Stacy Vlasits, Author at Not Even Past

The Politics of the Veil by Joan Wallach Scott

Joan Wallach Scott introduces The Politics of the Veil, about the 2004 headscarf debates in France, with a telling sentence: “This is not a book about French Muslims; it is about the dominant French view of them.” Writing in highly accessible prose, Scott examines the political firestorm surrounding the official French ban on headscarves for girls under the age of eighteen in public schools. She challenges the government’s assertion that headscarves represent chauvinism, sexism, repressive patriarchy, and “anti-modernism” and that they are therefore antithetical to the egalitarian ideals of the French republic. In reality, Scott contends, the headscarf ban typifies the roiling undercurrents of anti-Muslim racism endemic to contemporary French society.

Scott explains that the headscarf ban was justified by appeals to the French republican ideal of secularism. In the French legal system, unlike the American or British, differences of religion (as well as race, sex, etc.) are formally unacknowledged. Instead of being given legal protections based on differences, all are considered first and foremost French citizens, with the underlying ideal that French nationality comes before any other marker of identity. Secularity is designed to protect French citizens from any claims of institutionalized religion (in contrast to the American and British systems, which protect religion from the interference of government). Because of this, “[N]o official statistics are kept on the ethnicities or religions of the population. If differences are not documented, they do not exist from a legal point of view, and so they do not have to be tolerated, let alone celebrated.”

Scott notes that very few girls – a tiny minority – were wearing headscarves to school. There was not a sudden influx of veiled immigrant girls filling French schools. In addition, several of the girls who were involved in setting off the debates had voluntarily adopted the headscarf. These young women had not been pressured into hijab by their fathers, brothers, imams, or local community, but instead had selected to wear the headscarf as an individual choice. Their use of religious garb as a form of pious expression was both fully autonomous and entirely personal. Finally, these girls were wearing a form of hijab that only covers the hair and neck; they were not wearing niqab, the burqa, or other forms of the veil that obscure the face and render the wearer difficult to identify.

The reasons for outrage over the sartorial choices of such a small subset of the population can be traced to French colonial history, Scott contends. Explaining the internal contradictions inherent in the French mission civilisatrice, Scott argues that the assimilationist goals of the French colonizing mission – essentially an attempt to “Frenchify” the colonized – were fundamentally unattainable because the colonized peoples were perceived as un-civilizable. Formal policies of racial and ethnic segregation and discrimination accompanied the French colonial venture in Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, further distancing the colonizers from the people they were seeking to “civilize.” Nowhere, Scott argues, was this discursive colonial project of “Othering” more evident than in the French treatment of Muslim North African women. Muslim women were figured in a binary opposition as either oppressed, harem-bound victims or the exotic, hyper-sexed prostitutes. Historically, then, the headscarf has long served as a symbol of alterity within France. Contemporary France, dealing with an influx of mostly poor North African immigrants – who are officially citizens – from the former colonies fares little better, as the ban on headscarves, rather than “liberating” young women, perpetuates racist and sexist stereotypes of the Muslims within its midst.

H. W. Brands on Ulysses S. Grant

I wrote about Ulysses Grant for two reasons: necessity and curiosity. The necessity was that I needed a major American figure whose life and career covered the middle of the nineteenth century. Seventeen years ago I embarked on a project to write the history of the United States in the form of several biographies. The biographies would be of important people whose lives in some way or other captured the central issues of their times. I wrote about Benjamin Franklin, who exemplified the eighteenth-century struggle of Americans to redefine themselves not as British subjects but as citizens of an independent American republic. I wrote about Andrew Jackson as the herald of American democracy: the People’s President who helped put the country on the path to broad participation in governance. I wrote about Theodore Roosevelt as the leader who grappled with the issues raised by industrialization and America’s rise to world power. I wrote about Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Depression and World War II.

But I had a gap in the nineteenth century—a very large gap that included the sectional crisis and the Civil War. I considered writing about Abraham Lincoln, but at the time I was doing the considering, Lincoln was celebrating (posthumously of course) his bicentennial, and books on Lincoln were pouring off the presses. Besides, my gap stretched from the death of Andrew Jackson in 1845 until Theodore Roosevelt became an adult in the early 1880s. (My biographies overlap one another in this regard; babies and children don’t engage much in the public events of their times.) Lincoln was assassinated in 1865; if I wrote about him, I’d have to write a separate volume to get me up to the 1880s.

So I settled on Ulysses Grant. His dates were perfect. He was 23 when Jackson died, and he lived until 1885. He was involved in the big events of his lifetime: the war with Mexico, the sectional crisis, the Civil War and Reconstruction. One book, on Grant, and my nineteenth-century gap would be filled.

Here’s where the curiosity kicked in. I had written about presidents before, but I had never written about anyone who was most famous for being a soldier. (Jackson became famous for being a soldier, but he is better known as a president.) I have been intrigued by soldiers—by warriors—because, for better and worse, they have very often been the drivers of history. No society (that I have ever come across) has existed without war. Every society celebrates its warriors—and no society more than America, which makes its warrior-heroes president and honors even those who merely put on the military uniform.

