Jesse Ritner, Author at Not Even Past

Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World; Angola and Brazil during the Era of the Slave Trade by Roquinaldo Ferreira (2012)

Luanda and Benguela became the busiest, most profitable slaving ports in the transatlantic slave trade in the seventeenth century precisely because these two ports set up tribunals to hear tens of thousands of enslaved petitioners demand freedom. Paperwork in local tribunals set hundreds of thousands free, even at the risk of bankrupting powerful merchants. As petitioners litigated their freedom, the colonial state grew in legitimacy and bottom up support. Through petitioning and litigation, the peoples of Luanda and Benguela became active “Portuguese” vassals with rights. Those under the protection of the sovereign state became more than mere commodities while those outside became increasingly more vulnerable. Pervasively and paradoxically, the very consolidation of state legitimacy contributed to the expansion of the slave trade. After years of working in ecclesiastical, municipal, and state archives in Luanda, Rio, and Lisbon, Ferreria offers a major reconceptualization of colonialism and slavery itself. A better title for his book would have been: Petitioning Slaves and the Creation of the South Atlantic Slave Trade.

Angola was no more than these two relatively small ports of few thousand dwellers (moradores), each with strange connections to their hinterlands. Luanda and Benguela were overwhelmingly black and mulatto cities that engaged in formal ceremonies of protection and “transfer” of sovereignty with neighboring natural lords, sobas. The sobas offered labor, porters, and military aid to urban merchants (pumbeiros and sertanejos) and sheriffs (captães mores), the representatives of the Portuguese state, in exchange for a monopoly on the local redistribution of foreign commodities and support against their rivals. Sobas provisioned the trading caravans to the interior (sertões) with porters. The sobas also offered military aid to the cities when neighboring and distant sovereigns, including the Dutch, French, and British, threatened the ports.

This system of Portuguese sovereignty however was rather limited. To the north and south of Luanda and Benguela lay independent polities that for nearly three hundred years remained impervious to all threats of violence and negotiations. The degree of coastal isolation of these two ports was striking. Given the nature of maritime currents, Benguela and Luanda communicated much more easily with merchants in Rio (Brazil) than with one another. For nearly three centuries there were no roads connecting Luanda and Benguela. Like in the north and south, the eastern, interior frontiers of both cities ended where the independent Imbangala kingdoms began. The frontier was dotted with “forts,” or presidios, that were primarily trading centers: Indian cottons, Brazilian cachaça, and gunpowder for slaves. Within these narrow horizontal coastal-eastern corridors, the ports held loose control over the local natural lords, sobas, sworn to vassalage.

Ferreira describes how the expansion of trade within Luanda and Benguela’s subject territories led to the enslaving of vassals. As commodities arrived and credit expanded, so too did pawnship. Debtors would offer family members and subordinates as slaves to merchants. Sobas would also punish civil and criminal cases, particularly witchcraft, with slavery. This system benefitted merchants who did not have to rely on interior trading fairs to obtain chattel from independent kingdoms. Yet, at the same time, the Portuguese crown empowered local judges to set up tribunals to secure the rights of all vassals. Ferreria describes the workings and evolution of the Tribunal de mucanos in detail, offering a mind bending account of bottom up participation through paperwork.

Recently arrived slaves in Brazil, circa 1830 (via Wikipedia)

Mucanos were petitioners who orally pleaded in front of sobas and capitães mores for freedom when wronged. Slowly, oral petitions became written, local custom codified, local decentralized decisions centralized, and corrupted local judges overseen by outside referees. Ferreria describes how the tribunal de mucanos, originally under the control of mercantile interests and self-interested local lords, evolved into a tribunal controlled by bishops (junta das missões). The juntas would have priests as translators-cum-official legal intermediaries (inquiridor das libertades), scribes (escrivão), registries (livro branco), and archives. Priests would become accountants, collecting the royal quinto (20% tax) after having properly ascertained who was rightfully enslaved. In practice, the job of the junta became one of distinguishing between outsiders from the sertòes, who could be enslaved, from the internal vassals who could not. More importantly, after baptizing the properly enslaved, priests would use the body of slaves to document the act of royal authorization and baptism by fire branding chattel. Slaves leaving Angola would carry two other fire marks as notarial documents: the originating and the receiving merchants’. Ferreria also shows that local decisions taken by the local rural tribunals would evolve into a hierarchical system of urban appellate courts, moving petitions from magistrates (ouvidor) to the governor (ouvidor geral) to Lisbon. There were slaves who sent petitions to Lisbon to appeal. Some even appeared in Lisbon in person.

Ferreria shows that in the second half of the eighteenth century the debate over the right to enslave vassals evolved, particularly as the governor Miguel Antonio Mello argued that the same rules to judge the wrongful enslavement of soba vassals should also apply to processes within the sovereign kingdoms of the sertões. All slaves, regardless of their origin, should have the right to appeal. Mello’s good intentions were not to last beyond his time in office. Mello, nevertheless, waived all fees to mucanos in judicial procedures.

In Luanda and Benguela, race was meaningless except as marker of social status, which was signified through clothing. Many petty merchants were slaves-for-hire, retailers (quissongos), moving cachaça, guns, and Indian cottons into the trading fairs (feiras) in the interior sertões while bringing back caravans of slaves. Many settlers (moradores) of the ports were ladinos, that is urban slaves who enjoyed extraordinary freedoms, including often the right to move to Brazil as servants, petitioners, and traders. Merchants and captains were largely exiles and criminals, degredados, from Brazil. Black settlers and ladinos were considered “white,” but so too were the vassals of allied sobas who through trade acquired European shoes: Negros calçados would petition to be exempted from tribute as porters and be treated as “white.” Female slaves who amassed considerable fortunes as market women (quitanderas) also became free “white” settlers. This was a world of both strict social hierarchies and dizzying social mobility.

One of Ferrerira’s most intriguing contributions is to demonstrate the peculiar relation of Brazil and Angola, one that almost entirely excluded the Portuguese. If Angola was a colony, it was Rio’s and Minas Gerais’s. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, the expansion of gold mining in Minas led to the growth of Brazilian involvement in Luanda and Benguela. Merchant-pombeiros and sheriffs-capitães mores were often exile-degredados from Brazil. Luanda and Benguela settlers sent their kids to be educated in Rio. Many acquired trades in Brazil and came back as carpenters and tailors. When Brazil declared independence in 1822, the Portuguese remained fearful for several decades of repeated conspiracies to unite Angola to the new Brazilian empire. The case of Angola demonstrates that early modern monarchies were indeed polycentric. The center of gravity often lay in America, not Europe.

