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Not Even Past

Latin American and Caribbean History: Collected Works from Not Even Past

By Gabrielle Esparza

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Since its creation in 2010, Not Even Past has published a huge range of articles connected to Latin American and Caribbean History. To mark our new partnership with the Benson Latin American Collection, we have collected all these articles in one compilation page organized around 17 topics. These articles (156 in total) are a testament to the remarkable research conducted by faculty and graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin but they also draw more broadly from the work of groundbreaking scholars across the world. Together we believe they constitute an important resource for the field.

Topics

  1. Conquest and Empire
  2. Indigenous History
  3. Slavery
  4. Race and Identity
  5. Religion in the Americas
  6. Gender and Sexuality
  7. Key Figures
  8. History of Science
  9. Environmental History
  10. Cold War
  11. Digital Archives and Resources
  12. Memory and Museums
  13. Material Culture
  14. Music and Film
  15. Crime and Law
  16. Latinx History in the United States
  17. Migration Studies

Conquest and Empire

 The Radical Spanish Empire focuses on an early modern empire of paper, Spanish America, that experienced radical forms of social mobilization and governance that today we associate with “modernity.” Yet these very new forms of radical modernity led paradoxically to the constitution of hierarchical ancien regimes unlike any other in Europe.  Paperwork created Spanish America by first encouraging massive political participation in the business of government, collapsing through mediation and alliances European and Amerindian power elites. This same participation, however, led to the creation of top-down archives that not only slowed down the pace of change but also created a peculiarly resilient new ancien regime, neither indigenous nor European. By the late sixteenth century any individual who had royal favor, a robust personal archive, and money could secure status and generally overcome challenges about their status and ancestry. Our book seeks to explain this paradoxical trajectory of the early modern Spanish American polity, poised between radicalism (cultural, political, social and epistemological) and the immobility which we associate with societies of orders.

By  Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters

Indigenous History

I began to realize that the transition of this set of very consistent attributes – closed eyes, swollen lids, and puffy faces – from small-scale ceramics to monumental stone sculptures spoke volumes. These changes in sculpture, and the contexts in which they were used, were related to the other key social dynamics that characterized this period, such as state formation. Late Preclassic rulers appropriated the imagery and themes previously used in the domestic sector in the form of figurines and their associations with ancestors and moved them into the large, public plazas where they could proclaim their power as rulers and lay claim to their own privileged history and lineage. This imagery, which was ancient and powerful and about kinship, became a formidable tool when moved out of the hands of all and into the domain of rulers alone. The jowly facial features, the bloated bodies, and the closed eyes invoked not only dead or long-gone ancestors, but potent lineage.

By Julie Guernsey

Slavery

The destruction of Palmares failed to stem the emergence of hundreds, perhaps thousands of smaller quilombos throughout Brazil. Nor did it prevent countless other acts of resistance that undermined planter domination even after the abolition of slavery in 1888. Cheney describes how the legend of the Quilombo dos Palmares inspired a 1988 constitutional amendment that extended land rights to the descendants of fugitive slaves. Thousands of “modern quilombos” have petitioned for government recognition while organizing mass movement in the countryside that has won concessions from local landowners and pressured elected officials to implement affirmative action policies in other areas. In 2015, the specter of Palmares looms large over Brazil.

By Edward Shore

Race and Identity

Historically, racism in Brazil has not been legally-sanctioned or discursively explicit, but it can be observed in statistics on education, health, and job employment, as well as life expectancy. Today, the numbers are undeniable: more than 50,000 people die violently in Brazil in a country without wars, and the majority are Black males under thirty. João Alberto Silveira Freitas, in this sense, was already a survivor of systemic racial violence and social exclusion until he met his death at the hands of security guards while buying groceries.  Despite such grim numbers, however, conservative groups have sustained and defended  a lasting idea of racial democracy that far outlived Brazil’s military dictatorship.  For those reasons, the Vice President’s proclamation of the absence of racism in Brazil, on the occasion of a Black man’s murder on the Day of Black National Consciousness, is both  unforgivable but also sadly entirely predictable.  

