labor of mothering on plantations in the early nineteenth century.  Such attention frequently meant that other women (usually with the title Aunt or Aunty) mothered these women’s children for significant parts of the day, month, or year.  Lower- class women in seventeenth-century England frequently brought other women’s babies into their own homes, acting as wet nurses to maintain a stable income for their family while they cared for their own infants.  And Ojibwe women nursed the infants of women who died in labor, making them their own.  Mothering is necessary labor that varies dramatically depending on the society and its structures.

Knott’s chapters wander through broad histories of time periods, specific historical sources, and personal anecdotes.  If a single thread runs through her book, a single theme that ties all who mother together, it is interruption.  Mothering interrupts life in both momentary and continuing ways. Knott’s morning sickness risked interrupting her lectures. In the eighteenth century an infant interrupted a woman’s ability to work and bring needed income to her family.  On a homestead, the infant interrupted the domestic labor of doing laundry, cooking, and cleaning.  But interruption is not unidirectional.  Those who mother are also interrupted from time otherwise spent mothering.  For instance, Knott recounts an anecdote about an enslaved women separated from her children by trips to Washington D.C..  However, mothers also found ways to mitigate interruptions, such as a women in a factory who hung her child in a basket from the ceiling so she could watch the infant while she worked.  These interruptions certainly vary between time, place, and person, but from the seventeenth century on, they collectively define mothering.

Mother and Child: Pablo Picasso, 1921 (via ARTIC)

Knott is not the first historian to write herself into her book, but her method offers an important contribution to a growing genre.  Her evidence is in the form of anecdote, mirroring what Lisa Baraitser terms the “constant attack on narrative that the child performs.” (264)  Her stories are short and interrupted.  And her own anecdotes about the way her son’s crying, or her concern over his reflux  interrupts her work, are interspersed with historical voices.  Through these moments of memoir, she acknowledges herself as a historical actor who plays a role – equivalent to other historical mothers – in the long-embodied history of mothering.  Her theoretical framework reflects some of the most important feminist writings of the past forty years. In her appendix on methods, she discusses Joan Scott’s warning that historians of women must move beyond the study of normative women exclusively, or risk repetition of the political marginalization of all women in their future writing.  For Knott, writing a history of mothering, of mother as a verb, makes room for glimpses of trans, queer, and on rare occasion even non-female voices.  However, she is also honest about the dominant role cis-women often play in her history.  It seems that Scott’s warning both antagonizes and entices her throughout the book, but she resists a definitive answer.

One of the most impressive aspects of Knott’s book is how she invokes queer theories of embodiment, plasticity, and normativity without relying on the difficult terminology that is so common in theoretical works on gender. These theories allow Knott to see mother as something people continuously make themselves, through the labor they do, through the conversations they have, and through their own perceptions of their bodies.  “Mother” used as a verb insists that there is nothing inherent, biological, or natural about the action, but it is physical, bodily, and constitutive of identities, if always imperfectly and incompletely.

As a white male in my mid-twenties, who has had little interaction with mothering, I may seem an odd reviewer for this book.  However, “Mother is a Verb” is as important for those of us who never intend to become mothers, as it is for people who have been and will be.  For non-academics who want access to intricate innovative histories, this book offers a novel approach to the fields of gender studies and women’s history.  At the same time, historians who hope to write scholarly books that address wide audiences should take note of the clarity and concision of Knott’s wonderful prose.  While asking lots of questions about child care both in the past and the present, Knott offers few answers about the proper way to mother.  Instead, she demonstrates the historical centrality of the physical and emotional labor of mothering.

Other Articles by Jesse Ritner:

The Anthropocene and Environmental History
Changes in the Land
The Public Archive: Frederick Allen Williams

You May Also Like:

Driven Towards Madness
The Politics of the Handkerchief 
Monroe

Digital Resources – “The Reddest of the Blacks”

By Sean Guillory

Lovett Fort-Whiteman was born in Dallas, Texas in 1889 and died in a Stalinist labor camp sometime after 1938. The son of a former slave, a graduate of Tuskegee University, Fort-Whiteman became one of the most important African American Communist activists and organizers of the 1920s and the only known African American to be a victim of the Stalinist Terror. How did the Dallas native, dubbed “The Reddest of The Blacks,” by Time Magazine in 1925, wind up a victim of Stalinist violence in Soviet Russia? Sean Guillory has made this short video to recount his fascinating and moving story. The video was originally posted on Guillory’s excellent podcast and blog page, “Sean’s Russia Blog” and we re-post it here with his permission.