Related to my curiosity about warriors is the larger question of war. Specifically: why is war so common? Americans consider ourselves a peace-loving people, but in the past two centuries no country has gone to war (declared and undeclared) more often than the United States. And it’s not just Americans. Every society does it. Why is this? Most people think war is a bad thing, better off avoided. But people go to war again and again and again. Why?

I thought I might gain some insight by looking at Ulysses Grant. Grant was one of a type common in history: a man who was good at war but at little else. He performed ably and bravely during the war with Mexico as a young man, but during the 1850s he floundered. He left the army because there were no wars to fight, and he couldn’t find his footing in civilian life. He failed as a farmer, as a businessman, at just about everything. He was reconciled to a life of persistent mediocrity when the Civil War came and rescued him. He reenlisted and rocketed to the top of the Union chain of command.

Why? Because he had a singular gift for war. Others in the Civil War—Robert E. Lee, William Sherman, Phil Sheridan, Stonewall Jackson, to name the most conspicuous—shared the gift. War brought out the best in each of them. War provided the singular focus civilian life often lacked. War made things very simple: you lived or you died, you won or you lost. Grant and the others blossomed under war’s harsh but straightforward demands.

Grant more than the others. The traits that yield success in war are at once admirable and appalling. Grant was physically fearless, never worrying about whether the next shell would take his head off. And he had the ability—this is the appalling part—to send thousands of men to their deaths. Lincoln’s other generals couldn’t do it. Grant could. Convinced that preserving the Union would save millions of lives in the future, Grant was willing to sacrifice thousands in the present.

Americans (in the North, that is) loved him for it. He was the great hero of the age. His countrymen made him president, twice (he could have been elected a third and fourth time if he wanted, but he declined). Grant’s presidency has long been underrated. This is largely because his enemies wrote the histories and because Reconstruction was the most challenging time in American history to be president. Surrounded by the self-seeking and corruption of the Gilded Age, Grant nonetheless brought an essential humanity to the White House. He tried to give the Indian tribes a belated fair break, and he strove mightily to ensure that African Americans received the civil rights and equal treatment they were supposedly accorded by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. He didn’t accomplish all he fought for: the overwhelming weight of public opinion was against him. But the Indians, who would have been exterminated if the matter had been left to some of Grant’s contemporaries, survived. And the Ku Klux Klan was shattered in the South by Grant’s bold and timely action. (It would, unfortunately, revive in the twentieth century.)

I called my book The Man Who Saved the Union, because Grant did just that. Once during the Civil War, again during Reconstruction. Pretty remarkable, considering how little promise he showed before war gave him his chance.

The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements by Lynne Viola (2007)

by Andrew Straw

Lynne Viola’s The Unknown Gulag argues that the first and most heinous of Stalin’s notorious purges was the attack on wealthy or successful peasants known as kulaks, and their exile to desolate special settlements in the late 1920s and early 1930s. This account of “dekulakization,” is vital in understanding how the Bolshevik experiment with the New Economic Policy, or NEP (a limited market economy with communist party control), abruptly ended in the late 1920s when Stalin launched the radical industrialization and collectivization goals of the Five Year Plans. The NEP economy had allowed peasants to maintain their key prize of the revolution, land ownership, but this concession was seen by many Bolsheviks as undesirable and temporary and was ended by Stalin’s breakneck drive towards rapid industrialization, which required total state control of agriculture. The internal “colonial” settlements that housed the supposed “enemy” elements of the peasant population, were the foundation of what Solzhenitsyn later called the “Gulag Archipelago.” They set the precedent for the processes of political repression in the Stalinist Soviet Union, but among Stalinist crimes they are relatively “unknown” or understudied by historians. Viola asserts that the attempted elimination of the kulaks as “class enemies” was a disaster. The project was unrealistic, based on ideology rather than realistic planning; it was fiercely resisted, and only exacerbated the socio-economic problems of the USSR it was meant to solve.

Viola guides the reader through the full chronology of the dekulakization campaign by exploring the thinking of officials who organized a war against the peasantry, the construction of kulak identity, transport to exile, and the settlement conditions. Concurrently, Viola’s narrative humanizes the victims by unearthing grim accounts of the horrific deportation process and internment conditions, as families were loaded into trains and subjected to unspeakable conditions in settlements and by contrasting that reality with the deceptive propaganda used to disparage the kulaks in public. Victims’ testimonies are further supported by the first hand accounts of Soviet officials who confirmed the nightmarish conditions, particularly during the famine of 1932-33. By outlining the conditions in the countryside, initial orders from above, the “classifications” of peasants as kulaks, and the workings of the OGPU (Secret Police), Viola allows the reader to understand the archival evidence of kulak repression in the context of the inter-war USSR.

