Latin America Archives - Not Even Past

Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States, by Felipe Fernández-Armesto (2014)

From the editors: One of the joys of working on Not Even Past is our huge library of amazing content. Below we’ve updated and republished Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s brilliant and moving review of Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s magisterial Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States.

I first came across Felipe Fernández-Armesto many more years ago than I care to admit: I met his words first, before I met him. I was dazzled by Felipe’s Columbus: the flow, the style of his writing, the power of his argument. And then I came across Millennium. I had just finished graduate school and I was earning my bread and butter teaching large survey classes of Latin American History, and even larger ones of World History. I was to offer kids sweeping panoramas: from the age of the dinosaurs to current events, namely, the Cold War. Global history was yet to produce a multimillion dollar textbook industry. So Millennium came to me as a breadth of fresh air: irreverent, fast paced, learned, entertaining, full of strange and fascinating vignettes, from Ming China to Peronist Argentina. I was then writing my How to Write the History of the New World. I had a fellowship to the John Carter Brown Library.

One of the first things I learned at the JCB was that Felipe occupied the office right next to ours. We had 8 cubicles. His was for him, alone. He kept sherry in his office. His accent and demeanor made him seem unapproachable. I don’t remember the official title he was given, some kind of JCB lordship: The Lord of the Rings, I think. During the fellows’ luncheons he would tear into the other fellows’ arguments with probing, disarming questions, prefaced always by a learned and most insightful comment on any and every field of expertise. When asked about his own research, he would reply “civilizations.” It turns out, that year, he was writing that book. The whole thing was frightening to me at the time.

The John Carter Brown Library's MacMillian Reading Room: a large, richly decorated hall with a high ceiling. Low bookshelves and large pieces of art line the walls.; desks with work stations stand in the middle of the room. A few researchers are visible at the desks. — *The John Carter Brown Library’s MacMillan Reading Room, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

And then one day, I noticed Felipe spoke Spanish. I approached him for the first time in Spanish and a friendship emerged. He came for dinner and met my kids, Sebastian and Andrea, both then toddlers. Later Felipe would read my manuscript and help me improve it before it became a book; he wrote a blurb when it was published; promoted it in England and beyond; got it noticed in The Economist; passed judgment on my tenure; followed me around with letters of support in my peripatetic existence. Felipe and his awesome power changed my career and buoyed up my self-esteem. I owe him big.

Felipe and I share something beyond friendship and a common language: our view of the past. The book before us, Our America, epitomizes that shared view. It is about turning perspectives upside down. It is about reading self-satisfying narratives of the past irreverently, mockingly, unsparingly. It is about elucidating the political work that History, with capital H, does. History creates myths that move and inspire, but it also creates myths that silence. Our America is a book about myths: the fountain of youth, the cities of Cibola, the pursuit of King Arthur, the realm of Queen Calafia, the curse of Zorro, the revenge of Moroni, the republic of Hesperus. Our America narrates the history of the United States from a perspective I have often tried to use myself: from the South, rather than the East.

The book is divided into three periods: 1) when Hispanics loomed large over the colonial territories that are now the United States; 2) when Hispanics lost power in the 19th century as the Anglo imperial frontier expanded into the West, Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, and the Pacific, and when Hispanics came to be seen as racially inferior, misbehaving children to spank and educate; and 3) when Hispanics in the 20th century slowly crawled their way back from marginalization to claim forcefully a central role in the polity, demographically, politically, and culturally.

The first period uses the myths of the fountain of youth, the cities of Cibola, the knights of King Arthur, and the realm of queen Calafia to demonstrate how the Hispanic dimensions of US colonial history shaped its every detail, from Roanoke, to Jamestown, to Plymouth, to Massachusetts Bay, to Charleston, to the Ohio River Valley, to the siege of Yorktown. From the Puritan plantations to the American Revolution. Hispanics shaped every colonial event described in college textbooks.

The second period makes for tearful, tragic reading: losses, lynching, brutality, and racial slurs aimed at Hispanics, Indians, Blacks, all lumped together. Felipe follows El Zorro and the Mormon prophet Moroni to describe the losses of California, Texas, the Rockies, the Marianas, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, where Hispanics, Blacks, Comanche, Sioux, Apache, and Pacific Islanders had created shared worlds together for generations. Those shared worlds were found in the prairies, on the Mississippi (from the Ohio all the way to Louisiana), and on the Pacific coast (from Monterrey and Baja to Manila). These worlds surrendered to industrialization, machine guns, railroads, steamboats, industrial tractors, and millions of land hungry illegal immigrants from England, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Norway, and Central Europe, who came to the land to act as, say, Texas Rangers and carry out genocide.

The third period is not less tragic; it narrates the age of braceros and forced deportation, from the Great Depression to the Great Recession. Felipe reminds us that liberal Obama, who won his first and second presidency on the back of the Hispanic vote, has deported 1.4 million undocumented immigrants, four times as many as George W Bush, who only managed to deport 400,000. But this age of violence and racism, and merciless labor exploitation, has also experienced the Return of Aztlan: a huge demographic explosion, the Chicano movement, Cesar Chavez, and Civil Rights. And it also seems to be on its way to turning the Anglo republic into a republic of Hesperus, the king of the Hesperides, whose islands the chronicler Fernandez Oviedo claimed where in fact Hispanic colonies.

