Latin America Archives - Not Even Past

Agency and Resistance: African and Indigenous Women’s Navigation of Economic, Legal, and Religious Structures in Colonial Spanish America

This essay was written as part of Dr Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s course, Colonial Latin America. Hope Payton explores how Indigenous and African women—both free and enslaved—navigated the legal, economic, and religious institutions of colonial Latin American cities. Drawing on wills from Potosí and La Plata and a freedom suit from Lima, it examines how these women accumulated property, engaged with paperwork culture, and leveraged church tribunals to assert their rights. In doing so, the essay sheds light on the appeal of Catholicism in the Spanish Indies, particularly its role as a mediator of protection, legitimacy, and social mobility for marginalized communities.

The conventional narrative of Spanish colonization in the Americas typically portrays Indigenous and African peoples as passive recipients of European conquest and conversion. This perspective, however, overlooks the agency of these groups in shaping colonial society. In cities like Potosí—major economic centers of the Spanish Empire—free and enslaved indigenous and African people found opportunities to accumulate wealth, property, and legal knowledge. Contrary to the assumption that indigenous people were always relocated to cities by force or compulsion, many indigenous groups strategically used urbanization to consolidate power and to maintain authority within their own ethnic groups; securing leadership, controlling labor, and engaging in the colonial economy while preserving traditional structures—demonstrating their agency in shaping their own futures.

Despite their rigid social hierarchies, cities in the Spanish Empire allowed for certain flexibility that indigenous and African people, especially women, could exploit. Economic opportunities, particularly in large industrial cities like Potosí, created avenues for wealth accumulation, while the Catholic Church’s legal structures provided mechanisms for securing assets and negotiating social standing. Through participation in the marketplace, property ownership, and engagement with notarial culture, women actively shaped their own economic futures.

A reproduction on 12 linen canvases in the Edward Luther Stevenson Collection of the Geocarta Nautica Universale ("Worldwide Maritime Chart") or 1523 Turin Map believed to have been made by Giovanni/Juan Vespucci from the Spanish royal standard map (Padron Real). — A reproduction on 12 linen canvases in the Edward Luther Stevenson Collection of the **Geocarta Nautica Universale** (“Worldwide Maritime Chart”) or **1523 Turin Map** believed to have been made by Giovanni/Juan Vespucci from the Spanish royal standard map (Padron Real).
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

At the same time, the Church’s bottom-up structure, reinforced by extensive bureaucratic systems and opportunities for petitioning, allowed marginalized groups to access legal protections and assert their rights. Church tribunals provided an alternative to colonial civil courts, allowing commoners, enslaved individuals, and indigenous peoples to challenge injustices and seek legal remedies. This accessibility contributed to Catholicism’s widespread appeal and deep entrenchment in colonial society. Indigenous and African women in colonial Spanish America exercised agency by leveraging urban economies, church legal structures, and Catholic institutions to accumulate wealth, secure property rights, access legal recourse, and shape both their personal and communal identities within the Catholic Church and the Spanish colonial system.

Cities in colonial Spanish America, particularly those like Potosí and La Plata, provided indigenous and African women with unique opportunities to accumulate wealth, property, and legal knowledge. Unlike rural areas, where economic mobility was more restricted, urban environments fostered commercial activity, offering women access to markets, trade networks, and financial transactions that could increase their economic standing. Cities also housed notarial offices and church institutions, which played a crucial role in recording contracts, wills, and property transactions. Through engagement with these legal and bureaucratic systems, women learned to navigate paperwork, ensuring that their assets were protected and transferred to future generations.

Cities as Sites of Agency

The will of Luisa de Villalobos, a free Black woman who migrated from Nombre de Dios in Panama to Lima and later Potosí, exemplifies how cities enabled women to accumulate wealth through diverse commercial ventures in cities. Villalobos, who drafted the will in 1577, trafficked and had investments in fine European clothing, perfumes, and silver. Villalobos left a considerable amount of her wealth to two other Black women, Francisca Godines and Maria Fula, declaring “that to Francisca Godines or her closest heirs [you] pay the value of nine glass bottles of orange blossom water and thirteen flasks of the said water” and “that one yellow skirt with velvet trim, another trimmed with velvet, one doublet of fine wool and one wool cloth in which it is wrapped belongs to Costanca, morena, of the falconer of the Villa Real.”^[1] By drafting a will in 1577, Villalobos ensured the legal recognition of her property and debts while also making strategic donations or sales to other free Black or enslaved Black women that enabled them to accumulate wealth and property as well.

Potosí, Bolivia.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Cities in colonial Spanish America were also home to cofradías, religious brotherhoods, that provided monetary support to enslaved individuals so they could purchase their freedom. These organizations were supported by the church and its administrators, such as the Jesuits. Villalobos supported cofradías by leaving a portion of her wealth to a Jesuit priest, Father Medina. In her will, she states that she has “in the possession of María Fula” a large number of expensive European textiles and that it is her “will that with all of this Father Medina does what he likes.” This donation to the Jesuit priest likely supported cofradías in Potosí, thereby reinforcing the economic and legal networks that benefited marginalized groups in urban centers.

Similarly, the will and codicil of doña Isabel del Benino, a free indigenous woman, drafted in 1601, show how urban economies enabled indigenous women to accumulate wealth. She owned a rural estate near Potosí and conducted agricultural business with clerics in Potosí, such as “Father Joseph de Llanos, priest and vicar of this valley” whom she stated in her will owed her “a remainder of thirty pesos from some goats that I sold him.”^[2] Through her business with the clerics, she was able to accumulate wealth. In her will, she also leaves her remaining estate to her daughter, “my hija natural, doña María del Benino, whom I leave for my universal heir in all the remainder of my estate.” This statement in Benino’s will demonstrates yet another way cities and their legal framework allowed women to accumulate wealth and property, through knowledge of paperwork and the property rights granted to women in cities. Despite some racial and gendered restrictions, urban centers provided economic and legal opportunities that allowed African and Indigenous women to secure wealth and navigate the colonial system to their advantage.

The Church as a Legal Resource

The accessibility of church tribunals to commoners, enslaved individuals, and indigenous people played a crucial role in the widespread appeal of Catholicism in colonial Spanish America. Unlike civil courts, which often favored colonial elites and upheld rigid social hierarchies, ecclesiastical courts provided marginalized individuals with an alternative avenue for seeking justice. The Church’s willingness to hear petitions from society’s most vulnerable reinforced its image as the moral authority that protected the faithful and the followers, fostering loyalty and devotion among indigenous and African populations. By framing grievances in religious terms, petitioners could align themselves with the Church’s broader mission of upholding Christian values, further legitimizing Catholicism’s role in daily life.

Balck women laboring, Guiana, mid-19th century — Female workers in Guiana, mid-19th century.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The lawsuit filed by Natividad, an enslaved woman in Lima, against her master Doctor don Juan de la Reinaga in 1792, focused on his sexual abuse against her, exemplifies how church tribunals provided enslaved individuals with a means of contesting their mistreatment. In her petition, Natividad requested her freedom, telling the judge, who is a member of the Church, “Your superior understanding will mean that you will have understood that this case compels me to act by in the very least soliciting that you grant me the freedom that corresponds to me.”^[3] In a civil court, Natividad would have likely only petitioned to be sold to another master, as was dictated by the Spanish legal code of the time. However, due to her master’s position as a priest and member of the Church, she hoped that his immoral acts that violated the behavior expected of his position would cause the court to act in a more severe manner. At the beginning of her petition she states that “clearly my master forgot the obligations of his position, about Christianity and about authority when, on different occasions, he proposed his dishonest relations.”

Later, she once again appeals to the judge’s religious position, stating “I could very well lodge my appeal before the Señores of the Real Audiencia where the law of God has directed that slaves demand freedom whenever they seek the sanctuary and refuge that the law grants. But I wish that the secular courts should hear about the recklessness, indifferent, and tyrannies so foreign to leniency and self-restraint that an ecclesiastical priest professes. Thus, I renounce the indulgence of royal law and bring my case before the just commission of Your Most Illustrious Lord, who is very competent to reform the immoderate powers of a priest and decree what is in the interest of the pious cause of liberty that I claim.” In her language, Natividad clearly appealed to the religious nature of the court and the responsibility that they had for the behavior of a priest of their order.

*Plan for the ports at Nombre de Dios, Panama, circa the 17th century.*
*Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

Cases like Natividad’s reveal how enslaved and indigenous individuals viewed the Church not only as a site of religious devotion but more importantly as a powerful political institution where they could seek justice and social mobility. The fact that enslaved women, despite their legal and social subjugation, turned to the Church for recourse demonstrates the faith placed in its institutions, reinforcing its central role in colonial society as well as its popularity.

The wills of commoners, enslaved individuals, and indigenous people in colonial Spanish America reflect the profound influence of the Catholic Church. These documents not only served as legal instruments for dispensing wealth and property but also demonstrated investment in Catholic beliefs, rituals, and institutions. The consistent inclusion of religious donations, burial requests, and provisions for masses highlights how individuals—especially indigenous and African women—sought to secure their afterlife through the Church while reinforcing its central role in colonial society. Wills served as a final testament to religious devotion, illustrating how Catholicism shaped personal identity, social obligations, and cultural traditions across different racial and socioeconomic groups.

The will of Ana Copana, an indigenous woman born outside the city of La Plata who later became a property owner in the Andean highlands, exemplifies this deep religious commitment. Drafted in 1598, her will contains explicit instructions for her burial. She “order(s) that my [her] body be buried in the church of our Lord Saint Sebastian in the chapel of Our Lady of Copacabana and the customary alms be paid for the burial.”^[4] Her will also contains explicit instructions for the number of masses to be said for her soul. She orders that “a requiem mass be sung over my body…eight masses be said for my soul in the parish of Saint Sebastian…another six masses be said for my soul and my executors pay the customary alms…another six masses for my soul, by selling a little bit of corn that I leave in a pirua.” Her burial choice at a chapel of significance that is quite far from her deathbed and emphasis on masses reflect how indigenous individuals actively engaged with Catholic practices, reinforcing the Church’s importance in both life and death.

Catedral de La Plata.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Similarly, the 1658 will of doña Ana de Barba y Talora, a divorced mestiza woman from Potosí, further illustrates the Church’s pervasive role in shaping individual legacies. In her will she orders “that my [her] body be buried in the principal church of this city” and “that one hundred low masses be said for my soul by the clergy that my executors wish and the customary alms be paid from my property.”^[5] These requests indicate her desire for spiritual intercession. Beyond her own salvation, she left many religious paintings, statues, and cloths, such as “a statue of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception” and “a canvas of Saint Gertrudis without frame” to her daughter and niece. The number of items left to her family emphasize the importance of Catholicism in her everyday life and her desire that her family maintain the faith. Ana de Barba y Talora also paid for the continuation of her blind daughter’s care and musical education, charging her daughter’s new guardians with “continuing to teach music as he has begun with my daughter so that she is sufficiently skilled to procure her a place in a convent. There she can serve the choir, and be kept for this ministry.” This request emphasizes how convent life was seen as both a religious vocation and a form of security for women. Both of these women’s wills reflect the popularity and influence of Catholicism and the Catholic Church among commoners and the indigenous people of colonial Spanish America.

The experiences of indigenous and African women in colonial Spanish America challenge the notion of passive subjugation, revealing instead their agency in navigating economic, legal, and religious structures to their advantage. Cities like Potosí provided avenues for wealth accumulation, property ownership, and legal literacy, while the Catholic Church functioned as both a spiritual and political institution that reinforced social mobility. Through wills, lawsuits, and participation in religious organizations such as cofradías, these women asserted control over their assets, secured their family’s future, and engaged in Catholic traditions that reinforced the Church’s authority in their communities. The Church’s accessibility, particularly through its tribunals, further solidified its popularity, as marginalized individuals viewed it as an avenue for justice and social mobility. The examination of the legal and economic strategies of indigenous and African women highlights how they actively shaped colonial society, proving that even within a complex legal system and enslavement, they found ways to exercise power.

Hope Payton is a junior at the University of Texas pursuing a BA in history with minors in Spanish and UTeach Liberal Arts. While completing her undergraduate degree, she has been involved in the creation of an online exhibit examining modernity in nineteenth century Latin America with the Benson Latin American Collection. She looks forward to student teaching social studies at the high school level her senior year

^[1] Nora E. Jaffary and Jane E. Mangan, eds. Women in Colonial Latin America, 1526 to 1806: Texts and Contexts (Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2018), 34.

^[2] Nora E. Jaffary and Jane E. Mangan, eds. Women in Colonial Latin America, 1526 to 1806: Texts and Contexts (Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2018), 41.

^[3] Nora E. Jaffary and Jane E. Mangan, eds. Women in Colonial Latin America, 1526 to 1806: Texts and Contexts (Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2018), 208.

^[4] Nora E. Jaffary and Jane E. Mangan, eds. Women in Colonial Latin America, 1526 to 1806: Texts and Contexts (Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2018), 36.

^[5] Nora E. Jaffary and Jane E. Mangan, eds. Women in Colonial Latin America, 1526 to 1806: Texts and Contexts (Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2018), 45.

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Review of Making Never-Never Land: Race and Law in the Creation of Puerto Rico by Monica A. Jiménez (2024)

Banner for book review of Making Never-Never Land

In Making Never-Never Land: Race and Law in the Creation of Puerto Rico, Caribbean historian, and Black studies scholar Mónica A. Jiménez offers a new interpretation of Puerto Rican legal and political history. In her first book-length project, Jiménez explores the intersections between law, and race in the creation of Puerto Rico. More specifically, Making Never-Never Land interrogates how these intersections have framed the relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico since the territory was ceded by Spain in 1898. The book is shaped by Jiménez’s personal experience as a diasporic scholar moving from Puerto Rico to Texas. Jiménez’s family joined the first wave of Puerto Ricans who left for Houston, Texas in the mid-1980s in search of better economic opportunities which is part of a broader colonial history of forced migration, economic hardship, and discrimination. Jiménez seeks to answer the question: What is Puerto Rico for the United States? This is a question that many Puerto Ricans living in and out of the United States ask themselves every day. This question shapes Puerto Rican colonial history as a territory, historically and currently, especially following the imposition of the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (also known as PROMESA).

