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From There to Here: Tatjana Lichtenstein

November 6, 2018

(UT History faculty come from all over the world. Here are their stories.)

Map of Denmark (via Wikimedia)

Being an immigrant has always been part of my story. More than 50 years ago, my parents left their home country in search of a better life. They ended up in the small country of Denmark in northern Europe. And it’s small: if you take a map and draw a line connecting Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio – well, Denmark fits within that triangle – and its population is less than those three cities combined. Like many European countries, Denmark did not have a tradition for welcoming immigrants. It was not part of the country’s DNA. My strange name, my parents’ accent, and our different foods made me stand out. I was a foreigner despite having been born there. Even though we were citizens, my family didn’t quite belong; didn’t really feel at home.

Perhaps because I had this feeling of being different, I developed a fascination with history very early in my life. Much like you and I have personal histories – experiences that we can point to as having shaped us – communities and societies also have stories that define them. To me the past is the key to understanding who we are as individuals and as community members. By the time I graduated from high school, I had decided that I wanted to become a professional historian, a teacher and researcher. After finishing my undergraduate degree in Denmark, I spent two years at Brandeis University near Boston, before I went to the University of Toronto for my doctorate in History.

Over nine years ago, I started my job as a professor teaching history at the University of Texas at Austin. My specialization is war and violence in the twentieth century, specifically the Second World War. It is a great privilege to be a teacher and a mentor to my students. This past January, I became an American citizen and am proud to take on the responsibilities that follows with that privilege.

From Huehuetenango to Here

September 6, 2021

By Ilan Palacios Avineri

From the Editors: From There to Here is a new series for Not Even Past in 2021. It builds off a past initiative but expands its focus to document the journeys taken by individual graduate students to Garrison hall and the University of Texas at Austin. In this powerful first article in the series, Ilan Palacios Avineri, who is completing his PhD in History, shares his story with us. For more about Ilan, see his spotlight here.

My Guatemalan father was born in the middle of a civil war. His childhood house was built from corrugated metal and adobe brick. He grew up clinging to my abuela’s back wrapped in a blanket as she weaved to sustain the family. He did not have shoes until he was 8 years old. He dropped out of school after the second grade. Before he reached my age, he was nearly murdered by the army three times. He worked as a trench digger and then as a laborer before fleeing his home in Huehuetenango.

When I was a kid growing up in Los Angeles, my father never told us this history. Instead, I occasionally followed this familiar stranger to work and watched him demolish drywall. He would hold his sledgehammer tightly and swing with precision. His hands would often bruise, scab, or scar. We would break for tamales and he would make me promise never to do construction. He would then quietly return to demolition. Even so, I would watch his body as though it were my own.

*Family home. Huehuetenango (City), Guatemala.*

Our collective forgetting continued until I arrived at university. There I finally uncovered a usable past. I found books about the dispossession and militarization of his country. I read that the Guatemalan army routinely monitored, terrorized, and murdered people in Huehuetenango with impunity. I learned that they did so with the support of the United States, the country whose flag I was compelled to pledge allegiance to as a child. And I learned how people in Guatemala resisted in ways both small and large.

I returned to Los Angeles and started speaking to my father’s silences. He began unearthing the stories of his war. He trusted me with the memories etched in his skin, the trauma buried between his bones. He recalled the fear he felt when soldiers placed a muzzle to his back. He described being extorted by the Mexican police on his way to the US. This familial unforgetting was deeply painful and, at the same time, sustaining. Our lack of funds, our family’s struggles, our very condition was given cause. Our collective shame dissolved in the process. The dialogue set us free.

*Ilan and his father. Los Angeles, California.*

Through these conversations, I learned that love, justice, and understanding were one and the same. Each could only be realized when suffering was allowed to speak. Speaking truth required listeners. I arrived at UT, principally, to hear the histories of Central Americans. To listen to stories not only of suffering and despair, but of joy, happiness, and triumph. To participate in the healing dialectic.

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

May 27, 2019

By Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra:

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

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

March 25, 2019

By Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

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.

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

March 4, 2019

By Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

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.

