Latin American History Archives - Page 2 of 3

Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia, by Nancy P. Appelbaum (2016)

What occurs when elite driven narratives about national identity dramatically different differ from the realities people experienced? During the nineteenth century throughout Latin America, when national boundaries were just beginning to become coherent, the upper echelons of society constructed tales about their nations that often vastly differed from lived experiences.

Between 1850 and 1859, the Chorographic Commission traveled the territory of present day Colombia in an attempt to map the land and the people who lived there, using chorography, or detailed representations of a particular region. Sponsored by the government of New Granada (an older name for Colombia), the commission produced a wealth of maps, texts, illustrations, as well as travel journals and diaries, in order to construct the image of a unified nation. Implicit in the commission’s initial mandate was the assumption that it would justify the existing administrative order by making that order appear natural.

The visual culture it produced, however, depicted a nation that was far from cohesive, with regional individuality and diversity. Instead of portraying a unified nation, the commission presented the country as fragmented into different, and often opposing regions, inhabited by racially and culturally distinct races, that reinforced assumptions of Andean and white mestizo superiority. In this new book, Nancy Appelbaum expands our understanding of this central paradox, demonstrating that the commission’s materials reveal some of the ways that Colombian elites grappled with the challenges posed by varied topographies and diverse inhabitants.

The leaders of the Chorographic Commission included both foreign members and others who were born and bred in New Granada. Two of the key figures on the commission, whose writings play an important role throughout the book, were Agustín Codazzi and Manuel Ancízar. Born in Italy’s papal states and a Napoleonic war veteran, Codazzi was in fact first contracted to map the Venezuelan provinces, which had seceded from Gran Colombia, in 1830. The secession precipitated Gran Colombia’s dissolution into Venezuela, Ecuador, and New Granada. Manuel Ancízar, a Colombian lawyer, writer, and journalist, joined Codazzi on the Commission in 1850.

Gran Colombia and modern countries (via Wikimedia Commons).

Using personal correspondence between Codazzi and Ancízar, Appelbaum argues that although the creation of the commission reflected nationalist aspirations of the government, it was fundamentally shaped through its leaders’ own exposure to foreign culture. The geographic writings of Prussian Alexander von Humboldt, as well as Italian Adriano Balbi, strongly influenced Codazzi’s and Ancízar’s initial overviews, as they “draped themselves in the ‘mantle of Humboldtianism’ to emphasize their own scientific legitimacy.” Inspired by Humboldt, Codazzi divided the terrain of New Granada according to the differing altitudes, winds, and vegetables that he encountered. The ideological influence of Humboldt, together with Balbi’s schematic list methodology, helped the Commission create a novel and distinct approach to chorography that was more affordable than the fashionable trigonometric survey.

The detailed accounts produced by Codazzi and Ancízar on the commission’s initial expeditions to the highland region of Antioquia and the Pacific lowland, comprised not only field reports, but also included detailed watercolors created by the commission’s first illustrators in order to depict the populations they encountered. Through comparing the perceptions noted in the field reports with the pictorial representations, the tension comes out between the inclination to show these regions as homogenous when the commission clearly experienced great heterogeneity of the people and customs.

William Price, Typical Inhabitants of the Province of Medellín (via World Digital Library).

This visual culture reflected a literary and artistic current in nineteenth-century Latin America called costumbrismo, or using descriptive prose and dialogue to verbally paint a local scene, emphasizing the customs and particularities of that locale. Within these works, tipos “types” that organized the population into component parts defined by race, occupation, and place, were created to provide both a visual and discursive way to manage the heterogeneity that the commission encountered. In William Price’s Tipos de Medellin, the commission’s artists displayed idealized images of people one would encounter when visiting these places. These images of the racial types that the commission produced updated the eighteenth-century genre of casta paintings for the republican era.

As the commission moved into the tropical lowlands and the eastern plains, Appelbaum further elaborates how the illustrations were largely aimed at an external audience in order to attract immigrants and economic investment to the region. The commission’s efforts were not meant to simply represent the landscape, they were also to transform it in the service of economic advancement. Codazzi believed that these areas, rich in agriculture and livestock, could support many more people than their sparse, midcentury population. Elites defined the tropics, for instance, as being filled with disease, poverty, and backwardness, making it a desirable region for colonization and improved methods of production. The commission took on an ethnographic dimension, as studying the population became an integral part in determining the economic capabilities of the land. Reports, maps, and paintings that Codazzi, Ancízar, and others, produced provided abundant information aimed to facilitate the conquest of the regions they mapped and studied.

Manuel María Paz, Provincia del Chocó: Aspecto esterior de las casas de Nóvita (via World Digital Library).