This extraordinary, eye-opening book not only illuminates the distinct nature of South Atlantic systems of slavery, connecting Rio to Luanda and Benguela, a system that accounted for at least one third of all the slaves brought to the Americas. It also throws light on the role of slave petitioning in securing legitimacy and political resilience There were extraordinary parallels between the Tribunal de mucanos in Angola and the Republica de indios in Spanish America. In both cases, the state invested heavily in protecting nonwhite vassals from mercantile predation. In doing so, the system grew in legitimacy and longevity. The true paradox of modernity might not be that white freedom was possible because there was black slavery, as Edmund Morgan argued in American Slavery, American Freedom. The true paradox might well be that slavery grew and multiplied precisely because there were tens of thousands of slaves who petitioned and obtained their freedom.

It’s in Their Blood

By Ted Banks

(This article is reposted from Fourth Part of the World.)

The Progressive-Era white press and their audience had a fascination with Indians judging from the amount of ink that was devoted to musings on their place and progress in society. One component of that fascination, indeed one that was the basis for much speculation on how successfully or not Indians were integrating into white America, was how much “Indianness” could be attributed to Indian blood.

Many observers have noted that notions of blood and “mixing” among whites varied depending on whose blood was being considered. While the “one-drop” rule dictated that a single drop of black blood could overwhelm generations of otherwise Anglo (or Indian) infusion, Indian blood offered no such absolute outcome. At times commenters noted the tenacity of Indian blood, as demonstrated by its ability to preserve Indian physical characteristics across generations. Other times, white observers painted Indian blood as conversely unstable, susceptible to dilution through intermarriage, and seemingly at times, social contact or cultural proximity.

In a 1907 article penned by Frederic J. Haskins titled “Indians Increasing in America,” the author cites several examples of the persistence of “Indian” traits, which he ties to a rough accounting of blood quantum. He notes that the “strength of Indian racial traits is shown by the fact that the 700 persons now in Virginia who can prove their descent from Pocahontas and her English husband, John Rolfe, still have the Indian hair and high cheek bones.” Commenting on a handful of Indian politicians, Haskins introduces “Adam Monroe Byrd, a Representative from Mississippi, [who] is also of Indian blood.” Haskins reports that Byrd “traces his ancestry through a long line of distinguished Cherokee chieftains,” and that “He has the high cheek bones, copper skin and straight hair which indicate the blood of the original American.” Haskins’s article reveals the casual ambivalence with which settlers framed the racial makeup of Indians, and their desire to monitor the relative progress of Indians in America accordingly.

Four years before Haskins’s piece, an article on the upcoming Indian exhibition at the St. Louis World’s Fair played the other side of the ambivalence spectrum while employing much the same rhetoric regarding Indian racial traits. Titled “Pageant of a Dying Race,” the feature dramatically promised the “last live chapter of the red man in American history is to be read by millions of pale faces at the Universal Exposition.” Like Haskins, the author of “Pageant of a Dying Race,” T. R. MacMechen, describes the persistence of Indian racial traits, observing that “(the) blood of Pontiac, of Black Hawk, of Tecumseh and his wily brother, The Prophet, flows in the veins of the descendants who will be at the exposition,” and that “(no) student of American history will view the five physical types of the Ogalalla Sioux without memories of Red Cloud, nor regard the (word unclear) without recalling the crafty face of that Richelieu of Medicine Men, Sitting Bull.” However, MacMechen argues that despite the seeming durability of Indian traits, “the savage is being fast fused by marriage and custom into a dominant race, so that this meeting of warriors becomes the greatest and probably the last opportunity for the world to behold the primitive Indian.” In MacMechen’s account, marriage and custom function as ways to counterbalance, or perhaps mask, the otherwise durable Indian blood.

Festival Hall at World Fair (via Wikipedia)

White supremacy dictated the ways in which whites interacted with racial “others,” but not in such a way that all of these interactions were uniform across groups. That is to say that while intermarriage between blacks and whites was prohibited throughout much of the country on either a de facto or de jure basis, intermarriage between settlers and Indians was, at least at times, encouraged. A 1906 Dallas Morning News piece reported that “Quanah Parker is advocating the intermarriage of whites with the Indians for a better citizenship among the Indians.” The piece noted that “Quanah’s mother was a white woman and several of his daughters have married into white families.” The item quoted Parker as saying “Mix the blood, put white man’s blood in Indians, then in a few years you will have a better class of Indians,” and noted that “(Parker) hopes to live to see the time that his tribe will be on the level with those of pure anglo-saxon blood.” Another DMN article from two years later seems to reveal a gendered wrinkle to such unions, reporting that “(with) the coming of Yuletide Chief Quanah Parker of the Comanche Indians realized one of the greatest ambitions of his life when his young son, Quanah Jr., a Carlisle graduate, was married to Miss Laura Clark, a graduate of the Lawton High School last year,” and that “(this) is the first time in the history of Indians of this section where an Indian has been married to a girl of white blood.”

If persistent racial traits were attributed to Indian blood, but Indians were being “fast fused by marriage and custom” into white society, the result might be some Indians in unexpected places, or at least circumstances. Haskins, in his piece, noted that at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition, “. . . the strong voice at the entrance of the Indian Building calling through a megaphone, . . . (the) barker who thus hailed the passing throng in the merry, jocular fashion of the professional showman was a full-blooded Indian boy, a product of the new dispensation of things, just as Geronimo was of the old.” Of Charles Curtis, a US Senator from Kansas, Haskins observed that “(he) is not of pure Indian heritage, but his mother belonged to the Kaw tribe. . . . He has the hair and color of an Indian, but in politics does not play an Indian game.” A Dallas Morning News correspondent reported in 1906 that Quanah Parker had been elected a delegate to the Republican convention, but that he had declined, stating that he had no interest in politics. The anonymous scribe went on to comment that

Quanah is a half-breed, his mother having been Cynthiana (sic) Parker. Having
white blood in his veins, his conduct is absolutely incomprehensible. For who
ever heard before of a white man, or any kind of a man with white blood in his
veins, who did not want the honors or the salary of office? Still we must remember
that Quanah is King of the Comanches, and that is a pretty good position itself.

The writer’s tone indicates he was speaking somewhat in jest, but the gist of his comment was that Quanah, although possessing “half” white blood by his estimation, was “playing the Indian game” by staying out of politics, and, in doing so, positioned himself a world away from “any kind” of white man.