Throughout Making Never-Never Land, Jiménez examines the larger history of U.S. settler colonialism and racial exclusion, using an analysis of the United States Supreme Court’s decisions to better understand the unincorporated territory’s current debt crisis and disaster capitalism situation. She argues that PROMESA, which was meant to take care of Puerto Rico’s outstanding debt, reaffirmed the United States Congress’ plenary powers over the island and “effectively stripped the territory of its ability to self-govern” (p.119).

*Flags on the Coast of Puerto Rico. Source:* Pexels

To understand the limitations of a group of US Supreme Court decisions known collectively as the Insular Cases and interrogate the “state of exception” created by them, Jiménez draws back to place the Insular Cases within a more extended legal history of racial exclusion towards Native Americans, and African Americans. By closely examining early legal precedents and analyzing these cases together, in Making Never-Never Land Jiménez invites us to consider how race functions within them, shaping Puerto Rico’s present and future. Through this critical reading, she positions herself as an anti-colonial scholar with a deep understanding of Puerto Rican politics. She does not believe that simply overturning the Insular Cases will resolve the island’s challenges. Instead, she urges the reader to think about Puerto Rico’s colonial status and its history of exploitation and subjugation more broadly, which are deeply tied to the racism embedded in those decisions, as a deliberate legal reality. Rejecting that legal logic as valid is, a crucial first step, for her.

Making Never-Never Land is divided into two parts. The first part, “Toward a Legal Genealogy of Racial Exclusion” looks at the US Supreme Court’s resolution of the Insular Cases, particularly Downes v. Bidwell (1901), a foundational case that first established the legal framework of U.S.-Puerto Rico relations, placing that decision within a longer historical context of legal decisions before the United States’ acquisition of the territory. Chapter 1 puts the focus on Downes because it was in that case that the US Supreme Court pronounced Puerto Rico to be “foreign in a domestic sense,” and created a new legal category, “the unincorporated territory,” for the island effectively placing it in a legal limbo—neither fully part of the U.S. nor fully independent (pp. 19, 20). That decision created a series of limitations for the territory, continuing to undermine its sovereignty.

Chapter 2 examines the Marshall Trilogy (1823-1832), United States v. Rogers (1846), and Dread Scott v. Sanford (1856) concerning the rights of Native Americans and enslaved Africans, respectively, who were among the first nonwhite populations with whom the U.S. legal system had to contend, to connect their logics and legal reasoning to Downes. In these cases, according to Jiménez, the U.S. Supreme Court engaged in critical moments of racial formation and exclusion, were we see the birth and growth of plenary powers, creating what the authors refers to as the “American state of exception”.

In the second part of the book, “‘American’ State of Exception: Puerto Rico in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries”, Jiménez traces the legal, political, and social effects and logics of Downes into the present with implications for the future. She does this by identifying three key moments that established the limits of Puerto Rico’s relationship to the United States. For example, chapter 3 examines the immediate changes implemented after the United States acquired Puerto Rico as an overseas territory, and the Court’s ruling in Downes. Jiménez describes this process as “the creation of Puerto Rico as an experimental station,” where the island became a testing ground for colonial policies, and its inhabitants were subjected to a process of “Americanization” and were taught how to become proper U.S. colonial subjects (p. 63).

President Theodore Roosevelt in Ponce, Puerto Rico 1906. — President Theodore Roosevelt in Ponce, Puerto Rico, 1906.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Chapter 4 examines the events that led to “the midcentury miracle,” which lifted many Puerto Ricans out of poverty and culminated in the establishment of the Estado Libre Asociado (E.L.A.), or Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, in 1952. While acknowledging the benefits this period brought to some, including her own grandfather’s success story, Jiménez highlights the limits of Puerto Rico’s political authority and the overarching control of Congress’ plenary powers over the archipelago, much like Puerto Rican Nationalist Party leader Pedro Albizu Campos once did. In her effort to demystify archives of Puertorriqueñidad, the sense of Puerto Rican identity that became involved with the notion of E.L.A., she examines how Congress’ supremacy was reaffirmed in a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions from 2016 to 2020 concerning Puerto Rico’s current debt crisis. In Chapter 5, Jiménez further develops how the Court once again upheld the precedent set in Downes, reinforcing the island’s colonial condition.

Jiménez’s Making Never-Never Land makes a significant contribution to Puerto Rican Studies, American Studies, Legal Studies, and Caribbean Studies, by interrogating the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions through the lens of racial and colonial exclusion. Her work expands our understanding of unincorporated territories—Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa—and their relationship to the U.S. As a legal historian, Jiménez challenges the fiction that Puerto Rico holds real decision-making power, highlighting how Downes continues to justify the island’s exclusion and inequality. Her greatest scholarly intervention is tracing the genealogy of court decisions that have systematically stripped Puerto Rico of sovereignty, culminating in the imposition of PROMESA in 2016. By revisiting cases like Downes, she opens new avenues for understanding the present by rethinking Puerto Rico’s political and legal status.

Road Map of Puerto Rico, 1942.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Jiménez’s Making Never-Never Land arrives at a crucial moment when Puerto Rican Studies scholars are examining critically how the United States treats its overseas territories. She not only expands these conversations but also moves beyond centering the debate on the Insular Cases, critically interrogating their lasting impact on Puerto Rico today. In doing so, she builds on the work of legal scholars like Efrén Rivera Ramos, David E. Wilkins, Maggie Blackhawk, Paul Finkelman, and Adam Arenson, among many others. Her research also engages with Ed Morales’ Fantasy Island: Colonialism, Exploitation, and the Betrayal of Puerto Rico (2019) and Rocío Zambrana’s Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico (2021), particularly in the context of Puerto Rico’s debt crisis and disaster capitalism, making it a timely and innovative contribution. Jiménez is also successful in expanding the conversation to other states of the U.S., as this book also helps us understand the colonial dynamics still present with Native Hawaiians.

Making Never-Never Land is well-suited for courses in Puerto Rican, and Caribbean Studies, American, African Diaspora, and Legal Studies, as it addresses race, discrimination, law, citizenship, U.S.-Puerto Rico relations, and colonialism while encouraging critical engagement with these legal precedents. Additionally, Jiménez’s intersectional approach to race and law makes her work relevant for students in Native American and Black Studies. Ultimately, this book challenges us to rethink legal narratives and their ongoing consequences, urging a more profound reconsideration of Puerto Rico’s political and legal status.

Nelson M. Pagán-Butler is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin. His research explores Afro-descendant intellectuals in the Hispanic Caribbean, Black Caribbean feminist and Marxist thought, and Hispanic Caribbean queer archives.

Memories of War: Reflections on Japanese Borderlands Experiences and Nikkei Incarceration

Introduction by Lucero Estrella, Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at Lawrence University

When developing my syllabus for ETST 110: Introduction to Ethnic Studies, I thought of ways to have students at Lawrence University engage with the themes of race, ethnicity, borders, gender, indigeneity, and migration beyond the United States. Each week, we discussed themes such as settler colonialism, racialization, criminalization, and resistance and how these appeared across various temporalities and global geographies.

For our week on resistance and exclusion during the mid-twentieth century, I decided to have my students read my NEP piece “Memories of War: Japanese Borderlands Experiences during WWII,” alongside Karen M. Inouye’s article “No Simple History: Nikkei Incarceration on Indigenous Lands.”[1] My goal was to have students engage with alternative histories of Japanese internment that they might not have encountered in the past. While my NEP piece approaches Japanese incarceration and family separation through a hemispheric lens and discusses Japanese wartime experiences on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border, Inouye’s work centers Nikkei women’s narratives of incarceration on Indigenous land to highlight the interconnections between racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and wartime incarceration. Both works discuss the importance of memory in historical studies of the wartime period as a way of uncovering the continuing legacies of state violence.

*Japanese internment detainees, 1942. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

For my class, students were expected to write one weekly, in-class free writing exercise based on a few guiding questions. During the week we read both works, students were required to tackle one or more of the following questions: How do Estrella and/or Inouye use memory in their works? Who do these memories belong to? What new perspectives and possibilities emerge from the use of memory as a historical source?

The four reflections below are from four Lawrence University students who took my Fall 2024 term Introduction to Ethnic Studies course: Tahlia Moe, Niranjana Mittal, Nicholas Lubin, and Riya Jehangir Stebleton. Their short preces include reflections on some themes and methodologies that structured our class discussions for the term, such as relational race, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and incarceration.

Student Reflections

Tahlia Moe

Memory serves as the gateway to a hidden archive. Employing memory as a historical source unearths relations, stories, intimacies, and experiences that traditional historical methods often overlook. “Memories of War: Japanese Borderlands Experiences during WWII” by Estrella and “No Simple History: Nikkei Incarceration on Indigenous Lands” by Inouye explore the hidden archive as they prioritize memories as primary sources. Estrella highlights memories from Japanese families and activists in the U.S. and Mexico to display the legacies of violence and anti-Asian exclusion on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Meanwhile, Inouye writes about Nikkei incarceration on Indigenous lands in Arizona, featuring memories from Japanese women who were imprisoned as children in Poston. The memories of these women reveal legacies of racial capitalism and settler colonialism that are downplayed, erased, or otherwise not found in the archives. Their memories reveal interactions between the Japanese prisoners and the Indigenous people as they created their own economies and forms of resistance. A relational race approach becomes significant to understanding the interactions between the groups and the effects of state-sponsored violence and settler-colonialist ideologies and policies. Compiling these memories helps form a fuller, more empathetic picture that cares about and honors subjects of violent histories. Emerging perspectives from people involved thus introduce the personal perspective and intimate value, combatting traditional historical methods.

*Poston, Arizona, 1945. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

Niranjana Mittal

Estrella’s piece titled “Memories of War: Japanese Borderlands Experiences during WWII,” explores lived experiences from the Texas-Mexico borderlands through the lens of memory. By using oral histories and personal recollections, Estrella centers the humanity of these historical events, presenting an intimate narrative that contrasts with more traditional archival sources. Memory in her work becomes a vital tool for uncovering some overlooked aspects of history. Estrella’s use of memory is particularly powerful in reconstructing histories that lack extensive documentation or have been marginalized in mainstream narratives.

The memories she draws upon belong to individuals who lived through the upheaval of war. These are ordinary people whose voices are often absent from official records but whose experiences illuminate the complexities of war beyond its grand strategies and political machinations. For example, recollections of displacement and resource scarcity challenge the monolithic view of Japan as solely a wartime aggressor, adding nuance to our understanding of suffering in Japanese Mexican communities during the war. Estrella uncovers the brutality of imperial policies and how individuals navigated and survived these oppressive systems.

One of the most significant effects of Estrella incorporating these memories is how it opens up new perspectives on history. Memory, unlike official records, is subjective and malleable, shaped by individual experiences and the passage of time. This fluidity allows us to reveal dimensions of history that might otherwise remain hidden. For instance, memories often preserve emotional truths and everyday experiences that are absent in traditional state sources. They bring to light stories of resilience, survival, and moral ambiguity that challenge simplistic narratives of victimhood or villainy. Estrella shows how the memories of those at the margins, such as borderland communities, challenge nationalistic accounts that erase the interconnected and often contradictory realities of the war.

A dentist's office at the Granada Relocation Center, Amache, Colorado, 1942. — *A dentist’s office at the Granada Relocation Center, Amache, Colorado, 1942. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

Moreover, memory as a historical source opens up possibilities for reconciliation and healing. By including voices that have been silenced or ignored, Estrella’s work fosters a more inclusive understanding of history that acknowledges shared pain and loss across national and cultural boundaries. This approach humanizes history and highlights how memory itself is contested and politicized as individuals and communities negotiate their relationship with the past.

Ultimately, Estrella demonstrates that memory is not just a supplement to traditional historical sources but a vital means of understanding the complexities of human experiences. By foregrounding memory, she shifts the focus from the macro-level forces of war to the lived experiences of individuals – offering a richer, more empathetic perspective on the past.

Nicholas Lubin

In both Estrella’s and Inouye’s works, memory functions as a significant tool for recovery from the deterioration of Native American and immigrant narratives. Due to the United States’ history of isolation and displacement, many families are left with gaps in their history. However, memory functions to fill this gap. Although instances of displacement and isolation are not always documented, memory and oral histories help fill this gap. Memory in Inouye’s piece serves as a connector for the experiences of Japanese Americans who were subjected to incarceration following Executive Order 9066 and those of Native Americans who were displaced from their lands.

Inouye illustrates this overlap through the locations of campsites on Indigenous reservations mirroring the state-imposed limits and borders for the “allowed” spaces for Native peoples. Despite the differing circumstances of the two groups, the process of isolation and extermination is one and the same. Both works feature minority groups that were forcibly relocated because of the unsettling habits that hegemonic powers hold onto, such as settler colonialism and xenophobia. In Estrella’s work, she details this, showing the reader the widespread cross-border relocation of Japanese nationals following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Families across the Americas were torn apart, and many never returned to their homes, causing this impactful moment to fall under the radar. Estrella’s inclusion of oral history and memories of a Japanese Mexican family illustrates how the attempt to silence these voices with equivocation can be combated by preserving the narratives and memories of those who experienced violence and displacement during the wartime period.

Riya Jehangir Stebleton

The erasure of immigrant and Indigenous stories in the United States is a constant theme within hegemonic white narratives. Many families are unable to retrace the steps of their ancestors due to the history of exclusion, internment, and forced separation of ethnic groups. In the works of Estrella’s “Memories of War” & Inouye’s “No Simple History,” memory and empathy are used as powerful mechanisms to bridge historical gaps in the lives of both Japanese and Indigenous communities in the Americas. Although these communities endured different forms of injustice, an overarching system of racism in incarceration and exclusion can be seen through a relational race lens.

Civilian exclusion order #5, posted at First and Front streets, directing removal by April 7 1942 of persons of Japanese ancestry, from the first San Francisco section to be affected by evacuation.
Source: Library of Congress, Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-34565.

