20th Century Archives - Page 8 of 19

From There to Here: Tatjana Lichtenstein

(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.

Three-year-olds on the world stage

When I was very small, I lived six blocks from the Santa Fe Opera. Our home was in the Tesuque Village, which is really just a country road that runs alongside the Tesuque Creek just north of Santa Fe, with twenty tiny cul-de-sacs stretching up into the alluvial crannies of the southern Rockies. There were fruit stands and general stores. The Indians from the Tesuque Reservation would come to trade hides for cigarettes. This was before there were casinos. I remember the taste of the fresh local pears. There will be some in heaven, I assume. Once, I got lost. I was three. An Indian from the reservation took me to every house in the village and asked me, “Is that your house, little boy?”

On the horizon to the east, we had the Sangre de Cristos. They were huge, daunting, legendary and high. Mountain snow accumulated there in the winter to keep the semi-arid New Mexico wasteland inexplicably green all summer. Deep in the heart of the wilderness, at Horsethief Meadow, the early Comanche hid away in the lush green grass of summer with the wild and not-so-wild herds of mustangs that made them the wealthiest traders at the Taos market in the nineteenth century. Savages? Trade in your textbook. They knew more about selective breeding than Her Majesty’s Master of Horses.

To the west, there was the Opera. You might ask why Tesuque had an Opera. All I can say is that it just needed one. It simply couldn’t do without one. It was brand new, when I was three. It went up in 1957. I wasn’t sure where I lived, but I knew it was in the shadow of the Opera, a battleship on our western horizon. Man-made grandeur. And woman-made, of course. A work of art. An open-air theatre, like the Athenians had, long, long ago. A democratic, public forum.

I never went. I was three years old. My brother, one year my senior, and my sister, one year my junior, never went, either. But Momma and Daddy went. (Assuming I got the right house, and they were my real momma and daddy.) Newlyweds, twenty-five years old with three little kids, and walking distance from the Santa Fe Opera. They had season tickets. They were there when an aging Igor Stravinsky conducted his masterpiece, the Rite of Spring. With the New Mexican sunset descending behind the main stage. They were there, in the third row, behind Georgia O’Keeffe, our friend from the Piggly Wiggly in Santa Fe.

We got the LP’s. We just called them records. We played our records one after the other on the old Magnavox Hi-Fi, set into a handcrafted hardwood cabinet, as if that precise technology, the culmination of 1961 electronic genius, was expected to last, unaltered, for two hundred years.

I had to push a stool up to the speaker, so I could reach over to find the switch at the lower right-hand corner of the record changer. Click to the right and click back. Stacked high with Igor’s Rite of Spring, I piled on Sherry Lewis and Lamb Chop, Toscanini’s Beethoven, Belafonte’s Calypso, Walt Disney’s Bambi and the legendary Kingston Trio. I sang with the Kingston Trio one night at a night club in Reynosa. By then, I was four. Walked right across the darkened dance floor all by myself and sat on one of the amplifiers. I knew all the words, and I sang with them, just as I always did. Every day, at home. Of course, they knew who I was. We had sung those songs together hundreds of times. But that is a tale for another day.

Rite of Spring, well, we called it the jungle record, and we hid behind the couch during the rowdy parts. That same year, we got our first Peter, Paul and Mary. The LP. Help me find the way, to the promised land. But, the opera was out of reach. Daddy bought the LP’s for La Traviata, La Bohème, and Madame Butterfly, but he kept them up high and we were down low. It was so we wouldn’t scratch them. And, it was because they were in Italian. And, because they were sad. Too sad for three-year-olds.

Original 1904 poster for Madame Butterfly by Adolfo Hohenstein — Original 1904 poster by Adolfo Hohenstein (via Wikipedia)

I am sixty now. I have been away for a long time. I decided it was time to go back. To go inside the Santa Fe Opera. I bought my ticket online. It was expensive. And I drove two days to get there. I guess, on horseback, it would have been two weeks. Three, by stage coach. Not one to complain.

I wanted Doctor Atomic. It was a contemporary opera sardonically set right there in the New Mexico piñon rattlesnake drylands. The role of Oppenheimer was to be sung by a thermonuclear power tenor. And a healing ceremonial dance by the Navajo and Pueblo nations, on stage, to ward off the bad karma. But it was sold out. Of course, it was. So, I bought Madame Butterfly.

Before you continue, comrade, you should really punch up the famous aria on Spotify or wherever it is you satisfy your musical impulses these days. I don’t know if the María Callas version is on there. She was the diva. It was that good, that night. Sung by Ana María Martínez. Brought the house down. It has been more than a month, and I still cry when I think of it.

It had just rained. A grand New Mexico cloudburst, typical of mid-August. They call it their monsoon. The rain stopped before the curtain opened. Except there is no curtain. Athens, remember? It was cool and damp, though. A Santa Fe night, clouds lifting and the proverbial western sunset, iconic and scented of damp sagebrush, just behind the stage.

You know the melody of the aria. Even if you have never been to the opera. Now, imagine it, there. Cio-Cio San, a.k.a., Madame Butterfly, gazes across the harbor at Nagasaki in 1904. Waiting for her lawfully wedded American imperial husband, Lieutenant Pinkerton, who never took her seriously, to return. Delta Dawn, what’s that flower you got on? Could it be a faded rose from days gone by? Yeah, like that, but, Puccini, comrade. Way cooler. And sadder. The big sad. Still has me choked up.

One day, three years after his departure, a ship does sail into Nagasaki with an American flag on it. Pinkerton has not come to assume his commitment to the delicate Butterfly. He has learned, through the diplomatic gossip network, that he has a Japanese child with blue eyes, that his flesh and blood is descending into poverty and dishonor. Beside the woman he fancied and then, abandoned. Pinkerton has come to take the child away from his mother.

He can’t face her, of course. Too ashamed. Of how he let her down. Of how unremittingly faithful she was, in the face of his own callous indifference.

View of the stage at the Sante Fe Opera House (via Wikipedia)

At the curtain calls, without a curtain, the crowd booed the tenor. Joshua Guerrero. But he was a good sport. He understood. He had portrayed the playboy badass so well that the massive woke Santa Fe audience wouldn’t let him leave the role, not even for the curtain call. Pinkerton had been a world class prick, so his interpreter wasn’t getting a free pass. The listeners’ friendly jeers counted as a standing ovation, for the performer. There was something very wild west, about that. That was rodeo etiquette, comrade, not the Met.

The clincher, that night, was played by a three-year-old. I know this wasn’t in Puccini’s original score. These works are not dead artifacts. They are still alive. After Butterfly commits hara-kiri, Pinkerton arrives to take the boy away to America. The boy, without singing a note (he was really just three years old) wraps himself in the American flag that his mother had used as a curtain in her Japanese-American home in Nagasaki. He picks up the bloodied dagger with which his beautiful mother has just killed herself and, with it, faces down Pinkerton. He is having none of it.

