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Not Even Past

This is Democracy – Venezuela Elections

Dr. Kurt Weyland is the Mike Hogg Professor in Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.  He has conducted original research in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Peru, and Venezuela. Prof. Weyland is the author of seven books, including: The Politics of Market Reform in Fragile Democracies (Princeton, 2002); Making Waves: Democratic Contention in Europe and Latin America(Cambridge, 2014); Assault on Democracy: Communism, Fascism, and Authoritarianism during the Interwar Years (Cambridge, 2021); and Democracy’s Resilience to Populism’s Threat (Cambridge, 2024).

Mike Hogg is a Professor in Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.

Review of We the King: Creating Royal Legislation in the Sixteenth-century Spanish New World by Adrian Masters (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

Banner for We the King book review

In late 1546, auditor-president Pedro de la Gasca landed in the New World charged with retaking the entire continent for the crown, from Nicaragua to Chile. After having beheaded the viceroy, Gonzalo Pizarro had declared himself ruler of larger Peru with a fleet controlling the South Sea, from Callao to Panama. Curiously, La Gasca came with no armies, just a pile of blank decrees signed by Charles V. In one year, however, La Gasca quickly took over Pizarro’s fleet and routed Gonzalo into the Peruvian heartland. He was able to accomplish this because of the power of royal decrees and edicts granting rewards to any potential turncoat. La Gasca quickly dispatched the Pizarros, reorganized Peru, and promptly went back to become bishop of Palencia in 1550.

This largely bloodless, swift conquest of conquistadors by paperwork seems not to have caught the attention of historians of the sixteenth-century Spanish Indies, who were accustomed to narrating gory blood baths in Tenochtitlan. How did a faraway monarch manage to control a sprawling empire teeming with violent and ruthless factions, including, not only raiding conquistador-pirates but also thousands of theocratic friars and rebellious indigenous lords, all willing and able to seize control. This is the subject of Adrian Master’s extraordinary We, the King which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023.

Anyone superficially familiar with the history of conquest and colonialism in the Americas knows two things: First, Spain imposed a ruthless autocratic regime via top-down religious bureaucracies that enforced religious compliance and cultural uniformity. Second, Anglo America was a decentralized society of settlers with loose crown oversight until the eighteenth century, when overreach triggered revolution. This is not a cartoon version of history but rather our current historiographical canon. It is the argument at the heart of John Elliott’s monumental Empires of the Atlantic (2006). The Anglo-American bottom-up and Spanish American top-down dichotomy also structures the writings of the entire Cambridge School, from J.G.A Pocock to Quentin Skinner to David Armitage. Clerical Dominican and Jesuit theology allegedly organized top-down state formation in the south whereas bottom-up markets and indirect providence did it in the north.

Drawing of Guaman Poma
GKS 2232 4º: Guaman Poma, “Nueva corónica y buen gobierno” (1615), Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Copenhagen

In a bold, deeply researched book drawing on no less than twenty-six archives, Masters shatters this paradigm. The liberal and decolonial obsession with top-down Spanish autocracy has overlooked that the discourse of tyranny, underlying all neo scholastic theories of regicide, implied vast bottom-up forms of communication between vassals and monarchs. To claim legitimacy, that is not to be a tyrant, the crown encouraged all sorts of bottom-up paperwork communication via petitioning, audits, and denunciation (which was the point of the Inquisition). In the Spanish Indies, the state was created from the bottom up every bit as much as it was in Anglo America.

Masters’ subject is the hundreds of thousands of royal decrees created in the sixteenth century, but he does not discuss the millions of viceroyal edicts, mandamientos. Scholars have argued that the crown regulated everything from the length of trousers of Purepecha commoners to the number of horses of Nahua lords. We have been told that the crown rounded up natives into towns and issued top-down decrees on how to sleep on mattresses. The topic of race is especially dear to this scholarship. The crown decreed out of thin air prefigured categories of human difference. From the top-down, it engineered republics of Indians, Spaniards, Mestizos, and some forty Casta out of the Reconquista experience with purity of blood statutes.

Masters has no patience with any of this. Most decrees, he shows with brilliant empirical skill, came from bottom-up petitioning from millions of vassals, including both enslaved people and women. Even the very language of the decrees was often taken verbatim from bottom-up petitioning. The function of the Council of Indies was primarily to handle bottom-up paperwork on unsolicited reform and legislation. To be sure, this was no democracy where commoners had unmediated access to the Council and paperwork, but neither, it should be said, is ours. Be that as it may, Masters shows that systems of legislating petitioning were largely responsible for the creation of most racial categories in the Indies. Indigenous factionalism prompted petitions to draw casta (caste) and mestizo distinctions. Every bit as much as friars, bishops, and viceroys, native commoners participated in the creation of colonial categories of human difference.

Map of Teozacoalco
Mapa de Teozacoalco (1580) was part of a set of documents made in response to inquiries from the Spanish King Philip II. Source: Relación de Teozacoalco y Amoltepec, Relaciones Geográficas of Mexico and Guatemala Collection, Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas, Austin.

This is not a minor contribution. The scholarship on colonial Latin America is plagued by teleological narratives. As with any bad script, we all know how the movie ends. Categories, institutions, allegedly all came down prefigured from Spain. Masters shows throughout that the labor of making of the law not only took up a lot of actants (scribes, paper, ink, tlacuilos, ships, rowers, servants, porters, muleteers, magistrates, rivers, oceans, candles, seals, chasquis) but also rendered the system unpredictable. It took individual and communal agency to succeed. It also involved, stubbornness, networking, resilience, corruption, lying, luck.

Book cover for We the King

Along with the top-down authoritarian shibboleths, the literature on the Spanish Empire is packed full of picaros, the much-needed Macondo picaresque in our much-loved liberal and decolonial narratives. Masters is aware that the Indies was not Spain and that petitioning in the Indies changed over time. Corruption and deception were the twin bête-noir of legislation (decrees, edicts, ordinances).

Masters shows that over the entire century the crown struggled to stem corruption and misinformation from undermining its own legitimacy before vassals. In fact, this was the main function of Council magistrates. In a series of riveting chapters, Masters shows how various council audits transformed Indies systems of communication, relegating elite women from legislative decisions, for the wives and daughters of magistrates were the main conduits used by petitioners to communicate and sway the will of magistrates. Masters also shows that the battle to control misinformation led to the creation of a far less passive crown toward the end of the century, capable through its own archives of finally assessing the credibility of Indies testimonies accurately. For every picaro there was an archive.

This book is a tour de force that ought to transform our understanding of Latin American colonial state formation. We, the King: Creating Royal Legislation in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish New World is a brilliant study that I recommend to all. 

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is the Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas.

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.

NEP’S Archive Chronicles: El Archivo General de la Nación (AGN, Ciudad de México): Procesos afectivos, paisajes urbanos y la escritura de la historia

Cartel de El Archivo General de la Nación (AGN, Ciudad de México): Procesos afectivos, paisajes urbanos y la escritura de la historia

NEP’S Archive Chronicles explora el papel que desempeñan los archivos en la investigación histórica, ofreciendo una visión del proceso de realización del trabajo archivístico y de investigación. Cada entrega ofrecerá una perspectiva única de los tesoros y retos que los investigadores encuentran en los archivos de todo el mundo. NEP’s Archive Chronicles pretende ser tanto una guía práctica como un espacio de reflexión, en el que se expongan las experiencias de los colaboradores con la investigación archivística.