Seven men in work clothes pose for a photograph in a beet field near Stockton, California in this black-and-white photograph. — *Marjory Collins, photographer.* Stockton (vicinity), California. Mexican agricultural laborer topping sugar beets. 1943. Source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

There is little with which to take issue in this book. I share Felipe’s perspective and passion. I wish I could claim I also share his panache, wit, and style. The book is filled with insight, one-liners, and striking reversals of traditional narratives. Let me share with you a few:

Describing how millions of acres were stolen from rancheros in Texas, Nuevo Mexico and California in the 19th century to create large Anglo latifundias, Felipe points out: “The notion that US rule always broke latifundias and introduced morally superior smallholders is risible.”
His account of guerrilla fighters and rebels like Joaquin Murrieta who acted as social bandits in Texas and California explores also the emergence of the literary character of El Zorro as the first superhero to emerge in the US. Felipe then adds: “It is to me a delicious irony that a great line of American superheroes, with their lone trajectories, their alienating experiences, the disguises that place them outside society, and the astonishing dexterity with which they stun evildoers, goes back to a prototype who was a legend of anti-US resistance.”
His description of what the arrival of Anglo capital and law into New Mexico meant, is guided by the reading of the autobiography of Agnes Morely Cleaveland. After a description of her romantic narrative of frontier violence and odd Anglo characters, Felipe bitingly concludes: “Agnes Cleaveland was the chronicler of the Americanization of New Mexico, and her evidence, because it is neutral, is decisive in demonstrating that the United States was not a “civilizing influence.” On the contrary it brought more lowlifes, scapegraces, and refugees from civilization to the colony than ever before.”

I could multiply the examples, but you get the point.

I would not do my job if I were not to deliver some critical comments on Felipe’s book. So to conclude, let me offer a few.

I enjoyed the first section more than I did the second, and the second more than I did the third. The third section on the revitalization of Aztlan and the return of Hispanics into the mainstream of America follow the Chicano narrative too closely to offer fresh insights. How to present Hispanics as something more than undocumented or exploited laborers? How to populate the more recent history of the Hispanic diaspora with Nobel Prize winners, scientists, philosophers, economists, opera singers, and captains of industry to offset the dominant image of popular culture, one of curvaceous Shakira and awesome yet corrupt baseball players? And there is the history of the reverse: the “USification” of Latin America, namely, the transformation of a region by capital, values, and returnees from the United States. In the South there lies the Anglo just as deeply within as lies the Hispanic within the North. We can no longer sever the Hispanic from the Anglo, neither here nor there.

The second section on tragic outcomes, therefore, could have been balanced by a more continental approach of mutual influences, cutting both ways. It could have yielded a narrative of Hispanic influence and continental creativity beyond the bandit and the pistolero. I have in mind the printing presses of Philadelphia that in the first half of the nineteenth century became an endless source of books and ideas, shaping Latin America’s public sphere, just as much as did the books printed in London or in Paris in Spanish in the nineteenth century. There is also the case of the origins of American international law and the law of nations that Greg Grandin has so insightfully described in a recent article in the American Historical Review. Grandin shows that jurisprudence and identities, both in the North and South, were the product of codependences and mutual influences. In short, the Hispanic 19th century in the US is much more than dispossession and violence (for other examples of what is possible, see also Gregory Downs’ provocative essay on the Mexicanization of 19th-century American Politics).

The first section is for me the most satisfying and the one about which I know most. It manages to do what was a call to arms for me in 2006, namely, to Iberianize the early modern Atlantic. There are a few Puritan Conquistadors walking through Felipe’s pages. I therefore felt confirmed, justified, in short, delighted. But even here more could be done. I have encountered, for example, English Calvinist debates on colonization, in the 1610s in 1629 that were thoroughly shaped by Iberian categories of dominium and sovereignty. The odd figure of Roger Williams with his radical ideas about religion and state can better be interpreted if we put him in dialogue with Las Casas. Williams knew well the ideas about the radical separation of spiritual and temporal sovereignty so forcefully presented by Bartolomé de Las Casas and Francisco de Vitoria to undermine any Spanish claims of rightful possession of property and authority in the Americas. Williams got to his ideas about state and religion by first offering a critique of Calvinist and Stuart notions of dominium and sovereignty in America. This facet of Williams completely escaped Edmund Morgan’s pioneering study published 50 years ago. In 2012 it continues to escape John Barry, whose Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul remains as parochial as Morgan’s. Both Barry and Morgan should have known better had they not be so provincially Anglo: to study Williams is to study Las Casas and Vitoria. To paraphrase Berry and to capture Felipe’s spirit, to study the creation of the American soul is in fact to study the creation of the Hispano-American soul.

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

Digital Archive Review – Más de 72

by Ashley Nelcy García, Department of Spanish and Portuguese

An earlier version of this review was published on halperta.com.

What is a digital archive? I asked myself this question in the weeks before submitting this review. While digital archives are typically defined as a coherent set of digital objects that have been put online by a library or an official archival institution, Más de 72 challenges the notion of what we can identify as a digital collection of records.

Screenshot of Más de 72

Más de 72 is a digital project that collects primary sources pertaining to the massacre of 72 migrants from Central and South America and India. The documents and media shared on this site shed some light on the mass murder that occurred in San Fernando, Tamaulipas, Mexico in 2010, under the administration of Felipe Calderón. The collection was created by Periodistas de a Pie, an organization of active journalists that seeks to raise the quality of journalism in Mexico. The International Center for Journalists (ICFJ), CONNECTAS, and journalists who were invited to participate in the project supported the development and completion of this project.

The collection is a valuable resource for individuals interested in Mexico’s recent history, memory, and human rights issues. Visitors can access primary sources such as official documents from Mexico and the United States, including some judicial records and declassified files. Testimonies from surviving family members recorded in video and audio by journalists, as well as photographs and maps are also available. Additionally, journalistic investigations and reports published by human rights entities provide context to users unfamiliar with the case.

via Más de 72

Más de 72’s primary strength is its presentation. The site contains six different tabs or capítulos (chapters) that provide different types of information. For instance, the sections titled “La Masacre” (The Massacre) and “Después de la Masacre” (After the Massacre) include official and visual documents associated the mass murder of the 72 migrants. Under these tabs, visitors can access documents like the press release from the Secretaría de Marina (Secretary of Marine) and the diplomatic cable that the U.S. Embassy sent to the Department of State. Online browsers with an interest in the role of official documents can also download more than 50 files under the tab titled “Transparencia” (Transparency). On the other hand, users interested in criminal records and procedures and migration studies can access a list of objects found in the location where the massacre occurred and the names of the victims under “Después de la Masacre.” In regard to organization, it is important to note that the names of the victims are listed under their country of citizenship and under the month and the year they were identified.