Estrella discusses the mass displacement of Japanese immigrants after WWII, as well as the obscured and unknown history of Japanese Mexicans. In addition to the criminalization of Japanese migrants following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, working-class migrants in Mexican states such as Coahuila encountered discrimination through forced relocation. Similarly, Inouye highlights the misconstrued narrative of the Nikkei community in the U.S., which is made up of Japanese descendants who have permanently settled abroad. These communities were placed in incarceration camps under the War Relocation Authorities on land where native tribes’ reservations were located. Wartime systems of relocation and incarceration draw direct comparisons to the processes of settler colonialism. Due to the consistent reinforcement of white power, the stories of Japanese migrants and the entanglement of injustices are left unheard of in social spheres, education, and sometimes within families. So, how can these narratives be retold and amplified? For many, the answer lies in the ability to convey memory and empathy in a historical context.

Fragments of memory, combined with empathy, can be utilized to translate and preserve the overlooked histories of both immigrant and Indigenous communities. The usage of memory as a historical source allows for these stories to be retold, drawing connections between systems of incarceration, racialization, and dispossession that affected numerous non-white populations in the United States. For example, there are major gaps in the poorly documented history of Japanese Mexican families, and the usage of empathetic agency can bridge connections across the divide. Narrating history through a first-hand perspective also allows for the descendants of those affected to share the intergenerational impacts of settler colonialism and exclusion, demonstrating the long-term impacts. The preservation of these hidden narratives offers new perspectives on the underrepresented history of Japanese migrants while also integrating emotional analogy, remembrance, and personal influence. Incarceration rooted in white dominance continues to be a relevant issue in the United States. Consequently, it is crucial to remember and extend the narratives of Japanese migrants through mechanisms of memory, empathy, and knowledge, to break the cycle of ethnic erasure and carceral systems of injustice.

Lucero Estrella is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at Lawrence University

[1] Karen Inouye, “No Simple History: Nikkei Incarceration on Indigenous Lands,” Journal of Transnational American Studies, 15(1), 2024.

“Muhammad’s Law” in Latin America: Outlining Historiographical Legacies of Early Modern Atlantic Islam

“Muhammad’s Law” in Latin America invites readers to explore Islam in the early modern Iberian Atlantic—a historiographical field examining the interconnected histories of Islam across the Atlantic world. It is rooted in the lived experiences of Muslims who crossed the ocean, the metaphorical uses of “Muslimness” in Iberian colonial thought, and the material and intellectual legacies of the Islamic world that shaped the Americas. The six foundational books discussed here seek to disrupt traditional narratives of Atlantic history and highlight Latin America as an active participant in global modernity, shaped by cultural exchange and intellectual collaboration.

This exploration is a deeply personal one. My fascination with the legacies of Al-Andalus and the Middle East—metaphors for an Islamic continuum linking Spain, the Maghreb, the Sahel, and the Levant—has profoundly shaped how I understand the Americas. This intellectual journey began with my first reading of Albert Hourani’s A History of the Arab Peoples, a book that sparked my passion in history. The possibility of connecting the stories of Islam to Latin America captivates me, as it reframes the region as a global crucible for understanding modernity.

Al-Andalus, with its imperfect but real interreligious coexistence, continues to challenge us to rethink Latin America’s colonial history—not only as a story of vertical oppression but also as one marked by the incorporation of cultural difference, often through contested processes. These Muslim legacies, often referred to as alborotados (noisy and persistent), remain subtly yet powerfully visible in ways we often overlook. They complicate our understanding of the complex interplay between Christianity, native cultures, and the specters of Islam in the Americas. The following books, central to my comprehensive exams and my master’s thesis, The Alborotado Caribbean: Archiving Rowdy Gentes and Specters of Islam in the Long 16th Century, have helped me unravel these connections and reveal a more complex and interconnected Atlantic world.

African Muslims and the Atlantic World: Sylviane A. Diouf and Michael A. Gomez

Together, Sylviane Diouf’s Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (1998) and Michael A. Gomez’s Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas (2005) provide a comprehensive exploration of the role of African Muslims (mainly Wolof, Mandinka, and Fulbe) in shaping the Atlantic world. Diouf’s work emphasizes the resilience of Islamic faith and practices among enslaved Africans, while Gomez extends the discussion to encompass the broader social and cultural legacies of African Muslims across the Americas.

Diouf’s study highlights the enduring presence of Islam in West Africa, particularly in Senegambia, and how it influenced the identities of enslaved Muslims who crossed the Atlantic. Her meticulous analysis of primary sources, such as colonial decrees and inquisitorial records, reveals how African Muslims preserved their faith through practices including the use of protective talismans, dietary restrictions, and acts of resistance, such as the 1522 Wolof rebellion in Hispaniola (Enriquillo’s revolt). Diouf positions Islam not merely as a religion but as a framework for resilience and cultural survival in the face of dehumanizing conditions.

Gomez builds on this foundation by situating the experiences of African Muslims within a broader historiographical context, incorporating both Latin America and the United States. The narrative spans from West Africa to the Americas, examining how Islamic traditions adapted to different colonial contexts. For instance, Gomez explores how African deity names containing the particle Allah such as Ọbatala, the presence of Marabouts (Sufi holy people) and the practice of Taqiyya (religious dissimulation) facilitated the survival of Islamic practices in the early colonial Americas. He also delves into the intersections between African Islamic traditions and syncretic religions in the Americas, such as Lukumi in Cuba.

Both authors underscore the significance of African Muslims in shaping the cultural and religious landscapes of the Atlantic world, but they also diverge in their emphases. Diouf focuses on cultural retention and the religious practices of enslaved Muslims, while Gomez extends the discussion to the legacies of these practices, particularly in North America. Together, these works correct a long-standing historiographical neglect by emphasizing the centrality of African Muslims to the history of the Atlantic world. They reveal how Islamic traditions, both as faith and cultural practice, shaped the identities, resistance practices, and legacies of enslaved Africans and their descendants across the Americas.

Dialogues Between Symbolic and Material Legacies: Barbara Fuchs and Judith Carney

Barbara Fuchs’ Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities (2001) and Judith Carney’s Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (2001) approach the legacies of Muslim cultures in the Atlantic world through distinct yet complementary lenses. Fuchs examines how symbolic anxieties about Islam shaped Spanish colonial ideology, while Carney focuses on the environmental and agricultural transformations that were driven by the knowledge and practices of African Muslims. Together, these works demonstrate how the material and symbolic practices descended from Muslim people endured and adapted in the Americas, persisting despite colonial efforts at erasure and invisibilization.

Fuchs focuses on the literary and ideological constructions of “Muslimness” in Spanish colonial thought, showing how Spain’s long history of conflict with Islam informed its treatment of indigenous peoples and other non-Christian groups in the Americas. Her analysis reveals how anxieties about Islam—rooted in centuries of confrontation with Muslim powers in Iberia and North Africa—were projected onto the New World. Drawing on literary works such as Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana and Lope de Vega’s La Dragontea, Fuchs illustrates how Spanish authors used the figure of the Muslim in the Indies to articulate fears about rebellion, idolatry, and cultural otherness. For example, Ercilla’s portrayal of the indigenous Mapuche in La Araucana draws on tropes of Muslim resistance, likening indigenous leaders to Morisco rebels. Similarly, Lope de Vega conflates Protestant and Muslim enemies in La Dragontea by portraying Francis Drake and his crew as “Dracárabes” (Drake-Arabs). These representations reveal how Spanish anxieties about Islam shaped their perceptions of all non-Catholic groups, blurring the lines between religious, cultural, and political adversaries. Fuchs’ reliance on literary sources underscores how deeply embedded these anxieties were in Spanish intellectual and cultural production and demonstrates how the symbolic legacies of Muslimness were instrumental in shaping colonial narratives of conquest and suppression.

In contrast, Carney’s Black Rice foregrounds the material and environmental impact of African Muslims, particularly through their agricultural knowledge and practices. Carney highlights how enslaved Africans from Muslim regions of West Africa, especially Senegambia, brought sophisticated expertise in rice cultivation that transformed the landscapes and economies of the Americas. The rice of Senegambia was a clear expression of the Old-World interconnectedness provided by the Islamic world, from East Asia to West Africa. We cannot think about the typical Caribbean diet nowadays without considering the importance of this rice agricultural knowledge brought by Senegambians. The cultivation of rice, a crop long associated with Islamic agricultural traditions, became central to the economies of South Carolina, the maroon communities of Brazil, and other Atlantic regions. By adapting their agrarian knowledge to new environments, these enslaved peoples ensured both economic viability and cultural continuity. Carney’s work challenges Eurocentric narratives of the Columbian Exchange by revealing the critical role African Muslims played in shaping agricultural landscapes, effectively redefining the Americas as spaces marked by their contributions to environmental knowledge.

While Fuchs reveals how Spain’s anxieties about Muslims were projected onto indigenous peoples and other colonial subjects, Carney demonstrates how African Muslim agricultural expertise reshaped the ecological and economic foundations of the Atlantic world. Together, these works highlight the dual dimensions of Muslim cultural legacies—symbolic and material—and how they endured even in the presence of colonial systems that sought to suppress them. By placing Fuchs and Carney in dialogue, we see a fuller picture of how Muslim-descended peoples and traditions intersected with colonial life. Whether through literary anxieties about rebellion and heresy or the cultivation of rice fields that sustained enslaved communities, these legacies remind us of the profound ways the Islamic civilization influenced the Americas.

Muslim Identities in Individual Flux and Collective Stasis: Karoline Cook and Karen Graubart

Karoline Cook’s Forbidden Passages: Muslims and Moriscos in Colonial Spanish America (2016) and Karen Graubart’s Republics of Difference: Religious and Racial Self-Governance in the Spanish Atlantic World (2022) offer two different but complimentary perspectives for understanding the dynamics of Early Modern Atlantic Islam. Cook emphasizes the forbidden mobility of individuals marked by “Muslimness” (Turks, Arabs, Berbers, Moriscos, and West Africans), while Graubart focuses on the stasis and semi-autonomy of disenfranchised communities (Jews, Moors, Indians, Africans) within the framework of the Spanish Empire. Together, these works illuminate how both individuals and institutions navigated and reinvented the imperial Atlantic, showcasing microhistories of personal adaptation alongside broader histories of collective self-governance.

Cook’s exploration centers on the movement of Moriscos and other Muslim-marked individuals within the Spanish Empire, particularly their migration to the Americas despite legal prohibitions. Her work uncovers how individuals circumvented colonial restrictions, forging paths that challenged the rigidity of imperial legislation. Through inquisitorial records mainly from Mexico, Cook reveals the liminal spaces these individuals occupied, adapting between Muslim and Christian identities while carrying memories of their prayers in Arabic and material markers of faith, such as talismans and amulets. This “forbidden mobility” underscores the agency of individuals navigating the Atlantic system, even as their movements were surveilled and constrained. Cook’s narrative highlights how the specter of Muslimness shaped the legal, social, and rhetorical frameworks of the empire, with Moriscos often cast as symbols of contamination or rebellion—anxieties that were projected onto indigenous uprisings in the Americas.

Graubart, in contrast, shifts the focus from individuals to communities, examining how disenfranchised groups used the institutional framework of the república to assert forms of self-governance and negotiate their place within the imperial system. By analyzing urban spaces and corporations in Seville and Lima, like alhamas (Moorish communities), cofradias de negros (Black brotherhoods), and Indigenous pueblos, Graubart demonstrates how the Spanish Empire operated as a constellation of overlapping jurisdictions, where legal pluralism allowed for a limited collective autonomy (working as republics). Her use of GIS mapping to study the spatial organization of these communities reveals how they adapted imperial institutions to maintain cultural and religious identities while asserting their collective needs. This framework of collective semi-autonomy contrasts with Cook’s focus on individuals facing persecution or concealing their Muslim identity, highlighting two distinct ways marginalized populations engaged with the empire: through individual strategies of evasion or dissimulation, or by collectively adapting to imperial institutions to assert their communal presence.

By placing these works in dialogue, we see two sides of the same coin: the tension between mobility and stasis of identities within a proto-racial Atlantic world. Cook’s focus on individual trajectories reveals the fluidity and adaptability of particular identities, even in the face of systemic religious oppression. Meanwhile, Graubart’s analysis of micro-corporations highlights the endurance and reinvention of communal structures that facilitated collective action and cultural resilience. Both perspectives underscore how both institutions like the república and individuals traveled and transformed across the Atlantic, shaping the imperial world in reciprocal ways. The broader implication of this dialogue is a realization that the Atlantic world was not a monolithic system but a dynamic space of (re)invention of human difference. Institutions such as alhamas and cabildos evolved as they crossed the Atlantic, just as individuals like Moriscos navigated their roles within shifting social and legal frameworks. Cook’s microhistories and Graubart’s community-focused lens converge to show how Muslimness, both as a lived experience and a conceptual spectral category, was central to the development of the Spanish Atlantic world. Together, they offer a nuanced understanding of Early Modern Atlantic Islam, revealing how people and institutions alike negotiated the complexities of empire.

Final thoughts

Single-volume Qur’an. Ink, color, and gold on paper. — Ottoman single-volume Qur’an (1517). Source: *Wikimedia Commons*

The field of Early Modern Atlantic Islam opens a window into the complicated and interconnected histories of the Atlantic world. The works examined in this article collectively reveal how Islam shaped this world across multiple dimensions: through the resilience of African Muslims in the Americas, the metaphorical frameworks of “Muslimness” in Iberian colonial thought, and the tangible legacies of Islamic cultural, technological, and intellectual practices. Despite these contributions, there is much work to be done.

These six books disrupt conventional narratives of the Atlantic world as a space defined solely by European dominance. Instead, they reframe it as a region shaped by cultural intersections, shared histories, and dynamic reinventions of identity that go beyond the histories of a top-down successful Catholic spiritual conquest. They challenge us to recognize the complexities of Latin American colonial history, not merely as a story of exploitation and racialization but as one marked by contested incorporation by conversion or mestizaje, and transformation of difference—whether cultural, religious, or institutional. By tracing these legacies, we uncover shared histories that transcend cultural and geographical boundaries. From the rice fields of Senegambia to the “republican” institutions of Lima, these stories illuminate the interconnectedness of the Atlantic world and challenge us to rethink the narratives we take for granted. In doing so, we can see Latin American history was profoundly influenced by the specters and experiences of Atlantic Islam.