Max Alpert, “Seizing grain hidden by kulaks,” November 1930 (Wikimedia)

According to the author, the kulak identity was a form of “internal colonization” similar to western European ideas about the need to “civilize” the colonized races, but focused on the transformation of the peasants through “socialist reeducation.” However, Soviet attempts to apply progressive reasoning to dekulakization is exposed as almost entirely superficial and Viola stresses that the real effect was the creation of a kulak identity defined as an exploited class of peasants that was treated as resource for economic and state development. The haphazard building of special settlements and the authorities’ lack of preparation for the surviving deportees confirms the hypocrisy of a Soviet policy that hoped to exploit labor, only to have many able-bodied people die because they had no shelter or food. This kulak identity was internalized by all the victims, even the ones who came back into the Soviet mainstream through service during World War Two or repatriation after the death of Stalin. Equally important was the fact that this system of gulags did nothing to ameliorate the Russian and Soviet problems of rural underdevelopment, but merely created a Soviet superpower as a “Leviathan” built on the backs of the peasantry.

“Exclude the kulak from the collective farm” (LSE Digital Archive)

In sum, Viola convincingly argues that the “unknown gulag” provided the slave labor crucial to sustaining an otherwise unsustainable planned-economy and constructed a social distinction between those peasants moving up through the Soviet system and those enslaved as counter-revolutionaries. Anyone interested in Stalin’s Soviet Union will benefit from reading the Unknown Gulag because Viola successfully humanizes the victims of Stalin’s first attempt at reshaping the economic and social structure of the Soviet Union, while thoroughly examining the people and ideology that brought such plans to fruition. The “other Gulag’ of dekulakized peasants and the settlements where they suffered as “state enemies” now has a fitting account that will preserve their memory.

White House Forum on Latino Heritage

by Anne M. Martinez

In October 2011, I was invited to the White House Forum on American Latino Heritage, a gathering of historians, and labor and political leaders in our nation’s capital. The day-long forum featured a roster of distinguished speakers, including President Barack Obama, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis and Medal of Honor recipient Sergeant First Class Leroy Petry.

Labor Secretary Hilda Solis moderates a discussion on recognizing the contributions of American Latinos in the American economy with panelists Javier Palomarez, Dolores Huerta and Martin Cabrera. Tami A. Heilemann-Office of Communications

In the afternoon, we met in breakout sessions to identify sites important to Latina/o histories. According to Department of the Interior officials, only 4% of sites included in the National Register of Historic Places commemorate the histories of American women and people of color. Interior officials shared with us materials relating to the recent addition of the United Farm Workers California campus to the National Register of Historic Places to commemorate the life and work of Cesar Chávez.

Participants provided guidance for future sites to add to the register. My own recommendations included the site of the San Antonio pecan-shellers’ strike led by Emma Tenayuca in 1938. Labor organizing was important in the years after the Great Depression as industries worked to recover and unions sought to maintain the gains of previous decades. The strikers, primarily Mexican American women, had mixed success. When the federal government passed a minimum wage law of 25 cents an hour, the workers succeeded in getting the National Labor Relations Board to refuse the shelling companies’ requests for an exemption from the minimum wage. The shelling companies fought back by mechanizing shelling, costing the majority of workers their jobs, but those who stayed in pecan-shelling earned twenty-five cents an hour to run the new machines. I also recommended Holy Cross Catholic Church in Dallas, an African American parish that declared itself Sanctuary for Central American refugees in 1983, which I learned about from UT Department of History graduate student, Claudia Rueda. Holy Cross joined this national interfaith movement to protest U.S. policy in Central America by supporting those whose lives were devastated by the civil wars dividing Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. It was the only Catholic parish in Texas to declare Sanctuary and provides a rich example of interracial collaboration often overlooked in U.S. history.

The highlight of the day for me was the closing speaker, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. In her brief remarks, Justice Sotomayor noted that her mother had been a member of the Army Women’s Auxiliary Corp (WACs) during World War II. When I had a chance to greet Justice Sotomayor after her talk and I told her one of my students was studying Latina WACs, Sotomayor’s face lit up. “She should interview my mother!” It was a pleasure to meet the Justice and to see her commitment to Latina history, which of course she has shaped in the twenty-first century. The White House Forum was a fascinating opportunity to see how U.S. history is viewed by the federal government, and to assist in guiding it toward the many untold stories we historians are uncovering on a daily basis.

The Enduring Chanel: Reaction to a Revolutionary Reformer of Women’s Fashions

by Leila Bonakdar, Kate Chen, Jessica Salazar, and Lauren Todd

“The idea to do our project on women in the Roaring Twenties initially intrigued us because the romanticized era appealed to our captivation with fashion, music and American culture. Few people look past the glamorization of the flappers, but we wanted to dig deeper to find both the causes of the reform in gender roles as well as the era’s lasting impact on women today. In November, after a preliminary perusal of various sources at our local public library, we decided that our project should explore the controversial fashions of the twenties that boldly symbolized the liberation of women from confining Victorian social expectations.”

Drawing of three women in ankle length dresses with hats.