 

Other Articles You May Like:

The Proletarian Dream
Reforming Texas in Early Twentieth-century Texas
Confederados: The Texans of Brazil
The Enemy Within

 

Blacks of the Land: Indian Slavery, Settler Society, and the Portuguese Colonial Enterprise in South America by John M. Monteiro (2018)

By Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, nobody questioned enslaving Amerindians. In Blacks of the Land (originally published in 1994 as Negros da Terra) Monteiro studies Amerindian slavery in the Capitania de São Vicente, now known as São Paulo, and thus sheds light on practices and debates that took place all over the continent. What happened in São Paulo happened in Panuco, Hispaniola, Darien, Tierra Firme, Chile, Massachusetts, Georgia; in short, everywhere.

Monteiro traces slavery back to a widespread Amerindian institution. In coastal Brazil, the Portuguese found a linguistically unified indigenous world, yet one deeply ethnically fragmented. Indigenous societies built sharp corporate identities through raiding and counter-raiding. The Tupi did not incorporate captured rivals into households but dispatched them in rituals of cannibal consumption. The Portuguese used these practices to justify colonization and to build a native labor force.

The Portuguese ransomed captives from the Tupi for axes, scissors, and glass beads.  Those “rescued” through trade became slaves.  The use of the word rescate (rescue and commercial transaction) for ransom implied that it was better to be a slave in a Christian household than a morsel of a demonic cannibal. Purchasing slaves through native intermediaries was not the only strategy to get cheap labor. Slavers would get licenses to wage war on communities when the latter reportedly engaged in “unnatural” practices.

“Portuguese” raids (that involved hundreds and often thousands of indigenous allies), in turn, would lead the natives to counter-raid the Portuguese who would, in turn, gain new legal justification to wage war. This complex dynamic of just war and rescate did nothing but expand the institution of indigenous slavery in the Americas manyfold. It also imbued ideologies of indigenous captivity with deep religious, theological overtones.

Everywhere the Europeans went in the Americas, slavery flourished. To the theologically mindful, however, it soon became clear that Amerindian captivity was not the preferred route to indigenous conversion but a naked attempt at exploiting indigenous labor in mines, ranches, ports, and households.  As in many other places in the Americas, the religious in Brazil began to call into question indigenous slavery. By the mid-sixteenth century in Sao Paulo, the Jesuits became adamant opponents of the Paulistas (settlers of Portuguese and indigenous decent).

The Jesuits created “aldeas” (towns) where captives were catechized. Aldeas, however, also became rotational pools of wage laborers for Paulistas, not slaves.   The debate between Paulistas and Jesuits was over whether Indian captives were pliable-for-hire-Christian laborers or commodities whose bodies could be transacted at will and whose status would be inheritable. No one questioned just war or rescate as the preferred way to get converts or slaves.

Monteiro shows that in 1570 the crown introduced legislation to regulate indigenous slavery. Settlers had to justify raids and obtain licenses. The new legislation left paperwork, as raiders had to produce formal declarations of just war to proceed. Occasionally raiders would appeal to the Inquisition to cover their raids into the interior as expeditions to go after alleged heretics. Raiders would also often present their expeditions as mining prospecting.

As parties had to justify the legality of their raids, classifications of natives came in handy.  Legal hurdles encouraged the science of ethnology. Monteiro describes how settlers and Jesuits created ever more involved taxonomies, separating agriculturalists from nomadic savages, first on the coast (Tupis vs Tapuia) and later in the interior (Guairá vs. Goiá, Guaikurú, Carijó, Caeté, Tememinó, Kayapó). Slavers clearly preferred Tupi and Guairá whose agriculturalism prepared them to be slaves on wheat growing ranches. Getting Tupi-Guaranies, however, became increasingly difficult as the Jesuits armed the Guarani with guns in their Paraguayan missions.

After 1596, the crown sided with the Jesuits who became default legal wardens of all new captives ransomed through trade or rounded up via punishing raids.  Settlers, however, continued to keep the ransomed and the raided as “pieces.” Settlers would use wills to distribute Indians as property but would be careful not to leave notarial records of sales since these records could induce legal challenges and freedom suits.  Dowries and inventories, however, still registered Amerindians in household and ranches as transferable property.

The debate between Jesuits and settlers persisted over the entire seventeenth century. In 1639, Jesuits had the Pope reissued the bull of 1537, a brief originally issued to abolish Amerindian slavery in Mexico and the Caribbean. The Jesuits also sought to reduce the power of landed elites by taking them to court and by setting up their own mills to bankrupt their rivals. Finally, in 1649, Paulistas expelled the Jesuits from the province

Pedro Alvares Cabral, after his discovery of Brazil in 1500, with native Indians (via The Jesuits and Slavery in Brazil)

This dynamic crated several different types of indigenous populations in São Paulo. The first group were those members of Jesuits towns of wage earners (aldeas) who came as captives from faraway places and often spoke many different unintelligible languages. After the 1649 Jesuit expulsion, the towns never recovered; they remained small and depopulated even after the Jesuits were allowed to come back to the province thirteen years later.