Additional Recommended Readings

Deardorff, Max. A Tale of Two Granadas: Custom, Community, and Citizenship in the Spanish Empire, 1568–1668. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Gruzinski, Serge. ¿Qué hora es allá? América y el Islam en los albores de la modernidad. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2015.
Hamann, Byron Ellsworth. Bad Christians, New Spains: Muslims, Catholics, and Native Americans in a Mediterratlantic World. London: Routledge, 2019.
Hourani, Albert. A History of the Arab Peoples. London: Faber and Faber, 1991.
Rappaport, Joanne. The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.
Reis, João José. The Story of Rufino: Slavery, Freedom, and Islam in the Black Atlantic. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Schwartz, Stuart B. Blood and boundaries: the limits of religious and racial exclusion in early modern Latin America. Waltham: Brandeis University Press. 2020.

Acknowledgment
This reflection first began to take shape during the seminar “Islam in Europe and America” taught by Dr. Denise Spellberg, to whom I am deeply grateful for her generosity and encouragement to further explore these understudied and often overlooked connections. Dr. Spellberg has herself had the fascinating opportunity to examine some of these connections, particularly in relation to the United States, in her book Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders (2013)—a work that also contributes to broader efforts to understand the complex histories of Atlantic Islam.

Rafael David Nieto-Bello is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at The University of Texas at Austin and a historian from Bogotá, with a double bachelor’s in History and Political Science from Universidad de los Andes and a master’s degree in History from UT Austin. His research examines the intersections of the history of human sciences, race, religion, and the environment in the colonial Caribbean and the Atlantic world. He is currently writing his dissertation and working on digital humanities projects that analyze cartographic and textual representations of the colonial Caribbean.

Review of Empire of Poverty. The Moral-Political Economy of the Spanish Empire, by Julia McClure (2025).

In Empire of Poverty, Julia McClure presents an innovative approach to the study of the Spanish Empire. The book analyzes how poverty was conceived in the early years of the Spanish colonization of the Americas, and how it was transformed as attitudes towards the poor were changed by a series of economic, political, religious and social factors. Julia McClure argues that the transition to colonial capitalism in the sixteenth century modified previous attitudes towards poverty and modelled a new approach that shaped the very same institutions of empire.

The most innovative aspect of this work is the analysis of this ideological change. Rather than emphasizing the material aspects of poverty during the transition to capitalism, as previous Marxist analysis have done (in the case of Europe see: Karls Marx’s Capital and Catherina Lys and Hugo Solis’ Poverty and Capitalism in Pre-Industrial Europe), McClure analyzes how the moral-political concepts of empire-building changed and intertwined with social, political and economic factors, eventually influencing the governing models of imperial institutions. As the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the New World and amassed wealth and riches, new theories of monetary value emerged. These theories were accompanied by framing notions of indigenous people as impoverished and ‘‘uncivilized’’, which were constructed to justify Spanish colonization and the subsequent subjugation of these communities. This also explained the emergence of new theories of sovereignty.

Debates regarding the natural rights of Indigenous people and their role in colonial society as well as discussions led by scholars of the School of Salamanca followed the scholastic tradition but also inspired new models of governance. McClure demonstrates how poverty was used as an instrument for the control and subjugation of Indigenous people in the Americas. She identifies this period as the genesis of what she calls ‘‘colonial capitalism’’, marked by the emergence of moral-political values that helped shape new theories of empire and expand sovereignty claims over additional individuals and territories.

Picture of University of Salamanca — University of Salamanca. Source: Wikimedia Commoms

Taking a first look at the Iberian Peninsula, the book first delves with the Spanish arbitristas, intellectuals who wrote treatises to the King on the social, political and economic state of the kingdom. It analyzes the impact the New World wealth had in Spanish society at the time, rejecting previous analysis that regarded Spain as an impoverished kingdom. McClure argues that it was the sudden flow of wealth and riches from the New World that helped construct this idea of decline and poverty at home, with the arbitristas being the first to introduce and articulate this concept.

The book then takes the reader to America to first analyze the economies of pre-Columbian societies such as the Maya, Inca or Aztec. McClure argues that these indigenous political entities had their own mechanisms to face poverty and scarcity. She defines these economic systems as ‘‘moral ecologies’’, characterized by their interactions with their surrounding environment and resources. These systems developed their own mechanisms to reduce poverty and scarcity at times of risk, whether that be it as a result of a natural disaster or harvest failure (pp.54-67). Despite the existence of these mechanisms, the author shows how Spanish officials and intellectuals constructed Indigenous people as poor, and began classifying them in different social ranges, often denoting their economic status and racial features. This only mirrored the developments that were happening at the same time in the Iberian Peninsula.

Picture of Codex Mendoza folio 64r. The top two lines of the page on display here depict the training of a priest (which involved public works such as the repair of temples and bridges). The remaining images feature warriors, and illustrate the importance of war captives in the acquisition of social rank. — *Codex Mendoza folio 64r.* Source: Wikimedia Commons

Focusing again in Europe, McClure stresses the importance of the new theories of state and government that were emerging at the time. She defines them as contractual and collaborative in nature, emphasizing the negotiated relationship between vassals and rulers, despite the increasing power of European monarchs. These new theories of state –often embedded within the ‘mirror for princes’ literature– actively supported the provision of the poor and the existence of welfare systems as the monarch was regarded as the main benefactor and provider of the poor and those in need. As a result, intellectuals from the School of Salamanca legitimized the Spanish colonization of the Americas, and with it, the emergence of colonial capitalism. Their theories of sovereignty and government framed the King as the main supporter and provider of welfare and charity in the kingdom, stressing the contractual nature of this negotiated sovereignty.

At the same time, attitudes towards poverty shifted. These shifts in approaches to poverty and poor relief formed part of a wider trend in Europe where the poor began to be increasingly policed and controlled by government institutions. Treaties such as Juan Luis Vives’ De Subventione Pauperum (1530) or Miguel de Giginta’s Tratado de remedio de pobres (1579) offered new solutions to relief poverty and advocated for a tighter control toward vagrancy. New classifications emerged between deserving and undeserving poor, which further widened the gap between legal and illegal forms of poverty. Moreover, the issue of new poor laws during the reigns of Charles V (1516-1556) and Philip II (1556-1598) meant the further criminalization of poverty, and an acceleration in state-controlled legislation (p.126).

Additionally, the construction of poverty toward Indigenous people often meant their appropriation of their land and labor, which helped further cement the colonial project. McClure analyzes the various forms of labor appropriation and exploitation, including the encomienda system, the repartimiento, and the capture of individuals in combat through just war rhetoric (pp.138-142). In addition, as a result of the creation of novel forms of debt and tributary legislation, new forms of poverty emerged that widely affected Indigenous communities. The appropriation of lands and the legal mechanisms used to claim ‘empty’ lands or legalized already occupied ones, formed a model that ultimately favored Spanish colonists (p.164).

At the same time, the categorization of Indigenous people as ‘‘childish’’ and in need of protection helped Spanish officials to implement further governing structures in the Americas, strengthening the visualization of the Spanish Monarchs as the benefactors of these communities. The Crown exploited this discourse to build around its institution the myth of protector of the Indians and dispenser of justice. Yet, McClure also shows that Indigenous people navigated through the intricate system of Spanish colonial law, and often sought rewards and compensation for their miseries and poverty. This bottom-up system of petitions, rewards, and amparos also shaped the imperial institutions of the Spanish empire in the New World, and created a precedent for a passive resistance and cemented the survival of pre-conquest privileges and rights among Indigenous people and communities (pp.172-173).

In conclusion, Empire of Poverty shows how moral and political concepts of poverty influenced the governing institutions of the Spanish empire while also laying the foundations for the modern unequal systems that affect the exact same societies that were first colonized in the sixteenth century. Simultaneously, the monograph shifts attention from the Anglophone historiographical tradition that has usually overemphasized the Protestant models to study poverty and charity (highly influenced by Weber’s thesis on the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) to explain early modern attitudes towards poverty. This offers a new paradigm to explain the role and impact of Catholicism in poor relief and poverty management.

As a result, McClure concludes that scholars and officials of the Spanish Empire ‘reinvented poverty’ to legitimize their expansion of sovereignty in these new territories. In doing so, they created new forms of poverty through alien systems of labor extraction, tribute collection, and land appropriation. Despite this, the negotiated and participative nature of the Spanish empire also enabled its vassals to negotiate and even lobby for their own interests. At times, this led to the preservation of their rights and status, or the obtaining of rewards, in the newly created colonial society, evidencing the participatory and contractual nature of this system of rule and government. Finally, McClure stresses how the colonial capitalist model that developed over the sixteenth century paved the way for modern inequalities that continue in these territories, often shaping Indigenous ways of life and survival.

Jorge García-García is a first-year PhD History student at the University of Texas-Austin. He studied History as an undergraduate at the University of Glasgow (United Kingdom), obtaining a MA with Honors of the First Class. He then studied a postgraduate degree in World History at the Pompeu Fabra University (Spain). His research focuses on Colonial Latin America and the Spanish Empire.

NEP’s Archive Chronicles: Pensar el archivo hasta no ver. Ceguera y redes afectivas

NEP’S Archive Chronicles explora el papel que desempeñan los archivos en la investigación histórica, ofreciendo una visión del proceso de trabajo e investigación archivística. Cada entrega ofrecerá una perspectiva única de los tesoros y retos que los investigadores encuentran en los archivos de todo el mundo. Crónicas de archivo de NEP pretende ser tanto una guía práctica como un espacio para la reflexión, mostrando las experiencias de los colaboradores con la investigación archivística. En esta entrega de las NEP’s Archive Chronicles, publicada en inglés y español, Juan David Osorio Vargas piensa el el archivo hasta no ver, así como la ceguera y las redes afectivas

Note: Click here to access the English version.
Nota: Haz click aquí para acceder a la versión en inglés.

Jacques Derrida nos dice que existen, fundamentalmente, dos tipos de experiencias que son muy diferentes entre sí.[1] Una de ellas se establece en el presente y se refiere a aquello que podemos neutralizar con nuestros ojos. En este caso, una de las funciones del ojo es ver venir, anticiparse ante lo desconocido o ante la presencia de lo otro. Esta constituye una de las dos experiencias posibles. La otra, que quiero profundizar a continuación, es la experiencia de la ceguera. Es aquella que traza un viaje inesperado, imprevisible y abierto hacia la heterogeneidad de lo otro, ese otro que está allí para sorprendernos. Se trata, precisamente, de un viaje no programable, una cartografía de lo indeterminado, carente de finalidad. Es la experiencia del presente que nos remite a la incertidumbre de un evento histórico.

Como historiador ciego, estoy convencido de que las formas de conocimiento organizadas por otros sentidos son valiosas en sí mismas. La pregunta de si el historiador ciego puede acceder a los materiales del mundo visual tiene una respuesta afirmativa. Podemos trazar un lenguaje con estas características si ampliamos significativamente el alcance democratizador del archivo, así como las preguntas que lo rodean, mediante tecnologías de compensación que aseguren que la traducción de un registro a otro no pierda su estatus de legitimidad.

Quien se enfrenta al archivo atraviesa la experiencia de la ceguera. No todos los historiadores tienen ojos para ver venir por adelantado. El archivo nos enseña que, cada vez que entramos en él, se torna más incontenible y ajeno. Si partimos del segundo concepto de experiencia, podemos percatarnos que el archivo es un viaje sin horizonte aparente, con vista a lo que no está a la vista, una idea que se aproxima profundamente a la práctica del historiador.

El archivo es la experiencia de la ceguera porque no podemos anticiparlo. No sabemos con qué nos sorprenderá ni a través de qué nueva tecnología o pregunta nos responderá. Mucho se ha hablado del silencio de los archivos y de las borraduras que contiene, pero poco se ha reflexionado sobre la cualidad de la ceguera que habita en ellos y sobre la relación que establece con la visibilidad.

El verano pasado, mientras realizaba investigación de archivo en Colombia y Panamá, me encontré con esta realidad: no bastaba con ser ciego y vivir la doble experiencia de la ceguera para enfrentar el archivo, pues el habla también implica, estructuralmente, la no visión. Y es el habla mi primer acercamiento al archivo. Pareciera que aquellas voces familiares, que no se ven, son la realidad inmediata de su presencia. Percibo palabras que pueden interesarme. Hago una pregunta y me encuentro con el silencio. El archivo, otra vez, está mudo. Mi mamá se esfuerza por encontrar la palabra que busco en un documento que se está haciendo polvo, pero ella tampoco la ve. Nos quedamos a tientas. Estamos ciegos.

Reflexionaba sobre como esa materialidad podía actuar y hablarme para que yo pudiera interrogarla con mis indicios e intuiciones. Percibí el archivo como ese dispositivo irremediable que debemos transitar para llegar a algún lugar del pasado o del conocimiento histórico, de una manera similar a como concibo el bastón que, día a día, me permite tantear los espacios aún desconocidos que atravieso al caminar. La naturaleza de esta experiencia es la aprehensión: esa propiedad que habilita el desplazamiento entre la voz y el archivo, análoga al espaciamiento de la relación coordinada entre la mano y el bastón.

Considero que las múltiples mediaciones que permiten acceder al archivo son tecnologías que ayudan a comprender aquello que se revela. Representan una suerte de antropología muy antigua de la captura del mundo, cuya función es la de reducir la complejidad o familiarizar lo desconocido. Estas formas descargan el extrañamiento que produce la distancia temporal y la imposibilidad de leer un testimonio del pasado a través de la biología misma de los ojos. Estas tecnologías múltiples deben ser entendidas como partes constitutivas de las redes de lectura, interpretación y trabajo que ejecutan la práctica del historiador: voces que comunican sus trazos, grafos y huellas. Permitamos, entonces, que las tecnologías que circundan al archivo también hablen, rodeándolo críticamente. Son esas voces -como la de mi madre, mi padre y amigos- las que intentan hacer hablar al archivo en una red compleja de pregunta, respuesta e interpretación; un círculo hermenéutico que refuerza creativamente esta experiencia del no ver.