On the other hand, the tabs titled “Las Víctimas” (The Victims), “Los Culpables” (The Culprits), and “Sobre San Fernando” (About San Fernando) provide more detailed information regarding people and location. These sections can benefit visitors interested in oral history, memory, gender studies, and digital cartography. Under “Las Víctmas”, users can listen to four testimonies provided by victims’ surviving family members. “Los Culpables” has a list of the men and women involved in the mass murder; this section includes the names, the photos, the list of crimes they committed, and external links that provide additional information. The section titled “San Fernando” includes a digital map from Time Mapper that helps users identify the mass graves and the people that have been disappeared in Tamaulipas by geographic location.

Overall, the site benefits users who cannot visit Mexico or Tamaulipas. Aside from scholars, people who can potentially benefit from this repository include but are not limited to: family members of migrants and people who have been disappeared, residents from the state of Tamaulipas, people with relatives in the northern part of the Mexico, journalists, lawyers, and activists. Although the project is not affiliated with libraries, governmental, or academic institutions, Periodistas de Pie is open to working with community members. As stated in “Creditos” (Credits), users can share documents or materials by sending an email to the listed email address. In addition, the organization invites visitors to collaborate–either with skills or donations–to continue developing the site.

The website has some technical problems. It would be difficult for someone who is unable to read Spanish to understand the majority of the information included on the platform. Additionally, some links, hyperlinks, and images need to be updated. More descriptive metadata would also benefit the project and there is a need to assist with the second part of the collection titled, “Segunda Entrega: Fosas de San Fernando” (Second Delivery: San Fernando’s graves). While these are minor setbacks, they also provide an opportunity for archivists, scholars, and web developers to get involved with the project.

Capítulo 5: Sobre San Fernando (Chapter 5: About San Fernando) via Más de 72

Even though Más de 72 is not described as a “digital archive” by the journalists at Periodistas de Pie, this platform serves as a repository of digitized primary documents associated with an historical event. In this regard, it is important to consider how the digital humanities field can be co-opted by elites to control historically politicized spaces. We need to be thinking about what is at stake when the term “archive” is used to control information. The politics of archiving is especially important where journalists–the authors of many of the documents in Mas de 72–find themselves in a violent climate and are rarely protected by institutions of power.

Between King and People: Digital Tools for Studying Empire

By Brittany Erwin

Governing is complicated. It requires an understanding of both top-tier policy and a recognition of changing circumstances over time. It also involves a comprehensive workforce, who perform different tasks according to their position in the larger hierarchy. The Spanish monarchy ruled over territories stretching from the Caribbean to the islands of Asia, and to the southernmost point of South America, for over 300 years. During that period, there was no neat transference of authority from the court, located in Madrid, to the civilizations of the Americas. Instead, a confluence of contradictory voices and choices paved the way for Spanish imperial rule.

“Bureaucracy on the Ground in Colonial Mexico” is a digital exhibition created to help scholars and the public access the lived experience of colonial rule. Its newest features allow for further exploration of the many actors involved in the processes of governance.

The objective of this project is to follow bureaucratic function on the ground. In partnership with the Benson Latin American Collection, I created an interactive digital exhibition on the 1765 visita, or royal inspection, of New Spain. The visita examined local institutions, evaluated economic policies, and reorganized society in a broad display of royal authority. This procedure helped the king implement widespread political, economic, and social reform in this territory in order to tighten control and increase efficiency. It set the precedent for changing policies throughout the empire over the next several decades.

Designed for a non-specialist audience, the exhibition explores the timeline, spatial breadth, and procedure of the inspection, by providing access to digital versions of the original documents produced by the royal inspection visita. The project provides an accessible forum for understanding how the lengthy and expensive process of royal governance effectively fostered relations between the ruling government in Spain and its many different constituencies on the ground in the Americas.

The site now offers full transcriptions of all the documents. Users could previously read the documents in their original form from high-quality images. Now they can dive deeper into the significance of the text itself. The kinds of words that Spanish officials were using– and the patterns in which they used them–help reveal the way that the Crown’s authority manifested itself locally.

Closer textual analysis also helps identify the multiple actors involved in this process. The Spanish monarch, Charles III, had designated José de Gálvez as the inspector general, or visitador. However, at every point, the inspection required the assistance of a wide variety of local officials, from priests to supervisors at the tobacco factory. Gálvez also frequently consulted with the viceroy, Carlos Francisco de Croix. These personal connections are significant because they reveal both the tensions and the cooperation that royal administration could meet in the Americas.

The new features of the “Bureaucracy on the Ground” site help make the obscure topic of imperial governance more accessible. For the Spanish Crown, 300 years of colonial rule depended on more than the faraway king’s decisions. It was the people on the ground who made the bureaucracy work, and this project aims to acknowledge the many forms of their participation in the process of imperial rule.

This project has received support from Professor Joan Neuberger, LLILAS Benson Digital Scholarship Coordinator Albert Palacios, and the UT Digital Writing and Research Lab

Also by Brittany Erwin

The Museo Regional de Oriente in San Miguel, El Salvador
The National Museum of Anthropology in in San Salvador
Review of The Archaeology and History of Colonial Mexico by Enrique Rodríguez Alegría (2016)
History for Us at the El Paso Museum of History

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

Luanda and Benguela became the busiest, most profitable slaving ports in the transatlantic slave trade in the seventeenth century precisely because these two ports set up tribunals to hear tens of thousands of enslaved petitioners demand freedom. Paperwork in local tribunals set hundreds of thousands free, even at the risk of bankrupting powerful merchants. As petitioners litigated their freedom, the colonial state grew in legitimacy and bottom up support. Through petitioning and litigation, the peoples of Luanda and Benguela became active “Portuguese” vassals with rights. Those under the protection of the sovereign state became more than mere commodities while those outside became increasingly more vulnerable. Pervasively and paradoxically, the very consolidation of state legitimacy contributed to the expansion of the slave trade. After years of working in ecclesiastical, municipal, and state archives in Luanda, Rio, and Lisbon, Ferreria offers a major reconceptualization of colonialism and slavery itself. A better title for his book would have been: Petitioning Slaves and the Creation of the South Atlantic Slave Trade.