“We visited with Dr. Rebecca Sharpless, a Women’s Studies professor at Texas Christian University, in December and she suggested that we focus on the legendary French designer, Coco Chanel, whose revolutionary designs helped shape the role of women in the twenties. However, the majority of our research came from sources found in the University of Texas at Arlington Library. With the aid of Lea Worcester from the Special Collections Department, we were able to access a trove of primary resources, including 1920’s magazines, advertisements, newspaper articles, photographs, and microfilm, that was instrumental in helping us develop our script. We also accessed the university’s online research database and borrowed several books about fashion, the twenties and Chanel to refer to later in our project. We had the opportunity to view an exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art that featured works of American artists in the 1920’s. Many of the artists (O’Keefe, Hopper, Murphy, etc.) had dramatic, avant-guard styles that seemed to demonstrate the boldness of the decade. Melba Todd, a Neiman Marcus Special Events Coordinator, gave us her perspective on the significance and legacy of Chanel. Additionally, we visited several other local libraries and conducted email interviews with experts in the field of fashion.

We chose to do a documentary as our medium of expression because it allowed us to strategically use many of the visuals we found as we researched. In January we outlined the script and considered which issues would be crucial to our documentary. Our goal was to illustrate the significance of fashion in history. With our analysis, we were able to formulate the final script and record the voiceovers on Garageband. The documentary was compiled and edited on iMovie for the finished product.

Cartoon shows a woman in a large hat and long gown shooting at a flock of geese. — Source: The Library of Congress

The Roaring Twenties proved an ideal time to foster social, political and economic reform for women. And although fashion is considered by many to be immaterial to historical events, it often reflects changing attitudes because it is a powerful form of self-expression. Women reacted by embracing the androgynous, sleeker styles offered by Chanel as they audaciously proclaimed their independence and demand for equality. By shedding constrictive corsets and voluminous skirts, women were able to demonstrate their desire for freedom from oppressive social expectations. Chanel was more than a pioneer of fashion; her revolutionary designs and unusual role as a businesswoman consolidates her enduring legacy today.”

The Yacoubian Building by Alaa al-Aswany (2006)

by Janine Jones

Alaa al-Aswany’s novel The Yacoubian Building (2002, Arabic عمارة يعقوبيان‎) tells the story of a group of people loosely bound together by dint of living in the same crumbling building – a real place – in downtown Cairo. The son of a doorman; an older man with an endless fascination for women; the secret second wife of a wealthy and corrupt businessman; and a lonely newspaper editor looking for lasting love, are each connected to the building, either because they rent office space there, or have an apartment there, or visit someone who lives there. A scathing indictment of governmental corruption and a critique of the class-based limitations of contemporary Egyptian society, Yacoubian Building is nevertheless a piquant and entertaining read.

The Yacoubian Building gained notoriety in Egypt for being one of the first novels to break the homosexual taboo by featuring an openly gay character. The half-French, half-Egyptian editor of the fictional (French) newspaper Le Caire, Hatim Rasheed is portrayed sympathetically. Although other characters talk about him disparagingly he has nevertheless managed to gain the respect – or, at least, the quiet tolerance – of most of his neighbors and associates. Rasheed’s least sympathetic moment is not one related to his sexuality, but to his sense of class entitlement. He is deeply in love with a poor married Nubian man, Abduh, whom he has been supporting financially and with whom he has been having an affair. When Abduh’s child dies a sudden death, he is convinced that God is punishing him for engaging in forbidden sexual acts, and breaks off the affair. Rasheed, who wants a long-term committed relationship and has no interest in cruising the gay bars, seeks out Abduh and hopes to lure him back, promising him job security if they can only have one more night together. Abduh, deeply in debt and still racked with guilt, consents to one night in the hope of getting back on his feet. When Abduh gets up to leave, a drunken Rasheed demands that he stay, threatening and raving as though Abduh is nothing more than a servant whom Rasheed is entitled to command: “You’re just a bare-foot, ignorant Sa’idi. I picked you up from the street, I cleaned you up, I made you a human being.” While Rasheed’s ugly rant may be interpreted as the distraught sputtering of a heartbroken, inebriated man, the broader notion of entitlement and the economic and sexual exploitation of the poor by wealthy men is is clear here and throughout al-Aswany’s book.

One of the least sympathetic characters among these upper–class men is Hagg Azzam, a nouveau riche entrepreneur and budding politician who has accumulated vast drug wealth under the cover of more respectable, legal business dealings. Corpulent, seedy, selfish and malicious, Azzam typifies the corrupt businessman, justifying all manner of morally dubious behaviors under the veneer of Islamic sanction, denying seemingly even to himself the fact that his own pocketbook provides the necessary suasion with the religious leaders he consults for guidance about right conduct. He is allowed to take a second wife under Islam and to stipulate certain provisions about her behavior in the marriage contract, so he deliberately chooses a poor young widow, Souad, setting her up in an apartment in the Yacoubian building and then treating her little better than a call-girl. Azzam forbids her to see her beloved only son in Alexandria and demands that she not have any more children. When she does get pregnant and wants to keep the baby over his strident objections, he uses his wealth and means to forcibly drug and kidnap her, aborting their baby and divorcing her while she is unconscious. After repudiating her, any regrets he feels are related to sex and sex alone:

“He consoled himself with the thought that his marriage to her, while providing him with wonderful times, hadn’t cost him a great deal. He also thought that his experience with her might be replicable. Beautiful poor women were in good supply and wedlock was holy, not something anyone could be reproached for.”