Más que cualquier técnica contemporánea relativa a la digitalización masiva o a la utilización de la inteligencia artificial, es la proximidad de la voz lo que pone en presencia al archivo y lo acerca a la vida tanto de quien lee como de quien escucha. La ausencia de estas mediaciones es palpable y dramáticamente evidente en nuestra arquitectura archivística. La hegemonía de la visualidad parece gobernar la práctica del historiador, reforzando de manera positiva los hechos del pasado: lo que se lee es lo que es, y lo que registra el archivo se percibe como verdad.

Para quienes no vemos, sabemos que el archivo aparece desde el momento en que se accede a cualquier institución que custodia materiales y lleva su nombre. El archivo es todo este circuito material que lo sostiene. Su inaccesibilidad es un testimonio tangible de un tiempo pasado, con sus escaleras diseñadas para ciertos cuerpos, con ubicaciones en lugares que filtran ruido, y su ambiente predominantemente visual, desde el catálogo hasta el material de consulta, en su mayoría ilegibles para quienes no están inmersos en la lógica visual.

El archivo se inspira en las afecciones que lo hacen decir algo tras la experiencia imprevisible de la ceguera. De ahí que prescindir de los ojos no impide interrogarlo y hacerlo visible. Recuperando a Derrida, esta experiencia se presenta como una paradoja de la mirada, donde emerge un desacuerdo radical. Derrida nos invita a pensar en la elección que hacemos al mirarnos al espejo: debemos elegir entre mirar el color de nuestros ojos o mirar el influjo de la mirada que vemos. Parece que el archivo nos invita a reflexionar sobre esta paradoja. Podemos limitarnos a ver lo que nos dice o trazar el influjo de su mirada para interrogarlo y juzgarlo críticamente a través de la perspectiva. En cualquiera de estas alternativas no hace falta empezar con los ojos. El archivo nos aparece desde el comienzo en completa oscuridad; solo después emerge la mirada, con toda la potencialidad del encuadre.

La paradoja de este proceso radica en que la mirada que usamos para examinar el archivo necesita, desde el principio, un punto ciego. Aquello que iluminamos debe estar rodeado de una zona de ceguera, un borde que excluye lo inteligible del resto. Esta zona de indeterminación es el desafío que enfrenta la perspectiva: la visión de la mirada que, al enmarcar, selecciona.

Lo interesante es que no se necesitan ojos para complicar y hacer hablar al archivo: la mirada es el punto de vista de la selección, un régimen sensible que organiza la relación entre el ver y el no ver, o, dicho de otro modo, la teoría que ilumina las zonas de ceguera del pasado histórico.

La historia intelectual nos ha mostrado que el pensamiento se ha construido en torno a la metáfora de la visión.[2] Estamos permeados por su carga semántica y translaticia. Lo que yo propongo, siguiendo a Derrida, es pensar en el no ver, y creo que el archivo nos permite explorar esta singularidad. La ceguera plantea un conjunto de preguntas sobre la indeterminación de la historia. Son aquellos caminos de investigación que debemos emprender sin una carta de navegación. Por eso, la brújula de nuestra configuración antropológica nos impulsa a valorar la naturaleza de la pregunta y la respuesta tentativa.

Considero que emplear la ceguera como metáfora metodológica del archivo no solo tiene implicaciones interpretativas, sino que anima una agenda de investigación que puede ser fructífera para los estudiosos del archivo. En primer lugar, nos muestra las posibilidades sensoriales de los materiales del pasado, en una suerte de interdependencia de los sentidos como formas de conocimiento: tacto, visión, escucha, olfato; en segundo lugar, nos amplía la noción de accesibilidad y los públicos destinatarios del mismo, de acuerdo a una perspectiva democratizadora; y en tercer lugar, nos permite abordar las opacidades del archivo a través de una lectura enriquecida, planteando preguntas a tientas, respuestas provisionales, e interpretaciones nuevas.

Para cualquier desciframiento del archivo debemos enfrentarnos a la paradoja de la visión y la ceguera. Precisamente, el desafío al ocularcentrismo radica en esta paradoja: vemos sin mirar, y miramos seleccionando. Lo que propongo aquí es asumir el archivo como una experiencia de ceguera. Cubrámonos los ojos para recibirlo como un evento desconocido y singular, algo que no puede anticiparse ni percibirse por adelantado. Dejemos que la experiencia de la ceguera nos brinde la posibilidad de abordar el archivo en toda su complejidad, interrogándolo con todos los sentidos a nuestra disposición. Veámoslo desde el principio como un evento impredecible, imposible de agotar de una vez y para siempre.

Juan David Osorio Vargas es politólogo e historiador. Cursa una maestría en Estudios Latinoamericanos en UT Austin. Sus intereses de investigación incluyen las historias intelectuales de América Latina, las historias de la discapacidad y la política del cuerpo.

Los puntos de vista y opiniones expresados en este artículo o vídeo son los de su autor o presentador y no reflejan necesariamente la política o los puntos de vista de los editores de Not Even Past, el Departamento de Historia de la Universidad de Texas, la Universidad de Texas en Austin o la Junta de Regentes del Sistema de la Universidad de Texas. Not Even Past es una revista de historia pública en línea y no una revista académica revisada por pares. Aunque nos esforzamos por garantizar que la información de los artículos procede de fuentes fidedignas, Not Even Past no se hace responsable de errores u omisiones.

[1] Jacques Derrida, Thinking out of Sight. Writings on the Arts of Visible. The university Chicago Press, 2021, 35-36.

[2] Martin Hay, Downcast eyes. The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century Thought French. University of California Press, 1993, 33.

NEP’s Archive Chronicles: Archives & Blindness

NEP’S Archive Chronicles explores the role archives play in historical research, offering insight into the process of conducting archival work and research. Each installment will offer a unique perspective on the treasures and challenges researchers encounter in archives around the world. NEP’s Archive Chronicles is intended to be both a practical guide and a space for reflection, showcasing contributors’ experiences with archival research. In this installment of NEP’s Archive Chronicles, published in English and Spanish, Juan David Osorio Vargas explores the connection between archives and blindness.

Nota: Haz click aquí para acceder a la versión en español.
Note: Click here to access Spanish version.

Jacques Derrida tells us that fundamentally there are two types of experiences.[1] One of them is anchored in the present and refers to what we can balance with our eyes. In this case, one of the functions of the eye is to foresee, to anticipate the unknown or the presence of the other. This constitutes one of the two possible experiences. The other, which I wish to explore in this article, is the experience of blindness. It is the one that charts an unexpected, unpredictable, and open journey toward the heterogeneity of the other—the other that is there to surprise us. It is, precisely, a journey that cannot be programmed, a cartography of the indeterminate, devoid of purpose. It is the experience of the present that connects us to the uncertainty of a historical event.

As a blind historian, I am convinced that forms of knowledge organized through other senses are valuable in themselves. The question of whether a blind historian can access materials from the visual world is met with a clear yes. We can develop a language with these characteristics if we significantly expand the democratizing reach of the archive, as well as the questions surrounding it, through compensatory technologies that ensure the translation from one record to another does not lose its legitimacy.

To engage with the archive is to undergo the metaphorical experience of blindness. Not all historians possess the vision to anticipate what lies ahead, for some navigate the past without sight. The archive teaches us that every time we enter it, it becomes more uncontrollable and unfamiliar. If we consider the Derrida’s second concept of experience, we can recognize that the archive is a journey without an apparent horizon, directed toward what is not visible—an idea that closely aligns with the practice of being a historian.

I say that the archive is the experience of blindness because we cannot anticipate it. We do not know what will surprise us or through what new technology or which questions it will respond. Much has been said about the silence of archives and the erasures they contain, but little thought has been given to the quality of blindness that resides within them and the relationship it establishes with visibility.

Last summer, while conducting archival research in Colombia and Panama, I encountered this reality: being blind and experiencing blindness in a dual sense was not enough to navigate the archive, as speech itself structurally implies non-vision. And speech is my first point of contact with the archive. It seems that those familiar voices, unseen, are the immediate reality of their presence. I perceive words that might interest me. I ask a question and am met with silence. Once again, the archive is mute. My mother strains to find the word I am looking for in a document crumbling to dust, but she cannot see it either. We are left groping in the dark. We are blind.

I reflected on how that materiality could act and speak to me so that I could question it with my clues and intuitions. I perceived the archive as that inescapable device we must navigate to reach a place in the past or historical knowledge, much like I conceive of my cane, which allows me to feel out the unknown spaces I traverse each day. The nature of this experience is apprehension—the quality that enables movement between voice and archive, analogous to the coordinated relationship between hand and cane.

I consider the negotiations that grant access to the archive as technologies that help us comprehend what it reveals. They represent a kind of ancient anthropology of capturing the world, serving to reduce complexity or make the unfamiliar more accessible. These forms alleviate the estrangement caused by temporal distance and the impossibility of reading a testimony from the past through the biology of our eyes alone. These multiple technologies must be understood as constitutive parts of the networks of reading, interpretation, and labor that underpin the historian’s practice: voices that communicate traces, graphs, and imprints. We should allow the technologies surrounding the archive to speak as well, critically engaging with it. It is these voices—which remind me of those of my mother, my father, and my friends—that strive to make the archive speak within a complex network of questioning, response, and interpretation; a hermeneutic circle that creatively reinforces this experience of not seeing.

More than any contemporary technique related to mass digitization or the use of artificial intelligence, it is the proximity of the voice that brings the archive into presence and draws it closer to the life of both the reader and the listener. The absence of these mediations is palpable and dramatically evident in our archival architecture. The dominance of visuality seems to govern the historian’s practice, positively reinforcing the facts of the past: what is read is, and what the archive records is perceived as truth.

For those of us who cannot see, the archive appears the moment we access any institution that houses materials and bears its name. The archive is the entire material circuit that sustains it. Its inaccessibility is a tangible testimony of a past time, with its stairs designed for certain bodies, its locations in spaces that filter sound, and its predominantly visual environment—from the catalog to the reference materials, most of which are illegible to those who, like me, are not immersed in the visual logic.

The archive is inspired by the affections that make it speak after the unpredictable experience of blindness. Hence, to be without sight does not prevent us from questioning it and making it visible. Drawing on Derrida, this experience is a paradox of sight, where a radical disagreement emerges. Derrida invites us to think about the choice we make when we look at ourselves in the mirror: we must choose between looking at the color of our eyes or looking at the influence of the gaze we see. The archive also invites us to reflect on this paradox. We can limit ourselves to seeing what it tells us or trace the influence of its gaze in order to question and judge it critically through perspective. In either case, we do not need to begin with the eyes. The archive initially presents itself in total darkness; it is only later that the gaze emerges, carrying with it the full potential of the frame.

The paradox of this process lies in the fact that the gaze we use to examine the archive inherently requires a blind spot from the very beginning. What we illuminate must be surrounded by a zone of blindness, a boundary that excludes the intelligible from the rest. This zone of indeterminacy is the challenge faced by perspective: the vision of the gaze that, in framing, selects.

It is striking is that eyes are not necessary to complicate and give voice to the archive. The gaze is the point of view of selection—a sensory regime that organizes the relationship between seeing and not seeing, or, in other words, the theory that illuminates the blind spots of historical memory.

Intellectual history has taught us that ideas have been constructed around metaphors of vision.[2] We are permeated by their semantic and metaphorical weight. What I propose, inspired by Derrida, is to think about the act of not seeing, and I believe the archive allows us to explore this singularity. Blindness raises profound questions about the indeterminacy of history, guiding us toward research paths that must be navigated without a predefined map. For this reason, the compass of our anthropological framework urges us to value the nature of the question and the tentative response.

I believe that framing blindness as a methodological metaphor for the archive not only carries interpretative significance but also fosters a research agenda with transformative potential for archival scholarship. First, it reveals the sensory possibilities of materials from the past, reflecting an interdependence of the senses as forms of knowledge: touch, vision, hearing, and smell. Second, it broadens the notion of accessibility and the intended audiences of the archive, aligning with a democratizing perspective. And finally, it enables us to address the archive’s opacities through a more nuanced reading, formulating tentative questions, provisional answers, and new interpretations.

Deciphering the archive requires us to confront the paradox of vision and blindness. The challenge to ocularcentrism lies precisely in this paradox: we see without looking, and we look by selecting. What I propose here is to embrace the archive as an experience of blindness. Let us cover our eyes and receive it as an unknown and singular event—something that cannot be anticipated or perceived in advance. Let the experience of blindness offer us the possibility of engaging with the archive in all its complexity, interrogating it with every sense at our disposal. Let us approach it from the start as an unpredictable event, one that can never be fully exhausted or definitively grasped.

Juan David Osorio Vargas is a political scientist and historian pursuing a master’s degree in Latin American Studies at UT Austin. His research focuses on Latin American intellectual histories, disability histories, and body politics.

[1] Jacques Derrida, Thinking out of Sight. Writings on the Arts of Visible. The university Chicago Press, 2021, 35-36.

[2] Martin Hay, Downcast eyes. The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century Thought French. University of California Press, 1993, 33.

Remembering Violeta Parra

California State University’s Professor of Latin American Studies, Ericka Verba, has published a highly engaging volume entitled, Thanks to Life: A Biography of Violeta Parra. The Chilean folk musician and graphic artist, Violeta Parra (1917–1967), was indeed as the dust jacket claims, “an inspiration to generations of artists and activists across the globe.” She was also very important to me, personally. Let me explain why .[1]

On a warm Saturday morning in 1985, in the period when massive protests against dictatorial rule had just begun to ramp up in Santiago’s peripheral poblaciones, I had a fortunate, unique, and transformative experience. I had taken the bus, guitar in hand, from the población where I lived in La Florida on the southeast edge of the city for the two-hour journey to Pudahuel, on the northwest edge of town. That was where el Mingo lived. He was my partner in a musical duo. Saturday was our rehearsal day.

Our act had become mildly popular on the semi-clandestine protest circuit. Church communities, embattled labor unions, and university students put on shows to raise money for soup kitchens and families of persecuted resistance operatives. We performed for mulled wine, sopaipillas, and bus fare, if we were lucky. Mingo’s crowded home was at the end of the line. Mingo’s family had moved to the capital after the death of his father. Mother and father had been cantores—country musicians—the kind who played and sang for three days at a time for weddings, baptisms, and funerals, before electricity, phonographs, and cassettes. Mingo’s mother didn’t perform anymore. Back in the day, she had played until her fingers bled, while her husband had died of alcoholism—an occupational hazard for los cantores. She had had enough, but her children inherited her the musical talent. Mingo was the youngest, and the most gifted of the all.