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

February 20, 2019

By Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

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

Austin Historical Atlas: Development During World War I

November 12, 2018

(This is the first of a series that will explore creative ways to think about historic markers in Austin.)

By Jesse Ritner

1917 marked a turning point in the history of Austin’s development. A large donation and the dismembering of a family estate spread the city west and north, resulting in dramatic increases in public spaces, urban housing, and wealth for the Austin public schools. Yet, Austin’s growth came at the expense of one specific neighborhood. The story is already written onto the city, if we know where to look.

The Andrew Jackson Zilker marker (placed in 2002), the Clarksville Historic District marker (placed in 1973), and the Crusemann-Marsh-Bell House (placed in 2009) seem to be about distinctly different historical events. Zilker’s, located in front of the Barton Springs Pool House, informs us about the life of Austin’s “most worthy citizen” in basic outline, emphasizing his rags to riches story, and his generous philanthropy. The Clarksville marker, on the other hand, recounts a story of survival. It details the resilience of the black community of Clarkville, founded by freed slaves in 1871, who refused to move for over a century, despite repeated pressure from the city of Austin. Last, the Crusemann-Marsh-Bell House marker comments on the architecture of this 1917 home, built by the “granddaughter of Texas Governor E.M. Pease.” By themselves, the three markers recount one story of wealth, one of poverty, and one involving the American Dream. Collectively, they tell a dramatic geographic history of urban expansion into west Austin in 1917.

Although the date is missing in the Zilker marker, it notes that Zilker “indirectly funded school industrial programs when he sold 366 acres of parkland, including Barton Springs, to the city.” The sale occurred in 1917. The same year the heirs to the Pease estate, which spread from 12^th street to 24^th street and from Shoal Creek to the Colorado River, decided to split the estate and develop it, dramatically spreading the city of Austin north and west (marked in black on the map). This house was one of the first homes built in what would become the Enfield development. Comparing the map above to the historic map below (although it is a few years newer), it is easy to see that the black neighborhood of Clarksville (marked in red and bordering the new development), sits precariously between the new park and the burgeoning neighborhood that spread Austin west of Lamar Boulevard.

Map of Austin, Texas depicting the city's various neighborhoods

In 1918, as the Clarksville marker notes, the Austin School Board closed down the Clarksville public school in one of the first attempts to move Clarksville residents east. The decision by Austin’s school board, only a year after the single largest donation in their history, was not accidental. The absorption of what is now Zilker Park and the Pease Estate into Austin pushed city borders westward, pulling Clarksville undoubtedly into the urban sphere. The presence of a black neighborhood on the border of the soon to be wealthy and white neighborhood north of 12th street with the easy access to Zilker Park made their movement politically imperative in Jim Crow era Austin.

While the two years of 1917 and 1918 seem almost happenstantial in each individual marker, when read together they mark a significant turning point in Austin’s growth, as well as a distinct moment in Austin’s history of segregation.

Also in this series:

Mapping Austin’s Historical Markers

Similar series:

From There to Here

The American “Empire” Reconsidered

February 1, 2018

by A. G. Hopkins

Whether commentators assert that the United States is resurgent or in decline, it is evident that the dominant mood today is one of considerable uncertainty about the standing and role of the “indispensable nation” in the world. The triumphalism of the 1990s has long faded; geopolitical strategy, lacking coherence and purpose, is in a state of flux. Not Even Past, or perhaps Not Ever Past, because the continuously unfolding present prompts a re-examination of approaches to history that fail to respond to the needs of the moment, as inevitably they all do.

This as good a moment as any to consider how we got “from there to here” by stepping back from the present and taking a long view of the evolution of U.S. international relations. The first reaction to this prospect might be to say that it has already been done – many times. Fortunately (or not), the evidence suggests otherwise. The subject has been studied in an episodic fashion that has been largely devoid of continuity between 1783 and 1914, and becomes systematic and substantial only after 1941.
There are several ways of approaching this task. The one I have chosen places the United States in an evolving Western imperial system from the time of colonial rule to the present. To set this purpose in motion, I have identified three phases of globalisation and given empires a starring role in the process. The argument holds that the transition from one phase to another generated the three crises that form the turning points the book identifies. Each crisis was driven by a dialectic, whereby successful expansion generated forces that overthrew or transformed one phase and created its successor.