No baby jails. No icy separation from families at borders. No teaching them foreigners a moralistic lesson with heartless biblical puritan cruelty. Cio-Cio San’s boy was only three, but ready to take on the egotistical American imperial madness. If only that gesture could come off the Santa Fe stage, into the real world. Maybe it already has.

Because I am now sixty, and not twenty and not three, I felt that perhaps the central character in the opera was, actually, Suzuki, Butterfly’s servant and companion, the only one who knows her commitment and her suffering, the only one who understands that there cannot possibly be a happy end to this tale. The long night, as Butterfly waits for Pinkerton to arrive, and Suzuki knows that he will most certainly not, was moving. One would hope that she took the boy with her. Somewhere, far away, where his life will be more than the currency of cruel old men and their hateful games.

You May Also Like:

Borderlands Business: Conflict and Cooperation on the U.S. Mexico Border by Anne Martínez
Sanctuary Austin: the 1980s and Today by Edward Shore

Also by Nathan Stone:

The Battle of Chile
The Tiger
Miss O’Keeffe
Underground Santiago: Sweet Waters Grown Salty

Play Review – Monroe by Lisa B. Thompson (2018)

By Tiana Wilson

On September 15, 2018, I attended Monroe, winner of the Austin Playhouse’s Festival of New Texas Plays, staged at the Austin Playhouse. The playwright, Lisa B. Thompson based the piece on her family’s history prior to their move to California in the 1940s. Situating the narrative in 1946 Monroe, Louisiana, Thompson places the story in broader histories of the Great Migration and southern black people’s experiences in the United States after World War II. Monroe begins with the aftermath of the lynching of a young man that affects his family and friends as they struggle to come to terms with his death. The man’s younger sister, Cherry, confronts her belief that God is telling her to leave the South, while her grandmother, Ma Henry, dismisses the idea. However, Clyde, a friend of Cherry’s brother, takes her dreams seriously and invites her to come along with him to California. Cherry must decide whether she is going to stay in her hometown where she is familiar with the people and cultural traditions or if she is going to risk moving to a location where she does not know what to expect. Overall, Monroe explores how the threat and aftermath of racial violence haunts the lives of African Americans as they imagine different futures.

Fully unpacking all the underlying themes of Monroe is a challenge because the play is rich in ideas of blackness as it pertains to the body, spirituality, cultural traditions, imagined spaces, and racial terror. Each character represents a different set of ideas, agendas, and dreams, demonstrating the fluidity of blackness in the play. In Thompson’s writing, the importance of spirituality to black families as well as the difficulties of improving one’s life are underlying themes that illustrate how artists use performance to interrogate and narrate historical and contemporary black experiences.

One of Thompson’s aims in the play is to expose the totalizing effect of racial terror that crept into black people’s minds and everyday lives during the Jim Crow era. After witnessing her brother’s death, Cherry thought she was pregnant by God when she skipped a menstrual cycle. Cherry finally comes to terms with the loss of her brother only after her cousin Viola encourages Cherry to accept the reality. Furthermore, with the fear that Clyde and her brother might share the same fate, Cherry undergoes another level of terrorization that caused her menstrual cycle to start again. Mourning her brother not only put an emotional burden on Cherry but also physically stressed her to the point where her bodily fluids were irregular. This signifies the psychological, emotional, and physical trauma of racial violence that penetrated the lives of black people. The fact that Cherry assumed she was the new coming of Mary and pregnant by God symbolizes how central spirituality was for Christian African American communities as they made sense of the world. I appreciated Thompson’s writing of Cherry that highlighted her sexual innocence by portraying a form of black womanhood other than sexual exploitation and violence. At the same time, Thompson shows the variety of possibilities for black womanhood in portraying Cherry as sexually innocent and cousin Viola as sexually experienced.

Continuing the theme of African Americans’ struggles in recovering from racial violence, Thompson also aims to demonstrate how black families often migrated in search for better lives and how that move impacted the family members who stayed behind. Clyde’s character is one of the first people in the play to discuss his plans to travel to California where he hopes he will have better job opportunities and less racial terror. In response, Cherry begins to think of a life outside of Monroe, where she could possibly escape her painful past. However, Ma Henry, disapproves of her idea to migrate, representing an older generation’s skepticism about moving away from familiarity. Having lived through the deaths of her children and grandson, Ma Henry is also fearful of the violence Cherry may encounter in her journey west that may prohibit her return. Cherry must choose her own dreams of exploring somewhere new or justify living in Jim Crow where she remains the keeper of her family’s roots and cultural traditions. Cousin Viola, who previously migrated up north and settled in Chicago returns back home after the funeral sharing her success. Taken together, Clyde and Cherry’s desire to migrate to California and cousin Viola’s move to Chicago maps an array of black people’s destinations outside of the south in efforts to search for better opportunities. Monroe also explores how blackness is not geographically constrained; rather it highlights the importance of locality in black people’s different experiences within the U.S. during the 1940s. While the play is heavily representative of Southern, Christian black cultures through language, food, and attire, Thompson’s portrayal of cousin Viola offers the audiences a sense of “secular,” urban, northern black experiences.

Monroe is a fascinating piece of black art that contributes to our understanding of the complexities of African Americans families as they migrated throughout the U.S.

A Poverty of Rights, Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro by Brodwyn Fischer (2008)

Getúlio Vargas, President of Brazil from 1930-1945, is often credited as the champion of the Brazilian working class during the twentieth century. His policies led to the progressive industrialization of Brazil and to a barrage of labor regulations that protected workers’ rights. However, not everyone benefited equally from these laws. Thousands of poor Cariocas (Rio de Janeiro’s residents) who labored outside the formal economy were not legally considered workers and faced great challenges to attain the rights that Vargas originally intended for the organized working class.

Brodwyn Fischer presents a compelling study integrating urbanization, patronage networks, and conceptions of citizenship in modern Brazil. The book addresses the formation of poor people’s rights in Rio de Janeiro between 1920 and 1960. The basic thesis is that the poor’s claims to economic, social, and political rights were constantly constrained by legal ambiguity and informality, fostering a state of partial but perpetual disenfranchisement. Despite the unprecedented expansion of labor benefits for the workers during the Vargas era, socioeconomic assumptions and bureaucratic hurdles revealed the discrepancy between legislation and social realities. New regulations prevented outright exclusion from rights, but legal ambiguity prevented their full attainment, placing a significant portion of urban poor’s lives outside the sphere of citizenship. Fischer shows how this contest over citizenship rights played out in urban spaces, courtrooms, and in the government bureaucracy.

The implementation of legislation on urban growth in Rio in the early twentieth century shows one such disparity in the ways the poor were both included and excluded from citizenship rights. The sanitary code of 1901 and especially the Building Code of 1903 had lasting impacts on the conceptualization of urban spaces and poor’s place in cities. Both sets of legislation targeted the favelas (informal settlements) for removal, associating them with disease and moral danger. However, the incapacity of the state to enforce those laws enabled tolerance for them and created a venue for the poor to achieve a tenuous hold on land in the city.