Statue of Violeta Parra in Plaza de Armas in San Carlos, Chile — *Violeta Parra Sculpture.* Source: Wikimedia Commons

That day, on the last leg of my bus ride, I heard music coming from a bike shop on Calle Serrano, the last paved street on the edge of town. It sounded familiar, so I got off before my stop to check it out. There was Mingo, playing and singing with the bike shop owner, whose five wiry sons—under their father’s supervision—repaired the bicycles and cargo tricycles on which working men depended for their livelihoods. Their clever mechanical solutions helped maintain an essential material component of survival.

The bike shop’s owner was Don Lautaro Parra, one of the many surviving siblings of the late Violeta Parra. People remembered Violeta as a renowned folklorist, and arguably one of the most influential women that Chile had ever known. Her recordings of Chile’s folk music, as well as her many original compositions in the traditional style, had guided my understanding of how our resistance to the Pinochet dictatorship fit within a much longer struggle for the dignity of working men and women. Since the early days of the republic, they had been oppressed by the predatory inclinations of an unbridled oligarchy. In this context, song was a survival mechanism for the soul.

Don Lautaro was a tall man, expert in bike repair, and honored as working class nobility. Like his famous sister, Don Lautaro played instruments and sang in the authentic, traditional style. He had invited Mingo to join him at the Cementerio General on the anniversary of Violeta’s death, along with friends and family, for an informal a sidewalk singalong—he called it an esquinazo—to honor the godmother of the Chilean soul. He called her, la Chicoca, the little one, a term of endearment, and also, a reference to her short stature in a family of tall brothers. They rehearsed Parabienes al revés, a wedding song about a poor country bride who arrives at the church riding in an oxcart all covered in flowers.[2] Don Lautaro invited me to join, assigning me some very intricate harmonies. He encouraged us to “let our ears grow” until we had mastered the complex possibilities that lurked just beneath the surface of the simple but clever tune.

Foto of Población León XIII — *Población León XIII.* Source: Wikimedia Commons

I missed the homage at the cemetery. I can’t remember why. Communication was not easy. There were no cell phones, and poor people didn’t have ground lines, either, so we might have just missed a signal. But it had been my privilege to sing with a man that Chileans considered royalty, because of his lovely sister, that day.

Violeta Parra was a figure of mythical dimensions for us. Under the dictatorship, people tended to hide or discard her recordings, lest they spark rumors of subversive inclinations. As such, a whispered oral tradition had condensed the memory of Violeta Parra into a few bare essentials. Only a one-dimensional version of the woman who meant so much to us had survived. Ericka Verba’s biography recovers the lost details, the subtle nuances, and the dizzying evolutionary process of the gifted and impassioned artist who created and recreated herself, giving shape, verse, and melody to the common people of Chile.

Verba leaves no stone unturned, using interviews, recordings, and images from Santiago to Paris and Helsinki, to piece together a monumental human endeavor. Violeta’s unique style brought a dying cultural tradition back to life. She thought of herself not as a star, but as the silenced everywoman without whom Chile made no sense. However, not everything Verba has to say is flattering, including a discussion of Parra’s theatrical arrogance, her unbridled temper, and her sense of self-importance. Because of that sincerity, the overall picture stands out as far more reliable than the frequent lionizations that tend to circulate in artistic and political circles. This biography combines rigorous historiographical methods with fine aesthetic and musical sensitivities to formulate an authentic version, with all its symphonic dimensions and awkward dissonances.

*Yo no tomo la guitarra por conseguir un aplauso : yo canto la diferencia de lo cierto lo falso …* Source: Library of Congress

Verba frames her lively narrative as the artist’s quest for authenticity. The world of folk music in Chile and abroad had a growing tendency, in the increasingly mass-produced world of music for profit, to lean into an overly polished and often stylized version of itself. The commercial folksingers, like Los Huasos Chicheros, reminisced about an idyllic hacienda experience that affirmed the oligarchic status quo.[3] On two long sojourns in Paris, Violeta even encountered a naive fascination with staged exoticism. She recalls sharing a venue with a duo of upper class women from Buenos Aires, who dressed up as indigenous women from the Argentine pampa, to perform Andean music from a completely different region, for a Parisian audience that couldn’t tell the difference.[4]

As a young woman, Violeta had done her share of barroom singing to survive, With her sister Hilda, they performed whatever the people wanted to hear. But in her early 30s, Violeta experienced an awakening. With the help of her brother, the poet and physicist, Nicanor Parra, she discovered the profound artistic value in the authentic traditions of her own people.[5] She became a collector of the people’s poet-songs, and then a composer, in a style that she knew by instinct from her childhood. Verba points out the paradox of “becoming authentic,” but she shows that the artist herself lived that paradox. Performance, by nature, involves artifice, but Violeta’s brand of artifice found its beauty in truth.

A pivotal paragraph at the end of Chapter 3 captures her struggle for authenticity:

“In her newfound vocation as folklorista, Parra assumed the role of intermediary between the pueblo or folk and her cosmopolitan audience…. A number of factors—some unintentional, others deliberate—contributed to the blurring of lines between folklorista and folk informant: Parra’s claim to authenticity as a birthright… her lack of formal training in music or folkloric studies, her untrained singing voice, unassuming stage presence, and a repertoire of ancient poet-songs that allowed her public to experience her not as a performer but as the “real thing”; her offstage appearance as everywoman… and finally, encompassing all the other factors, her steadfast identification with the pueblo. Within this context, Parra’s turn to folklore in the early 1950s may be considered the first step in a process of authentication that would span the rest of her life.”[6]

Violeta Parra's signature. — *Violeta Parra’s Signature*. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Her careful biographer signals the cultural and technological tipping points that situated Violeta Parra strategically so that she could voice Chile’s broader quest for authenticity. The possibility of recording provided a way to preserve folk traditions from extinction, but they also threatened those traditions with an overwhelming and market-friendly foreign supply. Modernity pushed musical culture—including folk traditions—toward a global standard of success, but that could drown out the front porch style of not for profit musical production. Violeta depended on rooted people, who had lived for generations in the same place, but she herself became a wanderer. Her many years abroad helped her to identify, define, and embrace her local roots.

Violeta Parra found herself in a borderland between the erudite world of artists and intellectuals—her father’s world—and the uneducated country of her mother’s upbringing. Verba points to Violeta’s longing for market success. She thought it was not only her right, but the rightful place of her brand of artistry. In fact, her work, though always critically acclaimed, remained niche. Even in my time, the poor Chileans who appreciated Violeta’s work, and honored her as their champion, could not afford to but it. By then, cassette tapes had made it easy to pirate her recordings—and even easier to hide them from prying authorities.[7]

One recurrent flaw of Verba’s book might not undermine the overall argument of this biography, but it could affect her credibility with Chilean readers. The author tends to make erroneous assumptions about details of local culture. Verba narrates how the Parra children, in a period of extreme poverty, would sometimes steal and drink the chicha they found in people’s sheds. Verba explains that chicha is a fermented drink made from maize. True, Quechua women in the Peruvian altiplano have made it from maize for centuries, and they still do. But that chicha is not particularly sweet or attractive for mischievous children. Moreover, the common chicha found in Chile’s central valley is a cider made from grapes. The “chicha de uva” has been, and still is, the traditional drink for Chilean Independence Day celebrations on every 18^th of September, and no Chilean would assume that the mischievous Parra children snuck off with anything other than that.[8]

Additionally, Verba describes how some of Parra’s earliest recordings of the cueca came with the traditional animación, improvised shouts of encouragement that musicians and bystanders tend to provide as part of the usual ritual. The point is that Violeta wanted to demonstrate folk music in its most authentic form, with all of its improvisations and rough edges. But Verba assumes that the encouragement is directed to the singers. It is not. The cueca is dance music: animators encourage dancers to put extra energy into their steps.[9]

Verba references a special interest that Leonard Berstein showed in Violeta’s performance at an afterparty of the New York Philharmonic’s performance in Santiago. But she doesn’t mention the fact that Bernstein’s wife, Felicia Montealegre, was Chilean. This might partly explain why the world-renowned conductor paid attention to Violeta at all.[10] These details in no way affect the validity of Verba’s research or her arguments, but they merit correction, particularly if an eventual, and probably long-awaited, Spanish version is forthcoming.[11]

More importantly, Verba argues that Violeta Parra pushed the boundaries of gender roles in Chile. She longed to be a star, and she had the right stuff, but the patriarchal system held her back. I suspect that represents a reading of Violeta Parra’s experience from the perspective of first world women, trying to make a name for themselves in a toxic masculine world that thwarts their efforts and achievements. And, that might be a valid reading, if we were talking about the beautiful, protected, and submissive women of the Chilean upper crust, some of whom have broken the mold in courageous ways.

But I would argue that Violeta Parra comes from a tradition of impoverished women who have survived and raised their children over the centuries because of their tenacity, their audacity, and their implacable fighting spirit. Thus, she was not an outlier. Instead, she was a spokesperson for her class. She struggled, not to create a modern space of gender equality, but to preserve a traditional space of feminine prerogative that modernity had begun to eradicate.[12] Perhaps, Violeta is the most prominent, and the most expressive, of this brave and fearless sisterhood, but we need look no further than the Chilean “Families of the Disappeared” – the courageous mothers, wives, daughters, and girlfriends of the men that the Pinochet dictatorship erased from history – to find the same pattern of fearlessness exemplified in the life and work of Violeta Parra.

In spite of these minor defects in the details, I would recommend Verba’s Thanks to Life not only as a gripping read that puts chronology back into the narrative of a cultural icon on the verge of becoming just a one-dimensional symbol. The humanity of Violeta Parra as a Chilean woman and a world class artist shines through. Moreover, Violeta’s world might serve as the ideal prologue for a syllabus focused on Chile’s impending revolution.

[1] Erika Verba, Thanks to Life: A biography of Violeta Parra, (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2025).

[2] See Verba, Gracias, 224. This one of the songs that Violeta depicted visually in a painting that would be included in her one-woman show at the Museum of Decorative Arts in the Louvre, in Paris, in 1963.

[3] Verba, Gracias, 149.

[4] Verba, Gracias, 103.

[5] Verba, Gracias, 68-71.

[6] Verba, Gracias, 91-92. Pueblo, here, means the common people.

[7] Verba frequently notes that Parra was “good at being poor,” but she was not unique in that regard. Her most faithful followers were good at it, too.

[8] Verba, Gracias, 19.

[9] Verba, Gracias, 56.

[10] Verba, Gracias, 161.

[11] This kind of thing is not uncommon. The very prestigious historian, Karin Rosemblatt, in her monograph, Gendered Compromises: political cultures & the state in Chile, 1920-1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), situates the action of Nicómedes Guzmán’s novel, La Sangre y la Esperanza, in the neighborhood of the Estación Central, because it mentions a train station. In fact, it is in the neighborhood—in which I lived for a year—of the old streetcar station, which is no longer there.

[12] Chilean anthropologist José Bengoa argues that the sphere of powerful feminine prerogative dates back to precolonial Mapuche communities. See José Bengoa, “El Estado desnudo. Acerca de la formación de lo masculino en Chile,” in Sonia Montecino and María Elena Acuña, eds., Diálogos sobre el género masculino en Chile, (Santiago: Programa Interdisciplinario de Género, Universidad de Chile, 1996), 63-81.

NEP’s Archive Chronicles: Tips for using PARES (Portal de Archivos Estatales)

NEP’S Archive Chronicles explores the role archives play in historical research, offering insight into the process of conducting archival work and research. Each installment will offer a unique perspective on the treasures and challenges researchers encounter in archives around the world. NEP’s Archive Chronicles is intended to be both a practical guide and a space for reflection, showcasing contributors’ experiences with archival research. This article, part of a two-part series by Diana, focuses on three tips for using PARES, the digital platform of the Archive of the Indies in Spain.

In the first part of this archive chronicle, “”An experiential approach to the Archive of the Indies”, I discussed why PARES is the AGI’s front façade for virtually every researcher nowadays. Even though PARES is an online tool, my user experience changed significantly once I was in the reading room. After months of searching for references and organizing them, I thought I had mastered PARES through Scott Cave’s helpful guide. But I was humbled during the first week at the archive when it became obvious that PARES does not reflect the entire holdings or archival organization of the AGI. This is certainly true for any archive or collection. Still, I did learn a few tricks along the way that changed how I approached the archive and its online catalog. This piece has three how-to’s in PARES to help make the research experience easier for researchers.

1) How to explore the AGI’s numerous subsections or how to use PARES like a print catalog

Most of the search results I initially got from PARES were located in the section of Contratación. However, this is the archive’s largest section with close to six thousand legajos and fifty-one sections. When I finally started consulting some of these references, I wondered why most of them came from “Autos entre partes” (litigation between private parties). Did this mean that this subsection was described in greater detail than others? What else was out there in this immense section?

Two PARES features make it easier to answer these questions:

Clicking on “Location in the Archive Classification Scheme” shows where a document or section is located within the archive.

If we click on any of the hierarchical locations, it will open a new tab or window where we can see how many units a section has and a broad description of its contents.

In this case, the subsection of “Autos entre Partes” has 207 legajos, but the Content and Structure section does not provide a substantial description. For many other archival sections, there might be a finding aid on the index file that lists references to print catalogs which you can consult at the AGI’s reading room. Identifying these broader archival sections along with the legajo range they cover is quite handy when consulting microfilmed portions of the AGI. While now considered an almost defunct technology, it is important to remember that several libraries across the Americas have AGI microfilms such as the Benson Latin American Collection, the Bancroft Library, or the Eusebio Dávalos Library at Mexico’s National Anthropology Museum.

Once we click on “207 units more”, I recommend sorting the Description Unit by Reference number. This places the oldest legajo on top of the list and allows you to systematically review the section. I also like to use the “text filter” to make targeted searches within a single description unit.