By Marcelo José Domingos

Religion in the Americas

In Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean, Kristen Block explores the role of religious doctrines as rational, strategic discourses in the seventeenth-century Caribbean. Certainly, Christianity shaped inter-imperial diplomacy, economic projects, and “national” identities. Yet, Block argues that powerless and disenfranchised individuals embraced or denied religious doctrines at will, in order to obtain advantageous political outcomes. Block illustrates that religion was not only a force of social inclusion and exclusion, but also a persuasive tool that allowed ordinary people to shape allegiances, perform Catholic or Protestant identities, and pursue justice and opportunity.

By Ernesto Mercado-Montero
Photo by Adriana Lestido

Gender and Sexuality

As a historian, I was impressed with the visual symbolism inherent in the handkerchiefs. I was immediately reminded of the photographs many of us have seen of elderly Argentine women defying a murderous military dictatorship. Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo were middle-aged and elderly women who lost children and husbands to the military junta that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983. At great personal risk, these women met at the presidential palace every Thursday, beginning in 1977, to hold a vigil, wearing images of their missing kin on strings around their necks and plain white handkerchiefs on their heads.

It is reasonable to speculate that most of Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo would not have considered themselves feminists, and it is even less likely they would have supported abortion rights. The historian Diane Taylor has pointed out that these women mobilized to defend their roles as mothers and wives, and they exploited traditional representations of femininity (purity and subservience to male family members) to mobilize shame. Even so, they remain national icons of feminine resistance in the public sphere.

By Paula O’Donnell

Key Figures

History of Science

Early republican experiments in Spanish America occurred at a time when there were no models to follow. While republicans in Europe battled monarchists and the clerical old regime, while they increasingly imagined their republics as colonial empires of racial inferiors, and while republicans like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the United States built their republic on white supremacy and industrialized slavery in cotton plantations, a generation of Spanish American sociologists, economists, anthropologists, and political philosophers became the world’s republican vanguard.

One of their most resilient inventions was rhetorical. Spanish Americans consistently portrayed the period of Spanish rule as obscurantist, tyrannical, and corrupt. This discourse of Latin America’s “colonial legacies” is pervasive today. During the early nineteenth century, Spanish Americans invented distinct “colonial legacies” to legitimize their intellectual and political work in rejecting Spanish rule. They believed science could diagnose, treat, and excise those pernicious colonial legacies. Their radical new form of political modernity required they take a systematic approach to understanding and changing their society, their economic structures, and their political processes. As perceived obstructions changed over time, so did proposed solutions, which in turn contributed to the invention of new philosophies, anthropologies, sociologies, geographies, and sciences.

By Lina del Castillo

Environmental History

At the end of 1960, near Cienfuegos, Cuba, on the Soledad estate of a U.S.-owned sugar company, the American Director and Cuban staff of Harvard’s Atkins Institution began packing up their scientific equipment. The Cuban Revolution had caught up with them. Director Ian Duncan Clement, his wife, Vivian, and lab technician Esperanza Vega worked quickly to put the station’s herbarium, library, and lab “in stand-by condition.” The station’s horticulturalist, Felipe Gonzalez, and his assistants pruned the trees in the station’s arboretum, preparing them “to withstand a period of neglect.”

By Megan Raby

Cold War

Medical professionals are often viewed as apolitical, but what happens when they come to challenge a government? On February 4th, 1976, a cataclysmic earthquake brought an embattled Guatemala to its knees. Amidst a raging civil war, the terremoto (earthquake) razed countless houses and killed roughly 21,000 people in just 39 seconds. Thousands more emerged from the rubble with serious injuries and over a million, disproportionately Mayas from rural regions, were left homeless.

By Ilan Palacios Avineri

On January 2, 1959, Fidel Castro, the rebel comandante who had just overthrown Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, addressed a crowd of jubilant supporters. Recalling the failed popular uprisings of past decades, Castro assured them that this time “the real Revolution” had arrived. Castro’s words proved prophetic not only for his countrymen but for Latin America and the wider world.

The political turmoil that rocked a small Caribbean nation in the 1950s became one of the twentieth century’s most transformative events. Initially, Castro’s revolution augured well for democratic reform movements then gaining traction in Latin America. But what had begun promisingly veered off course as Castro took a heavy hand in efforts to centralize Cuba’s economy and stamp out private enterprise. Embracing the Soviet Union as an ally, Castro and his lieutenants, Che Guevara and Raúl Castro, sought to export the socialist revolution abroad through armed insurrection. Chairman Khrushchev’s early support aided the Cuban revolutionaries in defeating of the CIA invasion of Cuban émigré fighters at the Bay of Pigs. However, he subsequently lost his job over the 1962 Missile Crisis that pushed the superpowers to the brink of nuclear war.