The second group were the indigenous slaves, working on settler’s ranches and in their households. Monteiro reconstructs the system of slavery in some detail. Slaves grew their own food (corn, manioc) and worked growing wheat. Wheat left the province on the back of Indians slaves too. Porters took the cargo to the port of Santos to be shipped to the sugar plantations of the northeast and Rio. Using slaves, not mules, allowed settlers not to have to invest in road infrastructure between the Paulista interior and the port.

Despite the stifling violence that characterized this society, indigenous slaves enjoyed some agency and some mobility.  Slaves ran away. They also used church tribunals to initiate freedom suits. They also sought self-manumission and recreated fictive communities through the use of godparents and cofradias (brotherhooods). By the late seventeenth century, slave agency via runaway slave communities , freedom suits, self-manumission, and creolization, along with the arrival of African slaves, partially put an end to indigenous slavery in the province. Yet far more important to the demise of indigenous slavery was the growing difficulty in getting indigenous slaves from the interior.

The third group were those natives who remained sovereign and who therefore were either the target of raids or co-participants in Paulista raids. These groups disappeared from the coast as they removed themselves into the interior or were wiped out by disease and interethnic warfare (the War of the Tamoio,1550-1570, for example).

Monteiro reconstructs in detail the political economy of Paulista raids to get slaves and thus maintain Brazil’s ability to grow grain. As Tupis abandoned the coast, Paulistas went after the Guarani-Tupi located between Sao Paulo and the city of Asuncion in Paraguay. Monteiro describes how over the course of several decades, raiders organized large expeditions with Indian allies to net hundreds of Guarani slaves from the southwestern interior, particularly the Jesuits’ missions in Paraguay.

Under the false pretense of prospecting for mines of silver and gold to create a legal cover, the largest Paulista landowners led these expeditions themselves. Men like Raposo Tavares built reputations, fortunes, and noble lineages out of his raiding exploits.  The era of large raiding expeditions, however, ended in the 1640s when the Guairá acquired guns and resisted large attacks in fortified Jesuit missions. Raids became death traps and a disaster for the businesses of leading Paulistas.

The raids, however, continued as the preferred enterprise of the poor. Raiders pressed deep into the interior of Matto Grosso and Maranhão. These raids lasted years and required involved logistics, including clearing the forest and setting up temporary settlements to grow food. These expeditions would later establish the fame of raiders as the men who first established the national territory of Brazil.

Monteiro brings the legendary raiders down to size. Paulistas built Brazil’s granary on the back of Amerindian slaves and devastating raiding expeditions that permanently changed the social ecology of the interior. Moreover, Paulistas did not create a frontier society of equals but a profoundly hierarchical one, split between ruthless lords and poor settler peasants, whose path to social mobility was the piecemeal collection of indigenous slaves in never ending, pointless raids into the interior. Monteiro also brings the Jesuits down to size.  The Jesuits opposed slavery by creating towns of wage earners but their theology did nothing but confirm the authority of “just war” and “rescue” as the twin ideological pillars of slavery. The Jesuits battled slavery without addressing slavery’s underpinning justifications. Historians, however, should remain grateful to the Jesuits because their effort to regulate slavery created a large archive of petitions, declarations, and justifications upon which Monteiro’s masterful study rests.

Twenty-five years after its original publication, Negros da Terra stills stands, a testament to the strengths of Brazilian historiography. It is still path breaking when compared with the growing Anglo American scholarship on Amerindian slavery.

Also by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra:

From There to Here: Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra
Puritan Conquistadors
Jerónimo Antonio Gil and the Idea of the Spanish Enlightenment
When Montezuma Met Cortes

You May Also Like:

Slavery and Race in Latin America
Black Slaves Indian Masters
Cross Cultural Exchange of the Atlantic Slave Trade

Panel: “Brexit in Global and Historical Context”

The United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union would seem to mark an abrupt and unexpected break with post-WWII efforts to bring about greater European integration. Yet like most sudden historical breaks, a look beneath the surface reveals longer-term processes. This panel will discuss how Brexit can be understood from several angles: a) long-term developments in the UK and between the UK and continental Europe, b) Brexit’s challenge to the EU and its impact on internal national debates elsewhere in Europe, and c) Brexit in light of the recent upsurge of global populism.

Featuring

“Brexit: How Did We Get Here and What Awaits Us?”
Zeynep Somer-Topcu
Associate Professor, Department of Government
The University of Texas at Austin
liberalarts.utexas.edu/government/faculty/zs3955

“The Political Economy of Brexit, in the UK and the EU”
James K. Galbraith
Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations and Professor of Government
Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, and Department of Government
The University of Texas at Austin
lbj.utexas.edu/directory/faculty/james-galbraith

“The Janus Face of Brexit: UK-Europe Relations from Napoleon to Nigel Farage”
James Vaughn
Assistant Professor, Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin
liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/faculty/jv8775

Miriam Bodian, moderator
Professor of History, and
Director, Institute for Historical Studies
The University of Texas at Austin
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/faculty/mb35382

Other IHS Talks:

Climate and Soil: The Environmental History of the Maya
The Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919
Debt: A Natural 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.