The Yacoubian Building, No. 34 Talaat Harb, Cairo, Egypt

Nevertheless, despite Azzam’s ruthlessness and apparent lack of conscience, even he can be played by men who are more powerful. In one scene he goes to protest being asked to donate 25% of the proceeds of a business scheme to the powers-that-be, only to be required to sit and wait to talk to the “Big Man,” a disembodied voice piped in from the ether. This critique of the construction of modern Egyptian masculinity around power, intrigue, corruption, and manipulation, continues throughout al-Aswany’s novel.

Egyptians on the streets of Cairo in 1920. (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Azzam’s complicated approach to Islam, moreover, reflects al-Aswany’s diverse and nuanced characterization of Egyptian men and their religious sentiments. Although nearly all of the characters in The Yacoubian Building are Muslim, each interprets and understands Islam differently. For example, although it would be difficult to read this text as supportive of radical Islam, al-Aswany paints a sympathetic portrait of Taha el Shazli’s journey into radicalization, as a consequence of social and especially governmentally-imposed emasculation. Despite Taha’s considerable intellectual gifts and willingness to work hard, he is thwarted at every turn, unable to land a decent job because of his lack of connections and the stigma of having been born to a working-class father. His relationship with his first love falls apart as she too falls on hard economic times. Because Taha is unable to marry and provide for Busayna and thereby protect her from the leering, sleazy overtures of her employers, she gradually succumbs to a precarious balancing act of giving sexual favors (as long as they don’t compromise her all-important status as – technically – a virgin) in exchange for job security and increased monetary compensation. Selling herself in such a way, however, embitters Busayna. Though she never tells Taha what economic circumstances have forced her into, she grows cool and distant from him, finally breaking up with him in an almost glib manner in the street. In a sad irony, his increasing religiosity parallels her increasing descent into moral compromise, both a result of economic inequality. Having lost his love and any possibility of a real job, Taha finds meaning in Islam, actively protesting the corruption of the government and advocating for change. He finally finds the dignity and self-respect that broader Egyptian society had robbed him of in his Islamic organization:

“Those who knew Taha el Shazli in the past might have difficulty in recognizing him now. He has changed totally, as though he had swapped his former self for another, new one. It isn’t just a matter of Islamic dress that he has adopted in place of his Western clothes, nor of his beard, which he has let grow and which gives him a dignified and impressive appearance greater than his real age….All these are changes in appearance. Inside, however, he has been possessed by a new, powerful, bounding spirit. He has taken to walking, sitting, and speaking to people in the [Yacoubian] building in a new way. Gone forever are the old cringing humility and meekness before the residents. Now he faces them with self-confidence. He no longer cares a hoot for what they think, and he won’t put up with the least reproach or slight from them.”

No longer obsequious and servile, Taha feels confidence in himself as a man. Any ambivalence he may have felt about his Muslim associations is crushed when he is jailed, tortured, interrogated, blindfolded, and raped repeatedly by jeering police. His sense of alienation and emasculation complete, Taha turns wholly to the anti-nationalist teachings of Gama’a Islamiyya. Even marrying a beautiful Muslim widow (who manages to be sensual, sexy, and modest at the same time) doesn’t deter Taha from his goal of revenge through a martyrdom operation on those of the police establishment who violated him. Al-Aswany’s message is clear: lack of economic opportunity and government violence and corruption are leading to the religious radicalization of young Egyptian men.

(Image courtesy of Gigi Ibrahim/Flickr Creative Commons)

(Image courtesy of Hossam el-Hamalawy/Flickr Creative Commons)

This last is all the more interesting, relevant, and timely, given the brutal murder of 28-year-old Egyptian student Khaled Said by Egyptian police in front of his home in 2010, and the subsequent Facebook page and protest campaign, called “We are all Khaled Said” (كلنا خالد سعيد ). The viciousness and injustice of the murder served to galvanize public opinion, and was an important catalyst for the uprising, eventually evolving into the still-unfolding Egyptian Revolution.

You may also like:

Yoav di-Capua’s FEATURE piece on his recent book, Gatekeepers of the Arab Past.

Yoav di-Capua’s blog post about political and social conditions in Egypt eight months after Mubarak’s ouster in February 2011.

Lior Sternfeld’s review of Erez Manela’s The Wilsonian Moment.

Boxing Shadows, by W.K. Stratton with Anissa “The Assassin” Zamarron (2009)

By Anne M. Martínez

In November 2005, Anissa “The Assassin” Zamarron entered the ring for one of her most important bouts: a chance to win the Women’s International Boxing Association junior flyweight title. At 35, fighting in her opponent’s hometown and having lost her last four fights, Anissa was considered the underdog. San Antonio’s Maribel Zurita, a decade Zamarron’s junior, had earned the title three months earlier and was overwhelmingly favored to retain it. After ten full rounds, as the fighters awaited the scoring result from the judges, Anissa took comfort in the belief that she had fought the best match of her career. In the eight months since her last fight, she had eaten better and trained harder than ever before, and her preparation paid off: her trainer, Richard Lord agreed. “You did a great job,” he repeated, as the ring announcer came to the microphone. Anissa didn’t know it at the time, but it was her last fight, and she won: WIBA junior flyweight world champion!