2) How to find digitized files that do not look like they have been digitized

One of the best tips an AGI archivist shared with me was how to find apparently non-digitized documents from bound volumes known as libros. For example a reference with a geographical marker (e.g. Lima, Guatemala, Charcas, Indiferente) and an L such as MEXICO,1064,L.2,f.283r-283v indicates it comes from libros on the Gobierno section (including Indiferente). While the description and digitization of these books is almost complete, they are not always subdivided by individual files in PARES.

Here’s an example of a book that is clearly subdivided and can be easily accessed by clicking on “View Images”.

The reference below, however, looks like it has not been digitized because it does not have the camera icon. But since it has an “L”, we can almost be sure it has been digitized. Expanding the “Location in the Archive Classification Scheme”, shows that its containing section has a fully colored camera icon (when a camera is gray, it means the section has been partially digitized).

Once we click on this location, it will open a new tab where we can access the fully digitized libro.

Now it is only a matter of clicking on “view images” and finding the folios from the original reference. Since the PARES viewer operates by image number, this means we have to multiply the folio number by two if it’s a verso folio and subtract 1 if it’s a recto folio. Our reference number (283r-283v) suggests the image number should be 565.

Sometimes this might not work precisely so you might need to skim through a few pages to find the specific page numbers.

3) How to start identifying relevant documents for your research

Compared to its earlier version, PARES 2.0 has two new tools that are a good starting point to explore a new topic: the Authorities Search and MetaPARES.

The Authorities Search works similarly to a subject search in a library catalog. The main difference is that the results will lead you to a virtual index file that lists at the end a list of the Spanish Archives where you can find your topic and the number of documents previously identified by archivists. This search is by no means comprehensive, but it is a good starting point. For instance, to know more about the bison found in New Mexico, an authorities search would be useful to identify the jurisdiction and place names used for this region during colonial times.

Screenshot of the AGI documents associated with the subject of New Mexico

Another tool that connects published and unpublished academic work to the holdings of the Spanish State Archives is MetaPARES. The goal of this portal is to refer researchers to secondary literature that cites Spanish Archives. The tool is still in development, but it is a good way to quickly become acquainted with Spanish scholarship and document collections.

The MetaPARES search for New Mexico lists four results. They are not many, but they are more targeted than your typical Google Scholar search and will likely be in Spanish.

It also goes without saying that learning Spanish paleography and early modern Spanish vocabulary is key to identifying relevant documents. There are many online tools and software such as the Dominican Studies Institute Paleography Tool, the Diccionario de Abreviaturas Novohispanas, or Transkribus that make this endeavor easier nowadays. Additionally, reading transcribed document collections and getting acquainted with the structure of Spanish bureaucratic documents will improve your own reading and comprehension of the materials you collect. Navigating the archives and documents of Colonial Latin America demands practice and patience, but this experience can be slowly built throughout the years and from afar. For me, it took about seven years, but it was worth the wait.

Diana Heredia-López is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. Originally trained as a biologist in Mexico, she has specialized in the history of science and colonialism since 2012. Her current research examines dye cultivation and commerce as a framework to investigate early modern Hispanic extractivism, knowledge production, and material culture.

An Overlooked Success: How the Failed Annexation of Santo Domingo led to the Successful Prosecution of the Ku Klux Klan

The 19th century in American history is marked by rapid territorial expansion, from the Louisiana Purchase to the Mexican-American War. By 1850, the continental U.S. had taken a familiar shape. The Civil War interrupted this expansion as the nation grappled with the future of slavery and the role of the federal government. However, at the close of the war, during Reconstruction (1865-1877), territorial expansion resumed with the purchase of Alaska and the failed annexation of Santo Domingo, modern-day Dominican Republic. Yet, this attempt at expansion stands out from other additions to U.S. territory. The Annexation was not merely a land grab but a Reconstruction project, recognized as such by both its supporters and its detractors. It yielded no territorial gains, but surprisingly, it was this political fight over Santo Domingo that helped achieve one of Reconstruction’s great successes: the Prosecution of the Ku Klux Klan—America’s first organized terrorist threat.

On the first of July 1870, The Baltimore Sun reported that “The treaty for the annexation of the island of San Domingo to the United States was rejected by the Senate this afternoon by a vote of 28 to 28, being ten less than the required two-thirds to secure its ratification.”[1] The tie vote also saw thirteen abstentions, effectively killing what had become a pet project of President Ulysses S. Grant, though the initiative did not start with him. In 1867, Grant’s predecessor, President Johnson, intervened with the government of the recently independent Santo Domingo to aid in its defense against raids from Haiti. In his fourth annual message to Congress in 1868, Johnson detailed the support provided to Santo Domingo and expressed the desirability of acquiring land suitable for a naval base. He also proposed the idea of annexing both republics on the island of Hispaniola: Santo Domingo and Haiti.[2] However, Congress seemed uninterested in this suggestion, mainly because it had already allocated 7.2 million dollars to purchase Alaska in the spring of 1867, under the Johnson Administration.[3]

A High Price to Pay

During the Civil War, Russia was the only major European power to support the Union. Secretary of State William Seward[4] framed the purchase of Alaska as a gesture of goodwill towards the Czar, who was contending with his own conflict in Crimea.[5] Moreover, Congress appeared reluctant to purchase more land, particularly after the establishment of the Joint Special Committee on Retrenchment in 1866, aimed at cutting government spending.[6] The Civil War had cost nearly $5.2 billion, leaving a remaining debt of $3 billion (unadjusted for inflation). To put it into perspective, the annual budget of the government at the start of the war was $63.1 million. This financial reality made it clear in Washington that cost-cutting measures were necessary.[7] Additionally, President Johnson began losing allies in Congress that had helped him with the Alaska deal since he had tried to fire Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in violation of the Tenure of Office Act, resulting in Johnson’s impeachment in February of 1868.[8] While Congress would not find Johnson guilty nor remove him from office, the American people effectively did so by electing Ulysses S. Grant in November 1868.

Picture of Annexation demonstration in San Domingo City--the Seybo regiment in the citadel, bearing the U.S. colors — *Annexation demonstration in San Domingo City–the Seybo regiment in the citadel, bearing the U.S. colors.* Source: Library of Congress

In his relatively short first inaugural address, President Grant spoke of bolstering law enforcement in the South as new terror threats arose, touched on a foreign policy of mutual respect, promised to see the 15^th Amendment ratified, and pledged to pursue respectful policies regarding the Native Americans. As important as these subjects were, Grant spent most of his inaugural address talking about debt[9]: “A great debt has been contracted in securing to us and our posterity the Union. The payment of this, principal and interest, as well as the return to a specie basis as soon as it can be accomplished without material detriment to the debtor class or to the country at large, must be provided for.” [10] In over two paragraphs, he laid down a clear mandate to cut spending and pay off the debt.

Indeed, Grant would succeed in this reconstruction project by 1870, having reduced the public debt to $3.1 billion.[11] For Grant and many other radical Republicans, paying off the debt was a part of Reconstruction. However, this prioritization of debt reduction would undermine Congressional support for other Reconstruction projects like the Freedman’s Bureau and the proposed annexation of Santo Domingo. Opposition to the purchase was often linked to its financial cost, as well as broader tensions surrounding the abolition of slavery and the challenges of Reconstruction. While prejudice against the Dominican people was a factor for some, the resistance seemed more rooted in larger national debates of the era than in targeted animosity toward Santo Domingo. Democrat Representative Fernando Wood would say in debating against the treaty, “I am opposed to the San Domingo annexation, not only because of a large sum of money at this time, but also it is another step in the demoralization of the American People”[12]. In this case, “demoralization” refers to the effects of Grant’s Reconstruction.

Map of Provincia de santo Domingo 1861 - for An Overlooked Success — *Provincia de Santo Domingo 1861.* Source: Wikimedia Commons

In a letter to President Baez from President Grant on July 13, 1869. This tells us Buenaventura Baez reached out to Grant sometime between January and July 1869. Whatever Baez’s emissary said to Grant piqued his curiosity enough to greet him as a “Great and Good Friend. In the letter, Grant tells Baez that he would be sending Brevet Brigadier General Orville E. Babcock[13] as a special agent to assess the viability of annexing Santo Domingo.[14] Babcock went on to make two trips to the island and serve as the President’s chief emissary in the annexation negotiations. Once there, Babcock quickly realized the extent of Santo Domingo’s disputes with its neighbor, Haiti, with whom it shared the island of Hispaniola. Although Haiti was the smaller country on the island, it had a larger population compared with the sparsely populated Santo Domingo.[15] After gaining independence from Spain in 1821, Haiti invaded Santo Domingo within weeks, leading to a period of occupation. Despite its disadvantage in manpower, Santo Domingo prevailed in the face of a Haitian occupation until 1844.[16] Following its independence, Haitian raids along the borders became a regular occurrence. During this period of rising Dominican nationalism, caudillos (military strongmen or dictators) like Buenaventura Baez seized the moment to gain power, often for personal enrichment. Baez increased military spending to ward off Hattian raids, but this led to a mounting national debt, which reached $1.3 million by 1859[17]. As a result, Baez began seeking protectorate assistance from foreign powers, including the United States.[18]. In his diaries from his second trip to the Island, Babcock notes, “He (Baez) seemed in good spirit, much in favor of annex.”[19] Indeed, there seemed to be widespread support within Santo Domingo.

The Role of Fredrick Douglass

When Babcock returned to Grant, having confirmed that Baez was interested in Santo Domingo being annexed, Grant began using his influence to promote the idea. When word had reached Charles Sumner, he asserted that the people of Santo Doming were opposed to such an arrangement. In response, Grant enlisted Fredrick Douglass to travel to the island in 1871 and determine whether the citizens would support such a move. Douglass had long advocated for normalizing relations with black republics such as Haiti and Santo Domingo.[20] In 1873 he was happy to report that “they want to join their country to the United States and to become citizens of the United States.”[21] While Douglass’ report was based on anecdotal evidence from his conversations with the island’s inhabitants, there had also been a referendum ordered by President Baez with an admittedly low turnout. Still, of the 15,169 votes cast, only 11 were cast against annexation.[22] Despite this turnout, people like Douglas and Grant pointed to this result to demonstrate a political will on the part of the Dominican people to join the US.

Portrait of Frederick Douglass — *Retouched portrait of Frederick Douglass taken in the 1840s.* Source: Wikimedia Commons

Frederick Douglass was not simply advocating for territorial expansion. He viewed the annexation of the island as an opportunity to challenge prevailing prejudices and demonstrate the potential for all people, regardless of race. In his lecture on the annexation of Santo Domingo, Douglas compared the Spanish and French attempts to reenslave the black and mulatto inhabitants to the actions of the Klan in the South, who, after being paroled at Appomattox now formed a terrorist group to strengthen white supremacy. In his own words: “The fact is significant and has a lesson for those men in our county who are still endeavoring by violence and midnight crimes to worry the American negro back into slavery. The negro is no less a man here than in Santo Domingo.”[23] Thus, for Douglass, the annexation of Santo Domingo was closely associated with Reconstruction and civil rights, providing African Americans in the South with an example of resistance to white supremacy. Grant, like Douglas, linked the proposed annexation to the widespread terror of the Ku Klux Klan across the South.

Annexation as Part of Reconstruction

Grant’s first term was marked by intractable domestic issues, from the fight for the Fifteenth Amendment to the war he waged against the Ku Klux Klan in the South. Thus, he turned to foreign policy for what he thought would be an easy victory via the annexation of Santo Domingo. When he argued for annexation, he cited all the usual reasons for the acquisition, such as fertile soil and tropical produce, and strategic interests, such as having a naval base in the Caribbean to bolster the Monroe Doctrine, all common arguments made by the initiative’s supporters in Congress. But Grant went even further. In a memorandum issued to the State Department describing the benefits of the proposed annexation, Grant writes:

Caste has no foothold in San Domingo. It is capable of supporting the entire colored population of the United States, should it choose to emigrate. The present difficulty in bringing all parts of the United States to a happy unity and love of country grows out of the color prejudice. The prejudice is a senseless one, but it exists. The colored man cannot be spared until his place is supplied, but with a refuge like San Domingo, his worth here would soon be discovered, and he would soon receive such recognition as to induce him to stay.[24]

Frederick Douglass (seated, left) with The Commissioners to Santo Domingo for An Overlooked Success — *Frederick Douglass (seated, left) with The Commissioners to Santo Domingo, Brooklyn Navy Yard, January 1871.* Source: Getty’s Open Content Program.

The quote above shows that the annexation of Santo Domingo was wrapped up in Grant’s vision for Reconstruction. This excerpt shows that Grant wanted to keep Black communities in the US while also providing them with a refuge from Ku Klux violence. By the time of this writing, the emigration movement had gained considerable traction, even among the freedmen’s community. With the advent of Klan terror in the South, many Black communities sought refuge in places like Haiti and Liberia. Elias Hill, a notable leader of a Black church from South Carolina—where Klan activity had been incredibly violent—led the whole of his congregation in a move to Liberia.[25] However, offering a place to flee wasn’t the only way Grant linked Santo Domingo to Reconstruction. He also saw the annexation of Santo Domingo as a way of ending slavery in other parts of the hemisphere. In a speech after the treaty was rejected, Grant urged Congress to reconsider, arguing that an American government on the island would prompt enslaved people in the Caribbean to flee to Santo Domingo as a refuge. He further asserted that “Porto Rico and Cuba will have to abolish slavery as a measure of self-preservation to retain their laborers.”[26]

Grant wasn’t the only one that connected Santo Domingo to the Reconstruction, those opposed the annexation also made this link. In 1870, many of the arguments used by Democrats against the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment were echoed in their opposition to annexing Santo Domingo. Representative Fernando Wood, for instance, recycled his arguments against the Fifteenth Amendment in a Congressional debate stating, “As wicked as is the attempt to compel the fusion of two such opposite races existing among ourselves, it would be far more suicidal and criminal to add the people of San Domingo also.”[27] Importantly, when Wood referred to the “fusion of two opposite races,” he was speaking of the impact of the amendment on the communities of freed blacks born in the United States, as it granted them citizenship. Indeed, the democrats’ opposition to the proposed annexation reflected their broader resistance to naturalizing freed Blacks.