Angola was no more than these two relatively small ports of few thousand dwellers (moradores), each with strange connections to their hinterlands. Luanda and Benguela were overwhelmingly black and mulatto cities that engaged in formal ceremonies of protection and “transfer” of sovereignty with neighboring natural lords, sobas. The sobas offered labor, porters, and military aid to urban merchants (pumbeiros and sertanejos) and sheriffs (captães mores), the representatives of the Portuguese state, in exchange for a monopoly on the local redistribution of foreign commodities and support against their rivals. Sobas provisioned the trading caravans to the interior (sertões) with porters. The sobas also offered military aid to the cities when neighboring and distant sovereigns, including the Dutch, French, and British, threatened the ports.

This system of Portuguese sovereignty however was rather limited. To the north and south of Luanda and Benguela lay independent polities that for nearly three hundred years remained impervious to all threats of violence and negotiations. The degree of coastal isolation of these two ports was striking. Given the nature of maritime currents, Benguela and Luanda communicated much more easily with merchants in Rio (Brazil) than with one another. For nearly three centuries there were no roads connecting Luanda and Benguela. Like in the north and south, the eastern, interior frontiers of both cities ended where the independent Imbangala kingdoms began. The frontier was dotted with “forts,” or presidios, that were primarily trading centers: Indian cottons, Brazilian cachaça, and gunpowder for slaves. Within these narrow horizontal coastal-eastern corridors, the ports held loose control over the local natural lords, sobas, sworn to vassalage.

Ferreira describes how the expansion of trade within Luanda and Benguela’s subject territories led to the enslaving of vassals. As commodities arrived and credit expanded, so too did pawnship. Debtors would offer family members and subordinates as slaves to merchants. Sobas would also punish civil and criminal cases, particularly witchcraft, with slavery. This system benefitted merchants who did not have to rely on interior trading fairs to obtain chattel from independent kingdoms. Yet, at the same time, the Portuguese crown empowered local judges to set up tribunals to secure the rights of all vassals. Ferreria describes the workings and evolution of the Tribunal de mucanos in detail, offering a mind bending account of bottom up participation through paperwork.

Recently arrived slaves in Brazil, circa 1830 (via Wikipedia)

Mucanos were petitioners who orally pleaded in front of sobas and capitães mores for freedom when wronged. Slowly, oral petitions became written, local custom codified, local decentralized decisions centralized, and corrupted local judges overseen by outside referees. Ferreria describes how the tribunal de mucanos, originally under the control of mercantile interests and self-interested local lords, evolved into a tribunal controlled by bishops (junta das missões). The juntas would have priests as translators-cum-official legal intermediaries (inquiridor das libertades), scribes (escrivão), registries (livro branco), and archives. Priests would become accountants, collecting the royal quinto (20% tax) after having properly ascertained who was rightfully enslaved. In practice, the job of the junta became one of distinguishing between outsiders from the sertòes, who could be enslaved, from the internal vassals who could not. More importantly, after baptizing the properly enslaved, priests would use the body of slaves to document the act of royal authorization and baptism by fire branding chattel. Slaves leaving Angola would carry two other fire marks as notarial documents: the originating and the receiving merchants’. Ferreria also shows that local decisions taken by the local rural tribunals would evolve into a hierarchical system of urban appellate courts, moving petitions from magistrates (ouvidor) to the governor (ouvidor geral) to Lisbon. There were slaves who sent petitions to Lisbon to appeal. Some even appeared in Lisbon in person.

Ferreria shows that in the second half of the eighteenth century the debate over the right to enslave vassals evolved, particularly as the governor Miguel Antonio Mello argued that the same rules to judge the wrongful enslavement of soba vassals should also apply to processes within the sovereign kingdoms of the sertões. All slaves, regardless of their origin, should have the right to appeal. Mello’s good intentions were not to last beyond his time in office. Mello, nevertheless, waived all fees to mucanos in judicial procedures.

In Luanda and Benguela, race was meaningless except as marker of social status, which was signified through clothing. Many petty merchants were slaves-for-hire, retailers (quissongos), moving cachaça, guns, and Indian cottons into the trading fairs (feiras) in the interior sertões while bringing back caravans of slaves. Many settlers (moradores) of the ports were ladinos, that is urban slaves who enjoyed extraordinary freedoms, including often the right to move to Brazil as servants, petitioners, and traders. Merchants and captains were largely exiles and criminals, degredados, from Brazil. Black settlers and ladinos were considered “white,” but so too were the vassals of allied sobas who through trade acquired European shoes: Negros calçados would petition to be exempted from tribute as porters and be treated as “white.” Female slaves who amassed considerable fortunes as market women (quitanderas) also became free “white” settlers. This was a world of both strict social hierarchies and dizzying social mobility.

One of Ferrerira’s most intriguing contributions is to demonstrate the peculiar relation of Brazil and Angola, one that almost entirely excluded the Portuguese. If Angola was a colony, it was Rio’s and Minas Gerais’s. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, the expansion of gold mining in Minas led to the growth of Brazilian involvement in Luanda and Benguela. Merchant-pombeiros and sheriffs-capitães mores were often exile-degredados from Brazil. Luanda and Benguela settlers sent their kids to be educated in Rio. Many acquired trades in Brazil and came back as carpenters and tailors. When Brazil declared independence in 1822, the Portuguese remained fearful for several decades of repeated conspiracies to unite Angola to the new Brazilian empire. The case of Angola demonstrates that early modern monarchies were indeed polycentric. The center of gravity often lay in America, not Europe.