(via Wikimedia)

This is all to say that if one wanted to track the uses of “blood” in white America’s Progressive-Era discourse on Indians, the results would be—excuse the pun—mixed, to say the least. Like their feelings on Indians in general, the habitual deployment of blood as an explanatory concept nonetheless exhibited a remarkable ambivalence; white Americans seemed to think both that “Indian blood” definitely was of immense importance and that it could mean about anything they needed it to. This ambivalence stands out even more starkly when compared to the aforementioned belief in the complete impenetrability of African blood of the same period. A cynical reading might well deduce that white Americans said anything and everything about blood that would help to fortify white supremacy. A devil’s advocate counterpoint might argue that the rise of the eugenics movement indicated that white Americans of the time indeed believed in at least some of what they said. And still another would remind us that both of those could be, and probably were, the case.

The Anthropocene and Environmental History

By Jesse Ritner

The Trinity test, a proposed starting point for the Anthropocene (via Wikipedia)

If you open a textbook on geology and flip through to the chapter on geological time it will tell you we are currently living in the epoch of the Holocene. The Holocene started approximately 10,000 years before present with the end of the last ice age. However, research by a diverse array of scientists, who specialize in geology, climate, historical ecology, archeology, and a host of other fields, have begun to question whether or not human impacts on climate mean that we have entered a new epoch in geological time. They call this new epoch the Anthropocene.

The concept of the Anthropocene is on one level quite simple. It is based in part on the science of climate change, which has quite convincingly shown that human activity is the most important driver of global warming. However, the science itself is quite complicated. The problem is that it is impossible to study historic changes in climate in of itself. Instead, scientists use proxies, such as methane or carbon dioxide concentrations in ice cores to measure greenhouses gases, pollen and charcoal in lake cores to measure ecological change and fire frequency, deuterium isotopes to estimate temperature, and a host of other proxies to try and trace how things like greenhouses gases have increased or decreased over time. In of itself, this is fairly routine, although by no means simple, work.

Another problem is that the concept of the Anthropocene is dependent on the idea of the human species as the ultimate driver of climate change. As such, scientists often have to work with archeologists or historians to discover if there is a corollary human action that may cause the climate anomaly they discover through their proxies. Proving these correlations is quite difficult, and often involves people with a number of specialties in order to account for long lists of variables. While radioactive dust dated to 1945 has a clear human cause in the dropping of nuclear bombs, other connections are harder to prove. As scientists look further back in time for earlier and earlier human impacts thousands of years ago, historical and archeological evidence becomes scarcer, making it more difficult to correlate climate change with human action.

(For a short video on the Anthropocene click here!)

Despite an immense increase in studies over the past two decades, scientists have been slow to officially adopt the Anthropocene as a new epoch. Difficulty in determining a starting point is perhaps the most famous objection, but concerns about human agency, anthropocentrism, and the validity of the proxies have caused some scientists to question the utility of the designation.

A Depiction of Epochs and Periods as Understood Through Geological Time Scales ( via Earth Environments)

Despite debate within the scientific community, the Anthropocene as a discourse has taken on a life of its own among humanists and social scientists. Their engagements can be split into three camps: those concerned with defining the Anthropocene, those concerned with the political ramifications, and those concerned the ethical relationship between nature and humans. For instance, historian John McNeill has written about the history of the great acceleration, its human causes, and how energy systems which result in high carbon emissions became standard. Others, like Dipesh Chakrabarty (also a historian), raise questions about the implications for contemporary politics if we begin to think of humans as a species, when humans do not all have equal impacts on climate. Issues of race, class, gender, and histories of capitalism and imperialism are all at risk of being overlooked by discussions about species level solutions to Anthropocene problems. Lastly, philosophers like Donna Haraway have critiqued the anthropocentrism of the idea that humans are just now changing climate. Haraway argues for what she calls the Chthulucene, a world in which humans begin to understand themselves as a part of nature, rather than outside of it. For better or worse, the Anthropocene is now unavoidable in conversations about the environment.

For historians in particular, the Anthropocene demands an integration of climatic and ecological change with the cultural, social, and political changes historians already study. This idea is not totally new. Classic works of environmental history, such as Alfred Crosby’s Columbian Exchange and William Cronon’s Changes in the Land, both written decades before the Anthropocene existed as a concept, examine the historical effect of people on environments and the relationship between people and nature historically. But, ideas connected with the Anthropocene have caused a resurgence of historical work on the environment. Recent books such as James Scott’s Against the Grain and Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s The Shock of the Anthropocene explore how historians can contribute to discussions about the Anthropocene, both in placing its origin, in critiquing its anthropocentrism, in studying the differential impacts of humans on the environment, and in reverse, the impact of the environment on humans.

At Not Even Past, we want to help people work through these complicated questions. So here we are offering a growing list of book reviews and articles related to the environment and the Anthropocene. We hope this brief introduction, and the list below, can act as a resource for teachers looking to build curriculum on environmental histories, while also providing an easy and accessible portal for curious readers to scholarly debates regarding history and the environment.

Books on Environmental History

Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, by William Cronon (1983)

Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation, by Karl Jacoby (2003)

Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption & Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States by John Soluri (2005)

Fordlandia by Greg Grandin (2010)

The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil by Thomas D. Rogers (2010)

The Republic of Nature by Mark Fiege (2012)

The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us by Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (2015)

City in a Garden: Environmental Transformations and Racial Justice in Twentieth-Century Austin, Texas by Andrew M. Busch (2017)

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott (2017)

A Primer for Teaching Environmental History: Ten Design Principles. By Emily Wakild and Michelle K. Berry (2018)

Articles on Environmental History

Oil and Gas Drilling in the Gulf of Mexico

Boomtown, USA: An Historical Look at Fracking

Climate Change in History

The Public Historian: Quilombola Seeds

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6nMulSoBvw&feature=youtu.be

Enclaves of Science, Outposts of Empire

Of How a Hopi Ancient Word Became a Famous Experimental Film

Big Bend – “Some sort of scenic beauty”

Naming and Picturing New World Nature

For Native Americans, Land Is More Than Just the Ground Beneath Their Feet

Underground Santiago: Sweet Waters Grown Salty

The Empire of the Dandelion: Environmental History in Al Crosby’s Footsteps

US Survey Course: The American West, Native Americans, and Environmental History

The Environment i n History & History in the Environment

Great Books and a Film on the Amazon

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

By Edward Shore

(This is the first of two articles on a post-custodial digital archiving project being carried out by a group of researchers and archivists from UT Austin’s LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections together with their colleagues in the Ribeira Valley in Brazil.)

The author dedicates this essay to anti-dam activists on this International Day of Struggle Against Dams (March 14) and to the memory of human rights activist and Rio de Janeiro city councilwoman Marielle Franco, who was assassinated on March 14, 2018

Before dawn on March 14, 2015, I stood against a flickering street lamp at a bus station in the central square of Eldorado Paulista, a frontier outpost in the heartland of Brazil’s Ribeira Valley. Eldorado was the epicenter of a seventeenth-century gold rush that brought the first waves of enslaved West African peoples to São Paulo. With a population of 15,000, the town is hardly known for its raucous nightlife. Yet the thumping bass of baile funk music drowned out the twice-hourly chimes of church bells as young people congregated at an empty gas station to dance and to drink beer. I didn’t travel to Eldorado to party (although I can recommend a few local botecos). That morning, I was waiting for a ride to Adrianópolis, a mining town across the state border in Paraná, where I planned to interview quilombola activists at a demonstration commemorating the National Day of Mobilization Against Dams.