Movie poster of the movie Boxing Shadows

Boxing Shadows tells the story of Anissa Zamarron’s life in Central Texas, including her rise to two-time world champion boxer. To those unfamiliar with the sport, Boxing Shadows offers a primer on the training, traveling, and match-ups of the early years of professional women’s boxing. Zamarron fought in the first sanctioned women’s bout in New York State along with a number of international bouts before women’s boxing was much of a blip on the radar of most American sports fans.

Black and white image of the Bennett sisters boxings, c. 1910

The Bennett sisters boxing, circa 1910.

But the book, co-written by Zamarron and sports writer Kip Stratton, is about much more. Boxing was not just a meal ticket for Zamarron, it was a life-saver. She was born in San Angelo, Texas, and her family moved to the Austin area when Anissa was seven. Shortly after, her parents separated and her family was divided. Her brothers — her heroes — lived with their father and Anissa went with their mother who, having married in her teens, relished a freedom she had never experienced before, to work full time, go to happy hour every night, and date. The loss of the structure of family life, the longing for the company of her brothers, and the rough and tumble apartment complex where she spent these formative years pushed Anissa further and further into darkness.

Image of Anissa "The Assassin" Zamarron in the midst of a boxing fight

Anissa “The Assassin” Zamarron (The Women’s Boxing Archive Network)

Anissa felt a strong self-loathing as early as second grade, began cutting herself in middle school, and was committed to a mental hospital for the first time in her early teens. She discovered boxing in 1993 at age 23. After years of therapy, self-mutilation, and struggle, boxing was an outlet for the demons that drove Zamarron to hurt herself. Boxing did not end her battles with herself, but gave Anissa ways to work through challenges in the gym, rather than in her mind. Zamarron is open about her struggles with learning disabilities, mental illness, and drug addiction. Her success in the ring offers inspiration for others struggling to overcome similar challenges to reach their goals.

Master-at-Arms Seaman Rhonda McGee, left, spars with Patricia Cuevas during an exhibition match in the preliminary rounds of the 2011 Armed Forces Boxing Championship.

Boxing Shadows is devastating in its frankness, uplifting for its courage, and all the more impressive when one meets Anissa. In May of 2012, I visited Anissa at Richard Lord’s Boxing Gym in Austin, Texas to talk about Boxing Shadows. [You can see the video interview at the bottom of this page or on our Youtube channel here.] Zamarron is marked, more than scarred, by her past. She is surprisingly forgiving of those who disappointed her or otherwise contributed to the internal battles she fought as a child. After the interview, Anissa prepared to spar, and even then, nearly seven years after her last bout, in the ninety seconds it took Richard Lord to wrap her hands, the Anissa I had just interviewed was completely transformed. She forgot about the camera, disconnected from everybody in the gym, and began moving like a boxer — even standing still. Focused in a way I had not seen in the half dozen years I had known her, at that moment — “The Assassin” was back.

Video Credits:
Producer: Amanda E. Gray
Co-Producers: Therese T. Tran and Anne M. Martinez
Cinematographer: Therese T. Tran
Editor: Amanda E. Gray
Colorist/Online: Therese T. Tran
Transcriber: Lizeth Elizondo

Photo Credits:
All photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Except the photo of Zamarron in the ring, which comes from the Women’s Boxing Archive Network

You may also enjoy:
More by Anne Martínez, “Rethinking Borders”
More on women’s athletics: “Title IX: Empowerment Through Education”

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.

Trading Roles: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Urban Economy in Colonial Potosí by Jane Mangan (2005)

by Zachary Carmichael

In only a few decades during the seventeenth century, the Spanish American colonial city of Potosí, in modern-day Bolivia, grew from a small settlement to a metropolis of almost 200,000. With twice the total population of all of Britain’s North American colonies, Potosí became one of the largest cities in the Americas despite being at an elevation of over 13,000 feet. This expansion centered on the massive silver mines at the nearby Andean mountain of Potosí that fueled Spain’s imperial ambitions. How did the city’s infrastructure keep pace with this startling urban growth?

Jane Mangan’s Trading Roles focuses not on the Indian, African, or Spanish silver miners, but on the local urban economy, run by poor, mostly indigenous men and women, that kept the city functioning. She argues that Potosí, with its extremely active market, fostered a degree of social mobility that was unknown in the rest of the Americas and Europe. It was the indigenous population (whom Mangan intentionally calls Indians), particularly women who shaped the city’s economy. In their struggle against Spanish competition and the colonial bureaucracy, natives used urban entrepreneurship to power Potosí’s growth.