Picture of Ulysses S. Grant on horseback - for An Overlooked Success — *Ulysses S Grant on horseback.* Source: Wikimedia Commons

Predictably, Democrats opposed the annexation of a Latin American republic with a significant Black and mixed-race population. Still, those sentiments were shared by less radical Republicans like Senator Justin S. Morrill, who allied with Charles Sumner in his opposition to the treaty. In an 1871 speech, Morill spoke of the formerly enslaved Americans who had recently been made citizens by the 15^th Amendment, saying, “It is useless to disguise the fact that the people of a portion of our present territory have not become assimilated with the American people and American Institutions, and the time when they will do so must be computed, not in years, but by generations.”[28] Even critics of the acquisition recognized the connection between the proposed annexation and Reconstruction. Sentiments like those expressed by Morrill and Sumner led to fissures in the Republican party, leaving President Grant feeling betrayed.

A Misunderstanding with Mr. Sumner

Ultimately, it was Charles Sumner’s refusal, as Chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, which prevented the treaty from being passed. While he had supported the annexation of Alaska just a few years earlier, he refused to admit Santo Domingo. Sumner, along with Thadeus Stevens, had led the radical wing of the Republican party, but the two began to diverge when it came to handling Reconstruction. The more radical Stevens thought the South should be treated as conquered territory, while Sumner sought a conditioned reconciliation with the South.[29] Due to his leadership among the Radicals and his well-established support for Reconstruction, Grant expected Sumner’s support. Before moves had been made in Congress, Grant shared an early draft of the treaty with Sumner, to which Sumner promised his “friendly consideration.” Grant, still relatively new to politics, interpreted this as support for the acquisition.[30] This misunderstanding undermined Grant’s efforts to secure the treaty and led to him to push for a vote in the Senate without the necessary support from his party.

Sumner had his reasons for not supporting the treaty, some of which, as noted above, were rooted on pseudoscientific ideas of geographic racial determination.[31] But Sumner also sympathized with the Dominican nationalist arguments and distrusted Baez, whom he viewed as a despot trying to sell off his country. “A convention was appointed, not elected, which proceeded to nominate Baez for the term of four years, not as President, but as Dictator. Declining the latter title, the triumphant conspirator accepted that of Garn Ciudadano or Grand Citizen with unlimited powers…Naturally, such a man would sell his own country.” [32] Siding with the Dominican Nationalists, Sumner thought that support for the treaty represented a betrayal of its inhabitants by Baez, who he characterized as a villain.

Painting of General Gregorio Luperón — *General Gregorio Luperón – Monumento a los Héroes de la Restauración.*
Source: Wikimedia Commons

A correspondent of Sumner’s, General Gregorio Luperón, a leader in the Dominican Nationalist movement, wrote to Grant in late 1869 expressing his anger with the U.S. Navy in the sinking of the Telegraph, a ship used to transport Dominican Nationalists from Haiti to Cuba. President Johnson sank the ship as part of his established protectorate, but now he directed his anger squarely at Grant. The General wrote, “Spain, in spite of its traditional quixotism, rejected the cowardly Baez’s undignified petition, and to our understanding, the Spanish Government’s course of action was more honorable than yours…Your Excellency had the weakness to order, to authorize the destruction of Telegraph, accepting the immoral decree of Baez’s mercenary Senate.”[33] Issuing the protectorate and the actions of the U.S. Navy were primary reasons for Sumner’s opposition, and would cite incidents like the sinking of the Telegraph in his arguments against the annexation: “It is difficult to see how we can condemn with proper, whole-hearted reprobation, our own domestic Ku Klux with its fearful outrages while the President puts himself at the head of a powerful and costly proceeding operating abroad in defiance of International Law and the Constitution of the United States.”[34] For Sumner, Grant’s actions, which he viewed as violations of the Constitution and an “usurpation of war powers,” undermined the moral authority Grant had built through his prosecutions of the Klan.

The Santo Domingo Purge

In the fight for the annexation treaty, many in Grant’s cabinet saw that Santo Domingo was a losing battle long before Grant. Grant pressed on, ordering his department heads to spend political capital to have the treaty passed. Despite these efforts, support for the treaty was never strong. After many in his cabinet had sided with Charles Sumner, whose support was crucial, Grant began to rail against his disloyal cabinet. According to a diary entry by Secretary of State Hamilton Fish, Grant claimed that “the Secretary of the Interior is opposed to it; the Attorney-General says nothing in its favor, but sneers at it; and the Secretary of Treasury does not open his mouth.”[35] Indeed, Grant’s break with Sumner and less radical Republicans led to a purge within his cabinet, and he began dismissing all those members of his administration who served Sumner. While this may initially appear vindictive, there was some positive outcomes. Attorney General Ebenezer Hoar, a long-time friend of Charles Sumner who had opposed the treaty, Was initially recommended for the position of AG by Sumner. On July 15, 1870, Hoar received a letter requesting his resignation.[36] A month earlier, Grant submitted a new name for Attorney General, a man named Amos T. Akerman.[37]

But Akerman’s work as head of the new Department of Justice has largely been a footnote to history. Akerman, a former Confederate officer who has become a staunch Republican, had been personally threatened by the Klan for his shift in allegiance. He would go on to aggressively prosecute the Klan, effectively dismantling the organization for nearly four decades.[38] His appointment seems providential, considering the Act to Establish the Department of Justice does not mention civil rights.[39] Furthermore, it was the Joint Select Committee on Retrenchment and not a judiciary committee that passed it. This represented a move toward civil service reform and a cost-saving measure.[40] Indeed, Akerman ran up against repeated funding shortages throughout the Klan trials. However, Akerman oversaw the prosecutions heavily and even directly called on Grant to suspend the writ of habeas corpus in several counties in South Carolina. While coincidental, the proposed annexation of Santo Domingo led directly to one of the most successful reconstruction projects, the prosecution of the Ku Klux Klan.[41] What appeared to be a typical territorial land grab was, in fact, closely connected to the broader goals of the Reconstruction.

Conclusion

In the end, the proposed annexation of Santo Domingo failed, defeated by a strange alliance between well-meaning radical Republicans and racist Democrats, killing Grant pet project and limiting his vision for Reconstruction. Yet, the political fight over Santo Domingo played a pivotal role in staffing the newly founded Department of Justice with a leader who possessed the will to Prosecute the Ku Klux Klan. Unlike other territorial expansions, this attempt was directly linked to the question of Reconstruction, and not only by President Grant and his supporters, but also by those opposed to the treaty. Regardless of the failure to secure the annexation, it is clear that the debate surrounding this Reconstruction initiative contributed to one of the era’s greatest successes.

Acknowledgements:
This article originates in Dr. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s capstone undergraduate seminar.

Miguel Angel Canto Jr. is a first-generation college student and hopeful law school applicant, expected to graduate this May with a Bachelor’s in History and Philosophy. He is working on his undergraduate honors thesis on the establishment of the U.S. Department of Justice. His research interests include the legal history, history of ideas, history of republics and American history, particularly Reconstruction and the Gilded Age.

[1] “The San Domingo Treaty Rejected,” The Baltimore Sun, July 1, 1870, https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-baltimore-sun-the-san-domingo-treaty/158127723/.

[2] “December 8, 1868: Fourth Annual Message to Congress | Miller Center,” October 20, 2016, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/december-8-1868-fourth-annual-message-congress.

[3] United States and Russia, eds., Treaty Concerning the Cession of the Russian Possessions in North America by His Majesty the Emperor of All the Russias to the United States of America (Washington, 1867), https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcmassbookdig.treatyconcerning00unit/.

[4] Secretary of State for President Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson.

[5] “The Alaska Purchase, Articles and Essays, Meeting of Frontiers, Digital Collections,” web page, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA, accessed December 1, 2024, https://www.loc.gov/collections/meeting-of-frontiers/articles-and-essays/alaska/the-alaska-purchase/.

[6] The 39th Congress, “Concurrent Resolution Providing for a Joint Select Committee on Retrenchment” (Congressional Globe, 1866).

[7] “History of the Debt,” TreasuryDirect, accessed August 28, 2024, https://www.treasurydirect.gov/government/historical-debt-outstanding/.

[8] “The Impeachment Trial of President Andrew Johnson | Century Presentations | Articles and Essays | A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates 1774-1875 | Digital Collections | Library of Congress,” web page, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA, accessed October 19, 2024, https://www.loc.gov/collections/century-of-lawmaking/articles-and-essays/century-presentations/impeachment/.

[9] Grant Ulysses, “First Inaugural Addresses of Ulysses S. Grant,” Text, Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States (Washington, D.C.: U.S. G.P.O.: for sale by the Supt. of Docs., U.S. G.P.O., 1989, March 4, 1869), https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/grant1.asp.

[10] First Inaugural Addresses, Grant, 1869.

[11] “Public Debt of the United States. 1870, 1880, 1890 and 1902. [Washington, D. C. 1903].,” online text, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA, accessed December 4, 2024, https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.2080020a/?st=gallery.

[12] United States Congress, “The Congressional Globe: Containing the Debates and Proceedings of the Second Session Forty-First Congress; Together with an Appendix, Embracing the Laws Passed at That Session, (1870): 3034-3038.,” Book, UNT Digital Library (John C. Rives, 1870), United States, https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc30886/m1/209/.

[13] Babcock had served as one of Grant’s aides-de-camp during the Civil War.

[14] “Letter to President Buenaventura Baez of the Dominican Republic | The American Presidency Project,” accessed November 6, 2024, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/letter-president-buenaventura-baez-the-dominican-republic.

[15] John B. Crume, President Grant and His Santo Domingo Project: A Study of Ill Judgement (Florida Atlantic University, 1972) p. 11.

[16] “History of the Dominican Republic, Government, Facts, President, & Flag, Britannica,” October 28, 2024, https://www.britannica.com/topic/history-of-Dominican-Republic.

[17] Commission of Inquiry to Santo Domingo, “Report of the Commission of Inquiry to Santo Domingo” 1 (1871): I–II, https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.cow/reciqsadm0001&i=1, p. 178.

[18] Luis Martínez-Fernández, “Caudillos, Annexationism, and the Rivalry between Empires in the Dominican Republic, 1844–1874,” Diplomatic History 17, no. 4 (1993): 571–97, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24912228.

[19] Orville E. Babcock, “Orville E. Babcock Diary: The Second Journey to Santo Domingo November 8th to December 2nd, 1869” (Mississippi State University, 1869).

[20] Merline Pitre, “Frederick Douglass and the Annexation of Santo Domingo,” The Journal of Negro History 62, no. 4 (October 1977): 390–400, https://www-jstor-org.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/stable/2717114.

[21] Frederick Douglass, “Frederick Douglass Papers: Speech, Article, and Book File, 1846-1894; Speeches and Articles by Douglass, 1846-1894; Undated; ‘Santo Domingo,’ Manuscripts, Typescripts, and Fragments; 1 of 5” (1873), mss11879, box 28; reel 18, Manuscript Division, https://www.loc.gov/resource/mss11879.28013/.

[22] Harold T. Pinkett, “Efforts to Annex Santo Domingo to the United States, 1866-1871,” The Journal of Negro History 26, no. 1 (January 1941): 12–45, https://doi.org/10.2307/2715048.

[23] Douglass, “Frederick Douglass Papers.”

[24] Ulysses S. Grant, “Memorandum,” The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, November 1,1869-October 31, 1870, edit. John Simon, vol. 20 (Mississippi State University, 1995), https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/usg-volumes/20, p. 74.

[25] Scott Farris, Freedom on Trial: The First Post-Civil War Battle over Civil Rights and Voter Suppression (Guilford, Connecticut: Lyons Press, 2020,) p. 59.

[26] Ulysses S. Grant, “Making the Case for US Annexation,” in The Dominican Republic Reader : History, Culture, Politics, ed. Eric P. Roorda and et al. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, n.d.), 158–60, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/utxa/detail.action?docID=1689436.

[27] United States Congress, “The Congressional Globe: Containing the Debates and Proceedings of the Second Session Forty-First Congress; Together with an Appendix, Embracing the Laws Passed at That Session, (1870): 3034-3038.,” Book, UNT Digital Library (John C. Rives, 1870), United States, https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc30886/m1/209/, p. 1187.

[28] Justin S. Morrill, “Opposition to US Annexation,” in The Dominican Republic Reader: History, Culture, Politics, ed. Eric P. Roorda, et al. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014), https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/utxa/detail.action?docID=1689436.

[29] Fergus M. Bordewich, Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction, First United States edition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023,) p. 14-15.

[30] Chernow, Grant, p. 691-692.

[31] Hidalgo, “Charles Sumner and the Annexation of the Dominican Republic.”

[32] Charles Sumner, “Speech of Hon. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on the St. Domingo Resolutions; Delivered in the Senate of the United States,” March 27, 1871, HathiTrust, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.35112102553197&seq=3&q1=santo+domingo.

[33] Gregorio Luperón, “Dominican Nationalism versus Annexation,” in The Dominican Republic Reader : History, Culture, Politics, ed. Eric P. Roorda and et al. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014), 171–72, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/utxa/reader.action?docID=1689436&ppg=188.

[34] Sumner, “Speech of Hon. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on the St. Domingo Resolutions; Delivered in the Senate of the United States.”

[35] Chernow, Grant, p. 698.

[36] Ulysses S. Grant, From Grant to Hoar, The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, November 1,1869-October 31, 1870, ed. John Simon, vol. 20 (Mississippi State University, 1995), https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/usg-volumes/20, p. 170.

[37] Ulysses S. Grant, Appointment of Amos T. Akerman The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, November 1,1869-October 31, 1870, ed. John Simon, vol. 20 (Mississippi State University, 1995), https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/usg-volumes/20.

[38] Farris, Freedom on Trial, p. 78.

[39]An Act to Establish the Department of Justice.” P.L. 41-97 Stat.162, 1870 U.S.C. 41st Congress. Justice.gov, 2013. https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/jmd/legacy/2013/10/23/act-pl41-97.pdf.

[40]Jed Handelsman Shugerman, “The Creation of the Department of Justice: Professionalization Without Civil Rights or Civil Service,” Stanford Law Review 66, no. 1 (2014): 121–72, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24246730.

[41] Farris, p. 283.

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