African Catholic Decolonization and the Transformation of the Church by Elizabeth A. Foster (2019)

by  David Whitehouse

(This article was originally posted on Imperial and Global Forum)

 

On July 1, 1888, Charles Lavigerie, founder of the White Fathers Catholic missionary order, gave a speech to a packed Saint-Sulpice Church in Paris in which he denounced the evils of slavery in Africa. The event was a public relations triumph, with African children who had been repurchased from slavery being paraded by the Fathers, clad in white burnouses with red fezzes on their heads, on the church steps. In the late nineteenth century as in the 1950s, slavery was used by the Catholic Church to galvanize public opinion and to raise funds. Lavigerie was not an isolated forerunner of post-war Catholic radicalism. He trained a generation of missionaries to enter the field as convinced anti-slavery activists, as well as supporting a series of military operations against slavery in Africa, with varying degrees of success. And yet until now Catholic missionaries have usually been relegated by historians to the status of obedient cogs in colonial state machines. Elizabeth Foster’s new book offers a major challenge by showing how missionary leaders like Lavigerie and his successors had aims that were often in clear conflict with those of the colonial state – a conflict between French Catholic missionaries and the colonial powers that resurfaced in a big way after the Second World War.

An emphasis upon political transition from colonial regimes to independent states dominates the literature on African decolonization. But decolonization, defined by Foster as the “ending or limiting of European hegemony” that involved power systems that were clearly outside of state apparatus, was a much broader process (p. 11). The book effectively uncovers the conflict between colonial state and Catholic mission in Africa in the 1950s. Foster sees the emergence of a more robust Catholic Left in France against a backdrop of colonial crisis as a key development. Catholicism in France, Foster argues, had previously been the almost exclusive property of the conservative Right. The Catholic Church hierarchy therefore struggled in an “awkward dance” in the 1950s as it sought to reconcile conservatives with radical anti-colonialists (p. 14). To make its provocative case, the book draws on a rich supply of archival sources in France, Italy, and Senegal, as well as a wide range of periodicals.

Charles Lavigerie (via Wikipedia)

Another main strength of the book lies in its illumination of the bifurcation between European and Christian identity that Catholic missionary work in Africa entailed. Catholic intellectuals such as Joseph Michel sought in the 1950s to “reclaim and reorient the church as a defender of the oppressed, colonized populations” of the French Empire (p. 100). As Foster argues, the Catholic church was considerably more successful in keeping its adherents in post-colonial Africa than in Europe. World War Two looms large as a turning point here, complementing other recent scholarship. According to Darcie Fontaine, for example, the war is similarly seen as the turning point in the development of French Catholic thinking about the colonies, as Christian theology was used in France as a basis for resistance to Nazism.[1]This can, however, lead to obscuring the continuity of missionary agendas and practice.

In Foster’s account, racial hierarchy keeps its orthodox place as a guiding paradigm of missionary thinking.[2] Foster argues that racist disdain for évolué Africans was common among missionaries and that blatant Catholic racism only became institutionally unacceptable in the 1950s. The new generation of post-war missionaries had more enlightened attitudes than the old guard they replaced. Missionary longevity in the field, the assumption appears to be, solidified racism. This begs the question of why Catholic missionaries would want to work among “unredeemable” and “inferior” peoples for so long.[3] For Lavigerie, setting Africans free from slavery and building the kingdom of Christ in Africa were intended as achievements that would fully match or surpass the establishment of Christianity in Europe. Why would these goals have resonated with peoples who were considered as inherently inferior? Foster’s book begins to provide answers.

Foster’s focus is on the period of decolonization, and the chronological gap between her discussion of Lavigerie and the 1950s paves the way for a new field of research. So, too, would the addition of Protestant missionary sources. After all, Foster makes quite clear the French hostility to American Protestant missionaries. Protestants usually answered back, and denominational rivalry was itself a potential driver of more polarised political stances taken by missionaries on the ground in Africa. Foster’s work thus raises big questions about how Catholic missionaries’ anti-slavery agenda shaped developments and denominational conflict in the first half of the twentieth century across the vast swathes of sub-Saharan Africa in which Christian missions operated. This important book starts the process of giving radical missionary currents their due place in models of colonialism and decolonization.

 

David Whitehouse is a freelance editor at the Africa Report published by Jeune Afrique in Paris and a PhD candidate at Exeter researching the impact of missionaries in Rwanda and Burundi 1900-1972.

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[1] Darcie Fontaine, Decolonizing Christianity: Religion and the End of Empire in France and Algeria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

[2] For example, Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

[3] Adas has even argued that that Europeans in the early centuries of expansion into Africa and Asia rarely used race to explain what they saw as their superiority, but rather Christianity and, much later, technological accomplishment. See Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2014).

