Latin America Archives - Page 11 of 13

Making History: Takkara Brunson

Interviewed by Zach Doleshal

In the sixth installation of our new series, “Making History,” Zach Doleshal speaks with Takkara Brunson about her research on Afro-Cuban women in pre-revolutionary Cuba. Brunson’s research experiences in Cuba, and stories of the fascinating women who form the core of her research offer a taste not only of life and work in a place few Americans get to visit, but also a window into the making of a social and cultural historian.

Brunson’s dissertation, “Constructing Afro-Cuban Womanhood: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in Pre-Revolutionary Cuba, 1902-1958,” is the first full-length treatment of the formation of a modern Cuban identity that examines race and gender as complementary and conflicting forces in the lives of women rather than as distinct categories of analysis.

This dissertation explores continuities and transformations in the construction of Afro-Cuban womanhood in Cuba between 1902 and 1958. A dynamic and evolving process, the construction of Afro-Cuban womanhood encompassed the formal and informal practices that multiple individuals—from lawmakers and professionals to intellectuals and activists to workers and their families—established and challenged through public debates and personal interactions in order to negotiate evolving systems of power. The dissertation argues that Afro-Cuban women were integral to the formation of a modern Cuban identity. Studies of pre-revolutionary Cuba dichotomize race and gender in their analyses of citizenship and national identity formation. As such, they devote insufficient attention to the role of Afro-Cuban women in engendering social transformations. The dissertation’s chapters—on patriarchal discourses of racial progress, photographic representations, la mujer negra (the black woman), and feminist, communist, and labor movements—probe how patriarchy and assumptions of black racial inferiority simultaneously informed discourses of citizenship within a society that sought to project itself as a white masculine nation. Additionally, the dissertation examines how Afro-Cuban women’s writings and social activism shaped legal reforms, perceptions of cubanidad (Cuban identity), and Afro-Cuban community formation. The study utilizes a variety of sources: organizational records, letters from women to politicians, photographic representations, periodicals, literature, and labor and education statistics. Engaging the fields of Latin American history, African diaspora studies, gender studies, and visual culture studies, the dissertation maintains that an intersectional analysis of race, gender, and nation is integral to developing a nuanced understanding of the prerevolutionary era.

Takkara Brunson received her PhD in the history department from the University of Texas in 2011. She specializes in modern Latin American history with a particular focus on race and gender, citizenship, and national identity. She currently holds a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship at the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and Africa-American Studies at the University of Rochester.

Photo credits:

“Advertisement for Pomada ‘Mora,'” 15 December, 1914

Minerva via “Constructing Afro-Cuban Womanhood: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in Pre-Revolutionary Cuba, 1902-1958.”

You may also like:

Our book recommendations for readings on Afro-Cubans and Afro-Americans.

Hear UT Professor of History – and Takkara Brunson’s dissertation supervisor – Frank Guridy talk about his new, award-winning book “Forging the Transnational Diaspora” in our recent monthly feature interview.

And read Professor Guridy’s review of two recent movies about the figures behind the Cuban Revolution.

Dulcinea in the Factory: Myths, Morals, Men, and Women in Colombia’s Industrial Experiment, 1905–1960 by Ann Farnsworth-Alvear (2000)

by Lizeth Elizondo

Dulcinea in the Factory presents a gendered historical analysis of the boom in the textiles industry in Medellín that goes beyond the typical economic analysis of industry-based modernity. It places gender in the context of the roles of the church and the paternalistic factory owners as well as the memories of the workers, to tell this history of forgotten myths and morals in the workplace. Dulcinea in the Factory shows that male factory owners, managers, and church officials saw themselves as Don Quixotes protecting fragile, virginal Dulcineas –their female employees. However, as Farnsworth-Alvear reveals, the real Dulcineas, the mujeres obreras (working women) found clever ways of coping with such fervent guardianship.

Farnsworth-Alvear offers a synopsis of the evolution of industrial work in Medellín by examining the modernizing projects pushed by the technocrat elites who established the first textile factories. As the title implies, this industrial project was an experiment that merged modernity and religion on the factory floor. Housing, recreational facilities, and company-sponsored activities simultaneously monopolized control and granted factory owners opportunities for public display of their protective and affectionate nature toward the female workforce. In the same vein, Catholic rhetoric depicting a vulnerable, virginal, working woman influenced factory guidelines aimed at protecting women from arduous factory work and sexually precarious situations. As the author emphasizes, the close relationship between the factory and religious rhetoric is an important component to consider when evaluating the shifts in factory policy in Medellín.