Getúlio Vargas’ ascension to the presidency put the poor at the center of his populist project. A network of patronage among politicians, middlemen, and poor residents in the favelas soon arose to defend vulnerable constituents against the laws’ enforcement and to guarantee political support. Vested interests in the slums would prolong their existence in an atmosphere of legal uncertainty. While becoming the only solution to Rio’s housing crisis, favelas remained illegal according to the law. This fact deprived residents of any meaningful claim to urban rights, making vulnerability and dependence a key feature of Rio de Janeiro’s poverty.

Vargas also extended considerable material benefits to the Brazilian working classes mainly through the Consolidation of the Labor Laws of 1943. In the process, a poverty of rights emerged that made workers supplicants rather than fully enfranchised citizens. These reforms were exalted more as public displays of generosity from the president than as the attainment of full rights belonging to the citizens. Vargas’ administration articulated a conception of citizenship underpinned by notions of work, family, and patriotism according to which rights were distributed. In order to access these rights, the poor had to negotiate not only discourses of citizenship in their written petitions to the government, they also needed documentation to claim their benefits. The possession of birth certificates, work ID’s and other bureaucratic hurdles created a multi-tier system in which the procurement of a specific document unlocked the next level of social protections. The precondition of documentation for citizenship turned rights into privileges that benefited only those among the poor who were documented. Political loyalty, bureaucratic agility, and corruption often meant the difference between exclusion or access to benefits.

If Brazilian bureaucracy created serious obstacles for the attainment of rights, courtrooms presented a legal mine field awaiting favela residents. The inconsistent and heterogeneous Brazilian legal system added more ambiguity to the situation of the undocumented poor. Legal decisions often rested on perceptions of individual circumstances and character and as such, poor Brazilians and judicial officials engaged in negotiations of judicial responsibility and sentencing based on open-ended ideas of civic worthiness. Documentation might provide a solid signifier of citizenship permitting Rio’s residents to escape the more nebulous dimensions of social character, class, and circumstance. A positive vida pregressa (brief life history) and the possession of other documents such as a work card, constituted less ambiguous signs of civic honor. Thus, poor people who could not present themselves as such saw their civic rights undermined and a higher risk of conviction in the courts.

Fischer concludes by chronicling a series of conflicts in the favelas that were due to the growth of the city and the rising value of land in the 1950s and early 1960s. The proliferation of local social movements to defend claims to abandoned lands, coupled with networks of support from leftist politicians and favela middlemen, succeeded in preventing most of the public and private evictions in this period. However, this success rested on political loyalty and not in the enfranchisement of their residents per se. Untitled permanence and illegality would continue to constitute the ultimate legacy of the community’s legal battles.

Fischer offers a well-researched and nuanced analysis of ambiguities of citizenship in modern Rio de Janeiro based on the eclectic use of civil and criminal court cases, legal codes, statistics, oral histories and even samba lyrics.

Satan’s Playground: Mobsters and Movie Stars at America’s Greatest Gaming Resort, By Paul J. Vanderwood (2009)

By Diego A. Godoy

For Tijuanenses, the sight of the Agua Caliente entertainment complex conjures up images of two distinct things. The first: dogs. The Tijuana racetrack is home to nearly 700 galgos, Spanish greyhounds that race almost daily. Adjacent to the track is the multi-use Estadio Caliente, the home turf of Club Tijuana Xoloitzcuintles de Caliente, currently situated in the top-flight of Mexican professional soccer. The Xolos take their name from the sacred Aztec canine—a hairless, netherworldly little breed, albeit a quite congenial one. The second: Jorge Hank Rhon, Tijuana’s Trumpian ex-mayor (2004-2007). Born to a father with one foot firmly planted in politics and the other in business, Hank leveraged his family’s name to facilitate his acquisition of the Agua Caliente grounds in 1985 and subsequently founded Grupo Caliente, Mexico’s largest gambling company. He rapidly developed a penchant for snorting cocaine (inspiring one local columnist to dub him the “Abominable Snowman”), exotic animal trading, sporting a ridiculous mane, and fraternizing with associates of the Arellano-Felix Cartel. In time, credible accusations of money laundering, arms- and drug-trafficking, and homicide were levied against Hank and his partners, with one U.S. intelligence report asserting that his family represented “a significant criminal threat to the United States.”

But Agua Caliente’s unsavory history predates Hank’s tenure by several decades. In Satan’s Playground, Paul Vanderwood (UT History Ph.D., 1970), puts Jazz Age Tijuana on full display through the prism of the legendary tourist center. Founded in 1928, Agua Caliente was designed in an incoherent fusion of Old War styles and featured palatial amenities mimicking those of European vacation spots like Deauville and Monte Carlo. While most northern Mexican establishments attracted a heterogeneous clientele seeking respite from the puritanism of Prohibition-era America, Agua Caliente catered to a subset of moneyed elites who thirsted for the most upscale diversions. A year after its opening, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times toured the casino’s Salón de oro (Gold Room) where it was rumored that gamblers could only wager with gold chips, and later surmised that “there isn’t another place on the continent, outside of a U.S. mint, where you can see so much money piled up before your eyes at one time.” (Sept 8, 1929). The resort’s iconic racetrack, the site of several industry firsts, was graced by the presence of the finest thoroughbreds, most notably the fabled Seabiscuit. If betting on horse racing was insufficiently thrilling, one could place money on the bare-knuckled boxer most favored to remain vertical. And for those aching after a long night of carousing, several Turkish baths were available to sweat away what ailed them.

After an informative tour d’horizon of Baja California’s modern sociopolitical and economic history, Vanderwood proceeds to explain how Agua Caliente came to be. He traces the resort’s origins to the military man-cum-Governor of Baja California, Abelardo Rodríguez, who, along with 3 snake oil salesmen from the U.S., collectively dubbed the Border Barons, endeavored to capitalize on the dry laws and gaming restrictions imposed on the major metropolises of southern California. In 1927, having convinced his overseers in Mexico City of Agua Caliente’s economic potential, Rodríguez obtained a development deal, purchased a large plot of land near a natural hot springs (thus the name “Agua Caliente”) from its unwary owner, and used taxpayer money to construct and outfit the enterprise.

Born of a crime, Agua Caliente remained a magnet for illicit activities until its premature closing in 1937. The book’s chapters are studded with concise accounts detailing onsite murders, fixed games, and abductions, such as the 1932 kidnapping of Zeke Caress, commissioner of the racetrack and degenerate gambler, by Chicago’s Sheldon Gang. Al Capone and Bugsy Siegel, both resort regulars, also make cameos. Siegel was so taken by Agua Caliente that he cited it as his inspiration for Las Vegas’ pioneering Flamingo Club, although the visionary behind it was actually Billy Wilkerson, an L.A.-based nightclub owner and founder of The Hollywood Reporter.