This extraordinary, eye-opening book not only illuminates the distinct nature of South Atlantic systems of slavery, connecting Rio to Luanda and Benguela, a system that accounted for at least one third of all the slaves brought to the Americas. It also throws light on the role of slave petitioning in securing legitimacy and political resilience There were extraordinary parallels between the Tribunal de mucanos in Angola and the Republica de indios in Spanish America. In both cases, the state invested heavily in protecting nonwhite vassals from mercantile predation. In doing so, the system grew in legitimacy and longevity. The true paradox of modernity might not be that white freedom was possible because there was black slavery, as Edmund Morgan argued in American Slavery, American Freedom. The true paradox might well be that slavery grew and multiplied precisely because there were tens of thousands of slaves who petitioned and obtained their freedom.

You May Also Like:

Slavery and Race in Colonial Latin America
Slave Rebellion in Brazil

Also by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra:

From There to Here: Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra
Puritan Conquistadors
Jerónimo Antonio Gil and the Idea of the Spanish Enlightenment
Promiscuous Power: An Unorthodox History of New Spain

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

Power, he argues, was “promiscuous” in sixteenth-century Michoacán because there were dozens of claimants to overlapping jurisdictions: indigenous nobilities, native commoners, encomenderos (tributary lords responsible for conversion of entrusted indigenous communities), bishops, parish priests, friars, audiencia (high court) magistrates, alcaldes mayores (city mayors), city councils, corregidores (regional authorities), viceroys, general inquisitors, inquisitorial delegates, cathedral chapters, etc. Each corporate group brought the “imperial” state to a crawling halt. In fact, he argues there was no single colonial “state” but dozens, if not hundreds, of micro- imperial ones, in and around cities and in the many distinct regional rural hinterlands of the sprawling province of Michoacán. Nesvig describes these micro-states as being led by clerical caudillos (charismatic leaders of armed posses) and encomenderos who enjoyed flexing their raw patriarchal muscles (complemented by some matriarch encomenderas who flexed their biceps and ass-kicking thighs).

Nesvig irreverently pokes fun at the large Inquisition historiography that finds the key to the building of the colonial state in inquisitorial hegemony and fear-inducing techniques. He shows all these arguments to be nonsense because people in Michoacán repeatedly and literally shit on the Inquisition agents.

Rarely does the nature of the sources match the voice of an author as it does in Nesvig’s Promiscuous Power. Like his subjects, Nesvig likes shitting on the conventions of academic writing. Here is a sampling.

Francisco Hernández Girón was a Spanish encomendero in the Viceroyalty of Peru (via Wikipedia)

Nesvig quotes a bandit who beat, stabbed, and robbed the officials carrying the sealed correspondence of inquisitor of Mexico City, as saying:

“Come on, that paper isn’t worth anything, and whoever wrote it must be like you–come on, you dog, faggot, cuckold, snitch, asshole” (170)

And he writes:

“People laughed at the king and the pope and called their judges squashes, putos, and little whiny bitches while stabbing and cracking them and smacking their idiotic, pompous bonnets off their heads.” (171-72)

“Orduña [the Inquisition delegate in Michoacán’s capital Valladolid] thus upended the acceptable semiotics of power, and in so doing, he showed his rivals that he did not care a fucking bit if they thought he was a plebeian thug.” (129)

“True, he was a priest, but as he had no university education, he thought that licenciados (college graduates) were pompous assholes.” (115)

“He [Badillo a theologian, newly appointed inquisition delegate for Michoacán] was a creature of classroom lectures and of the intricate hierarchies and cultural niceties of academia, its ceremonial buffoonery and false collegiality.” (107)

I found Nesvig’s stylistic and historiographical irreverence both refreshing and powerful. I do have a critique, however.

Nesvig demonstrates on every page that the “state” enjoyed extraordinary legitimacy and authority, despite his claim that the state does not exist as such. But he has a difficult time finding the state only because he is on the trail of the narrowly defined Weberian state, that is, the state that has a monopoly on violence. Yet in Michoacán, there was a vibrant imperial state. Each of the corporate groups Nesvig investigates left a massive trail of petitions for redress via at least a dozen different bureaucratic channels and courts (Nesvig himself finds his sources in seven or eight different archives, and within each archive, in 5 or 6 different types of bureaucratic files). The audiencias (the high courts of Mexico and Guadalajara), the Inquisition (in Mexico and the Suprema in Madrid), the viceroy, the ecclesiastical courts (both of Mexico and Valladolid-Michoacán), and the crown sent dozens of visitas and residencias (mandatory outside evaluation of outgoing authorities) to investigate and mete out justice, whose dictates, in turn, were embraced or appealed in endless litigation. One finds the state in this infrastructure of paperwork, not in the monopoly of violence. The colonial state was a state of paper.

Nesvig is right that the colonial state was archipelagic, colonized by fierce defendants of corporate legal rights. Yet it was no vacuous abstraction. It manifested itself daily in rivers of ink and the profligate collective investments in paper, paralegals, lawyers, and lobbyists. The state lay in the daily, routine acceptance that courts, councils, magistrates, and monarchs could ultimately be swayed to listen. More often than not, conflict was resolved through the exchange of blasts of documents, not gun battles, civil wars, and massacres. This was the lasting legacy of even the most violent of Latin American colonial caudillos.

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

By Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Matthew Restall’s When Montezuma met Cortés delivers a blow to the basic structure of all current histories of the conquest of Mexico. Absolutely all accounts, from Cortés’ second letter to Charles V in 1520 to Inga Clendinnen’s masterful 1991 article “’Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty,’”[1] assume that the conquest of Mexico was led by Hernán Cortés, who is described by Wikipedia as a “Spanish Conquistador who led an expedition that caused the fall of the Aztec Empire and brought large portions of what is now mainland Mexico under the rule of the King of Castile.” These accounts represent Cortés as willingly deciding to enter Tenochtitlan in the hopes of capturing Montezuma, the Aztec Emperor, expecting to rule Mexico via a proxy ruler, and seeing himself as Julius Cesar in Gaul. Although Clendinnen shows that there was no Machiavellian logic in any of this Cortesian strategy, she keeps the trope of Cortés as the central protagonist of a tragic-comedy.