Yet, these imaginary threats to chastity, painted by the church and reinforced by factory rules, were often challenged by those women who did not consider themselves in need of protection. The author’s interviews reveal that some women were far from afraid of their workingmen counterparts and they often spoke out defending themselves in a variety of ways. Farnsworth-Alvear brilliantly utilizes a combination of statistical sources and oral history that together reveal the ideologies, challenges, and lived experiences of the workers. Oral interviews uncover the secret ways in which both women and men obstructed severe factory regimens: courtships, secret marriages, pregnancies, and even abortions occurred under this strict paternalism.

By focusing on gender relations and by comparing statistical and archival material with interviews of workers, the book offers a rich history of labor, gender, and class relations in Medellín. What emerges in Dulcinea in the Factory illuminates the experiences of those involved in the Medellín modernizing project. For sixty years, workers – whatever their gender and social stratum – had significant power in negotiating their own fate. This book offers an important contribution to the study of labor and gender. More importantly, it effectively incorporates the often-neglected social and cultural component into our understanding of industrial modernity.

Photo credits:

Dmitri Kessel, “Overhead view of housing project for workers,” Medellin, Colombia, July 1947

LIFE Magazine via Flickr Creative Commons

Dmitri Kessel, “Worker sorting leaves in a tobacco factory,” Medellin, Colombia, July 1947

LIFE Magazine via Flickr Creative Commons

Making History: Jesse Cromwell

Interview by Zach Doleshal

For the fourth installment of our “Making History” series, Zach Doleshal talks to Jesse Cromwell, a senior doctoral student in history at the University of Texas at Austin. From his childhood among the crumbling Spanish forts in West Florida to his experiences in the archives of Chavez’s Venezuela, Jesse Cromwell shares stories of adventure with Zach Doleshal culled from both his own life and the experiences of the Caribbean smugglers who form the subject of his dissertation. The relevance of Cromwell’s work on the contraband trade in the Colonial-Era Caribbean, as well as the author’s own philosophy of history, comes through clearly in what may be “Making History’s” most swashbuckling interview.

Jesse Cromwell is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department of The University of Texas at Austin. He is currently writing his dissertation, which is tentatively titled, “Covert Commerce: A Social History of Contraband Trade in Venezuela, 1680-1800.” This project examines the unexplored lives of non-Spanish smugglers, Venezuelan collaborators, corrupt Spanish officials, and Afro-Caribbeans involved in the colony’s flourishing illicit trade markets. It argues that the inter-imperial contraband carried out by these shadowy figures heavily influenced the development of Venezuelan society in the eighteenth century and facilitated a commercial separation from Spain that preceded its political rupture from the mother country.

His research interests include: seventeenth and eighteenth-century Latin American and Caribbean history, maritime history, imperial rivalry, commerce and trade, smuggling, and piracy.

In September 2011, Jesse presented a paper for UT’s Institute for Historical Studies’ “New Work in Progress” series entitled “Chocolate-Covered Colony: The Material Culture of Illicitly-Traded Cacao in Eighteenth Century Venezuela.” His talk focused on “the material culture of smuggled cacao, Venezuela’s most profitable cash crop, and how Venezuelans adapted to the presence of commercial criminality in their daily lives.”

You may also like:

Jessica Wolcott Luther’s interview for Making History, in which she talks about her dissertation on the history of slavery in seventeenth century Barbados.

Lauren Hammond’s review of “The Dictator’s Seduction: Politics and Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillio.”

The inaugural episode of “Making History,” which features an interview with UT history graduate student – and author! – Christopher Heaney.

Christina Salinas’ interview for “Making History,” in which she tells us about her childhood growing up on the Texas-Mexico border.

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.

Making History: Christina Salinas

Interview by Aragorn Storm Miller

In the third installation of our series, “Making History,” Aragorn Storm Miller speaks with Christina Salinas about her experience as a graduate student in history at the University of Texas at Austin. In the interview, Christina tells us about her childhood spent living near the Texas-Mexico border, the long history of the Texas Border Patrol, and how her research interests have evolved over the course of her undergraduate and graduate career at the University of Texas.