One crime in particular takes center stage in Vanderwood’s treatment of the topic. In 1929, two gunmen with possible mob ties assaulted a car transporting revenues from the resort to a San Diego bank, resulting in the death of the courier and accompanying guard. With the aid of judicial files, newspaper reports, and detective magazines, the author stalked the perpetrators across southern California where they were summarily captured and prosecuted. Using cases like the Dike Robbery, as this one came to be known, Vanderwood discusses the rise of organized crime on the West Coast and the press’ unblinking eye. “Have established East Coast and Midwestern syndicates infiltrated California and Baja? Are Tijuana and Agua Caliente to blame?” Questions like these preoccupied a simultaneously frightened and fascinated news media. Several articles on the botched heist focused on the thieves’ use of Thompson submachine guns. Some fixated on the details of the criminal performance while others loudly anticipated today’s debates. In the wake of Chicago’s St. Valentine’s Day Massacre four months before, mainstream opinion-makers doubled down on their stance that firearms of such devastating power should never be permitted in civilian hands. Unsurprisingly, the specter of violent, “professional” crime did not sully the resort’s image. On the contrary, the gangland presence fueled Agua Caliente’s allure. The Border Barons, often the victims of threats and extortion attempts, embraced the notoriety.

The majority of the recognizable faces populating the complex, however, did not belong to gangsters. Agua Caliente absorbed waves of Hollywood royalty in its heyday. On a weeknight, the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, Clark Gable, and Bing Crosby could be sighted sipping Sazeracs while wagering their fortunes. At least one young talent was discovered there—Margarita Cansino, a lounge dancer who later achieved stardom under the stage name “Rita Hayworth.” But far more numerous were the would-be actors and actresses desperate to quit their day jobs, the call girls looking for a career change or a more distinguished client list, and the producers hunting for the next big cash cow or casting couch conquest.

As far as President Lázaro Cárdenas was concerned, establishments like Agua Caliente absolutely merited the epithet “Satan’s Playground.” In July 1935, a year and a half after the repeal of Prohibition, he ordered the region’s casinos closed, and two years later decreed that the rest of the Agua Caliente estate be expropriated and turned into an industrial trade school. Labor arbiters denied severance packages to the laid off workers of Tijuana’s largest employer. The Border Barons, on the other hand, fared much better and emerged from this ordeal with their robust bank balances intact.

It is a shame that a deeper investigation into the last 30 years of Agua Caliente’s history, featuring Hank and company at the helm, will not be possible until these parties have long expired. But Vanderwood’s book makes for an exceptional first installment. Satan’s Playground offers more than a good story about a lurid vacation spot in a permissive border city. Figuring prominently are analyses of the evolution of transnational organized crime, border politics, capitalism, and the booms and busts of Tijuana’s vice-tourism industry. Anyone drawn to these topics will find plenty of stimulating material. Those with only a passing interest will nonetheless encounter a riveting read in this enviably written blend of social history and “true crime.”

Underground Santiago: Sweet Waters Grown Salty

Preso en su lecho mi rio pasa, pero se acerca su libertad.
Sus aguas dulces ya son saladas; ya no eres rio, eres el mar.

A prisoner within its banks, my river rolls on, soon to find freedom.
Your sweet waters now have grown salty; you’re no river, now, you are the sea.

Charo Cofré

Colegio Andacollo was a K-through-12 parish school in old town Santiago. The Holy Cross Fathers took it as their new mission when the military government kicked them out of Saint George’s, their traditional academy for the elite. Andacollo was another world.

The original Andacollo was a mountain town in the north where Our Lady of Deep Rocky Mines granted solace and safety to her devoted followers. Our Andacollo was on the corner of Mapocho and Cautín, in a barrio of old multifamily dwellings, cheap bordellos, and the local seafood market. The place had a history of union struggle, fiery passion, and a profound commitment to the miracle-working Virgin of Andacollo. It also had a secret tale of tragedy.

Teatro Municipal in Santiago, Chile (via wikimedia)

Old town Santiago sat atop an ancient network of canals. Some were small but others were regular aqueducts, lined with stone and brick. Built for irrigation, they carried quantities of water from Canal San Carlos to the Mapocho River. Before there was pavement. When Matucana and Avenida Matta were still just vegetable gardens and chicken coops. Back when every home had tomatoes, basil, and cilantro growing out back.

The central region of Chile is still crisscrossed with canals that were built by a dozen Jesuit missionaries and several thousand local Indians. The intention was to strengthen the native communities against European invasion. Taking advantage of the melting snowpack in the mountains, they transformed a semi-arid wasteland into the now-famous fertile green valleys.

The effect on the indigenous population was the opposite of what had been intended. In 1550, the conquistadors said that Nueva Extramadura was too poor and not worth the trouble. By 1750, they had changed their conquering minds. Irrigated and green, the Spanish liked it. So, they threw out the Indians and the Jesuits, and they set up their haciendas.

One hundred and fifty-three “nice families” colonized with all the rapacious vigor of their prestigious lineages. They were Spaniards, Basques, and some French. They brought their cattle and their vineyards. They brought their illusions of noble breeding and Chile criollo was born.

Their descendants became the barrio alto, the GCU, as they say, Gente Como Uno, (People Like Us), a code that only legitimate members of their tightly-closed circle were supposed to recognize. It wasn’t about money, comrade, though the GCU did tend to be rich. It wasn’t about land, either, though they controlled most of it. The GCU sustained an Old World fantasy of hereditary aristocracy. They really believed it, and they insisted on marrying their children to each other. A rich man without a pedigree was called, roto con plata, more or less, a bum with lots of cash. If he had not descended from the legendary hundred families (who were, in reality, one hundred and fifty-three), he was and always would be an outsider.

The canals in the central valleys are still functional. They are the reason why there is Chilean wine and fruit at Whole Foods. Building a canal is no joke. It has to always go downhill so that the water flows forward and never backs up. In 1600, that was an engineering masterpiece.

As the population grew in old town Santiago, the canals lost their reason for being. Family gardens became parking lots and chicken coops became bus stops. They are mostly dry today, an underground labyrinth for which there is no known map. Only the rats know their way around.

But, until the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s, the water continued to flow, and there was access at strategic places. Neighbors would draw a bucket or two to water a shade tree, or to dampen the streets and vacant lots in the summer. That kept the dust down as boys upheld an important tradition, the continuous game of pick-up soccer, la pichanga. No shirts, no shoes, no score, house rules. Everyone played until it was too dark to see your hand in front of your face. As the brown water flowed constantly down into the rocky Mapocho.