Trading Roles traces Potosí’s development from the middle of the sixteenth century, discussing the growth of an indigenous business market among natives who had left their communities for the silver capital. Leaders tried to regulate commercial space in the city to curb perceived excessive drinking among mine workers and to maintain social order. The commercial system created by unmarried Indian women was at the heart of the Potosí economy. Mangan uses several striking examples of their social mobility and entrepreneurship. Indian women were able to make a comfortable life for themselves by running bakeries and breweries and loaning money to customers. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, external economic forces caused Potosí to enter a period of irreversible decline. The end of the silver boom devastated the economy and cut the population in half, marking the end of this extraordinary social mobility.

The book is extremely well-researched, ably drawing upon the surprisingly large number of sources available about the city. Mangan draws upon notarial records from the old colonial mint in Potosí, minutes of city council meetings housed in Sucre, Bolivia, and imperial archives in Seville. Although records of business transactions between indigenous women and their customers are rare, Mangan compensates by finding contextual evidence of this economic activity. Her research demonstrates the crucial role of court and notarial records in recreating the lives of early modern non-elites.

The unique urban character of Potosí was exceptional in the seventeenth century, so it is difficult to apply Mangan’s arguments about social mobility to the rest of Spanish America and the wider early modern world. The discussion of the growth and decline of Potosí lacks the incisive analysis of the sections on Indian women entrepreneurs. Despite this, Trading Roles is an important contribution to the study of urban history and social mobility in colonial Spanish America. Mangan’s conclusions offer a counterpoint to prevailing theories about the economic role of the indigenous populations in the Americas and challenge conventional views about European control of colonial urban economies.

Photo credits:

All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Freud’s Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis by Rubén Gallo (2010)

by Adrian Masters

In a posh neighborhood of Mexico City in August of 1940, former Soviet leader and Marxist intellectual Leon Trotsky was murdered with an ice-axe. The perpetrator, a Spaniard named Ramón Mercader, confessed to the murder, but initially refused to discuss his motives (he was only later confirmed to be a Stalinist agent). To dissect the tight-lipped Mercader’s mindframe, criminologist Raúl Carrancá y Trujillo drew out his own ice-axe: Sigmund Freud‘s essays on psychology and criminal behavior. Mercader agreed to speak to Carrancá’s psychoanalysts and was bombarded with questions about his family, religion, politics, and his innermost self. Doctors traced Mercader’s murderous impulse to “a very active Oedipal complex” — the killer’s hatred for his father had been projected onto Trotsky. Mercader was given twenty years in a Mexican prison, and criminological psychoanalysis became a full-fledged practice in Mexico.

After authoring a number of books on Mexican culture and society, Rubén Gallo brings us the electric (and refreshingly jargon-free) Freud’s Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis. Dividing his work into two relatively independent segments, Gallo explores both Freud in Mexico and Freud’s Mexico. The first segment of Gallo’s work focuses on Mexican artists’ and intellectuals’ interpretations of Freud, and gallops through some truly unexpected expanses of Mexican cultural history. We are introduced to Sebastián Nova, a campy libertine poet and acolyte of Freud writing in the 1920s, whose very public fantasies included pornographic dreamlands populated with virile Mexico City cab drivers. While a character so ebullient as Nova would seem hard to top, Gallo’s research turns up an even more intriguing case: a Benedictine monk in 1960s Cuernavaca named Gregorio Lemercier whose alleged affair with drugs, sex, and psychoanalysis scandalized both the Vatican and the Mexican popular press. We learn of Freud’s impact on Mexican nationalism in the writings of Samuel Ramos and the renowned poet Octavio Paz, and explore the inner worlds of surrealist painters Frida Kahlo and Remedios Varo. Gallo shows us how Freud’s writings were attractive to the particular inclinations of each of these figures, be they driven by sexual preference, the question of Mexican nationhood, cynicism towards ‘consumer society,’ a quest for God, or even by murderous international politics. In Freud in Mexico, Gallo’s writing is almost breathless, and unafraid to be funny, a true rarity in history writing!

Sigmund Freud (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

If the first segment of the book twists with the eclecticism of a dream sequence, the second segment feels somewhat like a therapist’s session. This is not to say that Freud’s Mexico is uninteresting; after all, what therapy session with Sigmund Freud could be boring? Yet the tone is slower, the verve dampened, the humor relatively muted. This is perhaps no fault of Gallo’s at all, for he is exploring a rather esoteric set of subjects: Freud’s relationship with the Spanish language, his scanty literature on Mexico, and the even more limited treatment Mexico receives in Freud’s works. Still, Freud’s Mexico digs up fresh insight on the European (and Viennese) idea of Mexico past and present and on the Austrian psychoanalyst’s strange relationship with a country he never set foot in. In the midst of these insights we follow, among others, the tragic invasion of Mexico by Austrian Emperor Maximilian, Freud’s rather odd childhood loves and friendships, and a mischievous ‘little Aztec god’ who haunts Europe named ‘Vitzlipuztli.’