Montezuma’s reasoning for allowing Cortés and his 250 surviving conquistadors to enter Tenochtitlan is, after Cortés’s overblown heroics, the second leg of all histories of the conquest. Montezuma’s actions have been cast as a surrender to prophecy, implying imperium translatio (willingly bestowing sovereignty upon superior returning deities), idiotic cowardice, or simply unfathomable, unintelligible reaction. Either way, Montezuma always comes across as a diminished ruler, even a puppet. Cortés captured, imprisoned, killed, and desecrated Montezuma’s remains.

The third leg of the stool organizing narratives of the conquest of Mexico is the brutality of Aztec rule and the extent of the Aztec practice of human sacrifice. The alleged industrialization of Aztec ritual sacrifice has allowed some traditional accounts to justify the conquest.

Restall knocks down all three legs. He demonstrates that the numbers of sacrificed captives that are thrown around make absolutely no sense. The proposed numbers do not match basic arithmetic, demography, or the archeological findings at templo mayor, where the sacrifices were supposed to have taken place.

The leg that sustains Cortés as protagonist tumbles down just as easily. Restall demonstrates that Cortés was a mediocrity before landing in Yucatan and after the conquest. Cortés arrived in Hispaniola in 1504 and participated in the conquest of Cuba in 1511, playing the role of follower not leader throughout. After Tenochtitlan, Cortés led the conquest of Honduras and California where his incompetence shined through, not his greatness. Restall shows that leaders of the many Spanish factions, namely, the captains, bosses of family/town share-holding companies, who in Mexico made all key decisions, not Cortés.

Finally, the leg in the stool that portrays Montezuma as fool, is demolished by Restall in showing that Montezuma made fools of Cortés and his captains. He led them down a path that would secure attrition and observation. The envoys of Montezuma in Yucatan encouraged a path to Tenochtitlan via an enemy route. Cortés and his captains encountered first the Totonec and then the Tlaxcalan, before crossing the mountains to get to the valley that nestled Tenochtitlan in the middle. Restall demonstrates that when the weakened conquistadors stopped fighting with the Tlaxcalan, it was the latter,, not Cortes, who chose the path to get to the Aztec capital to visit Montezuma, including a detour to the city of Cholula.

This detour has always puzzled historians because it was out of the way and because the “conquistadors” staged a massacre of Cholulan lords for no apparent reason whatsoever. In his letters to Charles V, Cortés sought to explain the massacre as preventive violence to clamp down on the simmering rise of treasonous behavior among allies. Restall shows, however, that the massacre was a Tlaxcalan initiative and that the Spaniards had no role in its planning.. Tlaxcalan elites massacred the Cholulan for having recently broken the Tlaxcala Triple Alliance (that also included Huejotzingo) in order to embrace the Aztec. Even in their massacres, Cortés and his captains were puppets.

A 17th century CE oil painting depicting the meeting of Spanish Conquistador Hernan Cortes and Aztec ruler Montezuma (Motecuhzoma II) in 1519 CE (via Ancient History Encyclopedia)

Restall dwells on Montezuma’s zoos and collections to provide an answer to another puzzling decision of Cortés and his captains: they disassembled their fleet in Veracruz and crossed Central Mexico to dwell in Tenochtitlan for nine months. What would 250 badly injured and poorly provisioned conquistadors expect? To rule an empire of millions from the capital by holding the emperor hostage? Ever since Cortés penned his letters to Charles V, chroniclers and historians, (including indigenous ones trained by the Franciscans who wrote accounts of the conquest in the 1550s for the great multi-volume encyclopedia of Aztec lore, the Florentine Codex) have accepted this as a plausible strategy, even a brilliant Machiavellian one that took Montezuma unaware. Restall, however, proves that the Spaniards remained nine months walled in Montezuma’s palaces near the monarch’s zoo and gardens.

Restall proves that Montezuma’s majesty resided in his collection: zoos, gardens, and pharmacopeias. Montezuma collected women, wolves, and dwarfs. He led Cortés and his bosses to Tenochtitlan to add the pale Spaniards to his menageries and palaces. The Spanish factions had no choice. Montezuma was no one’s puppet. He used the Spaniards as curiosities to reinforce his majesty and power. Montezuma was no one’s prisoner; he was murdered. His body never desecrated by his own people. After the murder, the Spaniards were slaughtered and the few survivors fled the capital in the middle of the night, humiliated and beaten. The historiography has called the night when the Aztecs routed the Spaniards the Noche Triste.

Cortés and his surviving captains reassembled after the rout in Tlaxcala, from where they allegedly led a year long assault on Tenochtitlan. Restall shows that this protracted, final battle over the capital and the surrounding towns was not a campaign Cortés; captains controlled, any more than they controlled the first visit to Tenochtitlan. The final siege of Tenochtitlan was a war among noble Nahua factions as well as the reshuffling of altepetl (Nahua city) alliances. Elite families of Texcoco realigned to create a new alliance with Tlaxcala.

Restall introduces a new category to replace conquest: war. He equates the violence unleashed by the arrival of conquistadors with the violence of the two World Wars in the twentieth century. There was untold suffering and civilian casualties, systematic cruelty by ordinary people, rape and sexual exploitation as tools of warfare.

He is right. Yet this shift, paradoxically, infantilizes the natives and concedes all agency, again, to Europeans. In the political economy of malice, Spaniards had no monopoly. Restall demonstrates that Tlaxcalan and Texcocan lords led the massive massacres in Cholula and Texcoco. It is clear, also, that lords used the war to transact women like cattle and to amplify the well-entrenched Mesoamerican system of captivity and slavery. Why then does Restall concede to the Spaniards all the monopoly of cruelty? War made monsters not just out of ordinary vecinos from Extremadura and Andalucia. War also made monsters of plenty of local lords.