Flowing water was an urban temptation. Children learned early in life to toss all their trash into the open mouths of Santiago’s filthy underside. The subterranean monster swallowed everything, without complaining. What’s more, most homes still had no indoor plumbing. The canal was where people dumped their chamber pots. Anyone who drew a bucketful had to watch out for floaters from upstream. That was emblematic of the ongoing relationship between the barrio alto and los de abajo, the people down below. It just seemed natural that those in high places would dump their refuse on those who were geographically and socially below them. That was also the reason why typhoid and hepatitis were so common, down there.

La Iglesia de Andacollo (the church of Andacollo) (via wikipedia)

There was an opening in the schoolyard at Andacollo. It was about two feet wide and three feet long, rimmed with discarded railroad ties. The canal water rushed by about a foot below the ground level. Like everywhere else, at Andacollo, the canal water was used to keep the dust down and get rid of the trash. There was a big willow tree in the middle of the schoolyard that provided shade on hot afternoons. The groundskeeper would make a trench around it with his trowel, and fill it with water from the canal, using his big iron bucket.

The school was all boys back then, and la pichanga never stopped. One day, the ball bounced close to the opening. As tradition demanded, the boy closest ran backwards with reckless abandon, to make the save. It’s a passion, comrade. When the ball was in play, nothing else mattered. He fell into the canal and disappeared.

The foul waters dragged him through their labyrinth. No rescue was possible; nothing anyone could do. They found him the next day in the Mapocho River. His clothes had been ripped off. His body was twisted and broken, but he was recognizable. He had been dragged through hell in an unexpected, surprising, and unavoidable way. I don’t know his name.

Back then, it never occurred to anyone to cover a hole in a schoolyard because someone might fall in. They told the boys to be careful. That was part of their education. They had to learn that any one of them could drop into the abyss at any moment.

That awful day, the dead boy’s classmates learned that destiny could betray you; that there were tragic, violent accidents; that the lives of poor boys didn’t really matter; that in five seconds, it could all be over and done with; that they, too, could disappear and be forgotten. That day, the boys learned that you have to be clever to survive in a cruel world.

Nowadays, we cover holes like that. We deceive our children with the illusion that the world is safe and trustworthy. That has never been true, but if you are under thirty, you were probably brought up to believe it and expect it.

The fickle nature of fate is the elephant in our proverbial living room. Everyone pretends it isn’t there. And the willow tree, silent witness to everything, grows tall.

The national anthem says that Chile is the copia feliz del Edén. That means a happy copy of paradise. But it’s just a copy, not the real thing. And Eden was a tricky place, comrade. You do remember what happened there?

You May Also Enjoy:

Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950-1973, by Heidi Tinsman

Civil War and Early Life: Snapshots of Early War in Guatemala by Vasken Markarian

Monumental Reinterpretation

On the west side of the Denver Capital building stands a soldier atop a stone monument. The soldier is easily recognizable as a Civil War soldier with his rifle ready, sword at his side, his distinctive hat, and the gaze of a vigilant soldier, saddened to be fighting his brother and countrymen. Ari Kelman dedicates portions of his book, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek, to a discussion about the history of this Civil War monument. The monument was erected and dedicated in 1909. This date places the monument in a period of United States history that saw the rapid erection of monuments across the landscape. Americans had emerged from the smoke and haze of the Civil War into a brave new world of freed slaves, Indian wars, and reform movements. Memorialization allowed for the reinterpretation of the racially motivated fratricide and cleansing of the west. Instead memorializers could reforge the familial bonds of the Union in stone. Denver memorialized this glory with their Union Soldier statue and a plaque that proudly displays a list of all the battles and engagements of the Civil War that Coloradans participated in. Notably listed in the battles is Sand Creek.

On November 29, 1864, Colonel John Chivington, with 700 men, attacked the Cheyenne and Arapahos camped peacefully along Sand Creek. Within the encampment was Black Kettle, a well known peace negotiator between the white settlers and the Indians. Black Kettle had recently returned to the Sand Creek camp, after concluding peace settlement negotiations at Fort Weld, where Chivington happened to be stationed. Upon realization of Chivington’s betrayal, Black Kettle immediately raised the American Flag and a white flag of surrender above his tipi, desperate to prove how those in the camp were friends of Americans and therefore peaceful. Chivington and his men took no heed of the raised flag, and continued the attack, killing not only men, but women and children who begged for mercy on their knees. Many ran to the sand beds along the creek where they burrowed into the sand, seeking cover from the sea of bullets. As the dust settled, 150 Cheyenne and Arapahos were dead. Chivington suffered the loss of ten men. His remaining 690 men proceeded to mutilate and desecrate the bodies of the deceased, with many keeping various body parts as grisly mementos.

As Kelman shows, immediately following the events of Sand Creek the public memory becomes cloudy and convoluted. For Chivington, the Union soldiers, and the American Nation, Sand Creek was a glorious battle in the story of westward expansion and the expulsion of the rebellious and violent Indians from the landscape. For the Cheyenne and Arapahos, Sand Creek was a brutal slaughter and massacre. One of Chivington’s men saw it the same way. Silas Soule was uneasy as he marched out on the day of the attack. When they arrived at Sand Creek, Soule refused to order his men to fire and he watched from the sidelines as the rain of bullets poured down on Black Kettle’s camp. Soule recorded the event in his letters, agonizing over his memories of that day.

A battle is often defined as an extended struggle between two organized armies. A massacre on the other hand is understood as the brutal and violent killing of multiple victims. The terms battle and massacre both carry heavy and violent meanings, but the picture they evoke are not the same. This difference in how to view the history and memory of Sand Creek coalesced around the Civil War monument in Denver in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The inclusion of Sand Creek in the list of battles and engagements on the monument at the Denver State Capitol projects an authority over the definition of the event and downplays its injustice by suggesting that there was a more even playing field between two opponents equally engaged. This leads the general public to believe that the band of Cheyenne and Arapahos provoked Chivington’s attack.

The Sand Creek Massacre as imagined by Harper’s Weekly in 1868 (via wikimedia)

The debate over the monument was strikingly similar to the many debates we have seen in the past year over the many Confederate monuments across the American landscape. The central question is what do we do with these monuments that valorize highly politicized motivations but also provide a glimpse into the people, culture, and history of those who erected these very monuments? For historical preservationists, this question creates a crucial internal battle. Preservationists recognize the white veil that hides the ugly truth of the monument’s history and purpose. However, their desire to preserve leads them to a fiery inferno. Ultimately, preservationists cannot come to a consensus on what should be done, however. many advocate for at least reinterpretation of the monuments.

Reinterpretation was the path Colorado ultimately decided upon. A small plaque was attached, not to the monument itself, but to the brick knee-high wall around the monument. The plaque provides a small nugget of insight into the controversy over the memory of Sand Creek; and yet it still leaves open just enough ambiguity to allow a visitor to interpret Sand Creek as a battle.

Monuments have authority. They are literally etched in stone. They influence the way the public perceives and remembers history. After all, how do you argue with a giant bronze plaque attached to a monumental piece of stone, holding up a heroic citizen soldier who fought to preserve our Union?