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Because records of Freud’s ideas of Mexico are so limited, it is often Gallo who places Freud on the therapist’s couch, teasing out the Austrian’s unspoken inner thoughts. Gallo is incisive and transparent about his own inferences, but his playful psychoanalysis of Freud left me wishing for a more in-depth disclosure of the author’s own views on his famous subject. Still, Gallo has offered a book that balances craft, humor, and insight into the under-explored field of Mexican psychoanalytical history. Funny, light-footed, and brisk, Gallo gives us a cultural history aimed at the reader’s pleasure principle. Only those stricken with an acute narcissistic cathexis of the ego could possibly turn Freud’s Mexico down.

You may also like:

Our review of Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary, on Leon Trotsky’s final years in Mexico.

The Second World War by Antony Beevor (2012)

by Dolph Briscoe IV

Acclaimed British historian Antony Beevor’s recently published The Second World War is a masterful account of the worst conflict in human history, when truly the entire world became engulfed in the flames of war. Having written previously on various aspects of the era, Beevor’s work attempts to synthesize his prior research into a detailed narrative of World War II.

Consisting of over 800 pages, The Second World War is primarily a military and diplomatic history of the war. Beevor provides a brief introduction discussing Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and creation of the Nazi totalitarian state in Germany, as well as Japan’s invasion of China, in the 1930s. The book covers the entire course of World War II, beginning with Nazi Germany’s preparations during 1939 for invading Poland and concluding with American use of atomic bombs to force Japan to surrender. Beevor skillfully describes the military strategies employed by both the Allied and the Axis Powers during the war. He focuses on the particular generals from each country, such as Rommel of Nazi Germany, Zhukov and Chuikov of the Soviet Union, Montgomery of Great Britain, and Eisenhower, MacArthur, and Patton of the United States, contemplating how their individual personalities affected their planning and the course of the war. The author gracefully moves his story from one sphere of the war to another, whether it be Western and Eastern Europe, North Africa, China, or the Pacific islands.Hitler attending a Nazi rally (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

The leaders of the great powers serve as the major actors in The Second World War. Beevor especially gives much attention to Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, and fittingly so, as the vicious battles between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were of central importance in World War II. The author vividly depicts how both dictators possessed excessive vanity and extreme paranoia. Such characteristics contributed to creating brutal totalitarianism in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union. Hitler and Stalin bitterly hated each other, and their mutual loathing influenced the course of the war, according to Beevor. Hitler became obsessed with conquering Stalingrad, believing that the loss of his namesake city would humiliate the Soviet leader. This proved disastrous for the German armies. After Hitler’s suicide at the war’s end, Stalin ordered his men to find his corpse and bring it to the Soviet Union as a final punishment for the Nazi leader. Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt also receive much attention from the author. Churchill possessed dogged determination to ensure Great Britain’s survival, even in the darkest hours of the war. Roosevelt’s pragmatism and moderation helped keep the Allied Powers focused on winning World War II, especially when Churchill and Stalin clashed on matters of military strategy and postwar Europe. Beevor also examines their often complicated relationship with allies Chiang Kai-shek of China and Charles de Gaulle of France, and illustrates the significance of the Emperor to the Japanese people.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin pose for photographs during the Yalta Conference. (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)Representatives from the Allied countries meet in Tehran in December 1943. Standing outside the Russian Embassy, left to right: unidentified British officer, General George C. Marshall, Chief of staff of USA, shaking hands with Sir Archibald Clark Keer, British Ambassador to the USSR, Harry Hopkins, Marshal Stalin’s interpreter, Marshal Josef Stalin, Foreign minister Molotov, General Voroshilov. (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Stalingrad ablaze (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

The author vividly depicts the unprecedented violence and cruelty of World War II. Soldiers fought to sheer exhaustion in harsh climates. Civilians in China, Poland, the Soviet Union, and Germany suffered from widespread rape, looting, and murder at the hands of enemy armies. Hundreds of thousands of people became refugees and prisoners of war. Starvation affected millions around the world. Bombing raids devastated cities and countryside. Atomic bombs destroyed two Japanese cities and radiation caused lasting health problems for many people in Japan. Stalin’s paranoia led to vicious purges of both real and imagined enemies. And most infamously, Hitler and Nazi Germany conducted genocide against Jews in Europe. Beevor fully describes this horror, discussing concentration camps, sickening medical experiments performed on Jews, and how virulent anti-Semitism and propaganda caused most Germans to ignore these crimes against humanity perpetrated around them. Beevor’s accounts of the brutalities of World War II, especially the Holocaust, reminds readers how hatred can lead to sadism and true evil.

A bombed Hiroshima (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Aerial view of Nagasaki before the Allied bombing (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Aerial view of Nagasaki after the Allied bombing (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Antony Beevor’s The Second World War is a most welcome addition to the vast historiography on World War II. With great skill Beevor narrates the military and diplomatic events of this war while also examining the terrible human suffering of these years. Readers interested in World War II, military history, and international relations will benefit from reading this fine book about the most consequential event of the twentieth century.

You may also like:

Antony Beever talks to the BBC about conducting research for The Second World War.

“Looking at World War II”: Part I and Part II: our blog pieces on recently released German and Russian photographs taken during the war.

Our monthly feature on the UT Austin History Department’s Normandy Scholar Program.

Our review of Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II.

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