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

Es un lugar común empezar por decir que estaba leyendo La atracción de archivo de Arlette Farge el primer día que fui a hacer investigación al Archivo General de la Nación (AGN) en la Ciudad de México, pero es verdad. No lo hice a propósito, llevaba tiempo queriendo leer el texto y acababa de comprar un ejemplar usado cuando empecé a investigar sobre la historia del Archivo General de México a lo largo del siglo XIX.

Esto ocurrió hace tres años, pero lo recuerdo claramente. Tiendo a olvidar las cosas, pero allí donde falla mi memoria social, mi memoria bibliográfica es casi impecable. Puedo recordar todos los libros que he leído. Sé cómo es la portada, qué tamaño tiene el libro, y dónde y cuándo lo leí. Recuerdo cómo se siente un libro dentro de mí, y puedo reconstruir lo que dice o por qué es importante. Sobre el clásico de Farge, recuerdo que el libro es romántico, que ella narra cómo recorría los pasillos de los Archivos Judiciales de París buscando mujeres en las fuentes, reflexionando sobre la afectividad del espacio, y recuerdo que lo estaba leyendo ese día. 

Era pleno verano, un día sombrío y lluvioso en la ciudad. También estábamos en plena pandemia de COVID. Por lo tanto, el AGN estaba abierto, pero su horario de atención al público era restringido, así como el material que podían consultar los investigadores. Había agendado una cita una semana antes para asistir y ver si realmente podía encontrar algo. Nunca había oído hablar de la colección que buscaba, pero estaba segura de que existía. Un archivo debe tener una colección sobre sus operaciones institucionales internas, ¿no?

Salí temprano de casa, me subí en el metro y eventualmente llegué a San Lázaro, en el centro-este de la ciudad. La estación de metro debe su nombre a la antigua terminal ferroviaria del mismo nombre, que solía ser parte importante del sistema ferroviario interoceánico en la ruta México-Puebla-Veracruz. San Lázaro siempre es caótico. No sólo hay dos líneas distintas de metro tienen parada ahí, pero el espacio también se comparte con la Terminal de Autobuses de Pasajeros de Oriente, la TAPO, haciéndola una de las estaciones más concurridas de la ciudad, con más de 44.000 usuarios que la cruzan al día. Me costó trabajo encontrar dónde abordar la línea 5 del Metrobus, pero eventualmente lo logré. Una parada después, llegué a la estación Archivo General de la Nación.1

Imágenes de la estación de metrobús de Ciudad de México para NEP's Archive Chronicles
Fotografías tomadas por la autora.

El AGN se encuentra actualmente ubicado en el Palacio de Lecumberri. Inaugurado originalmente en 1900 por el presidente Porfirio Díaz, este edificio fue diseñado como una moderna penitenciaría panóptica, propósito con el cual cumplió hasta 1972, cuando fue clausurado debido a una serie de irregularidades, corrupción y falta de espacio para sostener el creciente número de reclusos. Una vez cerrado y abandonado, estalló un debate en la prensa mexicana sobre su destino. Su demolición privaría a los antiguos reclusos como a las familias de las víctimas de un importante lugar de memoria. Además, quienes se oponían a su demolición subrayaron la importancia de conservar el edificio como un lugar crucial para estudiar y comprender la historia de la arquitectura disciplinaria durante en México en el siglo XX. Pero ¿qué hacer con él?

En los medios de comunicación estalló un debate sobre los posibles usos del edificio. La polémica de «los historiadores», representados por Edmundo O’Gorman, Eduardo Blanquel, Jorge Alberto Manrique y el arquitecto Flavio Salamanca, fue decisiva para que Lecumberri pasara de ser una cárcel a un archivo. El argumento principal de los historiadores se centró sobre todo en la cuestión del espacio, conscientes de que una de las características fundamentales de los archivos es que nunca dejan de crecer. En ese momento, el AGN, originalmente alojado en el Palacio Nacional desde su inauguración en 1823, hacía tiempo que se había quedado sin espacio y sus fondos se encontraban dispersos por diversos lugares de la ciudad, como el Palacio Nacional, el Templo de Guadalupe en Tacubaya o la Casa Amarilla, la Ciudadela y el antiguo Palacio de Comunicaciones, hoy Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL).2 La descentralización perjudicaba las funciones de la institución y ponía en riesgo el acceso de los usuarios.

Tres imágenes del palacio de Lecumberri: estructura exterior, cúpula interior, edificio exterior para NEP's Archive Chronicles
Fotografías tomadas por la autora.

Consciente de sus necesidades presentes y futuras, el personal de la institución había estado buscando soluciones para este problema. José Ignacio Rubio Mañé, que fue director de la institución entre 1960 y 1977, incluso llegó a viajar por el mundo a través de un programa financiado por el gobierno en busca de inspiración en otros archivos para mejorar el que él supervisaba. Pero el proyecto de remodelación quedó truncado antes de concluirse.

Y ahora, la solución estaba ahí: Lecumberri. El edificio ya era propiedad del gobierno, estaba abandonado y salvarlo garantizaría su funcionamiento como lugar rememoración y estudio. Como elemento adicional y fortuito, este palacio se había construido para garantizar las prácticas de vigilancia, un componente muy necesario para los archivos. Estos otorgan una gran prioridad a la vigilancia porque almacenan documentos sensibles y únicos que sirven de fuentes primarias para los relatos históricos de una comunidad determinada en el tiempo. Su robo o deterioro puede tener repercusiones sociales, materiales e incluso emocionales.

En 1977 se aprobó la transformación de Lecumberri en la nueva sede del AGN, que se trasladó en 1982 bajo la dirección de Alejandra Moreno Toscano. Las antiguas celdas de la prisión se convirtieron en bóvedas para el almacenamiento de documentos, y las largas galerías de cada uno de los 5 brazos de la prisión se transformaron en salas de lectura y oficinas. Aunque poética, la falta de control técnico sobre el clima y las plagas que los archivistas podían tener sobre los documentos dentro de las bóvedas impulsó la construcción del Anexo Técnico. Inaugurado en 2018, el Anexo es una instalación de almacenamiento de documentos moderna y tecnológica que aumentó masivamente el espacio de almacenamiento y modernizó los sistemas. Las celdas sirven ahora de oficinas para el personal, y algunos de los largos pasillos se han acondicionado para un proyecto de digitalización masiva. En el exterior, el gran edificio blanco y cuadrado contrasta con el palacio decimonónico situado a su lado. Dos estrategias e innovaciones tecnológicas diferentes para un mismo fin.

Tres imágenes de bloques de celdas y espacio de almacenamiento de documentos. Actualmente son oficinas para NEP's Archive Chronicles
Fotografías tomadas por la autora.

A mi llegada, me recibieron dos agentes de policía. Como en muchos archivos de todo el mundo, tuve que dejar mi mochila, papel, plumas, agua y cualquier alimento en los casilleros y registrarme con un documento de identidad oficial y registrar el número de serie de mi equipo de trabajo (computadora y tablet). Una vez registrada, tomé mi computadora, teléfono, guantes y mascarilla, y me dirigí a la Centro de Referencias, una parada obligatoria antes de entrar en las salas de consulta. No sabía dónde encontrar el archivo institucional, así que hablé con los archivistas. Mi primera conversación con la mujer de recepción -llamémosla M.- fue más o menos así:

“Buenos días”.

            “Buenos días”.

            “¿En qué puedo ayudarle?”

            “Estoy buscando… Estoy buscando el archivo del Archivo”.

            “¿Disculpa?”

            “Sí. Busco el archivo del Archivo”.

No puedo evitar reírme al recordar la cara de M. ante mi extravagante solicitud. Le expliqué que yo era historiadora, que estaba investigando la historia del Archivo General y que buscaba el archivo interno de operaciones del AGN.