Further Reading:

Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013).

Thomas J. Brown, The Public Art of Civil War Commemoration: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St Martins, 2004).

Stephanie Meeks, “Statement on Confederate Memorials: Confronting Difficult History.”

In Defense of the Crime Story

By Diego A. Godoy

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.

It would be unwise, however, to pigeonhole the crime story as a mere chronicle of events, as recourse when police or judicial files are sanitized or inaccessible (as can often be the case in Latin America), or as an aid for imbuing one’s work with the narrative thrust facilitated by the beat reporter’s proclivity for anecdote and imagery. Rather than treating the crime story strictly as a source detailing the particulars of an incident, one would do well to recognize its potential to elucidate a broader range of phenomena, too.

Carlos Monsiváis author of Mexican Postcards (via wikipedia)

Excessively graphic, littered with inaccuracies, and saturated with classist and racist and other biases, Latin American crime papers were once considered little more than pulp trash, and thus beneath serious scholarly engagement. Thankfully, this prejudice seems to be receding. In recent years, a handful of Latin Americanist intellectuals have demonstrated how a rigorous analysis of these sources can yield highly original insights.

Readers could always count on the late Carlos Monsiváis for incisive takes on Mexican life including crime related affairs. In his essay collection on modern culture, Mexican Postcards, Monsiváis asserts that the content and presentation of crime news was profoundly altered after the Revolution (1910-1920). His survey of notas rojas (lit. “red notes/news”)—a popular variety of tabloid showcasing the violence occasioned by robberies, accidents, and crimes of passion—leads him to the conclusion that the press’ crime coverage required a substantial makeover to pique interest and sell papers in the post-revolutionary era. After a decade of storied military feats and charismatic protagonists, standard crime reporting proved forgettable. Striving to provoke visceral reactions and satiate morbid curiosities, nota roja journalists settled on the perfect sensationalist formula: obscenely gory visuals—think severed heads and flayed corpses—plus brief, melodramatic narration devoid of commentary, and crude, often facetious, captions. By the 1960s, entire newspapers adhered to this style, and some even sold in the United States, including ¡Alarma!, the genre’s quintessential publication. Today, many tabloid journalists still bank on the blood of butchered spouses, but they have also mixed drug trafficking stories into their repertoires.

The consolidation of the Mexican drug trade in the 1970s provided an opportunity for certain segments of the press to traffic in a distinct variety of crime story. In the media coverage of the narcotics business, Monsiváis discovered a cult of celebrity built on illusory images of criminality. Rather than minor thievery rings or homicidally jealous lovers, the protagonists of these stories were a different class of criminal who were accorded “the notoriety once reserved for politicians, sports personalities, and film stars.” Their exploits and life stories were related in prose that was reminiscent of early modern picaresque tales. Often, the most unsavory aspects of the criminal experience were omitted, or at least obfuscated by the glamour conferred by power and fortune.

Monsiváis meditates on the case of Rafael Caro Quintero, co-founder of the defunct Guadalajara Cartel. Many tabloids aided in the cultivation of Caro Quintero’s “social bandit” image, despite his being motivated by personal gain. His archetypal rags-to-riches story and supposed beneficence to the Sinaloan backwater from which he emerged were artfully tapped by writers. Seldom did these outlets delve into his organization’s brutal exploitation of poor poppy-farming communities, the effects of their sticky brown product in U.S. cities, or his elbow rubbing with members of Jalisco’s business elite.

Those familiar with the history of the Mexican drug trade will recall that Caro Quintero’s ascendancy was short-lived. On April 4, 1985, he was arrested for his involvement in the prolonged torture and murder of DEA Agent Enrique Camarena. Mexican television broadcast the moment when Caro Quintero and associates were escorted into Interpol’s Mexico City headquarters. Hordes of people tailed the group and shouted “Caro, reveal the corrupt!” “Unmask them all, Caro!” “Names, Caro, names!” Monsiváis likens this scene to that of a revolutionary hero riding into the main plaza of a town, being greeted by a hopeful peasantry awaiting the dissolution of an unjust government. Images of the purported social bandit and anticipated whistleblower beamed across the country.

Rafeal Quintero identification picture (via FBI)

Comparable transformations in crime coverage occurred in Buenos Aires during the interwar period. In While the City Sleeps: A History of Pistoleros, Policemen, and the Crime Beat in Buenos Aires Before Perón, historian Lila Caimari lays the shift in crime reporting at the feet of an array of factors related to “modernity,” namely, technological advances and the importation of U.S. tabloid journalism and Hollywood cinema. This onslaught of variables coalesced to generate what she dubs the new “languages of crime.”

Caimari recounts how in the late 19th century the Buenos Aires press wrote about crime in “natural-scientificist” language that borrowed terminology from medicine, criminal anthropology, and psychiatry. Taking cues from English and French journalists, Argentine reporters played detective by attempting to decipher the cause of a perpetrator’s criminality. But toward the 1930’s, these European influences could no longer compete with the flashier of American tabloids. Argentine editors, cognizant of the public’s insatiable appetite for detective novels and U.S. gangster cinema, quickly adopted a highly stylized, entertainment-driven approach.

The most prominent national media outlets spearheaded what the author calls the “cinematization of crime reporting” by deploying a vibrant assortment of visual and verbal tools. Popular newspapers La Razón, Última Hora, Crítica, and the illustrated Caras y Caretas employed melodramatic language, references to films, theatricalized reconstructions, photographic staging, and comic strips to accompany their narration. Stories were chosen for their similarity to contemporary U.S. criminal practices and featured a new protagonist: the pistolero (lit. “gunman”)—a Capone-esque gangster with the latest technological resources at his disposal. The elements of the criminal performance—weapons, automobiles, attire, and argot—became the main focus for writers, illustrators, and photographers. In stark contrast to the previous century, the question underlying press accounts of the criminal was no longer why he committed his crime, but how. And much like in Mexico, many publications contributed to the legends that shrouded criminals’ careers. Ahora’s stories on the train and bank robber David Segundo Peralta, a.k.a. “Mate Cosido,” were part of a trend in which certain outlets gave organized crime figures the matinee idol treatment.

Following a string of kidnappings—most notably the 1932 abduction and slaying of Abel Ayerza, the son of an affluent family, by Sicilian-Argentine Mafioso Juan Galiffi, a.k.a. “Chicho Grande”—journalists shifted their attention to these protracted dramas. Now, the victims’ families became the main protagonists, and their visible agony instigated a renewed debate over the proper administration of justice. Both the public and media voiced their desire for more stringent laws, heightened police presence on the streets, and the reinstatement of capital punishment.