Just after 3 am, José “Zé” Rodrigues, an activist from Ivaporunduva, São Paulo’s oldest quilombo community, pulled up in a grey 15-passenger van.

“Did you have a good time?” he smiled, pointing to the crushed beer cans at my feet.

“Maybe when we get back,” I said.

Under a pitch black sky, we sped along SP State Road 165 into the heart of the Atlantic Forest, stopping at a dozen quilombos along the way to pick up other passengers. I had hoped to catch a few hours of sleep during the five-hour drive to Adrianópolis. But I couldn’t sleep as the activists next to me told jokes, stories, and legends of more than 200 years of struggle for land, citizenship, and racial equality.

During the nineteenth century, the Ribeira Valley served as a hotbed of resistance in the world’s largest and longest-lasting slave society. Rebel slaves escaped the gold mines and rice plantations that dotted the landscape of Eldorado, joining scores of maroon communities of fugitive slaves, known in Portuguese as “quilombos.” The Atlantic Forest provided safe haven to runaways like Gregório Marinho, Bernardo Furquim, and Rosa Machado, who raised farming and fishing villages near the shores of the mighty Ribeira de Iguape River. Many of these quilombos, such as Ivaporunduva, São Pedro, and Pedro Cubas, still exist today. Their survival is in part the result of geographic isolation and territorial mastery. Yet it also derives from the fact that since the nineteenth century, quilombolas and their descendants have drawn on history, ecology, and the law to challenge the efforts of governments and elites to dispossess them. The quilombos’ endurance is a testament to their long history of activism and resistance.

Quilombo Ivaporunduva in the Ribeira Valley, São Paulo. Photo by the author.

Throughout the twentieth century, quilombos confronted an onslaught of government projects to colonize the Ribeira Valley, the final frontier of Brazil’s most heavily industrialized state. The arrival of cattle ranchers, banana farmers, and mining companies led to violent clashes with small farmers, including quilombolas. In 1982, Carlitos da Silva, a rural activist from Quilombo São Pedro, was assassinated after standing up to a local rancher. The creation of state parks and enactment of environmental restrictions on subsistence farming in the Atlantic Forest also posed challenges to maroon descendants, whose livelihoods came under increasing attack. In 1988, the proposed construction of four hydroelectric dams threatened to flood 11,000 hectares of rainforest and submerge several dozen quilombos. But residents fought back.

During the 1990s, quilombolas gained the support of new allies who backed their struggle against the dams. Maria Sueli Berlanga and Ângela Biagioni, Sisters of Jesus the Good Shepherd nuns, founded MOAB (Movement of those Threatened by Dams) in Eldorado. Espousing the tenets of Liberation Theology, MOAB helped to organize rural black communities in opposition to the dams while pursuing legal action against cement giant Votorantim, the corporation behind the dam proposal. In 1988, on the centenary of abolition in Brazil, farmers and fishermen throughout the Ribeira Valley invoked Article 68, a constitutional provision that accorded land rights to remanescentes de quilombos or “maroon descendants.” In 1994, Ivaporunduva became the first quilombo to sue the Brazilian government for its failure to enforce Article 68. Under significant pressure from rural activists and the Catholic Church, the administration of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso finally bestowed a collective land deed to residents of Ivaporunduva. But the threat of the dams, mining companies, and land colonization still remained. Ever since, quilombolas of the Ribeira Valley have staged demonstrations on March 14 to demand land rights and an end to developmentalist projects.

Quilombola activists gather in Adrianópolis, Paraná, to protest developmentalist projects in the Ribeira Valley. March 14, 2015. Photo by the author.

At 8 am, we crossed the Ribeira de Iguape River by ferry, driving another fifteen kilometers until we arrived at a hillside village overlooking Adrianópolis. A delegation from Quilombo Córrego do Franco, Paraná, greeted us as we filed into a one-room schoolhouse for a town hall meeting. The giddy atmosphere of our delirious jaunt through the emerald mountains of the Upper Ribeira turned somber as activists spoke about the challenges confronting their communities.

Sr. Nilton Morato dos Santos of Córrego do Franco decried the devastating effects of lead mining, which has poisoned ground water, killed livestock, and contributed to alarming rates of cancer in Adrianópolis.

Sr. Benedito “Ditão” Alves of Quilombo Ivaporunduva lamented the failure of government agencies to grant special licenses to quilombolas for cultivating subsistence garden plots (roças) in the Atlantic Forest.

Dona Elvira Morato of Quilombo São Pedro blasted the glacial pace of titling quilombola lands.

Of the more than six-thousand quilombos that have petitioned for territorial rights in accordance with Article 68, only fifteen communities possess full titles to their ancestral lands.

At this rate, it will take the Brazilian government more than a millennium to issue land deeds to eligible communities, according to a recent study by the Comissão Pró-Índio.

Finally, Sister Maria Sueli Berlanga, co-founder of MOAB (today known by the acronym “EAACONE,” the Articulation and Advisory Team to Black Communities of the Vale do Ribeira), addressed the crowd.

“We started this fight thirty years ago. We keep fighting because we’re organized! We keep fighting because we know our rights! We keep fighting because we have each other! And we’ll be back here [in Adrianópolis] next year and the year after that and so on until we no longer have to fight anymore!”

MOAB banners commemorating National Day of Mobilization Against Dams. The first sign reads, “Yes to life! No to mining on quilombola lands!” The second sign reads, “For the preservation of our Environment, our History, our Culture, our Lives, and our Peace…[We say] no to mining companies! [We say] no to Dams in the Ribeira Valley!” Photo by the author.

I first traveled to the Ribeira Valley four years ago to carry out field work for my dissertation. But I discovered so much more: purpose, solidarity, and a remarkable history of resistance to slavery, capitalist exploitation, and environmental degradation. In addition to participant observation research and ethnography, I conducted extensive archival research at EAACONE’s field office in Eldorado. This extraordinary collection—spanning over two hundred years and containing newspaper clippings, photographs, film, correspondence, legal documents, and property deeds—demonstrates how runaway slaves and their descendants used historical memory and legal claims predating abolition to challenge territorial dispossession decades prior to the enactment of Article 68. In addition to demonstrating a historical agency that is often overlooked, the archive challenges the allegations of Article 68’s opponents, who have attempted to discredit remanescentes de quilombos by dismissing their territorial claims as the fabrication of outside agitators. In the coming weeks, I am planning to blog about my recent experiences working with LLILAS Benson archivists and EAACONE to create a post-custodial digital repository of the histories and legacies of quilombos, while considering the implications of this project for historical research and human rights in Brazil.