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“Debt: A Natural History,” by Daniel Lord Smail, Harvard University

Debt is a human constant. The social implications of systems of credit and debt, however, are not; they can vary significantly over time and space. Traveling freely across the human past, this paper explores the paradoxical nature of the borrowing and lending and provides signposts for writing the natural history of debt.

Daniel Lord Smail is Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of History at Harvard University, where he works on the history and anthropology of Mediterranean societies between 1100 and 1600 and on deep human history. In medieval European history, his work has explored the social and cultural history of the cities of Mediterranean Europe, with a focus on Marseille in the later Middle Ages. He has covered subjects ranging from women and Jews to legal history and spatial imagination, which was the subject of his first book, Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseille (Cornell University Press, 1999). His recently published book, Legal Plunder: Households and Debt Collection in Late Medieval Europe (Harvard University Press, 2016), approaches transformations in the material culture of the later Middle Ages using household inventories and inventories of debt recovery from Lucca and Marseille. Smail’s work in deep history and neurohistory has addressed some of the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of these approaches to the human past. His most recent article in this vein asks whether there is a history of the practice of compulsive hoarding. His books include The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264-1423 (Cornell University Press, 2003); On Deep History and the Brain (University of California Press, 2008), and, with Andrew Shryock and others, Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (University of California Press, 2011).

Smail has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, and his publications have received several prizes. In 2007, he received the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize from the undergraduates of Harvard University, and, in 2014, the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

“Reclaiming the Pre-Modern Past” is an IHS lecture series that examines how new technologies and approaches are enriching our understanding of pre-modern eras and cultures

 

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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.

The Quilombo Activists’ Archive and Post-Custodial Preservation, Part II

By Edward Shore

Carlitos da Silva was an activist and community leader from São Pedro, one of 88 settlements founded by descendants of escaped slaves known in Portuguese as quilombos, located in the Atlantic Forest of Brazil’s Ribeira Valley. During the early 1980s, amid an onslaught of government projects to develop the Ribeira Valley through hydroelectric dams, mining, and commercial agriculture, da Silva defended his community against Francisco Tibúrcio, a rancher from São Paulo. In 1976, Tibúrcio falsified a deed to usurp lands belonging to the residents of São Pedro, a practice known in Brazil as grilagem. When da Silva and his neighbors refused to leave, Tibúrcio dispatched thugs to intimidate residents, burning down homes and setting loose cattle to trample the community’s subsistence garden plots (roças). Several families relocated to the sprawling shantytowns of Itapeuna and Nova Esperança, joining thousands of refugees from rural violence throughout the Ribeira Valley. Yet many others, including Carlitos da Silva, fought back.

A 1982 newspaper clipping documenting territorial dispossession of peasant communities in the Ribeira Valley.

Supported by Liberationist sectors of the Brazilian Catholic Church, da Silva and his neighbors pursued legal action against Francisco Tibúrcio and his associates. In 1978, they formed a neighborhood association, claiming collective ownership to their lands based on usucapião, equivalent to the English common-law term “adverse possession,” meaning “acquired by use.” Their militancy coincided with a wave of activism throughout the Brazilian countryside, as indigenous peoples, landless workers, and descendants of slaves pressed for agrarian reform and reparations. Large landowners, flanked by rural politicians and the police, responded with repression. On the morning of July 2, 1982, assassins gunned down Carlitos da Silva in the doorway of his home, in front of his mother, wife, and young children. Francisco Tibúrico had sought to crush the São Pedro neighborhood association by silencing one of its leaders. Yet the assassination of Carlitos da Silva became a rallying cry, emboldening the descendants of quilombos throughout the Ribeira Valley to fight for land rights and social justice.

“We were threatened. Some of us left [São Pedro] and others fled the region altogether,” Aurico Dias of Quilombo São Pedro told me in a 2015 oral history. “But thanks to our faith in God, we were able to rise up again, quickly, and discovered the courage to take back what was ours.”

I learned about Carlitos da Silva’s story while conducting archival research at the Articulation and Advisory Team to Rural Black Communities of the Ribeira Valley (EAACONE, formerly MOAB, the Movement of Peoples Threatened by Dams), an Eldorado-based civil society organization that defends the territorial rights of quilombos residing in the Atlantic Forest of São Paulo state and Paraná. During my first trip to EAACONE in 2015, I found a dossier documenting the history of political activism for communal land rights in São Pedro, a village established during the 1830s by a fugitive slave, Bernardo Furquim, and his companions, Coadi and Rosa Machado, near the banks of the Ribeira de Iguape River. The dossier was the tip of the iceberg. For more than thirty years, MOAB/EAACONE’s staff has compiled historical documentation—property deeds, baptismal records, court documents, photographs, and oral histories—to strengthen the legal claims of quilombos to their ancestral lands. In 1994, the quilombo community of Ivaporunduva brandished land titles belonging to Gregório Marinho, a fugitive slave, as historical evidence of their long-term territorial dominion when its residents sued the Brazilian government for its failure to apply Article 68, a constitutional provision that accords land rights to the descendants of maroon communities. The lawsuit, the first of its kind in Brazil, paved the way for thousands of quilombo communities to enlist history and genealogical memory to demand collective land rights.