[1] Inga Clendinnen “Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty”: Cortés and the Conquest of Mexico, Representations 33 (1991): 65-100

From There to Here: Lina de Castillo

By Lina de Castillo

Map of Columbia (via Wikipedia)

In September of 1980, my mother took a calculated risk. As a talented singer with perfect pitch frustrated by a broken marriage and limiting law career, my mom left Bogotá, Colombia to pursue her dream of opera singing. My father, already starting his second family, agreed that my brother and I needed to go with her. My maternal grandparents followed us to the United States soon thereafter. While my mother worked hard to win first prize at international lyric-opera competitions with the help of a renowned voice coach, my brother and I worked hard to learn English and excel in school with the help of caring teachers, our grandparents, and kind friends. We both were inspired by our mother’s tremendous efforts and her willingness to take risks. Although my daily life during the school year took place in Westchester County, New York, an important part of my childhood also took place in Bogotá, where I spent many summers and occasional winter breaks with my Colombian family. I yearned to learn more about the place of my birth. I also missed my family terribly when I wasn’t with them. At the same time, I appreciated the security, opportunities, and friendships I found in the United States.

Curiously, although Latin America was often included in the content of our social studies textbooks, we rarely got the chance to actually study the region. As an undergraduate student at Cornell University, I finally found courses that began to teach me about Latin America, including a course on US-Latino literature (the gendered sensitivity evoked by “Latinx” had yet to be imagined). For the spring semester of my junior year, I decided to ‘study abroad’ at home in Colombia. Doing so proved to be one of the most eye-opening and academically satisfying experiences of my life up to that point. The international relations seminar I took with Juan Gabriel Tokatlian at la Universidad de los Andes helped me see more clearly the problems that come with treating a public health crisis (drug addiction) through militarization and strategies of war. At the Javeriana University, I signed up for a graduate-level seminar on the Annales school, a style of historiography developed by French historians in the 20th century that stresses long-term social history. A fellow student openly revealed his Marxist leanings and offered memorable critiques of our readings. These conversations for the first time allowed me to realize that there could be different schools of thought when it came time to develop historical analyses. Upon graduation, I decided to return to Colombia, where I taught a version of the US-Latino literature course at the university level, but only until my supervisor required that I teach the 19th-Century Colombian History survey. These experiences, together with the friendships I made with colleagues at la Javeriana and los Andes made one thing clear: if I wanted to be serious about teaching and researching at the university level, I needed to pursue graduate study in the United States. At the end of the day, the only career track that would allow me to bi-locate between my two beloved homes, the United States and Colombia, was the historical profession.

Also in this series:

Tatjana Lichtenstein
Julie Hardwick
Toyin Falola
Yoac Di-Capua
Susan Deans-Smith

The Politics of a Handkerchief: Personal Thoughts on the Motif of Female Activism in Argentina

By Paula O’Donnell

(All photos are courtesy of the author unless otherwise stated.)

Windswept litter and flaming logs on asphalt. Backlit figures swaying to handmade percussive instruments and bongos. High school seniors from Colegio Nacional huddled for warmth on the sidewalk, resting foreheads on shoulders for brief shut eye. A neighboring group of teens hoisted Argentine flags that read Movimiento Estudiantil Liberación. They danced and chanted, their makeshift bonfire illuminating passionate faces, streaked with glittering green paint. Tens of thousands filled the park, mostly young and female. Their necks adorned with green handkerchiefs, an aesthetic marker of political and ethical community.

It was June 13, 2018 at around 10:30 pm when my mother and I joined the lively demonstration taking place outside of Argentina’s Congressional palace. After seeing intriguing images of the protest on the news, we were eager to witness the spectacle with our own eyes. We entered Plaza del Congreso just as the sun receded behind the neoclassical citadel in which the House of Deputies deliberated. Argentina’s lower house of Congress was voting on a bill that would decriminalize abortion in the first fourteen weeks of pregnancy. As political elites quarreled in their palace, a discussion that would last nearly twenty hours, protestors flooded the plaza outside to noisily advocate for the bill. Empty tour buses from countless distant provinces lined up along the avenues north of the blocked-off parameter. Inside the square, a cacophony of voices, symbols, and bodies deluged the space. Signs, banners, canopies, and tents exhibited slogans and logos of Tendencia Guevarista, Juventud Radical, Frente Popular Darío Santillán… and innumerable other left-wing political organizations.

A loquacious group of teen artists sat on checkered blankets exhibiting sketches, magnets, and stickers for sale. My mother paid a blond boy with a nose-ring ten pesos for a magnet, which she handed to me, “un regalo – a present.” In bright red letters on a green background, it read “¡CUIDADO! EL MACHISMO MATA” (Careful! The patriarchy kills.) More than anything, I wanted a green handkerchief like everyone else, but no one seemed to know where they came from.

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

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

Certainly, Las Madres paved the way for other female activist organizations, some of whom aligned themselves more directly with reproductive rights. For instance, Las Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo consisted of women whose daughters or daughters-in-law were pregnant when detained by the military dictatorship. While searching for their missing grandchildren, this political group highlighted the military regime’s practice of kidnapping newborn infants for adoption into “loyal,” Catholic families. Margaret Atwood claims that this pro-natalist practice, with deep roots in Argentine history, was a fundamental inspiration for her novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Today, Las Abuelas continue to search for their grandchildren, many of whom are now in their late 30s or 40s and unaware of their biological heritage.

Las Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo (via Wikipedia)

It goes without saying that today’s generation of activists in Buenos Aires operates in an entirely different historical context, with distinct political objectives. However, the symbolic implications of the pieces of cloth they wear on their bodies appear to acknowledge the role Las Madres and Abuelas played in legitimizing female activism. Now as then, Argentine women have shown they can provoke concrete political changes by assertively occupying public spaces.