Episode 118: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity

Host: Christopher Rose, Department of History
Guest: Megan Raby, Department of History

Biodiversity has been a key concept in international conservation since the 1980s, yet historians have paid little attention to its origins. Uncovering its roots in tropical fieldwork and the southward expansion of U.S. empire at the turn of the twentieth century, ecologists took advantage of growing U.S. landholdings in the circum-Caribbean by establishing permanent field stations for long-term, basic tropical research.

Megan Raby describes how, from these outposts of U.S. science, a growing community of American “tropical biologists” developed both the key scientific concepts and the values embedded in the modern discourse of biodiversity.

“London is Drowning and I, I Live by the River”: The Clash’s London Calling at 40

By Edward Watson

On February 7, Seattle’s non-profit broadcaster KEXP headed to London for their seventh annual International Clash Day. In celebration of The Clash’s London Calling turning 40 in December 2019, KEXP organized a 4-day live broadcast in Seattle and London, featuring performances from contemporary bands and covers of The Clash’s songs. Their intention was to highlight the “enduring influence” of The Clash’s music as well as their “human rights message.” Released in the UK in December 1979 and in the US in January 1980, London Calling is widely recognized as one of the most influential albums of the twentieth century. Rolling Stone listed it as the eighth best album of all time, Q Magazine listed it at number 20, and the NME placed it at number 39.

The Clash are tied to punk’s emergence in 1976. After the band made its live debut supporting the Sex Pistols in Sheffield in 1976, The Clash became one of the key players in London’s punk scene. By January the following year, The Clash had signed with CBS Records for £100,000 and in April they released their self-titled debut album. The record deal was considered an astronomical fee by the music press and fans alike. Mark Perry, founder of influential punk fanzine Sniffin’ Glue, claimed, “punk died the day The Clash signed to CBS.” Nonetheless, The Clash’s debut record was still recognizably a punk record. London Calling, however, reflected the band’s exploration into styles of music that transcended their punk origins, such as rock and roll, reggae, and ska. In spite of their substantial record deal, The Clash struggled financially. By 1979, The Clash was largely in debt and they were at war with their record company. They needed a commercial success and fast. London Calling delivered, selling around two million copies upon its release. In the UK, it was certified gold in December 1979 and in the US it peaked at number 27 on the Billboard Pop Albums chart.

Cover of the first edition of Sniffin’ Glue (via Wikipedia)

In addition to its diverse range of musical influences, London Calling’s success derived from its sociopolitical content. In the album’s title track, Joe Strummer declared, “we ain’t got no swing, ‘cept for the ring of that truncheon thing.” Strummer was referring to the collapse of what Time had labeled “Swinging” London in the 1960s, evoking police truncheons and riots in the city to elucidate a growing sense of turmoil in the 1970s. After the optimism of the 1960s, London seemed culturally and politically stagnant. But these changes were not just limited to the city of London. London Calling was released at a critical moment in Britain’s post-war history: unemployment was on the rise; there were frequent trade union strikes in 1973 and 1974; the British government sought a loan from the IMF in 1976; and ongoing disputes between James Callaghan’s Labour government and trade unions during the coldest winter for 16 years was dubbed the “Winter of Discontent” in 1978 and early 1979. Britain, once a manufacturing and imperial powerhouse on the global stage, was perceived to be in sociopolitical disarray. The overarching sense of doom and disorder was a large factor in Thatcher’s election in May 1979. Not only this, but the punk movement seemed to have lost its early momentum as an articulation of political and cultural discontent. “Phony Beatlemania” Strummer dubbed it, had “bitten the dust.”

Even though historians such as Jim Tomlinson and Andy Beckett have argued that the doom and gloom of the 1970s tends to be exaggerated, The Clash spoke to genuine political discontent and a seemingly desolate socioeconomic climate. Their earliest songs were particularly scathing about the state of the world. “White Riot” expressed exasperation at the lack of white working-class struggle, claiming “all the power’s in the hands, of people rich enough to buy it, while we walk the street, too chicken to even try it.” “London’s Burning” reflected on cultural stagnation and crippling boredom and “I’m so Bored with the U.S.A.” critiqued American imperialism: “Yankee dollar talk, to the dictators of the world, in fact it’s giving orders, and they can’t afford to miss a word.” The Clash was one of the more overtly political punk bands, using punk’s fast-paced, urgent, and aggressive style to critique 1970s society from the left.

London Calling continued in this vein, with most of its songs predictably centered on London. “Jimmy Jazz” and “Guns of Brixton” tell the stories of fictional characters in the city’s criminal underbelly. “Rudie Can’t Fail,” a heavily ska-influenced song, documents how young first-generation immigrant men, known as “rude boys,” were often subject to scorn from the British white middle class. The Clash also described how young people often neglect their idealism and political views once they get older and more comfortable in “Clampdown.” In “Spanish Bombs” the band drew comparisons between the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and the rhetoric of Basque nationalists of the late 1970s. “Lost in the Supermarket,” offers a critique of consumerism as a key reason for political apathy and “Lovers Rock” endorses safe sex and family planning. Finally, the title track and album opener depicts a scene of rising unemployment, racial tensions, and drug use. London Calling is a scathing sociocultural commentary of the 1970s. This was reflected on International Clash Day when KEXP spotlighted various social justice organizations “because The Clash was anti-racist, anti-fear, pro-solidarity, pro-unity, pro-inclusion.”

But questions about whether The Clash had sold out never went away. To some, these doubts undermined the legacy of London Calling with regard to its political message. Others see a more complex history. American artist and activist, Mark Vallen, argued in 2002 that even though The Clash had sold out by allowing Jaguar to use “London Calling” to advertise cars, its original composition had been in keeping with the punk ethos. “When The Clash released London Calling,” he claimed, “the song was one of the band’s most chilling works. Ominous and dark, it foretold of the Western world collapsing in a spasm of war and out of control technologies, it addressed our fears of government repression.” Although some people in the punk movement believed The Clash had already sold out by this point, the initial excitement that London Calling generated was contingent on the authenticity of its political message.