1861 land title belonging to Gregório Marinho

These archival materials documenting the history of the African Diaspora in Brazil are at risk. Government officials have enacted deep cuts to public education, museums, and state archives in the aftermath of the 2008 global economic crisis. Although the National Archives in Rio de Janeiro and the Public State Archive of São Paulo have digitized vulnerable materials, many archives and museums throughout Brazil have fallen into disrepair. The electrical fire that tore through Rio’s National Museum in 2018 destroyed priceless artifacts and historical patrimony pertaining to indigenous peoples and Afro-Brazilians.

Collections documenting underrepresented populations in Brazil, especially quilombos, are politically vulnerable, as well. In 1890, two years after abolition, finance minister Rui Barbosa ordered the treasury to burn all records related to slavery, in part to stave off the demands for the indemnification of slave owners, but also to suppress the historical claims to land rights and reparations that quilombola activists assert today. In 2019, President Jair Bolsonaro declared war on rural activists, pledging to amend the Brazil’s terrorism laws to prosecute members of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) and vowing never to cede “another centimeter” of land to quilombos and indigenous communities. Amnesty International has reported sabotage, arson, and hacking of human rights activists and progressive civil society organizations throughout Brazil. In light of the dire political situation confronting traditional peoples in Brazil over the past several years, and given EAACONE’s gracious support for my research, I wanted to give back. Then fate intervened.

In March 2015, during my first research trip to the Ribeira Valley, I received an email from my dissertation adviser, Seth Garfield, with exciting news. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation had invited LLILAS Benson to apply for a grant to build local capacity in Latin America to preserve vulnerable human rights documentation and to make the resulting documents digitally accessible. The project embraced a post-custodial approach to archival collection. According to the Society of American Archivists, post-custodial practice requires that “archivists will no longer physically acquire and maintain records, but they will provide management oversight for records that will remain in the custody of the record creators.” Through this model, LLILAS Benson establishes contractual partnerships with smaller, underserved institutions with archival collections, including community archives and civil society organizations based in Latin America. Partner institutions maintain ownership of their original materials and intellectual rights over digital copies, while LLILAS Benson provides funding, archival training, and equipment to produce and preserve digital surrogates. Additionally, LLILAS Benson promotes online access to the collections through the Latin American Digital Initiatives (LADI), a digital repository for historical materials pertaining to human rights in Latin America, which launched in November 2015. Designed to be mutually beneficial, the post-custodial model aims to democratize the traditional power dynamics of archives by repositioning LLILAS Benson as collaborative partners and centering communities as contributors and owners of their own documentary heritage.

Homepage for Latin American Digital Initiatives (LADI), a digital repository for human rights documentation in Latin America supported by LLILAS Benson and UT Libraries.

The University of Texas at Austin has long been a pioneer in the area of post-custodial archival preservation and human rights. In 2011, LLILAS Benson, UT Libraries, and the School of Law’s Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice partnered with the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive (AHPN) to create an online digital repository of their collection. The existence of the archive, long denied by the Guatemalan government, was uncovered in 2005, and contains nearly 80 million documents relating to the National Police, including their activities during Guatemala’s brutal civil war (1960-1996). Although the collection was physically fragile and remains politically vulnerable, its relationship with the University of Texas at Austin assures its continued viability, providing critical evidence in trials related to human rights violations committed by the National Police and other state actors.

This collaboration laid the foundation for an innovative project, funded by the Mellon Foundation, to digitally preserve and provide online access to three archives in Central America: Center for Research and Documentation of the Atlantic Coast (CIDCA, Nicaragua); the Museum of the Word and the Image (MUPI, El Salvador); and Center for Regional Research of Mesoamerica (CIRMA, Guatemala). In Spring 2015, LLILAS Benson announced a “call for partners” to support post-custodial initiatives with partners in Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil, with particular emphasis on archival collections documenting human rights, race, ethnicity and social exclusion. I excitedly shared the news with my friends at EAACONE and the Socio-environmental Institute (ISA), a São Paulo-based NGO that defends the social and environmental rights of traditional peoples in Brazil and a longtime ally of MOAB/EAACONE.

Although my colleagues in Brazil were intrigued by the project, they voiced serious concerns related to privacy, access, and power. EAACONE is hardly a traditional archive. In fact, the collection serves primarily to furnish historical evidence to support quilombos’ legal battles for land and resources. While EAACONE grants access to their archive to vetted researchers, the organization was understandably reluctant to publish any sensitive materials that might jeopardize ongoing cases. Furthermore, their members underscored the necessity of maintaining intellectual and physical control of their collections in their original context. They pointed to the sordid legacy of imperialist collecting practices, whereby researchers from the Global North extracted documentary heritage from communities in the Global South and re-concentrated them in museums and archives in Europe and the United States. In a similar vein, members of quilombos have long lamented how scholars have conducted academic research in their communities, only to withhold their findings or publish them in English. EAACONE and ISA were eager to participate in the post-custodial project, but only if it promoted collaborative partnership to advance the territorial and socio-environmental rights of quilombo communities.