            “Tiene que haber uno, ¿no?”.

            “Ay, no sé la verdad, no he oído hablar de él. Pero ¿por qué no pruebas en el buscador general a ver qué encuentras?”.

Me senté frente a una computadora y escribí lo primero que se me ocurrió: «archivo». Pero al teclear una palabra que forma parte del nombre de toda la institución, el sistema transcribió toda la base de datos en la sección de resultados del programa, y lo colapsó. Pasé las siguientes semanas en Centro de Referencias analizando ArchiDoc, el gigantesco sistema de búsqueda del AGN, intentando averiguar cómo encontrar esta colección de la que nadie en el había oído hablar. Hasta que un día, a primera hora de la mañana, se acercó M. para decirme que había visto una colección en el perfil de administrador de ArchiDoc. Se llamaba Archivo Histórico Institucional (AHI) y figuraba en la sección del siglo XIX.

¡Eureka! Resulta que no había visto esta colección en ningún lado porque los documentos estaban todavía siendo catalogados y procesados, y no estaba disponible aún para su consulta3. Se me puso la piel chinita de la emoción. Lo recuerdo claramente. Estos documentos constituyen la historia del Archivo a través del papeleo burocrático de la administración de la misma institución. De hecho, esto era exactamente lo que yo buscaba: el archivo del archivo. Y significaba que mi investigación doctoral era posible.

El Archivo Histórico Institucional tiene dos tipos de formatos documentales: volúmenes y cajas que contienen expedientes guardados en carpetas amarillas sin ácido. Los volúmenes están encuadernados en piel y tienen unas dimensiones aproximadas de 40 cm x 25 cm, con un número de páginas que oscila entre 250 y 450 por volumen. Consta de 295 volúmenes que van de 1825 a 1944, abarcando 119 años de historia administrativa archivística. La colección muestra un aumento significativo de volúmenes a lo largo del tiempo con un patrón de crecimiento sostenido a lo largo del tiempo. Su contenido es ecléctico y abarca informes, remisiones, recibos, notas, instrucciones y solicitudes de información, entre otros. En estos documentos podemos encontrar los mundos sociales, económicos, políticos, materiales e incluso afectivos que han sido parte esencial de la mecánica interna de la institución y de los materiales que ella resguarda.

Imagen del volumen encuadernado en cuero
Fotografía tomadas por la autora.
Imagen de papel con membrete de AGN
Fotografía tomadas por la autora.

No pude examinar los documentos físicos ese año y tuve que esperar hasta el verano siguiente para hacerlo, tras conseguir autorización previa de la administración del Archivo. Poco después, la historiadora y archivista Linda Arnold tuvo la amabilidad de compartir con nosotros la hoja Excel de toda la colección, lo que me permitió procesar y comprender más profundamente la colección antes acceder a los documentos.

En cuanto pude, regresé a la Ciudad de México y me dirigí directamente al AGN para analizar la colección física. Para ese momento ya sabía de qué elementos se componía el AHI, y por fin había llegado el momento de leerlo. Desde entonces he pasado cientos de horas en la Sala de Lectura «A» del AGN leyendo los documentos y tomándoles fotos para mi investigación.

En estos años, he paseado los extraños caminos de Lecumberri y he llevado a mis seres queridos a las visitas guiadas que ofrece la propia institución. También me he hecho amiga de algunos de los archivistas que trabajan ahí y he conocido a historiadores que admiro haciendo investigación. Mi investigación también me ha llevado a otros archivos de México y del mundo, donde he estado buscando evidencia que lo represente como parte de una red global de emergentes tecnologías de la información en el siglo XIX.

Tres imágenes de los exteriores de Lecumberri: edificio, cúpula desde el exterior, torre para NEP's Archive Chronicles
Fotografías tomadas por la autora.

Ya empecé a escribir la tesis y espero que esté lista en los próximos años. Pero escribir esta historia no ha sido del todo fácil. Los archivos son entidades por naturaleza fragmentadas y están constituidos por silencios y ausencias más que por lo que han logrado custodiar.4 Como objeto de tasación, botín de guerra o resultado de la volátil e imprevisible fragmentación de los fondos, la información documental que sobrevive en la actualidad no es más que un minúsculo fragmento de lo que se ha producido alguna vez. Esto plantea algunas preguntas fundamentales: ¿Por qué no se ha analizado en detalle la historia de los archivos? ¿Qué nos dice esto hoy? ¿Qué tipo de historias podemos recuperar analizando en detalle los archivos institucionales de las instituciones archviísticas?

Es precisamente la naturaleza fragmentada del AGN lo que me ha impulsado a explorar formas más experimentales de escribir sobre sus historias, llevándome a abordar sus complejidades a través de la escritura creativa, especialmente a través del ensayo. Porque al reflexionar sobre las condiciones en las que se archivó la historia, nos hacemos una idea de cómo se vivió y experimentó ésta, generando oportunidades para reinterpretar la formación de la identidad nacional y el pasado de formas nuevas y previamente inexploradas.

Camila Ordorica es candidata doctoral en Historia Latinoamericana por la Universidad de Texas en Austin, donde estudia la historia del Archivo General de México durante el largo siglo XIX (1790-1910). Su investigación dialoga con la archivística y la historia cultural, social y material, y explora cómo los archivos se escriben en la historia y su papel dentro de ella. La pasión de Camila por los estudios archivísticos tiene sus raíces en su formación como archivista. Camila ha trabajado en los Acervos Históricos de la Universidad Iberoamericana y en los archivos de Sine-Comunarr. Además, ha colaborado con la ENES-Morelia de la UNAM, el Instituto de Estudios Críticos ’17 y la Federación Internacional de Historia Pública en estudios y prácticas archivísticas y humanidades digitales.

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

  1. Desde entonces he descubierto que la mejor ruta en transporte público es ir a la estación del metro Bellas Artes y tomar el Metrobús 4 directo al AGN. Suele haber más tráfico, pero el trayecto es más bonito. Con el aire fresco de la mañana, se puede contemplar todo el centro histórico, con sus edificios torcidos y su bulliciosa actividad. ↩︎
  2. Pereyra, Carlos, et al. Historia, ¿para qué? 1st ed. (México: Siglo Veintiuno, 1980) ↩︎
  3. El IHA aún no se ha abierto oficialmente a consulta, pero tengo entendido que se presentará oficialmente al público antes de finales de año. ↩︎
  4. Ver: Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression, (The University of Chicago Press, 1996); Michelle Caswell, Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia, (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014); Verne Harris, Ghosts of Archive: Deconstructive Intersectionality and Praxis, (Routledge, 2021); Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past. Power and the Production of History, (Bacon Press, 1995) ↩︎

NEP Author Spotlight – Camila Ordorica

The success of Not Even Past is made possible by a remarkable group of faculty and graduate student writers. Not Even Past Author Spotlights are designed to celebrate our most prolific authors by bringing together all of their published content across the site together on a single page. The focus is especially on work published by UT graduate students. In this article, we highlight the many contributions made to the magazine made by Camila Ordorica, our incoming Associate Editor and Communications Director for academic year 2024-2025.

Camila Ordorica is a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American History at the University of Texas at Austin, where she studies the history of Mexico’s General Archive during the long nineteenth century (1790–1910). Her research bridges archival science with cultural, social, and material history, exploring how archives are written into history and their role within it. Camila’s passion for archival studies is rooted in her training as an archivist. She has previously worked at the Universidad Iberoamericana’s Acervos Históricos and the archives of Sine-Comunarr. Additionally, she has collaborated with UNAM ENES-Morelia, ‘17, Institute of Critical Studies’, and the International Federation of Public History on archival studies, practice, and digital scholarship training.