By Jonathan C. Brown

Digital Archives and Resources

Memory and Museums

The Colombian violence of the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, the subject of my work, left many victims. It also left many survivors of atrocities who needed some kind of closure in order to continue with their lives. During these decades, civilians found themselves caught among four armed actors: the National Army, paramilitaries, guerrillas, and drug lords, who were fighting over the control of land and civilians. These groups committed brutalities such as kidnappings, disappearances, forced displacement, bombings, massacres, and targeted murders. In order to cope with and overcome the trauma caused by all this violence, diverse communities set up museums and displays. These acts of memory and reconciliation demonstrate that people and communities remember and represent the past differently. Some exhibitions portray violence, others focus on personal histories and others turn to the strength their cultural traditions give them. They contain different meanings and intentions, and take a variety of forms including traveling museums, murals, houses, kiosks, and even cemeteries devoted to remembering the ones who are gone. But they all work towards the same goal: never again.

By Jimena Perry

Material Culture

Music and Film

National identity has been both a dream and a nightmare for historians. When they attempt to historicize the concept, it becomes a thick web of actors, motives, and unintended consequences. Exploring the “invention of tradition” underlying modern national identities proves an appealing but extremely difficult task. In Hello, Hello Brazil, Bryan McCann offers a suggestive method to master this process. By tracing the emergence of Brazilian popular music, he successfully shows how the “traditional” samba was composed in an unequal exchange between regional musicians and composers, state officers, recording managers, radio producers, and radio broadcasters. The history of modern Brazilian music must be understood, then, within the broader debate on “Brazilianness.”

By Franz D. Hensel Riveros

Crime and Law

Judicial records usually provide the empirical grist underpinning historical studies of crime, but journalism is the lifeblood of the field.  The efforts of reporters, editors, photographers and illustrators have allowed researchers to resurrect bygone crimes, often in forensic detail.  In the more recent Latin American past, for instance, the intrepid sleuthing of journalists—whose “narco libros” populate the Spanish-language shelves of book retailers—has spared academics from treading on paths far more perilous than graduate school could have ever prepared them for.  Their revelations pertaining to the inner-workings of criminal syndicates and their state cohorts have deepened our information trove, making it possible for researchers to formulate more comprehensive analyses of the underworld.

By Diego A. Godoy

Latinx History in the U.S.

The year 2019 marks the 60th anniversary of the Tex-Son strike, a major labor battle waged in San Antonio, Texas from 1959 to 1963 by mostly Mexican, Mexican-American, and some Anglo women all of whom were active members of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) Local 180. This strike is important for the history of Mexican Americans, women, and labor organization because it bridged the two other major moments for Mexican and Mexican American labor activism: the Pecan Shellers strike in San Antonio during the 1930s and the other Farah strike of the 1970s in El Paso. Little is known about labor activism strategies of marginalized women in the Southwest during the period in between these two infamous labor organizing efforts. The Tex-Son strike unveils what working women did to advocate for their needs on the garment factory floor during the Cold War period, especially in a historically anti-labor, anti-union state.

By Micaela Valadez

Migration Studies

In October 1937, Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered his troops to slaughter Haitians living in the Dominican frontier and the Cibao. The horrific violence left as many as 15,000 dead. Trujillo apologists managed to justify the action nationally, but the massacre created an international public relations nightmare for the regime. Newspapers cited Trujillo’s ruthlessness and compared him to Hitler and Mussolini. Trujillo quickly moved to restore his credentials as an anti-fascist ally of the United States by offering refuge to 100,000 European Jews fleeing Nazi Germany.  In Tropical Zion, Allen Wells tells the story of the establishment and decline of the small Jewish agricultural colony at Sosúa in the Dominican Republic and illustrates the significance of the colony in the international sphere. While only a handful of Jews migrated to the Dominican Republic during the Holocaust, Wells argues that ultimately, Sosúa saved lives and that its history uncovers the complex intersection of Zionism, U.S.-Dominican relations, American and Europe anti-Semitism, and the racism of the Trujillo regime.

By Lauren Hammond

Gabrielle Esparza is a Ph.D. student in the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a historian of Latin America, with a focus on twentieth-century Argentine history. Her current research interests include democratization, transitional justice, human rights, and civil military relations.

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