Vanessa de França, teacher and community activist from Quilombo São Pedro, speaks at the University of Texas at Austin at the 2017 Lozano Long Conference, “Revoluciones Alimentarias.”

We took their concerns to heart. Over the next four years, I worked with Rachel E. Winston, Black Diaspora Archivist at LLILAS Benson, to build trust and foster partnership between EAACONE, ISA, and LLILAS Benson. “There is something very powerful in helping to facilitate a community’s efforts to document themselves and their experiences. To that end, one of the things that has to be examined very carefully is the equity of the partnership,” Winston later reflected. “This is something that, at its core, has to serve a meaningful purpose for our partners and the larger institutional goal of providing online access to vulnerable, underrepresented, important documents.”

In November 2015, LLILAS Benson invited Frederico Silva, an anthropologist at the Instituto Socioambiental (ISA) in Eldorado, to participate in a workshop in Austin, Texas, alongside representatives from archival collections in Mexico, Colombia, and Central America. Two years later, in Spring 2017, I invited Silva and Vanessa de França, a teacher and community activist from Quilombo São Pedro, to Austin to participate in a roundtable discussion about threats to quilombola agriculture and food security at the Lozano Long Conference. Last summer, Rachel Winston and I traveled to Eldorado to deliver our pitch to EAACONE and ISA personally. We assured their full autonomy in selecting materials for digitization and publication, guaranteeing that sensitive documentation would remain inaccessible to the public. In August 2018, members of EAACONE and ISA voted to accept our proposal, joining the Process of Black Communities of Colombia (PCN, Colombia) and the Royal Archive of Cholula (Mexico) as members of LLILAS Benson’s second post-custodial cohort in Latin America.

Last fall, collaborators in Eldorado and Austin prepared for the implementation of this ambitious, transcontinental project. With funding from the Mellon Foundation, EAACONE hired two full-time archival technicians, Leticia Ester de França and Camila Mello de Gomes, to process, digitize, and describe the collection materials. De França is a student and activist from Quilombo São Pedro, who has worked with ISA and EAACONE to support the training of quilombola youth leaders. Mello de Gomes is a geographer from Piedade, São Paulo, who has long collaborated with EAACONE and quilombo communities to support human rights, youth education, and the collective mapping of traditionally occupied lands. In Austin, David Bliss, Digital Processing Archivist at LLILAS Benson, researched and ordered scanning equipment and software to meet the needs of our partners, developing a detailed scanning workflow to guide EAACONE’s team through every step of the digitization process. Itza Carbajal, Latin American Metadata Librarian, developed schemas and templates for the capture of metadata, the information displayed alongside archival materials to describe their content and historical context. Under a post-custodial framework, Carbajal will work with de França and Mello de Gomes to produce their own metadata to describe the contents of EAACONE’s collections. As a CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation, I translated workflows and digitization manuals into Portuguese while serving as a liaison between LLILAS Benson and our collaborators in the Ribeira Valley. In February, Rachel Winston and I traveled to Brazil with Theresa Polk, Head of Digital Initiatives at LLILAS Benson, to deliver equipment and co-teach a week-long seminar on digitization and metadata for EAACONE’s team.

Back row, from left to right: Rachel E. Winston, Rodrigo Marinho Rodrigues da Silva, Edward Shore, Sueli Berlanga, Ângela Biagioni; Front row, from left to right: Tânia Moraes, Theresa Polk, Leticia de França, and Camila Mello de Gomes.

The training was the highlight of my professional career, an exercise in community building, collaborative research, and transnational solidarity. Accompanied by Raquel Pasinato and Frederico Silva of the Socio-environmental Institute in Eldorado, we met with EAACONE’s team—Sister Maria Sueli Berlanga, Sister Ângela Biagioni, Rodrigo Marinho Rodrigues da Silva, Heloisa “Tânia” Moraes, Antônio Carlos Nicomedes, Leticia Ester de França and Camila Mello de Gomes—to exchange stories and talk politics over a cafézinho. The group gave us a tour of the archive, displaying historical maps, nineteenth-century land deeds, and photo albums capturing popular demonstrations against the Tijuco Alto hydroelectric dam project during the 1990s. Sueli Berlanga, Sister of Jesus the Good Shepherd nun, attorney, and co-founder of EAACONE, shared pedagogical materials from her early experiences as a community organizer in the countryside, unveiling lessons plans she used to teach literacy and promote conscientização (similar to “consciousness raising”) of the historical legacies of slavery in Brazil. Meanwhile, our teams installed equipment and prepared a work station. Mello de Gomes, de França, and members of EAACONE practiced scanning various kinds of fragile materials—posters, maps, photos, and bound books—creating TIFF files for storage on external hard drives and generating checksums to detect errors that may have occurred during digitization or storage.