Camila earned her B.A. in History from Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City and later pursued an M.A. in Gender Studies from the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest, Hungary. At the University of Texas at Austin, she has served as co-coordinator for the Lozano Long Centennial Conference, ‘Archiving Objects of Knowledge with Latin American Perspectives’ (2020 – 2021), and the ‘History Department’s Symposium on Gender, History, and Sexuality’ (2022–2023). Camila’s research has been supported by Conahcyt/Contex, the École nationale des Chartes, the Newberry Library, the W.M. Keck Foundation, and the Conference on Latin American History. Her writing is featured in Revista nexos, Letras Libres, el Boletín del Archivo General de la Nación, Revista América, Historia Mexicana, Contributions to the History of Concepts, and Not Even Past.

Note: This bilingual article appears first in Spanish and then in English.

Por segunda vez en los 73 años desde su creación, UT Austin fue sede del XVI Encuentro de Historiadores Internacionales de México (octubre de 2022). Bajo la coordinación de un comité conjunto presidido por la Dra. Susie Porter de la Universidad de Utah, el Dr. Pablo Yankelevich de El Colegio de México y el Dr. Matthew Butler como organizador local de UT Austin, la conferencia se planificó como un diálogo sobre la relación binacional entre México y Estados Unidos—y más específicamente Texas—y sobre los archivos. ¿Cómo ha cambiado la escritura de la historia de México y de la frontera desde la última vez que se llevó a cabo este encuentro aquí, en 1958? Este artículo presenta una breve historia de los Encuentros de Historiadores Internacionales desde 1949 y ofrece algunas notas sobre cómo ha cambiado la escritura histórica sobre México y sus fronteras desde entonces

For the second time in the 73 years since its inception, UT Austin was the host the XVI Meeting of International Historians of Mexico (October 2022). Under the coordination of a joint committee chaired by Dr. Susie Porter of the University of Utah, Dr. Pablo Yankelevich of El Colegio de México, and Dr. Matthew Butler as UT-Austin’s local organizer, the conference was planned as a dialogue concerning the binational relationship between Mexico and the United States—and more specifically Texas—and about archives. How has the writing of Mexican and borderland history changed in the last time the meeting took place here, in 1958? This article presents a brief history of International Historians Meetings beginning in 1949 and gives some notes on how historical writing about Mexico and its borders has changed since then.

In honor of the centennial of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, the 2022 Lozano Long Conference focuses on archives with Latin American perspectives in order to better visualize the ethical and political implications of archival practices globally. The conference was held in February 2022 and the videos of all the presentation will be available soon. Thinking archivally in a time of COVID-19 has also given us an unexpected opportunity to re-imagine the international academic conference. This Not Even Past publication joins those by other graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin.  The series as a whole is designed to engage with the work of individual speakers as well as to present valuable resources that will supplement the conference’s recorded presentations. This new conference model, which will make online resources freely and permanently available, seeks to reach audiences beyond conference attendees in the hopes of decolonizing and democratizing access to the production of knowledge. The conference recordings and connected articles can be found here.

Between 1793 and 1794, the Jacobin Club, a leftist political organization led by Maximilien Robespierre held political power in France. Via this medium, the Jacobins, as they came to be known, enforced a radical understanding of the revolutionary values of the French Revolution through mass violence. This episode is known simply as “the Terror”. In 1794 the Jacobins were forced out office in an episode called the “Thermidorian Reaction”, after which everything seemed to show what the Terror was a thing of the past. In The Afterlives of Terror. Facing the Legacies of Mass Violence in Postrevolutionary France, Ronen Steinberg challenges this assumption and argues that this episode stretched beyond the years of its occurrence in the form of debates and practices aimed towards overcoming this modern form of national trauma.

In From Angel to Office Worker: Middle-Class Identity and Female Consciousness in Mexico, 1890-1950, Susie S. Porter explores the material conditions of working women in Mexico City from 1890 to 1950 and the formation of middle-class female identity. She examines how societal practices and debates shaped this identity, analyzing the Mexican women’s movement in the early twentieth century and its connection to global feminist movements. Porter’s work highlights how women negotiated their roles during and after the Revolution and organized to improve their working and living conditions.

Between 1793 and 1794, the Jacobin Club, a leftist political organization led by Maximilien Robespierre held political power in France. Via this medium, the Jacobins, as they came to be known, enforced a radical understanding of the revolutionary values of the French Revolution through mass violence. This episode is known simply as “the Terror”. In 1794 the Jacobins were forced out office in an episode called the “Thermidorian Reaction”, after which everything seemed to show what the Terror was a thing of the past. In The Afterlives of Terror. Facing the Legacies of Mass Violence in Postrevolutionary France, Ronen Steinberg challenges this assumption and argues that this episode stretched beyond the years of its occurrence in the form of debates and practices aimed towards overcoming this modern form of national trauma.

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.

The Fellowship of the Tree Rings: A ClioVis Project

My grandparents and I looked down onto the vast Sonoran Desert from Mount Lemmon, north of Tucson, Arizona. At nearly 8,000 feet, quaking aspen, cottonwood, alder, and other tree species surrounded us—a stark contrast with the desert below. An audio guide played on my grandma’s Samsung Galaxy as we took in our surroundings. The voice, who I later learned is a singer named Joey Burns, told us about how researchers at the University of Arizona learned that fires are essential to healthy forests by studying tree rings.[1] Burns continued, “Every tree you see around you has the story of its life hidden in its rings.”[2]

Fast forward six years: Dr. Erika Bsumek sends me a podcast called The Fellowship of the Tree Rings, which explores connections between tree rings, hurricanes, the Golden Age of European Piracy, and even the Sugar Revolution.[3] The podcast is based on research from Valarie Trouet, Marta Domínguez-Delmás, and Grant Harley, reconstructing 500 years of Caribbean hurricane records by studying tree rings.[4] It is a remarkable resource that sheds light on the intersection between climate science and history.

A dendrochronological sample from a beam in Gödenroth Rathaus, Germany.
A dendrochronological sample from a beam in Gödenroth Rathaus, Germany.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Meeting at the Second American Dendrochronology Conference in Tucson, Arizona, near Mount Lemmon, the three researchers discussed how shipwreck records and tree ring data could be combined to reconstruct a history of hurricanes in the Caribbean.[5] After successfully reconstructing a chronology, the researchers observed a dip in the number of hurricanes between 1645 and 1715.[6] Trouet noticed that this correlates with what is known as the “Maunder Minimum,” a period of low solar radiation.[7]

This made sense—less solar radiation meant cooler temperatures, which is not the ideal environment for forming hurricanes. Hurricanes thrive in environments with warm water and air.[8] But why is the connection between the “Maunder Minimum” and a period of fewer hurricanes significant? The work of Trouet, Domínguez-Delmás, and Harley illustrates the ability of climate proxies to reveal new perspectives on history that would go otherwise unnoticed. Assistant Professor of History Melissa Charenko, whose research was influential in the creation of my project, defines climate proxies well in another article for Not Even Past. She writes:

Proxies are things like tree rings, ice cores, pollen, and lake sediments. They are material traces that indirectly reflect the climates of the past. For example, scientists can use tree rings to reconstruct past temperature and moisture. Or they can use the air bubbles trapped in ice to study the composition of the atmosphere through time.[9]

In the case of The Fellowship of the Tree Rings, researchers used tree rings as a climate proxy to reconstruct a chronology of hurricanes in the Caribbean. Their use of climate proxies is especially interesting because of the subsequent historical connections they made using the chronology.