Christina Salinas is a PhD candidate in the history department at UT Austin. Her dissertation explores social relations forged on the ground between agricultural growers, workers, and officials from the U.S. and Mexico, and their impact on shifting national approaches to border enforcement and Mexican migration during the 1940s. She argues that, although border control policies have rested within the bounds of federal authority, it was the interconnection between federal power and local geographies of culture and history that inhabited these policies and gave them meaning.

You may also like:

The inaugural episode of “Making History,” which features an interview with UT history graduate student – and author! – Christopher Heaney.

The second episode of “Making History,” featuring an interview with seventeenth-century Caribbean scholar Jessica Wolcott Luther.

Making History: Christopher Heaney

Interview by Jen Eckel

We begin our series with an interview with Christopher Heaney.

Christopher Heaney is a Harrington Doctoral Fellow in the History Graduate program at the University of Texas at Austin. After graduating from Yale University with a B.A. in Latin American Studies, he worked in journalism for several years, including a life-changing stint at the oral history project StoryCorps.

In the fall of 2005, a Fulbright Fellowship took him to Peru to continue his undergraduate research on the explorer Hiram Bingham and the excavation of Machu Picchu. The year of research in Cuzco and Lima produced articles for The New Republic and Legal Affairs Magazine, and an Op-Ed for the New York Times, and, ultimately, Cradle of Gold: The Story of Hiram Bingham, a Real-Life Indiana Jones, and the Search for Machu Picchu (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), his first book.

At UT, Heaney studies the history of archaeology and indigenous peoples in the Americas, particularly Peru, knowledge production in the Atlantic World, museum-building, race and nation-building, and grave-robbing, the world’s second-oldest profession.

In the interview, Christopher tells us about how he stumbled upon Hiram Bingham, the subject of his undergraduate thesis and first book, and how he combined his love of archaelogy and history to become a historian of Latin American history.

Learn more about Christopher Heaney and his work by visiting his website.

You may also like:

This recent National Public Radio story about the recent legal battle between Yale University and the Peru government, featuring comments from Christopher Heaney.

The Dictator’s Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo by Lauren Derby (2009)

by Lauren Hammond

Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961, remains a figure of mythic proportions in the popular Dominican imagination. A light-skinned mulatto with Haitian ancestry, Trujillo rose from obscurity as a sugar plantation guard to establish one of Latin America’s most enduring dictatorships. His appetite for women was legendary and common belief held that he never sweated. Trujillo’s minions, and even foreign governments, lavished him with praise and an array of titles from Generalissimo to Benefactor of the Fatherland to Restorer of Financial Independence. However, outside portrayals of Trujillo as a make-up wearing megalomaniac and revelations of his regime’s oppression, many questions remain about the mechanisms of state power and relations between the Dominican populace, Trujillo, and the state. In The Dictator’s Seduction, Lauren Derby uncovers the cultural economy “that bound Dominicans to the regime.” She reinterprets the regime’s theatricality – pageants, parades, and the practices of denunciation and public praise – as critical in obscuring the inner workings of the regime and argues that the Trujillato gained and maintained the support of the masses, albeit in attenuated form, by creating a new middle class and co-opting Dominican understandings about the embodiment of race, gender, sexuality, and the process of community formation.

Derby’s most salient observations of the populist dynamics of the Trujillo regime come through her examination of the ritualized practices of denunciation and praise and the tensions between the Dominican Party and an expanded state bureaucracy. Amongst ordinary citizens, state workers, and party officials, accusation reflected the Caribbean practice of gossip as a means of social control, while panegyric was used for personal gain. The conflict between the Dominican Party and an expanded state bureaucracy reflected this dynamic. Founded in 1930, the massive Dominican Party created a new, darker middle-class indebted to the regime for its new identity. State workers, on the other hand, continued to hail from lighter-skinned elite families. While this divide played on pre-existing socio-racial tensions, Derby demonstrates that Trujillo and his proxies also encouraged a culture of enmity between state and party officials. This left members of both groups vulnerable to charges of corruption, disloyalty, and moral failings, which could result in social death. In a culture sensitive to the loss of personal honor and respect, Dominicans lived in fear of social isolation. Moreover, state bureaucrats and Dominican Party workers used praise of Trujillo and their efforts on his behalf to improve their positions within the Trujillato and as a means of defense against condemnation.