The first phase, proto-globalisation, was one of mercantilist expansion propelled by Europe’s leading military-fiscal states. Colonising the New World stretched the resources of the colonial powers, produced a European-wide fiscal crisis at the close of the eighteenth century, and gave colonists in the British, French, and Spanish empires the ability, and eventually the desire, to claim independence. At this point, studies of colonial history give way to specialists on the new republic, who focus mainly on internal considerations of state-building and the ensuing struggle for liberty and democracy. Historians of empire look at the transition from colonial rule rather differently by focussing on the distinction between formal and effective independence. The U.S. became formally independent in 1783, but remained exposed to Britain’s informal political, economic and cultural influences. The competition between different visions of an independent polity that followed mirrored the debate between conservatives and reformers in Europe after 1789, and ended, as it did in much of Europe, in civil war.

“A Rival Who Has Come to Stay. John Bull – Good ‘evins! – wotever ‘ll become of my ship-building monopoly, if that there Yankee is going to turn out boats like that right along?” Puck magazine, July 24, 1895 (via Library of Congress)

The second phase, modern globalisation, which began around the mid-nineteenth century, was characterised by nation-building and industrialisation. Agrarian elites lost their authority; power shifted to urban centres; dynasties wavered or crumbled. The United States entered this phase after the Civil War at the same time as new and renovated states in Europe did. The renewed state developed industries, towns, and an urban labor force, and experienced the same stresses of unemployment, social instability, and militant protest in the 1880s and 1890s as Britain, France, Germany and other developing industrial nation-states. At the close of the century, too, the U.S. joined other European states in contributing to imperialism, which can be seen as the compulsory globalisation of the world. The war with Spain in 1898 not only delivered a ready-made insular empire, but also marked the achievement of effective independence. By 1900, Britain’s influence had receded. The United States could now pull the lion’s tail; its manufactures swamped the British market; its culture had shed its long-standing deference. After 1898, too, Washington picked up the white man’s burden and entered on a period of colonial rule that is one of the most neglected features of the study of U.S. history.

Columbia’s Easter Bonnet: In the wake of gainful victory in the Spanish–American War, Columbia—the National personification of the U.S.—preens herself with an Easter bonnet in the form of a warship bearing the words “World Power” and the word “Expansion” on the smoke coming out of its stack on a 1901 edition of Puck (via Library of Congress)

The third phase, post-colonial globalisation, manifested itself after World War II in the process of decolonisation. The world economy departed from the classical colonial model; advocacy of human rights eroded the moral basis of colonial rule; international organisations provided a platform for colonial nationalism. The United States decolonised its insular empire between 1946 and 1959 at the same time as the European powers brought their own empires to a close. Thereafter, the U.S. struggled to manage a world that rejected techniques of dominance that had become either unworkable or inapplicable. The status of the United States was not that of an empire, unless the term is applied with excessive generality, but that of an aspiring hegemon. Yet, Captain America continues to defend ‘freedom’ as if the techniques of the imperial era remained appropriate to conditions pertaining in the twenty-first century.

The signing of the NATO Treaty, 1949 (via Wikimedia Commons)

This interpretation inverts the idea of “exceptionalism” by showing that the U.S. was fully part of the great international developments of the last three centuries. At the same time, it identifies examples of distinctiveness that have been neglected: the U.S. was the first major decolonising state to make independence effective; the only colonial power to acquire most of its territorial empire from another imperial state; the only one to face a significant problem of internal decolonisation after 1945. The discussion of colonial rule between 1898 and 1959 puts a discarded subject on the agenda of research; the claim that the U.S. was not an empire after that point departs from conventional wisdom.

The book is aimed at U.S. historians who are unfamiliar with the history of Western empires, at historians of European empires who abandon the study the U.S. between 1783 and 1941, and at policy-makers who appeal to the ‘lessons of history’ to shape the strategy of the future.

A.G. Hopkins, American Empire: A Global History

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