When looking at the larger history of the Caribbean, the lull in hurricane activity can be connected with an influx in Caribbean maritime activity, specifically within the context of the Sugar Revolution and Golden Age of European Piracy, which lasted roughly from 1650 to 1730.[10] The Fellowship of the Tree Rings asserts that the sun—and, more broadly, the environment—played a vital role in both shaping and uncovering our past. By connecting solar phenomena like the “Maunder Minimum” to historical periods such as the Sugar Revolution, The Fellowship of Tree Rings illuminates the environment’s unseen hand in transforming human history. Furthermore, by understanding how Trouet, Domínguez-Delmás, and Harley used tree rings to provide insight into a larger Caribbean history, we can reconsider our natural surroundings as a burgeoning resource in explaining our past.

Sugar manufacture in the Antilles Isles, 1665
Sugar manufacture in the Antilles Isles, 1665.
Source: Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-72094 DLC

As I think back to my trip to the top of Mount Lemmon, I did not understand how impactful the story of a tree’s life might be to understanding human history. Human history is all too often framed as something separate from environmental history when really it should be seen as inextricable. The work of Trouet, Domínguez-Delmás, and Harley demonstrates that the environment and human history are forever intertwined.

All of this inspired me to build a timeline that contextualized their research.

For this project, I took The Fellowship of the Tree Rings podcast episode and mapped information from it onto an interactive timeline using ClioVis—an interactive timeline software that allows you to chart historical (or nonhistorical) concepts, events, and themes, emphasizing connections between them. The Fellowship of the Tree Rings lent itself well to the ClioVis format as the story contains various historical and scientific connections. After mapping the RadioLab episode, I went through the timeline and added my own events, connections, and eras to give greater context to the story.

While building this timeline, I became increasingly fascinated in how interconnected piracy, the Sugar Revolution, and hurricanes were. I learned about the complex relationship between empires and piracy. Although they were outlaws operating in maritime spaces, pirates paradoxically facilitated the expansion of empires by assisting in territorial conquests.[11] This took place against the backdrop of the Sugar Revolution, where imperial powers scrambled to gain control of lucrative trading ports and colonies. European states sought to extract as much wealth as possible from the Caribbean. To do so, they plundered indigenous communities and violently exploited enslaved African labor.[12]

As millions of enslaved Africans were forcibly taken by these empires from Africa to the Caribbean, some African people were able to escape and join pirate crews.[13] This all took place during a historic period of low hurricane activity. When the idea of the climate shaping these events is added to the picture, it changes things. Did the significantly reduced threat of hurricanes to ships propel both the Sugar Revolution and piracy? In my timeline, I attempt to map out this complex history and answer that question.

As the timeline shows, contextualizing The Fellowship of the Tree Rings demonstrates the complex relationship between the “Maunder Minimum,” hurricanes, the Golden Age of European Piracy, and the Sugar Revolution. Between 1650 and 1715, a lull in hurricane activity associated with the “Maunder Minimum” transformed the environment. As maritime trade increased, ships simultaneously faced a comparatively lower threat of hurricanes than in other periods in history. This meant that hurricanes did not play their traditional role in the Caribbean ecosystem—their check on human activity was temporarily weakened.

Why is this important? Between 1650 and 1715, European colonial powers cemented their position in the Americas through the Sugar Revolution. European ships transported a massive amount of wealth—including enslaved African people—in the triangular trade, which helped fund Europe’s industrial revolution.[14] The Fellowship of Tree Rings introduces the environment as playing a role in accelerating that process, sinking fewer fleets because of hurricane activity. This connection reveals how historical periods are impacted by changes in climate, providing us with new understandings of the larger societal shifts that come with them.

Valerie Trouet, Marta Domínguez-Delmás, and Grant Harley make use of tree rings as climate proxies to establish these connections and illustrate the value of studying human history in terms of the environment. Their study joins the growing field of paleoecologists who seek to learn about our climatic history from the natural world around us. In addition to learning about climate history as it is narrowly understood, these scholars are studying the environment to learn about systems of power, like the rise of the Sugar Revolution and its relationship with the Golden Age of European Piracy.

Historians often leave out an important voice in their stories: the planet. In The Fellowship of the Tree Rings, we hear about the environment’s role in one of the most formative time periods in the Western Hemisphere, the Sugar Revolution and the Golden Age of European Piracy. As we enter an era defined by human-made climate change, it is even more important to understand the historical relationship between social changes and the climate. Trouet, Domínguez-Delmás, and Harley tell us to first look at the environment itself.

Now, when I reflect on my work contextualizing The Fellowship of Tree Rings, I think again about what Joey Burns meant when he said, “Every tree you see around you has the story of its life hidden in its rings.”[15] A tree’s rings are not just the story of its life but a perspective on the history of the world around it.

Aidan Dresang is an undergraduate history major studying to become a public high school history teacher. He is interested in environmental history, resistance movements, and histories of the Americas. As a future history teacher, Aidan hopes to teach history critically and bridge the community-classroom divide. He is currently a ClioVis intern.

[1] Joey Burns, “Mt. Lemmon Science Tour” (Audio Tour, University of Arizona College of Science, 2015).

[2] Burns.

[3] Latif Nasser and Lulu Miller, “The Fellowship of the Tree Rings,” RadioLab, accessed October 25, 2023, https://www.radiolab.org/podcast/fellowship-tree-rings/transcript.

[4] Valerie Trouet, Tree Story: The History of the World Written in Rings (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022), 203.

[5] Trouet, 201.

[6] Trouet, 204.

[7] Nasser and Miller, “The Fellowship of the Tree Rings.”

[8] Hackney Blackwell, Amy, and Elizabeth P. Manar, eds. “Hurricane.” In U-X-L Encyclopedia of Weather and Natural Disasters, 398–407. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2016.

[9] Charenko, Melissa. “IHS Climate in Context: Climate by Proxy.” Not Even Past, December 15, 2020. https://notevenpast.org/ihs-climate-in-context-climate-by-proxy/.

[10] Nasser and Miller, “The Fellowship of the Tree Rings.”

[11] Robert C. Ritchie, Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates (Cambridge (Mass.): London Harvard University Press, 1986), 15.

[12] Richard S. Dunn, Sugar, and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (Chapel Hill, UNITED STATES: Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, 1972), 50–68.

[13] Aimee Wodda, “Piracy in Colonial Era,” in The Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice, 1st ed. (Wiley, 2013), 2, https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118517383.wbeccj528.

[14] Barry W. Higman, “The Sugar Revolution,” The Economic History Review 53, no. 2 (2000): 213.

[15] Burns, “Mt. Lemmon Science Tour.”

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.

Notes from the Field: Reflections on Dictatorship and Democracy in Argentina

In January 2023, I traveled nearly three hundred miles from my apartment in Buenos Aires to meet a stranger in Paraná, Argentina. We had chatted sporadically via WhatsApp, but I had agreed to spend a long weekend in her home months before we ever met. As I stepped off the bus, I had little sense of what awaited me, yet I was excited to finally meet Luz.

Our meeting happened by chance. A few months earlier, I started research in the Archivo General for my dissertation on President Raúl Alfonsín. He had led Argentina’s 1983 democratic transition, following the country’s longest and most brutal dictatorship. Between 1976 and 1983, the military junta forcibly disappeared an estimated 30,000 people. I had mentioned this project to Álvaro, another doctoral student working in the archives. That weekend he texted me from his friend’s home. “You’ll never believe this,” he said, “but my friend’s parents were friends of Alfonsín.” Accompanying his text was a photo of Luz, walking alongside the president. Álvaro said that he had told Luz about my project, and she had invited me to visit.