The book’s most interesting claims emerge from Derby’s exploration of popular belief surrounding Trujillo’s invulnerability, which Dominicans attribute to his muchachito, or spiritual guide. After the assassination of Trujillo on the highway between Ciudad Trujillo and San Cristobal, the arranged coup failed to take place because conspirators inside the regime hesitated to believe that Trujillo, who had survived three previous assassination attempts, was dead. Derby shows that Dominicans attributed Trujillo’s invulnerability to his muchachito who purportedly visited Trujillo in his sleep. The muchachito found its roots in a popular mixture of Haitian voodun and Afro-Dominican vodú and was associated with black magic. It told Trujillo how to invest and about plots against him, providing a popular explanation of the apparatus of power. Popular Dominican religiosity viewed the duality of Trujillo and his spirit guide as extremely dangerous and unstable. Many believe that in the end Trujillo lost trust in his muchachito and challenged it. This loss of confianza led to Trujillo’s undoing. Derby also examines the rebuilding of Santo Domingo following Hurricane San Zenón, the coronations of his daughter at the Free World’s Fair of Peace and Confraternity in 1955 and his mistress at the Dominican Republic’s 1937 Carnival, clothing and tiguerage, and the growth of a grassroots religious movement called Olivorismo following Trujillo’s assassination.

Lauren Derby’s monograph makes a significant contribution to Dominican historiography and scholarship on populism, Latin American and Caribbean dictatorship, and gender and sexuality. However, while many of her conclusions are based on a series of oral histories, the voices of her subjects remain largely absent from the text. In addition, at times the work would have benefitted from a more in depth analysis of the complexity of race and national identity in the Dominican Republic. Overall, the text offers much needed assessment of popular culture in the Dominican Republic during and after the Trujillo regime.

Photo credits:

Harris & Ewing, “Former President [of] San Domingo arrives in Capital. Washington, D.C., July 6. A close-up of General Rafael L. Trujillo, former President of the Dominican Republic, made as he stood at attention while the national anthem was being played upon his arrival today,” 6 July, 1939.

via The Library of Congress

Unknown artist, “Insignia of the Dominican Party, the party founded by the Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo on 16 August, 1931.”

via Wikipedia

You may also like:

This interview, conducted in May 2011, with General Imbert, one of the men who assassinated Rafael Trujillo in 1961. (BBC News)

Adrian Masters’ review of The Doubtful Strait, Ernesto Cardenal’s poem chronicling the history of Nicaragua from colonial discovery to the Somoza dictatorship.

Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America edited by Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O’Hara (2009)

by Kristie Flannery

Since Douglas Cope’s seminal study The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City 1660-1720 was published in 1994, historians have understood the caste system, or sistema de castas, that categorised New Spain’s multiracial population as an elite construct to impose order on a disordered plebe, rather than a discourse that reflected existing, clearly defined racial boundaries. Cope overturned the idea that racial identity in colonial Mexico was “fixed permanently at birth” and argued that race was a versatile identity that could be “reaffirmed, modified, manipulated, or perhaps even rejected.” The unfixed nature of identities assumed and performed by individuals and groups in colonial Latin America beyond Mexico City is the subject of the collection of essays edited by Andrew Fisher and Matthew O’Hara recently published as Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America.

Together the nine essays printed in this volume demonstrate that identities forged throughout Spain and Portugal’s empires in America were “fluid, malleable and constrained.” For example, Ann Twinam’s essay reveals that in the late eighteenth century mulattos and pardos from diverse parts of Spain’s Latin American empire petitioned the Council and Camará of the Indies to purchased whiteness. Mariana Dantas shows that in mid-eigtheenth-century Minas Gerais, the black brotherhood of Saint Joseph petitioned the King of Portugal for an exemption from a regulation that prohibited blacks and other people of “inferior condition” from carrying swords. Dantas emphasizes that this group of men justified their request on the grounds that they were loyal vassals, Christians, and skilled tradesmen; they evoked political, social and economic identities that they believed would override racial identity. Both Twinam and Dantas discuss the notion of ‘calidad’, which was a sense of the ‘quality,’ ‘state’ or ‘condition’ of a person that could be influenced by, but was not at all dependent upon, a person’s physical attributes including skin colour. ‘Calidad’ is a common thread that runs through many of the essays in Imperial Subjects that reinforces the impermanence of racial identity.