A few decades later, back in Mexico, an analogous phenomenon transpired as the nota roja assumed the role of bastion of the public sphere. In his latest book, A History of Infamy: Crime, Truth, and Justice in Mexico, Pablo Piccato (UT History Ph.D., 1997), explores civil society’s efforts to mend the ruptured nexus between crime, truth, and justice that emerged during the post-revolutionary era. The inefficiency and corruption of the authorities, coupled with the wiliness of certain criminals, often made it impossible for truth and justice to prevail. Consequently, citizens sought the facts of a case and proper application of the law by engaging in debates in both courtrooms and the press. Jury trials, in which ordinary people attended proceedings to discuss the full gamut of criminal behavior and settle on truths, were a novelty in the country’s legal history. But after their abolition in 1929, the nota roja took over as civil society’s primary marketplace of ideas for crime-related issues.

Unlike Mexico’s leading newspapers, many of which counted on government subsidies to stay afloat, tabloids like ¡Alarma! and Detectives were free to lay bare the collusion between state officials and underworld figures. For readers, these publications came to represent unparalleled sources of important information. Many even made a habit of writing in to opine on a variety of topics, from how police should go about their job, the likely motives of serial killers, and most commonly, to suggest the rectification of heinous crimes via extrajudicial methods. Columnists generally concurred with the latter point, arguing that since capital punishment was no longer an option (it was abolished for civil cases in 1937), jailers should be given carte blanche to dispose of those convicted of the most despicable crimes. Torture, lynching, or a quick and easy bullet to the brain were all deemed fitting punishments. Some favored the so-called ley fuga, or law of flight, a Porfirian-era extrajudicial punishment that empowered police to shoot fleeing prisoners. In practice, however, the police themselves would often set the prisoner free in order to apply the penalty.

At the heart of Piccato’s study is what he describes as “criminal literacy.” Rooted in lessons from both notas rojas and fictional narratives, criminally literacy refers to specific knowledge that was essential to safely navigate the dangers of contemporary Mexico City. It comprised an eclectic mix of information, such as knowing which neighborhoods to avoid, the standard ruses of thieves and con artists, and the potential perils of nightlife. All of this was certainly helpful in staving off victimization, but it undoubtedly reinforced anachronistic ideas about the perceived differences between good, lawful citizens and bad, unlawful ones.

These and a small number of other authors have been wise to treat the crime story with greater seriousness. Consequential narratives about certain types of crimes, malefactors and victims, whether accurate or not, are disseminated through newspapers, magazines, radio and television broadcasts, and even literary works. Unsurprisingly, popular perceptions (as opposed to reality) offer an important indicator of the public’s knowledge. And frankly, sometimes what people believed is more interesting than what actually occurred. Cultural histories of crime writing or criminal archetypes as fostered by the languages of mass communication constitute an alluring new research frontier—a sort of history of popular criminological thought—that have the potential to flourish alongside the more traditional scientific and legal historiographies.

Books Discussed:

Carlos Monsivais. Mexican Postcards. Translated and Introduced by John Kraniauskas (1997)

Lila Caimari. While the City Sleeps: A History of Pistoleros, Policemen, and the Crime Beat in Buenos Aires Before Perón (2016)

Pablo Piccato. A History of Infamy: Crime, Truth, and Justice in Mexico (2017)

Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (2014)

Archives, especially state archives, have political agendas. Whether private or public, holdings of individual, institutional, and government documents can serve to invade and control the lives of citizens and societies. Their organizations shape historical knowledge and national narratives about the past. Kirsten Weld addresses these political issues of government intrusion, historical memory, and archival knowledge production by focusing on The Project for the Recovery of the National Police Historical Archives in Guatemala (The Project). Weld identifies two different political agendas structuring the National Police Archives from its professionalization in the 1950s until the state of decay in which it was found in 2005. The first agenda served the purpose of surveillance and social control, using archives as a weapon against people considered enemies of the state during the Guatemalan Civil War between 1960 and 1996. The records’ rescue gave these archives a new social purpose geared towards democratic opening, historical memory, and the pursuit of justice for victims of the state’s war crimes. The book chronicles the transition from the first political agenda into the second with the goal of capturing the process through which a new historical narrative about the war was produced.

Weld argues that how people think about archives is critical to understand their role in the generation of new historical narratives. Archival holdings are also telling about the relationship between citizens and the state in the construction of these national histories. The Project helped transform negative perceptions of archives as dumpsters that perpetuate silence and political apathy, into treasures seen as tools for democratization and empowerment. The author combines historical and ethnographic perspectives to understand how the Police Archives transitioned to a new agenda of democratic opening and citizen’s accountability for crimes perpetuated by the state during the Civil War.

Weld uses ethnography and oral histories to explore how The Project came to be, the tensions that erupted between older and new generations working at the Police Archives, and the dangerous political context in which they had to work. She shows how former guerrilla fighters began an uncertain effort to recover the police archives until the institutionalization of the initiative through foreign funding. Due to the messy and decaying state of the police documents, archival preservation required former guerillas to learn concepts of original order, provenance, and chain of custody in order to know how the National Police organized information. Therefore, the norms outlined in the International Standard for Archival Description would undergird the new organizational logic of The Project from the onset.

Working in The Project also entailed understanding the goals that drove people to get involved with the Police Archives in the first place. Weld shows that former revolutionaries were driven to work on The Project by powerful experiences of loss and militancy, fueled by the desire to restore honor and agency to the dead. The young people she studied who came from militant families saw the preservation of police documents as a new way to continue the revolutionary struggle. To those without revolutionary ties, the archives represented a way to put academic training to use and to advance in the recovery of historical memory and truth telling. These experiences will shape the legacy of the Guatemalan Civil War and the next generations’ interpretations of the past.

The growing visibility of this collaborative effort, however, made it the target of military pressures, which raised concerns about the welfare of the archives and its personnel. This threat of violence was not new and was preceded by what the author calls “the archival wars,” — battles between citizens and the state over the access and meaning of state documents. Weld presents the different strategies rulers and ruled have used since the beginning of the Civil War to limit or expand access to records. These include legislation to block or undermine the preservation of state information, the demand to know what information the state holds about a particular citizen, or the successful publication of reports about disappeared Guatemalans.

Drawing from state archives and human rights reports, Weld also focuses on the institutional history of the National Police. The restructuring of this institution from 1954 to 1974, through counter-insurgency aid from the U.S, led to the establishment of efficient record keeping systems as a means to enact effective social control. The Central Records Bureau and the Regional Communications Center are just two initiatives that helped the Guatemalan state monitor its citizens. Better archives, modern equipment, and professional personnel became synonymous with the battle against “subversion.” This counterinsurgent mentality of the police accounted for most of the urban violence in the 1980s. The transition to democracy in 1986 perpetuated the counterinsurgency approach into the post-conflict period, explaining the militarized and centralized nature of the new National Civil Police.