Raúl Alfonsín and Enrique Pereira at a book talk in the Biblioteca Popular in Paraná (courtesy of Luz Buscema)

Luz’s invitation was unexpected and unusual but also very exciting. I quickly followed up by WhatsApp. She promised to share books and photos from her late husband Enrique’s personal archives. Enrique had held local political office for Alfonsín’s party, la Unión Cívica Radical (the Radical Civic Union, UCR). He had also spent thirty years writing a history of the UCR and its important figures. After Enrique’s death, Luz had undertaken the process of editing and publishing his life’s work. Now she offered to share these materials and her memories of Alfonsín’s presidency with a curious historian from the United States.

Luz alongside President Alfonsín (courtesy of Luz Buscema)

Arriving in Paraná in January, I immediately felt overwhelmed. The bus ride from Buenos Aires lasted a little over eight hours, and Luz greeted my tired face with a flurry of questions. I worried that my Spanish would sound rough or that she would regret inviting me. On the way to her home, I tried to organize my thoughts. I had never collected interviews in such an intimate way, and I was anxious not to overstep or offend my host. Luz, on the other hand, seemed eager to begin sharing her stories.

I spent the first full day in Paraná sorting through Enrique’s papers and photos. As I read his work, I gained a better sense of his life and career. Luz helped fill in the gaps—the tiny details that remained outside of her husband’s papers. She remembered difficult years under the military dictatorship. Prior to 1976, Luz and Enrique had participated in local politics and labor unions. The military regime would criminalize these activities, and those who participated risked arrest, torture, or disappearance. Despite the high levels of repression, Luz and Enrique continued to engage in their old social circles and to organize secret political meetings.

This framed photo of President Raúl Alfonsín greets all visitors to Luz’s home (author’s photo)

A palpable sense of fear permeated Luz’s memories. She spoke of how the couple navigated the constant threat of repression. “We thought one of us should stay . . . stay alive to take care of the children,” Luz said. Often this meant that she stayed home while her husband attended meetings. Other times the couple ignored their fears and opened their own home as a space for political gatherings. They hosted a talk by future president Raúl Alfonsín at their home in 1981—two years before the dictatorship’s end. Luz explained how they had carefully instructed guests to arrive at varying times and in small groups to avoid suspicion. “The only one who wasn’t afraid was Alfonsín,” recalled Luz.

Raúl Alfonsín in the backyard of Luz and Enrique in December 1981 (courtesy of Luz Buscema)

Later, I asked Luz why she agreed to host meetings in her home despite her fears. “I always liked open doors,” she replied. Perhaps that also explained why she willingly invited a stranger to spend the weekend in her home. This openness struck me as remarkable, and our conversations enriched my project. Luz’s recollections might not become the focus of my dissertation, but her stories echo throughout its pages. Often overshadowed in the official narratives, experiences like those of Luz and Enrique are a powerful reminder of the everyday courage and resilience that quietly shaped Argentina’s path toward democracy.

Gabrielle Esparza is a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American history, with a focus on twentieth-century Argentina. Her dissertation revisits President Raúl Alfonsín’s democratic project to examine the intersection of welfare policy and democratization in post-dictatorship Argentina. She holds a B.A. in History and Spanish from Illinois College and received a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Argentina in 2017. There she taught at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Gabrielle graduated with her M.A. in History from the University of Texas at Austin in 2020. Her master’s thesis The Politics of Human Rights Prosecutions: Civil Military Relations during the Alfonsín Presidency, 1983-1989 examines the evolution of President Raúl Alfonsín’s human rights policies from his candidacy to his presidency, which followed Argentina’s most repressive dictatorship.

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.

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

banner image for Review of 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.

book cover for Millennium

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.

book cover for our America

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, and 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:

  1. 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.”
  2. 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.”
  3. 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 follows 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.

Review of Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America (2020), by Tanya Harmer

banner image for Review of Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America (2020), by Tanya Harmer

At about nine o’clock on the morning of September 11, 1973, Beatriz Allende, the daughter of Socialist President Salvador Allende, arrived with her younger sister Isabel at the Chilean presidential palace in the heart of downtown Santiago.[1] The military coup that would end her father’s presidency, and Chile’s dream of a peaceful revolution, had begun around dawn that day. Though seven months pregnant at the time, Beatriz had come to join forces with the presidential bodyguard to defend, by force of arms if necessary, the legitimate presidency of her father and her country’s democratic transition to socialism.

Beatriz had acted as her father’s right hand on the executive team since he took office. But in recent months, as signs of an imminent overthrow became clear, President Allende had begun to pull his daughter back from the political front lines in order to protect her. That morning, in spite of her resistance, he ordered Beatriz to leave, along with her sister and five other women. In the words of Tanya Harmer, author of Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America, Allende’s effort to shield his daughter from the impending attack “amounted to an act of betrayal from the person Beatriz loved most,” and he did it “because she was a woman” (212). Harmer’s recent monograph provides serious readers of history with a riveting close-up of how Chileans experienced their revolutionary years, focused especially on how leftist longings for a more just and equitable society challenged culturally-determined presuppositions. Like Harmer’s acclaimed masterwork, Allende’s Chile and the Interamerican Cold War (2011), this book prioritizes local agency and conflict over international interference to show how Chileans struggled to define their own history. 

The primary subject of this volume, Beatriz Allende, shines in public memory as Allende’s favorite child, the middle daughter who became the son he never had. Educated in revolutionary politics from an early age, Beatriz followed in her father’s footsteps, first into the medical profession and then into Socialist Party militance. Though not outright wealthy, the family belonged to Chile’s comfortable intellectual middle class. They vacationed at the upscale seaside town of Algarrobo and, like any Chileans of means, they had domestic servants who did all their cooking and cleaning. The Allende clan could not be called armchair socialists, by any means, but they did not actually belong to the masses of working poor their political cause championed.   

A large crowd marches along a tree-lined street in Santiago in this black-and-white photograph from 1964. Members of the crowd are holding aloft several large banners, all of which indicate support for Salvador Allende. Two banners are easily legible; they read "Telefonicos con 1 Allende" and "Trabajadores municipales con Allende."
Supporters of Salvador Allende’s 1964 presidential campaign parade in the streets of Santiago. Allende lost the election of 1964 but would go on to win the presidency six years later. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

As a medical student at the University of Concepción, Beatriz grew close to the Enríquez brothers, Luciano Cruz, and Bautista Van Schouwen. Together with Beatriz’s first cousin, Andrés Pascal, they would become founding members of Chile’s most radical leftist organization, the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, usually remembered by its acronym, MIR. After some training in Cuba, and in opposition to her father’s lifelong commitment to the peaceful road to socialism, Beatriz embraced MIR’s option for armed insurrection as the only path to a meaningful revolution. She never made the switch to MIR, instead acting as a permanent go-between, informally linking MIR with Salvador Allende’s leftist coalition. In 1967, she did become a part of a very secret armed faction of the Socialist Party, called Organa, that mobilized in support of Bolivia’s ELN—Ejército de Liberación Nacional—as it attempted, in vain, to revive Che Guevara’s ill-fated insurrection there. Committed to actual armed participation, she found that the elenos (as ELN members styled themselves) protected her, partly because she was a woman, but mostly because she was Salvador Allende’s daughter and more valuable to their cause if she managed to stay alive.