The expansive geographical and temporal scope of Imperial Subjects is a sure strength of this project; it persuades readers that the fluidity and malleability of racial identity was a defining feature of Latin American colonialism, rather than an anomaly. This collection has a strong footing in interdisciplinary analysis, borrowing theories from anthropology and cultural studies. The concept of ‘social identity’ attributed to the Norwegian anthropologist Fredrik Barth is deployed implicitly or explicitly within all of essays. Barth theorised that ethnicity was produced through processes of group interactions that defined boundaries, and therefore were inherently fluid.

Imperial Subjects may be faulted for giving the false impression that all historians have accepted the fluidity of identity in colonial Latin America. In a recent study Matthew Restall argued that the mobility of Africans and people of African decent in the colonial Yucatan was restricted to the ‘black middle.’ Although a porous line dividing enslaved and free blacks afforded blacks a degree of social mobility in this corner of New Spain, Restall insists that “men and women of African decent could never become full and indistinguishable members of the colony’s Spanish community.”

Can we accept both the fluidity of identity showcased in Imperial Subjects and Restall’s thesis of the ‘black middle’? The jury is out on this question. Yet Restall’s thesis is commensurable with Fisher and O’Hara’s view that the production of subaltern identities was fundamentally constrained in colonial Latin America. Fisher and O’Hara clearly state in their introduction to Imperial Subjects that this collection of essays rejects the “constructionist interpretation of personhood,” which they claim “places too much stock in the ability of individuals and groups to shape identities.” Imperial Subjects shows that power in colonial Latin America was fundamentally unequal, and draws our attention to the multiple ways in which the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies and transatlantic bureaucracies in Latin American imposed limits upon the range of identities that individuals and groups could assume or perform. Twinam and Dantes respectively demonstrate that the Council of the Indies and the Monarch had the power to determine the race and calidad of imperial subjects. Jeremy Mumford’s essay on indigenous nobles in sixteenth-century Peru highlights the power of local forces to render irrelevant identities approved by the Monarch. In pointing to the influence of the state upon the experiences of individuals and groups in colonial Latin America, this collection prompts us to ponder the present state of research into official colonial institutions. In contrast to race, gender and class, which have been the focus of countless studies in the past two decades, colonial institutions have received little attention from historians in recent years. If Fisher and O’Hara’s suggestion that we must understand colonial cultures and institutions in order to understand colonial identities, then historians should pay more attention to how these institutions operated and evolved.

Garcilaso de la Vega, a sixteenth century Peruvian writer born to a noble indigenous family.

The contributors to this collection draw on a variety of sources to understand colonial institutions and identities, including demographic data mined from parish and census records, as well as petitions, and other items of correspondence between imperial subjects and the colonial bureaucracy. The editors acknowledge the limitations of these sources; specifically that they generally not written by the subjects themselves. Imperial Subjects is an important collection reflecting nine influential scholars’ current thinking about race and identity in Latin America before independence. Undergraduate and graduate students alike would do well to read this work.

Photo credits:

Bruno Girin, “Carmo Church Overlooking Ouro Preto, Brazil,” 2005

Author’s own via Wikimedia Commons

Portrait of Felipe Guaman Poma de Aya

via The National Library of Peru

Borderlands Business: Conflict and Cooperation on the US-Mexico Border

by Anne M. Martínez

The economic ties between the United States and Mexico are well over a century old, but the coverage of the border rarely contextualizes it in these terms. In order to understand the violence we see today, we must consider the violence that erupted there in the early 1990s. The film Señorita Etraviada/Missing Young Woman (2001) chronicles the mysterious deaths of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juárez starting two decades ago. Filmmaker Lourdes Portillo challenges us to look beyond our assumptions about Mexican culture and biases about working-class women to recognize an epidemic of violence costing Mexico a generation. Portillo finds the maquiladoras, the factories on the border that manufacture products largely for American consumption and largely profiting American corporations, at the middle of the chaos that allowed the murders of these women.

Alejandro Lugo’s book, Fragmented Lives, Assembled Parts: Culture, Capitalism and Conquest at the U.S. Mexico Border, considers the historical legacy of the twin cities of Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, Texas. Lugo suggests that the placement of Juárez, at the intersection of the Iberian Century and the American Century, brings together global capitalism and imperial conquest in a way that reduces the human element – the maquiladora workers – to a cog in a global machine. To explore the historical legacy of the borderlands even futher, consider Intepreting Spanish Colonialism: Empires, Nations and Legends, edited by Christopher Schmidt-Nowara and John M. Nieto-Phillips. This collection of essays examines nation-building and historiographies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, centering on the narratives of Spain and its colonies as backward in comparison to the narratives of progress associated with Great Britain and its colonies. These historical legacies have stuck, in great measure, and they intersect in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

Vicky Funari and Sergio de la Torre present a different view of the maquiladoras in their documentary, Maquilapolis (2007). In a colonia on the edge of Tijuana, women maquiladora workers organize to fight for severance pay, safe working conditions, and to clean up of the toxic waste polluting their community. American business interests and Mexican government officials insist their workers have good lives, but we see otherwise in the tours the women give us of their communities. (Watch the trailer here.)