Finally, the author delves into the successes and risks that the new archival agenda of social reconstruction and historical revisionism faces in Guatemala today. By working toward the passage of national archives system laws, and creating archival science programs in national universities, the Project has inaugurated a new archival culture in Guatemala, one that seeks a more democratic and transparent relationship between government and citizens. But the military’s institutional opposition to The Project reveals resistance to a new historical memory that subverts old narratives of a triumphant nation against communism.

Weld combines an impressive set of written sources with an ethnographic approach and oral histories of people who worked in the Project. These sources serve her well in capturing the transition from one archival agenda to the other. The author’s writing style is clear and fluid. This is a critical study that intertwines new interpretations about urban violence in Guatemala with a growing literature on historical memory and the politics of state archives in post-conflict societies.

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The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Film Review – Dazed and Confused (Dir: Linklater, 1993)

by Ashley Garcia

Borrowing its title from Led Zeppelin’s first album, Richard Linklater’s classic film Dazed and Confused continues to resonate with filmgoers and critics decades after its release. This September marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Linklater’s cult hit and the overwhelming surge of Dazed and Confused viewing parties along with its re-release in theaters reveals the staying power of this small budget high school comedy. Linklater’s film is difficult to describe to those who have never seen it. In fact, the plot can seem quite uneventful. It lacks the drama, heartbreak, and seemingly high stakes of conventional high school stories and instead takes its viewers on a journey into the everyday banalities that make our lives what they are. Linklater’s film shows us how many of our life defining moments occur in the daily minutiae we experience.

The film takes place within a twenty-four-hour period on the last day of high school in Austin, Texas. Freshmen are hazed, the teens party under one of Austin’s legendary moontowers, and the story ends with a trek to purchase some killer Aerosmith tickets. The film perfectly encapsulates both the silly and startling aspects of high school. Whether you’re the anxious senior grappling with questions of the post-graduation unknown or the vulnerable freshman dazed by a new high school student hierarchy that feeds off freshman fear, the film captures the ethos of the high school experience. However, it would be easy to simply brush the film off as a lighthearted comedy that oozes nostalgia and brings its viewers back to the glory days of kegs, cruising, and classic rock. Linklater’s film exposes a new type of youth culture and lifestyle movement, referred to as slacker culture, born out of the failures and successes of radical domestic political and cultural movements collectively referred to as the American counterculture.

From left to right: Don (Sasha Jenson), Wooderson (Matthew McConaughey), Pink (Jason London), and Mitch (Wiley Wiggins) outside the bowling alley (via IMBd)

This new slacker culture emerged in the 1970s and consisted of a new type of cultural persona that fused the hippie with the dispirited misfit. The slacker embraced aspects of hippie culture that reinforced the right to be whatever type of individual you felt like being, but abandoned hippie political projects and radical ideologies. Slackers embodied an optimistic aimlessness while their politics celebrated choice and championed individual liberty. Slacker politics valued personal autonomy but rejected ideology and overarching political programs. Slackers were the non-participating participants. People with a point of view who lacked a cause.

The most vivid example of this slacker politics is represented in the storyline of the film’s most prominent character, Randall “Pink” Floyd. At the beginning of the film, Pink’s coach asks him to sign a sobriety pledge. The coach is concerned with winning a championship and does not want any of his players jeopardizing their chances of a winning season. Pink’s ambivalence toward the request lasts throughout the film as he grapples with options that include refusing to sign the pledge, quitting the football team altogether, or submitting to his coach’s authority. He ultimately refuses to sign the coach’s pledge but states that he will continue to play football regardless. Pink cites his right to privacy and above all else his independence when he refuses to sign the pledge. His refusal is more than teenage disobedience or protest for the sake of protest, yet the refusal is not an attempt to change the coach’s views on drug and alcohol use or pressure the coach into dropping the pledge requirement in its entirety. His protest is a statement about individual autonomy and the right to choose how to engage with the world on your own terms. The pledge is not portrayed as a collective issue that can be challenged by the gripes of the student body, but one that each football player must come to terms with on their own. If Linklater’s film was set in the sixties one cannot help but imagine the hippie version of Pink’s character staging an all-night sit-in or demonstration to protest the pledge with his fellow classmates.

Michelle (Milla Jovovich) in Dazed and Confused (via IMDb)

Pink’s decision at the end of the film embodies a slacker culture equipped with its own set of new cultural attitudes and political understandings. Slackers were indebted to a countercultural revolution that altered societal norms and changed the way America’s youth engaged with sex, drugs, and of course rock ‘n’ roll. However, these seventies slackers were left to face the fallout of a post-hippie and post-countercultural society where a new generation of young Americans lacked a cause or revolutionary project. By the late 1970s, the radical political movements that emboldened America’s youth for over a decade faded away and a new personal politics that emphasized individual choice and personal growth emerged. The high school slackers portrayed in Dazed and Confused embody this new personal politics and illustrate the evolution of youth culture following the death of the counterculture.

Linklater’s teenage characters can easily seem apolitical, inward thinking, or even lazy. One could view the characters’ priorities of getting high and hanging out as humorously pathetic, or a symptom of a group of teens with little professional and academic drive and nothing better to do. However, it would be a mistake to think that the film simply portrays a group of idle and self-centered teens looking for a good time. The film is punctuated with moments of self-reflection when its characters expose the depths of a new political attitude. Throughout the film, characters contemplate inherently political questions such as how to live a happy life, how to be true to yourself, and what it means to be free.

Director Richard Linklater (via Flickr)

While cruising the boulevard on the way to the moontower party, nerdy student Mike Newhouse reveals to his friends that he has decided not to go to law school. His dream to become an ACLU lawyer and “help the people that are getting fucked up and all that” has vanished. It only took a disastrous trip to the local post office where he witnessed a room full of pathetic people drooling in line to realize he is a misanthrope. When his friend asks him what he plans to do instead of going to law school he simply replies that he wants to dance. Linklater’s film is littered with these short but insightful moments that expose the ins and outs of slacker culture. Mike’s statements are laughable, yet they represent a decision to reject conventionalities and embrace an honest life. Mike believes it would be a lie to become a lawyer, even though he would be helping people in need. Linklater’s collection of stoners, slackers, and dreamers believe in staying true to themselves and being honest about who they are even if that means withdrawing from the world. Slacker politics is based in the banalities of everyday life and encourages individuals to follow the whims of their own hearts.

As the twenty-fifth anniversary of Dazed and Confused approaches, it is worth recognizing the indisputable contribution Richard Linklater has made through his reflective storytelling. In Dazed and Confused, Linklater offers us more than a stoner cult classic or sentimental high school comedy. The film not only captures the zeitgeist of the slacker movement but also provides insight into a cultural moment in American history. Dazed and Confused showcases a young generation’s struggles, dissatisfactions, pleasures, and truths. It navigates the rocky terrain of adolescence as young misfits, dreamers, and stoners discover who they are and how they want to live their lives.

Also by Ashley Garcia:

A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar American by Grace Elizabeth Hale (2011)

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