Beatriz married a Cuban intelligence agent, Luis Fernández Oña, in 1970. Through him, she had already become a backchannel liaison between Allende’s coalition and the Cuban high command. After the coup in 1973, Beatriz fled to Cuba with her husband. She had her second child in Cuba, and she found herself thrust into a very public role, representing the exiled Chilean left, and the many victims of the military dictatorship back home. As the government of General Augusto Pinochet became an international pariah, Beatriz became an international celebrity, but it was not a role she wanted.

Though fascinated by Cuba, Beatriz found no peace there. Cuban authorities detained Loti, her long-time housekeeper—who had been caught in a lesbian relationship—and sent her off for reeducation. Fidel’s revolution considered homosexuality, and even feminism, to be capitalist vices that would naturally fade away in the socialist utopia of tomorrow. Moreover, classless revolutionary Cuba could offer no replacement for Loti. As a consequence, in her early thirties, with her fine medical training and her unfulfilled revolutionary aspirations, Beatriz Allende found herself isolated in a foreign land, facing the unknown challenge of traditional feminine domesticity for the first time (249). To make matters worse, news of the assassinations of former comrades, including Miguel Enríquez and Orlando Letelier, began to trickle in, making Beatriz feel increasingly helpless. That fatal combination drove her into a severe depression. She died by her own hand in 1977.

While Harmer’s work is rich in personal details and human drama, she did not set out to write a biography. Her study focuses on the catalytic agency of an extraordinary person pivotally situated in the unfolding of many previously untold historical connections. In the process, she reveals many previously unrecounted historical connections. The author’s sensitivity to the particularities of Chilean revolutionary culture is unparalleled. Elegantly written and abundantly sourced in memoirs, letters, and periodical sources—much of them from Cuba—Harmer’s skillful treatment of extensive personal interviews makes this work unique and remarkable. Harmer has created a rigorous, unbiased, but very gendered study, showing how the patriarchal patterns of even the most revolutionary movements consigned Beatriz Allende and others like her to a very particular kind of evolving agency. Ultimately, the author attributes her protagonist’s untimely demise to the internal contradictions and unviability of that gendered but revolutionary role.

Through the lens of this one conflicted revolutionary life, Harmer shines light on the many contingencies that contributed to the Chilean revolutionary phenomenon. Her study examines, for example, the growing influence of Chilean youth in the long decade of the 1960s. Compounded by the disruptions of an enormous earthquake in 1960, which united young people in massive solidarity efforts, sheer numbers, a fact that can be attributed to the post-war baby boom, made Chilean twenty-somethings a new and powerful contingent. Universities became the room where it happened. As Harmer observes, “university student numbers rose from 7,800 in 1940 to just over 20,000 in 1957, and 120,000 by 1970” (10). That university experience, as Beatriz knew it, represented a quantum leap in the political potential of the younger generation.

But even that giant leap would not be enough. In the most hopeful early days of the Popular Unity experiment, Harmer observes that “the opposition was strong and united. Indeed, the Left’s defensive measures . . . paled in comparison with the Right’s organization, resources, and propensity for violence” (196). Right wing women, as historian Margaret Power observed in her foundational study from 1998, formed the ideological bedrock of that opposition.[2] But there were left wing women, too, with unique struggles, decisive agency, and an untold story. Harmer has opened a new window on them.  

A black-and-white photograph of Salvador Allende and his Minister of Labor and Social Welfare, Mireya Baltra, in the midst of a large crowd of people wearing suits. Both Allende and Baltra are smiling; the President is handing his minister a document.
President Allende photographed with his Minister of Labor and Social Welfare, Mireya Baltra, a member of the Communist Party of Chile. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Despite its many strengths as a work of multilayered analysis, the book has some flaws. One is a simple editorial failure: a propensity to reproduce grammatical and orthographic errors in the Spanish language. Población, a Chilean settlement of the urban poor, has an accent mark in the singular form. Poblaciones, in the plural, does not, but Harmer’s work consistently maintains that telltale accent mark. This kind of defect does not detract from the overall argument, nor from the English reader’s appreciation. Chilean scholars, on the other hand, ever mindful of their legalistic traditions, especially when it comes to proper Spanish grammar and spelling, may be frustrated by these minor orthographic failings.

A second misunderstanding goes deeper. The author observes that, in her mid-thirties, Beatriz didn’t even know how to fry an egg. This is by no means an overstatement, but the author leaves it at that, as if to say, it would only occur to the unjust patriarchal universe to expect that women should be frying eggs (185, 233). In making such statements, Harmer elides over the fact that an ignorance of domestic skills in Chile often revealed more about social class than about gender roles. This was especially true for the revolutionary left. What good was a revolutionary who could shoot an AK-47, but then needed to be fed by someone else at the guerrilla hideout?

Among pobladores, Chile’s shantytown dwellers, anyone who could not buy fresh bread, fry an egg and slice a tomato would be esteemed pituco—haughty or snobbish—a fish out of water. In the informal economy of extreme poverty, where women could earn cash frying the eggs uptown, their unemployed menfolk often took care of housekeeping by default. Egg frying, a fact of life for the poor, became an asset and a virtue for a true guerrilla fighter.

Harmer recognizes that with regard to gender equality, it would be “unfair to expect the Left to have adopted practices not found anywhere else in society” (14). In fact, it would be anachronistic. And Beatriz Allende never identified as a feminist, but as a revolutionary guerrilla fighter. But cultural presuppositions allotted her only a supporting role. In exile after the coup, travelling between solidarity events, she commented to a friend that she had grown tired of being “Allende’s daughter” (260). She wanted to be Tania, the legendary compañera of Che Guevara, who supposedly died fighting by his side in the Bolivian altiplano (257). Though Beatriz Allende never achieved that dream, her experience made it possible for other women to dream it, too. Her prominence helped to shape a vocabulary that, as Harmer points out, contributed to “a searing call to end gender violence” during the 2019 protests in Chile (274). That call went viral worldwide.

[1] Isabel Allende, the daughter of the President, should not be confused with her second cousin, Isabel Allende, the acclaimed author of the novel The House of the Spirits (1982).

[2] Margaret Power, Right Wing Women in Chile: Feminine Power and the Struggle Against Allende, 1964-1973 (New York: Routledge, 1998)

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.

Republics of Knowledge, Democracy, and Race in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America (2020) by Nicola Miller

banner image for Republics of Knowledge, Democracy, and Race in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America

Professor Nicola Miller’s research on intellectual history, knowledge, and modernity in nineteenth-century Spanish America has informed my own work in several meaningful ways. In her recent book Republics of Knowledge: Nations of the Future in Latin America (2020), Miller understands Spanish American republics as “communities of shared knowledge,” rather than as “imagined communities” à la Anderson. By focusing on “republics of knowledge,” Miller illuminates how the historical processes of nation-building and the creation of collective identities intersected and were negotiated in the realm of public knowledge during the nineteenth century. This helps us to better understand how an extraordinary array of historical actors, networks, institutions, and settings contributed to crafting these political communities. As Miller argues, knowledge, however imperfect or fragmentary, is more substantial and evidence-based than imagination.

book cover for Republics of Knowledge: Nations of the Future in Latin America

Miller proposes the term localized transnationalism to analyze the multitude of exchanges, connections, and comparisons that took place between the countries of the region. I found this analytical category particularly productive. By highlighting those transferences of knowledge within the region’s borders, so often overlooked by scholars, Miller counteracts well established understandings of Spanish American knowledge as derivative and mimetic and challenges the traditional approaches to the directionality of knowledge in the region. Through this concept, Miller’s work transcends historiographical binomials—such as global and local, modernity and tradition, center and periphery—that have structured both the practice of intellectual history and the ways we understand the relations between Latin America and the world until recent times.