Sister Maria “Sueli” Berlanga displays pedagogical materials to promote conscientização (“consciousness raising”) about the history of slavery and white supremacy in Brazil.

Among the materials that EAACONE chose to digitize was the Carlitos da Silva dossier. Leticia de França, a resident of Quilombo São Pedro, identified her relatives in the newspaper clippings, photographs, and testimonies documenting Carlitos’ assassination in 1982 and the murder trial of Francisco Tibúrcio. In capturing metadata for the dossier, she and Mello de Gomes stressed the importance of recording the names of every quilombola who was affected by the violence and who fought for justice for Carlitos da Silva and his community. “Our greatest challenge is to remember all the people whose work has gone unnoticed, those who appear [in the documents] and those who have managed to preserve all this information for so many years, so that today, the archive remains intact to be digitized,” de França reflected. “Now those documents that capture the history of our struggles can be passed onto the communities themselves.”

Camila Mello de Gomes, Leticia de França, and Rodrigo Marinho Rodrigues da Silva capture metadata for newspaper clippings pertaining to the Carlitos da Silva dossier.

Over the next several months, she and Camila Mello de Gomes will continue to scan and create metadata for more than five thousand documents pertaining to the history of the Quilombo Movement in the Ribeira Valley. They will deliver external hard drives to LLILAS Benson, where the Digital Initiatives Team will process the materials and upload them to LADI. The EAACONE Digital Archive is scheduled to launch this November, together with the PCN and Fondo Real de Cholula digital collections. But the real work is what comes next.

From the very beginning, our collaborators have reflected on how best to use post-custodial digital archives to promote international research, teaching, advocacy, and collaboration to defend the rights of vulnerable communities in Latin America. This week, the Digital Initiatives Team at LLILAS Benson is hosting a symposium in Antigua, Guatemala, where representatives from each of our post-custodial partners will share their experiences and plot future steps.

Rodrigo Marinho Rodrigues da Silva, Camila Mello de Gomes, and Leticia de França.

Camila Mello de Gomes and Leticia de França shared with me their vision for EAACONE ahead of the symposium. Mello de Gomes proposed the creation of a Center for the Historical Memory of Traditional Peoples of the Riberia Valley, based on the EAACONE archive, which would encompass the collections pertaining to indigenous communities, caiçaras (traditional inhabitants of the coastal regions of southern and southeastern Brazil, descended from Europeans, indigenous peoples, and Afro-descendants), caboclos (persons of mixed indigenous and European ancestry), and small farmers. She expressed hope the Center would furnish historical documentation to advance territorial claims and redistributive justice. “As these documents make visible the history of human rights violations that traditional peoples of the Ribeira Valley continue to suffer, I believe that international and scholarly pressure can jointly advance calls for historical reparations and accountability for those responsible for this violence, as well as ensure the care and preservation of an extremely powerful and revolutionary collective memory of the work of MOAB/EAACONE.”

Leticia de França expressed hope that the digital archive will serve as a pedagogical resource for preparing the next generation of quilombola activists in the Ribeira Valley. “I hope [the project] draws more young people into confronting the day-to-day challenges that our communities still face…I hope this makes young people more aware of the importance of preserving each document, every single handwritten draft, that tells the history of the struggle of the quilombola people,” Leticia de França reflected. “All these documents are evidence of the social struggles that we have endured throughout history. Our people never had the support of the rich and powerful. Each victory we achieved was [society’s] recognition of our basic rights. Since we are a humble people, our rights are too often ignored. But with the preservation of this archive, the world will know that every single document that we digitized is a human right that we fought for and won.”

LLILAS Benson and Latin American post-custodial partners in Antigua, Guatemala. From left to right: Itza Carbajal; Albert Palacios; Edward Shore; Jessica López (CIDCA); Theresa Polk; Thelma Porres (CIRMA); David Bliss; Marisol Alomia (PCN); Lidia Gómez (Fondo Real de Cholula); Carlos “Santiago” Henriquez Consalvi (MUPI); Leticia Ester de França (EAACONE); Camila Mello de Gomes (EAACONE).

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The author would like to thank the Reed Foundation’s Ruth Landes Memorial Fund, the Mellon ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) for supporting his fieldwork in Brazil, which led to post-custodial collaboration between LLILAS Benson, ISA and EAACONE.

In defining post-custodial theory and practice, the author drew from: Hannah Alpert-Abrams, Itza Carbajal, and David Bliss, “Post-Custodialism for the Collective Good: Examining Neoliberalism in US-Latin American Archival Partnerships,”  Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 2: 1 (2019).

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You May Also Like:

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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.

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