London Calling’s continued popularity is largely down to a careful balancing act. The album could be called the greatest punk rock record of the era or it could be said that it is not a punk rock record at all. From a musical perspective, it is an amalgamation of various styles. Particularly, it pays homage to rock and roll. The album cover captures bassist Paul Simonon smashing his bass guitar on stage. This rock cliché is anchored by a logotype referencing Elvis Presley’s 1956 debut album. Musically, it was a nod to the past while incorporating an eclectic blend of contemporary styles. The three cover songs on the album emphasize this: “Wrong ‘em Boyo” and “Revolution Rock” were first recorded by reggae artists and the other was “Brand New Cadillac,” originally a rock and roll song from 1959. All three sound at home on the album next to the Clash’s original compositions.

London Calling undeniably helped bridge the divide between punk as music and punk as a historical moment. It normalized punk as a credible genre of music while articulating the sociopolitical grievances that British punks were reacting to: high unemployment, racial politics, and the sense that society around them was falling apart. The album has the feeling of a party during the apocalypse. From a historical perspective, even though The Clash had signed to a record label – a cardinal sin for a 70s punk rock band – their wide-ranging sociopolitical commentary encapsulated the cynical mood of the late 1970s. At the end of the title track there is a message in Morse code, created using Mick Jones’ guitar pickups, that spells out S-O-S. Amidst political crises in Westminster, London Calling’s apocalyptic tone is as relevant to Britain in 2019 as it was in the winter of 1979.

Promiscuous Power: An Unorthodox History of New Spain by Martin Nesvig (2018)

Power, he argues, was “promiscuous” in sixteenth-century Michoacán because there were dozens of claimants to overlapping jurisdictions: indigenous nobilities, native commoners, encomenderos (tributary lords responsible for conversion of entrusted indigenous communities), bishops, parish priests, friars, audiencia (high court) magistrates, alcaldes mayores (city mayors), city councils, corregidores (regional authorities), viceroys, general inquisitors, inquisitorial delegates, cathedral chapters, etc. Each corporate group brought the “imperial” state to a crawling halt. In fact, he argues there was no single colonial “state” but dozens, if not hundreds, of micro- imperial ones, in and around cities and in the many distinct regional rural hinterlands of the sprawling province of Michoacán. Nesvig describes these micro-states as being led by clerical caudillos (charismatic leaders of armed posses) and encomenderos who enjoyed flexing their raw patriarchal muscles (complemented by some matriarch encomenderas who flexed their biceps and ass-kicking thighs).

Nesvig irreverently pokes fun at the large Inquisition historiography that finds the key to the building of the colonial state in inquisitorial hegemony and fear-inducing techniques. He shows all these arguments to be nonsense because people in Michoacán repeatedly and literally shit on the Inquisition agents.

Rarely does the nature of the sources match the voice of an author as it does in Nesvig’s Promiscuous Power. Like his subjects, Nesvig likes shitting on the conventions of academic writing. Here is a sampling.

Francisco Hernández Girón was a Spanish encomendero in the Viceroyalty of Peru (via Wikipedia)

Nesvig quotes a bandit who beat, stabbed, and robbed the officials carrying the sealed correspondence of inquisitor of Mexico City, as saying:

“Come on, that paper isn’t worth anything, and whoever wrote it must be like you–come on, you dog, faggot, cuckold, snitch, asshole” (170)

And he writes:

“People laughed at the king and the pope and called their judges squashes, putos, and little whiny bitches while stabbing and cracking them and smacking their idiotic, pompous bonnets off their heads.” (171-72)

“Orduña [the Inquisition delegate in Michoacán’s capital Valladolid] thus upended the acceptable semiotics of power, and in so doing, he showed his rivals that he did not care a fucking bit if they thought he was a plebeian thug.” (129)

“True, he was a priest, but as he had no university education, he thought that licenciados (college graduates) were pompous assholes.” (115)

“He [Badillo a theologian, newly appointed inquisition delegate for Michoacán] was a creature of classroom lectures and of the intricate hierarchies and cultural niceties of academia, its ceremonial buffoonery and false collegiality.” (107)

I found Nesvig’s stylistic and historiographical irreverence both refreshing and powerful. I do have a critique, however.

Nesvig demonstrates on every page that the “state” enjoyed extraordinary legitimacy and authority, despite his claim that the state does not exist as such. But he has a difficult time finding the state only because he is on the trail of the narrowly defined Weberian state, that is, the state that has a monopoly on violence. Yet in Michoacán, there was a vibrant imperial state. Each of the corporate groups Nesvig investigates left a massive trail of petitions for redress via at least a dozen different bureaucratic channels and courts (Nesvig himself finds his sources in seven or eight different archives, and within each archive, in 5 or 6 different types of bureaucratic files). The audiencias (the high courts of Mexico and Guadalajara), the Inquisition (in Mexico and the Suprema in Madrid), the viceroy, the ecclesiastical courts (both of Mexico and Valladolid-Michoacán), and the crown sent dozens of visitas and residencias (mandatory outside evaluation of outgoing authorities) to investigate and mete out justice, whose dictates, in turn, were embraced or appealed in endless litigation. One finds the state in this infrastructure of paperwork, not in the monopoly of violence. The colonial state was a state of paper.

Nesvig is right that the colonial state was archipelagic, colonized by fierce defendants of corporate legal rights. Yet it was no vacuous abstraction. It manifested itself daily in rivers of ink and the profligate collective investments in paper, paralegals, lawyers, and lobbyists. The state lay in the daily, routine acceptance that courts, councils, magistrates, and monarchs could ultimately be swayed to listen. More often than not, conflict was resolved through the exchange of blasts of documents, not gun battles, civil wars, and massacres. This was the lasting legacy of even the most violent of Latin American colonial caudillos.

A Brief History of Feminism by Patu (illustrations) and Antje Schrupp and translated by Sophie Lewis (2017)

By Namrata B. Kanchan

“Let this really be brief!” was the first thought that crossed my mind as I read the title of Patu and Schrupp’s book. It was listed on the syllabus for a course on Gender and Decolonization and after some heavy reading on decolonization, I was less than enthusiastic about reading this book. I had not heard of it before and let’s be honest, we have come across “Brief Histories…” on foundational concepts (nationalism, existentialism, socialism or any -ism you would like to add here) that promise brevity but turn out to be 300+ pages of dense, jargon-filled exercises in theoretical name-dropping.

In retrospect this book signaled its difference right in its cover design. Instead of monochromatic colour schemes, sober font styles, and a black-and-white picture of a dead white lady proclaiming its seriousness, we see a quirky, multi-hued, animated cover with illustrations of key feminists. At this point, I thought the cover was off-beat but was still not prepared for the content, so you can imagine my shock, relief, and utter sense of joy when I found out the whole book was ILLUSTRATED! Yes, a comic book for feminism! Fans of Marjane Satrapi’s Persopolis series will discover parallels in this book that skillfully combines graphics, narrative, humor, and history to provide a powerful account of women’s lives, struggles, and victories.