As I think back to that Wednesday, I still remember wading through the sea of green, dazed and impressed with the demonstration unfolding. The closer to the palace we moved, the more boisterous and frenetic the crowd became. About fifty feet from the limestone and marble building, it became difficult to move. Here, banners rose fifteen feet into the air, most of them advertising Trosky-ist political parties, such as Movimiento Al Socialismo or Movimiento Socialista de los Trabajadores. The clamorous singing and drumming left my ears ringing after we painstakingly made our way out of the mosh pit. It was a rowdy rock concert with no central performer to orient the crowd and no security team to direct flows of human traffic. An overstimulation of sound, color, and corporal energy contrasted conspicuously with public displays of exhaustion nearby: teenagers sleeping in truck beds, on blankets, and against the iron fence circulating the square. A village of silent camping tents at the periphery of it all.

I spent only an hour or so at the demonstration, a small fraction of the time that most participants sacrificed to stand in the brisk winter night. The next afternoon, the Argentine Chamber of Deputies voted to decriminalize abortion by a narrow margin. This was an unprecedented victory for reproductive rights in a dominantly Catholic society and region of the world. The bill would have made Argentina just the third Latin American nation (after Cuba and Uruguay) to decriminalize abortions, and analysts speculated as to the effects this would have on reproductive rights transnationally. Unfortunately, the victory in the House of Deputies subsequently galvanized a counter mobilization of pro-life Catholics all over the nation. Even Argentine-born Pope Francis spoke out to condemn the legislation, and the country’s Senate ultimately defeated the bill in August. All the same, the bill’s narrow margin to victory and the movement’s prominent visibility were remarkable for a conservative country on a continent where abortion rights are the exception. In any case, the extraordinary June demonstrations deserve to be remembered for their historical and social significance in the larger trajectory of the Argentine feminist movement, rather than the legislative defeat that followed.

For more on gender in Argentina, see Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War,” (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).

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The King’s Living Image: The Culture and Politics of Viceregal Power in Colonial Mexico by Alejandro Cañeque (2004)

Latin American popular culture presents two common tropes about Spanish colonial rule. One is the representation of viceroys as autocrats who ruled without any institutional constraint. This perception “explains” the authoritarian tendencies of Latin American societies in the postcolonial period. The other trope ironically undermines perceptions of authoritarian control by highlighting the margin of discretion that colonial officials enjoyed in the application of the law. One example of this flexible interpretation of the law is a famous phrase uttered by the Spanish American bureaucrats when a royal order came from the metropolis: “I obey but I do not comply” (obedezco pero no cumplo). Officers used this prerogative in some cases to avoid enforcing certain royal policies that they thought might be harmful for the territories in the New World where they ruled in representation of the king. This trope “explains” the apparent disregard of modern Latin Americans for the law. Neither of these representations of colonial rule is accurate.

Alejandro Cañeque’s The King’s Living Image invites readers to reconsider many of the misconceptions about Spanish America found in Latin American popular culture. Cañeque argues that we cannot understand the colonial Spanish bureaucracy with our modern conceptions of the state. In fact, Cañeque refutes the centralizing and autocratic vocation of the Spanish Monarchy for most of the colonial period (until the beginning of the eighteenth century) because those elements associated often with the modern state simply did not appear there. Without a standing army and an extended and centralized bureaucratic apparatus, how did Spain rule over almost a whole continent? Central to the author’s argument is that political beliefs and institutional practices were crucial in sustaining viceregal power and colonial rule. Spaniards imagined the state as a human body in which each body part (institution) played a key role in the system. The king represented the head, but even a king could not move if his legs did not respond. At the institutional level, the king could not procure good governance in the kingdom without the help of his most trusted councilors working in those institutions. The collective action of the whole created a sense of community among all its members.

Cañeque reinforces this idea by stating that political power was transmitted from God to the community, which then transferred it to a king. Thus, the monarch had the absolute obligation to rule for the benefit of the people and the common good. Justice and good governance became the ideological foundations of the Spanish Monarchy. Their fulfillment depended on the cooperation of the head and the different body parts. Shattering misconceptions about despotism in the Spanish Monarchy, Cañeque claims that this system of government had its analogy in heaven, where God was assisted by the Seraphim, who had the job of purging, illuminating, and perfecting the hierarchies below them. In this framework, the author analyzes the administrative hierarchy in Spanish America from the upper echelons to the local forms of government. Through his study of Viceroyalties, and Audiencias and Cabildos, Cañeque shows how the Spanish Monarchy was structured in a way that any site of power reflected a higher level.

Cañeque focuses in the figure of the viceroy, who represented the living image of the king, playing the role of the head of the political body in Spanish America. Mirroring the celestial court, viceroys had to be exemplary rulers for their subjects. Like the king, they had to rule by virtue, and not by force. If we add to this their mission of dispensing justice, we now can understand the famous phrase “I obey but I do not comply.” Viceroys and other colonial officials did not enforce certain royal policies when they were thought to be contrary to the justice and the laws of the kingdom. Certainly, they could abuse this prerogative for other goals, but its purpose was not the disregard of the law but the protection of the larger conception of justice.

If the viceroy represented the living image of the king, how did the king project his power through the viceroy? Symbolic representations, such as triumphal arches, processions, and the magnificence and pomp in the viceroy’s public appearances, all constituted and sustained viceregal power. People today would see mere spectacle and vanity. But these were the means through which authority was legitimated, especially when coercion on a grand scale was simply impossible. Symbols and political rituals were fundamental for the legitimization of power. Consider modern states and their use of symbols to command respect and loyalty. Think about the purpose of national hymns, or the splendor of national parades. Allegiance to the nation’s flag evokes the same feelings that people would have experienced by seeing the public appearance of the king’s living image in the figure of the viceroy.

Cañeque’s The King’s Living Image is a readable and well researched contribution that serves as a wake-up call to reexamine many of the misconceptions that have informed Latin American popular culture about Spanish American colonial power.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Precarious Paths to Freedom: The United States, Venezuela, and the Latin American Cold War
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