Miller’s approach goes beyond analyzing how knowledge is produced and circulated in Spanish America. Her work delves deep into the fundamental question about how certain forms of knowledge acquire greater legitimacy and status than others, adding methodological breadth to the field. By bringing the problem of the recognition and validation of knowledge to the center of Spanish American intellectual history, Miller underscores how knowledge is deeply entrenched in global hierarchies of power, while at the same time it cannot be reduced to its imperial and colonial dimensions. Knowledge has its own dynamics and is not merely subsidiary to wider economic, political, and social processes.

Portrait of Alexis de Tocqueville
Portrait of Alexis de Tocqueville by Theodore Chasseriau, ca. 1850. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Building upon Miller’s methodological contributions and engaging in conversation with her work, my paper analyzes the ways Spanish American intellectuals envisioned the creation of social and political knowledge from the region as the main path to achieve political modernity and respond to entrenched global hierarchies of democracy, empire, and race. Like Miller, I am interested in the creation, validation, and recognition of knowledge. U.S. democracy became “universal” at the expense of rendering alternative knowledges in Spanish America as “local.” I study how Tocqueville’s ideas about Spanish America were received, deployed, and contested in the Atlantic world. While some Spanish Americans endorsed Tocqueville’s diagnosis of the region as a self-evident reality, others claimed his interpretation was the product of racial prejudice and eagerly refuted his ideas.

The alternative sociological knowledges these Spanish Americans created have remained buried and ignored. In the North Atlantic, meanwhile, Tocqueville’s ideas provided a political rationale for US expansion into Spanish America. Tocqueville’s ideas were not only validated and recognized in the North but also became fundamental to proclaim the historical teleology of US racial exceptionalism. The problem of the recognition of the political and social knowledge produced about democracy and race in Spanish America is at the heart of these discussions. 

Alexander will present his paper “Democracy and Race in the Americas: Readings of Tocqueville’s ‘Democracy in America South of the Rio Grande'” on Monday, September 13. Dr. Nicola Miller (University College London), Dr. Lina del Castillo (University of Texas at Austin), and Dr. James Sidbury (Rice University) will offer comments. More information on this event can be found here.

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

Film Review: La Llorona, Directed by Jayro Bustamante

banner image for Film Review: La Llorona, Directed by Jayro Bustamante

The legend of La Llorona is ubiquitous in Latin America. The tale typically centers on a woman who, upon learning of her husband’s infidelity, drowns their son and daughter in a moment of madness. She soon realizes what she has done and drowns herself in a river. Despite her contrition, she is unable to enter heaven and wails incessantly throughout the night. For this reason, she is known as La Llorona, the weeping woman.

In Jayro Bustamente’s 2019 film adaptation, La Llorona cries for her children once more. But rather than being killed by their own mother, the Guatemalan director foregrounds Enrique Monteverde (Julio Díaz), a former Guatemalan general during the nation’s civil war, as the perpetrator.

Movie poster for La Llorona; byline "the past will haunt you". A women peers out from behind an embroidered veil.

This powerful and moving film begins in Monteverde’s mansion. The elite, upper-class officer — ostensibly based on Guatemala’s infamous President Efraín Ríos Montt — is depicted in decline, struggling to breathe, and increasingly paranoid. Bustamante employs dark lighting and gaunt makeup to underscore the man’s ailing state. Yet it quickly becomes clear that Monteverde is not senile but rather haunted by the ghosts of his past. He is standing accused of genocide against the Ixil Mayas during the nation’s 36-year-long civil war.

At Monteverde’s trial, a veiled Maya woman begins testifying in a shadowy courtroom. In a beautiful-tracking shot, she recounts how the Guatemalan army arrived in her village, brutalized children, and razed her house to the ground. The grey-haired former general then takes the stand, flanked by more victims of his crimes. He declares that his intention was “to create a national identity in this country” and that he does not even understand the accusations against him. Despite his defiance, the court finds him guilty, causing Monteverde to hyperventilate before being rushed to the hospital.

The abuelas [grandmothers] of Sepur Zarco. First row seated (from right-left): Antonia Choc (blue huipil); Felisa Cuc (orange huipil); Rosario Xo (blue huipil); Candelaria Maaz (pink huipil); Manuela Bá (light blue huipil); Demesia Yat (dark blue huipil); Seated behind Demesia Yat (left) (wearing white huipil with green embroidery): Margarita Chub. Standing, second row, (from right-left): Matilde Sub (pink); Catarina Caal (off-white); María Bá (purple huipil); Cecelia Xo (purple huipil); Carmen Xol (tan flowered huipil)
Director Jayro Bustamente’s courtroom scene drew inspiration from indigenous women who testified, with their faces covered by veils, against military officers in the the Sepur Zarco case. The groundbreaking case resulted in the conviction of two former military officers of crimes against humanity and granted 18 reparation measures to the women survivors and their community. Source: UN Women

As the defeated Monteverde and his family await the patriarch’s sentencing in their mansion, Bustamante’s La Llorona enters the picture. Alma (María Mercedes Coroy), an almost spectral Maya woman, arrives at the front door after wading through a crowd of demonstrators celebrating the guilty verdict outside. She requests work since the house’s servants have all resigned due to the former general’s increasingly erratic behavior. Distracted by Monteverde’s conviction, the family hires the woman as a housemaid despite knowing little about her.

When Alma starts her job, Bustamante unravels Monteverde’s sinister past, and the horrors of the Guatemalan Civil War, with increasing detail. The former general’s history of sexually abusing indigenous women, for example, surfaces as the otherworldly Alma compels the depraved man to watch her as she dries off in the bathroom. When the family discovers Monteverde aroused by Alma, his daughter Natalia (Sabrina De La Hoz) and granddaughter Sara (Ayla-Elea Hurtado) look at him with utter disgust. The following morning, Sara mysteriously tells her mother that Alma’s two children died. Bustamante juxtaposes these surreal scenes with slow shots of Monteverde chasing voices of wailing women down the mansion hallway with a gun. In the process, he prompts viewers to wonder if Alma has possessed the former general in retribution, or if the woman’s sheer presence has caused him to unravel from long-standing guilt.

María Mercedes Coroy as Alma walks through protestors toward police in a still from the film.
María Mercedes Coroy as Alma walks toward police in a still from the film.

Regardless, Monteverde and his family’s hallucinations only become more vivid the longer Alma resides in the mansion. Bustamente’s llorona eventually possesses Monteverde’s wife Carmen (Margarita Kenéfic), who previously denied her husband’s invidious history. “The past is the past,” she had claimed, “[and] if we turn around, we’ll turn into salt sculptures.” The older woman is then forced to live the murder of Alma’s children as though they were her own. Here, Bustamante’s choice to foreground Guatemalan elites’ confrontation with the war, rather than indigenous victims’ physical suffering, helps prevent watchers from being unwittingly transformed into voyeurs of violence.

Ultimately, La Llorona is an engrossing interpretation of the famous folk legend. Bustamante’s follow-up to Ixcanul (2015) and Temblores (2019) —which addressed similarly fraught topics — uncovers the civil war’s indelible imprints on Guatemalan society. His use of magical realism evinces how indigenous victims remain profoundly impacted by the army’s counterinsurgency and how perpetrators have repressed their guilt. Although Alma herself perhaps demanded more characterization, her role largely stands as a representation of the war’s victims. Her hauntings of the elite family reveal that the past is not even past in Guatemala. And only by allowing suffering to speak, or wail, will justice be realized.

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.

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