Patu and Schrupp rescue feminist scholarship from academic confines and present it to a new generation of general readership in a way that is most palatable to them. The ascendance of Instagram, Snapchat, Anime and Marvel comics have elevated the status of images in our society. Millennials consume information as well as tell their stories increasingly through digital images or emojis. Mainstream sitcoms such as Blackish have tapped into this phenomenon and use graphics intermittently to present the dark side of Black history succinctly and with humor so that all Americans can comprehend the gravity of African-American experiences.

A page from A Brief History of Feminism (via Amazon)

A Short History of Feminism acknowledges these new trends and ushers feminism into contemporary focus by using graphics to treat feminist history not as a relic of the past trapped in a sea of words and theories that has no place in our present. Graphics woven masterfully with humor signal the contemporary relevance of this topic. This combination strikes the right balance between levity and gravitas and emerges as a medium with powerful immediacy. The book’s pictorial stories thus draw us into a continuum that connects our collective past, present, and future. Female characters are not busy enacting ‘history’ but occasionally look straight to the reader and address them as in the case of French philosopher, Marie de Guornay (1565-1645). These female voices are direct, contemplative and sometimes funny as they mouth our own contemporary concerns about equal pay or work-life balance. These women acknowledge us, talk to us and remind us that the struggle is not over.

One highlight of this book is that we really do get a brief run through of feminists from ancient to modern times. This book is also a great quick reference to various female figures, little known facts about them, and the social situations that gave birth to their individual struggles. From Mary Magdalene to Sappho, Sojourner Truth to Gloria Steinem, the book surfs deftly through all the waves of feminism. The authors cover topics ranging from workplace to marriage rights, suffrage to political participation to provide a broad introduction to all the areas in which women fought hard to win rights.

Flora Tristan’s (1803-1844) story struck me as particularly fascinating because the French-Peruvian fought not only for female rights but also rallied against slavery and class exploitation. She composed an important socialist treatise called The Worker’s Union in 1843, a full five years before Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto where she displayed crucial links between oppression of women and the proletariat. Yet, she is a marginal figure, which Patu and Schrupp demonstrate poignantly by showing Marx shushing Engels when the latter mentions Tristan’s name. Das Patriarchy, anyone?

Another highlight is that the authors do not assume universal sisterhood when it comes to feminist concerns. Feminism and its various iterations are constantly evoked to remind us that this concept is not ubiquitous, monolithic, and bourgeois but something that is in constant flux and assumes various forms. We get the varying concerns of proletariat and upper-class women as well as Black slave-women and socialist women. The display of a plurality of voices appears to be the main agenda of the book but despite the emergence of a multitude of voices, the book is predominantly the history of white, Christian, Western European and American feminists. It is not a history of feminism but western feminism, which frankly, as a South Asian woman left me feeling marginalized. One the one hand, western women have been an instrumental force in ushering global rights for women but their stories are not the only ones worth telling. If the authors are interested in presenting a wide range of stories, women from Asia, Africa, and Latin America have their own unique struggles and victories to recount Modern feminists such as Gayatri Spivak, Maria Lugones, Denise Noble, and Madina Tlostanova provide great insights into non-white, non-western women’s movements and their works deserve an illustrated book so that women from Central Asia to the Caribbean can see themselves reflected in a truly global and plural feminist movement.

A Short History of Feminism is a compelling, funny, and thoroughly enjoyable book. It contains universal appeal that demystifies western feminism and can easily be enjoyed as leisure reading or an introductory book in a college freshman class. My only appeal, and I believe a lot of readers would agree, is that may we have second part to this collection please!

Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary, by Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali

Nikita Khrushchev is one of the most important men of the last century. Moreover, he was the main protagonist of Soviet foreign policy during the most perilous period of the Cold War which climaxed with the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. How dangerous was the Soviet Union to the West during Khrushchev’s term? Which factors contributed to sow distrust between the United States and the Soviet Union, and to what extent the Soviet menace was more bluff than real capabilities? Fursenko and Naftali answer these questions successfully by presenting an extensive and well-researched study that uncovers Soviet foreign policy during the Khrushchev’s Era.

In Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary, the authors explore the complicated balance between cooperation with the West and competition for Third World support that undergirded the Soviet diplomatic strategy from 1955 to 1963.To understand these diplomatic maneuvers, Fursenko and Naftali focus on Khrushchev’s complex policies of building détente with his penchant for risky brinkmanship and coercive diplomacy which, he hoped, would yield substantive geopolitical gains. From the two Germanys question to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the final outcome of this dual diplomatic approach proved contradictory. The competition for Third World allies diverted scarce economic resources from domestic problems, and exacerbated tensions between the superpowers effectively undermining any sustainable opportunity for détente.

Fursenko and Naftali underline two elements that contributed to heightened tensions during the Cold War. The first one, perception in international politics, led to the frequent misreading of the adversary’s intentions, fostering a strong and lingering feeling of mistrust and deception. This atmosphere of misunderstanding transformed the years between 1958 and 1962 into the most dangerous period of the Cold War concluding with the perilous Cuban Crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.

1960s poster with Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev: “Long live the eternal, indestructible friendship and cooperation between the Soviet and Cuban peoples” (via Wikipedia)

The second element draws on the first, and involves the crucial role played by Third World leaders in aggravating the perceived threat that each superpower felt from the other. The authors do an excellent job in dispelling one of the greatest myths of the Cold War, the erroneous impression that the United States and the Soviet Union orchestrated and fully controlled events in Africa, Asia and Latin America. To the contrary, leaders like Fidel Castro and Gamal Nasser skillfully courted and played off the superpowers for their own gains. This perspective restores a great deal of agency to social and political actors that in other Cold War narratives have been relegated to the roles of mere pawns.

The authors conclude that Khrushchev’s foreign policy did much to preserve the boundaries of the Soviet empire but less in extracting considerable geopolitical concessions from the West. The inherent military weaknesses of the Soviet Union, coupled with limited economic resources, led Khrushchev to rely more on the appearance rather than the reality of Soviet power. However, his brinkmanship at least succeeded in deterring the United States from invading Cuba and in securing recognition for East Germany in the long run.

The book’s writing style is fluid with a clear prose, making it accessible to any audience. This is quite an achievement in a co-authored work. Fursenko and Naftali also succeed in providing an informative and compelling account of Soviet foreign policy under Khrushchev by relying mostly on declassified material from the Soviet Presidium. It is certainly a pertinent starting point for anyone interested in the intricacies of world affairs and foreign relations from the Soviet perspective.