There are examples of productive cross-border alliances as well. The photographer David Bacon documents many of the efforts to build solidarity across the border, including the deep roots of many non-governmental organizations. There are also corporate projects that change the relationship between U.S. and Mexican partners. For example, PepsiCo has undertaken a new initiative that saves the corporation money, but also benefits small corn and sunflower farmers in Mexico. The elimination of middlemen and strategic use of regional production facilities, helps both the corporation and the farmers. Such projects, while still profit-oriented, can enhance communities in Mexico and reduce migration to the United States.

For more reading and viewing, take a look at Anne Martínez’s “Rethinking Borders” in DISCOVER.

Photo Credit:
Guldhammer, A Maquiladora factory in Mexico, via Wikimedia Commons

Undergraduate Essay Contest Winner: Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Eduardo Galeano (1971)

by Lynn Romero

Almost forty years after its first publication, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent remains a relevant, if controversial, read.The book, by Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano, follows the history of Latin America and the Caribbean through a perilous centuries-long struggle against poverty and those imperial powers whose unabashed exploitation ensure its steady existence. For Galeano, Latin America is poor precisely because it is so rich.

Galeano begins his saga of extortion with the European conquest of the Americas and the subsequent silver and gold rush. He details the atrocities of conquest that are so commonly focused upon but that never cease to shock and amaze: the enslavement of natives, the horrendously sharp decline in population, the insatiable thirst for riches that the Europeans harbored and the actions that they were willing to take in order to obtain wealth and glory. Then quite unpredictably Galeano negates the assumption that it was the Spanish conquerors that benefited from the riches extracted from the new world, but states rather that this was the beginning of a long tradition of Latin American riches being siphoned off to world superpowers and to their mighty, private investors. Galeano asserts, “The Spaniards owned the Cow, but others drank the milk. The kingdom’s creditors, mostly foreigners, systematically emptied the ‘Green Strongroom’ of Seville’s Casa de Contratación, which was supposed to guard, under three keys in three different hands, the treasure flowing from Latin America.”

The second phase of imperialism, according to Galeano, consisted in the systematic repression of Latin American industrialization, the promotion of huge monocultures for export, and the emergence of countries that were completely dependent on one raw export. This era was characterized by foreign (mainly U.S.) investors taking control of Latin American industries that tended to be lacking greatly in diversity. Galeano explains in painstaking detail the perils of countries that put all of their effort into producing one export for the benefit of foreign companies, and then who imported all of their staples and processed goods from those same foreigners. In the 1930s many countries began to nationalize their industries in an effort to retain profits. This ushered in a new phase of U.S. military and aid intervention, both of which intended to create favorable conditions for U.S. interests and stop practices, such as the nationalization of resources, that were viewed as detrimental and communist. At this point Galeano illustrates example after example of U.S. backed coups and other military actions that would have been impossible without foreign support. Eerily he dwells on the untouchability of Chile’s Salvador Allende, a Marxist who was democratically elected, and who committed suicide during a U.S. backed coup the same year as Open Veins was published.

Despite the cult following that Galeano has garnered and the religiosity with which some regard him, Galeano is not perfect. Open Veins is openly and very proudly leftist, it is at times so dense with fact its message is obscured. It lacks many a citation and it fails to meaningfully address the cause and importance of intra-country class divisions. Nevertheless Hugo Chavez of Venezuela recently proved how relevant Galeano remains when he publicly handed President Obama a copy of Open Veins of Latin America. Galeano’s is a work that must be read in order to understand today’s Latin America. His ideas, although controversial, are well researched, widely regarded, and are just as relevant today as they were when first published in 1973. Ultimately, whether or not one agrees with Galeano’s interpretation of history, the read is a valuable and insightful one that will surely spark many a conversation on just what the role of a developed nation is in the developing of another.