When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History, by Matthew Restall (2018)

Matthew Restall’s When Montezuma met Cortés delivers a blow to the basic structure of all current histories of the conquest of Mexico. Absolutely all accounts, from Cortés’ second letter to Charles V in 1520 to Inga Clendinnen’s masterful 1991 article “’Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty,’”[1] assume that the conquest of Mexico was led by Hernán Cortés, who is described by Wikipedia as a “Spanish Conquistador who led an expedition that caused the fall of the Aztec Empire and brought large portions of what is now mainland Mexico under the rule of the King of Castile.” These accounts represent Cortés as willingly deciding to enter Tenochtitlan in the hopes of capturing Montezuma, the Aztec Emperor, expecting to rule Mexico via a proxy ruler, and seeing himself as Julius Cesar in Gaul. Although Clendinnen shows that there was no Machiavellian logic in any of this Cortesian strategy, she keeps the trope of Cortés as the central protagonist of a tragic-comedy.

Montezuma’s reasoning for allowing Cortés and his 250 surviving conquistadors to enter Tenochtitlan is, after Cortés’s overblown heroics, the second leg of all histories of the conquest. Montezuma’s actions have been cast as a surrender to prophecy, implying imperium translatio (willingly bestowing sovereignty upon superior returning deities), idiotic cowardice, or simply unfathomable, unintelligible reaction. Either way, Montezuma always comes across as a diminished ruler, even a puppet. Cortés captured, imprisoned, killed, and desecrated Montezuma’s remains.

The third leg of the stool organizing narratives of the conquest of Mexico is the brutality of Aztec rule and the extent of the Aztec practice of human sacrifice. The alleged industrialization of Aztec ritual sacrifice has allowed some traditional accounts to justify the conquest.

Restall knocks down all three legs. He demonstrates that the numbers of sacrificed captives that are thrown around make absolutely no sense. The proposed numbers do not match basic arithmetic, demography, or the archeological findings at templo mayor, where the sacrifices were supposed to have taken place.

The leg that sustains Cortés as protagonist tumbles down just as easily. Restall demonstrates that Cortés was a mediocrity before landing in Yucatan and after the conquest. Cortés arrived in Hispaniola in 1504 and participated in the conquest of Cuba in 1511, playing the role of follower not leader throughout. After Tenochtitlan, Cortés led the conquest of Honduras and California where his incompetence shined through, not his greatness. Restall shows that leaders of the many Spanish factions, namely, the captains, bosses of family/town share-holding companies, who in Mexico made all key decisions, not Cortés.

Finally, the leg in the stool that portrays Montezuma as fool, is demolished by Restall in showing that Montezuma made fools of Cortés and his captains. He led them down a path that would secure attrition and observation. The envoys of Montezuma in Yucatan encouraged a path to Tenochtitlan via an enemy route. Cortés and his captains encountered first the Totonec and then the Tlaxcalan, before crossing the mountains to get to the valley that nestled Tenochtitlan in the middle. Restall demonstrates that when the weakened conquistadors stopped fighting with the Tlaxcalan, it was the latter,, not Cortes, who chose the path to get to the Aztec capital to visit Montezuma, including a detour to the city of Cholula.

This detour has always puzzled historians because it was out of the way and because the “conquistadors” staged a massacre of Cholulan lords for no apparent reason whatsoever. In his letters to Charles V, Cortés sought to explain the massacre as preventive violence to clamp down on the simmering rise of treasonous behavior among allies. Restall shows, however, that the massacre was a Tlaxcalan initiative and that the Spaniards had no role in its planning.. Tlaxcalan elites massacred the Cholulan for having recently broken the Tlaxcala Triple Alliance (that also included Huejotzingo) in order to embrace the Aztec. Even in their massacres, Cortés and his captains were puppets.

A 17th century CE oil painting depicting the meeting of Spanish Conquistador Hernan Cortes and Aztec ruler Montezuma (Motecuhzoma II) in 1519 CE (via Ancient History Encyclopedia)

Restall dwells on Montezuma’s zoos and collections to provide an answer to another puzzling decision of Cortés and his captains: they disassembled their fleet in Veracruz and crossed Central Mexico to dwell in Tenochtitlan for nine months. What would 250 badly injured and poorly provisioned conquistadors expect? To rule an empire of millions from the capital by holding the emperor hostage? Ever since Cortés penned his letters to Charles V, chroniclers and historians, (including indigenous ones trained by the Franciscans who wrote accounts of the conquest in the 1550s for the great multi-volume encyclopedia of Aztec lore, the Florentine Codex) have accepted this as a plausible strategy, even a brilliant Machiavellian one that took Montezuma unaware. Restall, however, proves that the Spaniards remained nine months walled in Montezuma’s palaces near the monarch’s zoo and gardens.

Restall proves that Montezuma’s majesty resided in his collection: zoos, gardens, and pharmacopeias. Montezuma collected women, wolves, and dwarfs. He led Cortés and his bosses to Tenochtitlan to add the pale Spaniards to his menageries and palaces. The Spanish factions had no choice. Montezuma was no one’s puppet. He used the Spaniards as curiosities to reinforce his majesty and power. Montezuma was no one’s prisoner; he was murdered. His body never desecrated by his own people. After the murder, the Spaniards were slaughtered and the few survivors fled the capital in the middle of the night, humiliated and beaten. The historiography has called the night when the Aztecs routed the Spaniards the Noche Triste.

Cortés and his surviving captains reassembled after the rout in Tlaxcala, from where they allegedly led a year long assault on Tenochtitlan. Restall shows that this protracted, final battle over the capital and the surrounding towns was not a campaign Cortés; captains controlled, any more than they controlled the first visit to Tenochtitlan. The final siege of Tenochtitlan was a war among noble Nahua factions as well as the reshuffling of altepetl (Nahua city) alliances. Elite families of Texcoco realigned to create a new alliance with Tlaxcala.

Restall introduces a new category to replace conquest: war. He equates the violence unleashed by the arrival of conquistadors with the violence of the two World Wars in the twentieth century. There was untold suffering and civilian casualties, systematic cruelty by ordinary people, rape and sexual exploitation as tools of warfare.

He is right. Yet this shift, paradoxically, infantilizes the natives and concedes all agency, again, to Europeans. In the political economy of malice, Spaniards had no monopoly. Restall demonstrates that Tlaxcalan and Texcocan lords led the massive massacres in Cholula and Texcoco. It is clear, also, that lords used the war to transact women like cattle and to amplify the well-entrenched Mesoamerican system of captivity and slavery. Why then does Restall concede to the Spaniards all the monopoly of cruelty? War made monsters not just out of ordinary vecinos from Extremadura and Andalucia. War also made monsters of plenty of local lords.

[1] Inga Clendinnen “Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty”: Cortés and the Conquest of Mexico, Representations 33 (1991): 65-100

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