Photo credits:

James N. Wallace, Marchers for Allende, 5 September, 1964

U.S. News & World Report Magazine collection via Library of Congress

Check out the other winning and honorable mentions submissions for our First Annual Undergraduate Writing Contest:

Carson Stones’s review of Odd Arne Westad’s Global Cold War

William Wilson’s review of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia

Katherine Maddox’s review of Beirut City Center Recovery

Rethinking Borders: Salman Rushdie & Sebastião Salgado on the US-Mexico Border

by Anne M. Martinez

The U.S.-Mexico border, with all its power, danger, intrigue and excitement is even more complex than most acknowledge. As Gloria Anzaldúa suggested in her seminal work, Borderlands/La Frontera:

The U.S.-Mexican border es un herida abierta [an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country – a border culture… A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A border is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary.

Anzaldúa focuses on the U.S.-Mexico border, while Salman Rushdie emphasizes figurative, more than literal, borders in Step Across This Line, “there are frontiers which, being invisible, are more dangerous to cross than the physical kind.” Rushdie, an international figure who spent nearly a decade in his own “borderlands” existence, provides a unique perspective on the role of frontiers, as he calls them. Step Across This Line, his 2002 Yale University Tanner Lecture on Human Values, travels the globe and the centuries to try to make sense of lines, frontiers, and borders and the peoples who traverse them in the early twenty-first century. Consider Rushdie’s analysis of this photograph:

There is a photograph by Sebastião Salgado that shows the wall between the United States and Mexico snaking over the crests of hills, running away into the distance, as far as the eye can see, part Great Wall of China, part gulag. There is a kind of brutal beauty here, the beauty of starkness.

Give the photo a second or third or fourth glance before continuing. Which side is the United States? How do you know? What kind of activity do you see? What kind of lives do you imagine are lived on either side of the wall? Rushdie continues,

At intervals along the wall there are watchtowers, and these so-called sky-towers are manned by armed men. In the photograph we can see the tiny, silhouetted figure of a running man, an illegal immigrant, being chased by other men in cars. The strange thing about the picture is that, although the running man is clearly on the American side, he is running toward the wall, not away from it. He has been spotted, and is more afraid of the men bearing down on him in cars than of the impoverished life he thought he had left behind. He is trying to get back, to unmake his bid for freedom.

Rushdie’s turn of phrase is striking. The idea of “unmaking” one’s “bid for freedom” counters our traditional casting of the United States as the land of the free.

So freedom is now to be defined against those too poor to deserve its benefits by the edifices and procedures of totalitarianism. What kind of freedom is it, then, that we enjoy in the countries of the West – those exclusive, increasingly well-guarded enclaves of ours? That is the question the photograph asks, and before September 11, 2001, many of us – many more, I suspect, than today – would have been on the running man’s side.

This prescient vision, a decade ago, came to be: the border in the post-9/11 world has been directly tied to terrorism, despite our knowledge that none of those who struck on 9/11 entered through Mexico. In fact, the alliance between the United States and Mexico that was being strengthened by Presidents George W. Bush and Vicente Fox in the days immediately prior to 9/11, disintegrated. The spirit of opportunity and cooperation between these neighbors evaporated in the aftermath of the attacks on the United States.

You may also enjoy this author’s blog post: Borderlands Business

In the meantime, you may enjoy these resources:

The Borderlands Encyclopedia
Educational resource on contemporary US-Mexico border issues.

Borderlands Information Center (BIC)
Central clearinghouse and referral center for information about the Texas-Mexico border region.

Migrations.
A photo essay on world migration by Sebastião Salgado (1997)

Corruption at the Gates
Two-part series from NPR’s All Things Considered, which examines the culture of drug money and corruption along the US-Mexico border.

The Forgotten Americans
PBS documentary about the people who live in Las Colonias, shanty towns and rural communities within 150 miles of the US – Mexico Border.

Latin American Network Information Center
“LANIC’s mission is to facilitate access to Internet-based information to, from, or on Latin America. While many of our resources are designed to facilitate research and academic endeavors, our site has also become an important gateway to Latin America for primary and secondary school teachers and students, private and public sector professionals, and just about anyone looking for important information about this public region.”

Photo credit:
Sebastião Salgado (Brazilian, born 1944)
U.S. – Mexico Border, desert of San Ysidro, California
negative 1997; print 2009. Gelatin silver print
34.4 x 51.4 cm (13 9/16 x 20 1/4 in.)
© Sebastião Salgado
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

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