Applebaum goes on to discuss the methods that mid-nineteenth-century intellectuals living in the highlands around Bogotá employed to rationalize their claim over the local populations. By emphasizing the glorious origins and civilization of the Andean region around Bogotá, at the expense of lower “savage” climates, intellectuals reinforced Bogotá’s claim over this topographically disparate territory. Codazzi projected national history into the ancient past by weaving geology, archeology, and history together and referencing the past as “history” rather than prehistory. They placed themselves, not the local indigenous populations, who ultimately were the Commission’s guides, at the top of the intellectual scale to read the cataclysmic past.

Carmelo Fernández, Piedra grabada de Gámesa. Provincia de Tundama (via World Digital Library).

After Codazzi died in 1859, elites left behind tried to make sense of his project and battled each other over meanings and representations of the nation. Although members of the commission had high hopes for the mass reproduction and circulation of the materials they produced, that did not occur. Chorography and the work of the Chorographic Commission died with Codazzi, supplanted later in the nineteenth century by newer forms of mapping which are still common today, such as topography.

Although the work that the Chorographic Commission created between 1850 and 1859 was not as widely received as hoped, the spatialized and racialized regional hierarchy inherent in its visual materials would be reproduced and refined within Colombian scholarly and popular discourse. By no means the originator of this fragmented discourse, the Commission’s cartographic project formed the basis for most maps of Colombia into the early twentieth century.

Gracefully written, integrating over thirty images and maps, Mapping the Country of Regions offers a fascinating window into both the visual culture produced during the nineteenth century in Colombia, and the ways that territories, boundaries, and state-lines are constructed. Appelbaum’s contextualization of her source base that she makes explicit within her analysis heightens her claims about the use of geographic, ethnographic, and visual methods to secure territory. This theme of racialization of geographic hierarchy is not solely limited to Colombia, as ideas about how race and region have historically informed each other throughout Latin America. The blending of analysis with visual representation enables this book to be of use for those interested in not only Latin American nation-state building, but this methodology of combining visual and textual analysis would be of value for anyone incorporating visual culture into their own work.

Nancy P. Appelbaum, Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016).

Also by Madeleine Olson on Not Even Past:
A Texas Historian’s Perspective on Mexican State Anticlericalism.

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Antonio de Ulloa’s Relación Histórica del Viage a la America Meridional, by Haley Schroer.
Casta Paintings, by Susan Deans-Smith.

Secrecy and Bureaucratic Distancing: Tracing Complaints through the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive

By Vasken Markarian

On June 1982, two pages of official letter sized paper marked by the symbol of the Ministry of Finance made their way across a network of various bureaucratic desks of the National Police of Guatemala. A rural farmer and grandfather from Uspantán in El Quiché, Julio Ortiz (this is a pseudonym for reasons of privacy and safety) was addressing a top-level Police Chief in the capital city about his deep concern for a missing grandson. Kidnapped by a certain state authority figure under the false accusation of subversive activity, Julio’s grandson was missing and Julio had no information as to his whereabouts. The letter was Julio’s plea to the Chief to find out what happened to his grandson, pointing out that such a disappearance was “unjust.”

El Quiché department (via Wikimedia Commons).

This and many other similar complaints to authorities, called denuncias, or complaint reports, flowed into the offices of police officials and clerks at an alarming rate during the 36 years of civil war in Guatemala. They represented the responses of people in Guatemala to the widespread political agitation and repression that in some way or another affected their loved ones and friends, a pattern of repression that was the staple of successive governmental regimes with heavy anti-communist agendas since 1954. Julio’s 1982 denuncia belonged to a period in Guatemala’s history when state authorities ignored legal due process, violated civil rights and constitutional guarantees, and maintained widespread impunity for Police and Military actors.

For historians of Guatemala, a document such as this may be only one of a large number of such denuncias, yet Julio’s letter nevertheless serves to help us make educated guesses about the nature of the State Police in Guatemala, about secrecy in the structure of institutionalized violence, and about the relationship between Guatemalan society and its authoritarian figures. What stands out about this document in particular is the number of possible intermediaries involved in producing it and passing it along. To better understand such a document, we can try to recreate the course it ran, before reaching a final audience and a final verdict.

The National Palace in Guatemala City was the seat of the Guatemalan government during the civil war and the target of several attacks (via Wikimedia Commons).

As we zero in on the finer details of Julio’s denuncia, three important trends reveal themselves. First, it is likely that a lawyer or clerk, rather than Julio himself, who was a farmer in a rural town, produced this complaint. The denuncia was typed on formal letter sized paper that had to be bought from the Ministry of Finance. It uses formal language that had to be typed by someone with the resources to do so. The guidelines for what was considered a proper complaint were strict; anything that violated the guidelines would be thrown out.

A formalized complaint-making process was not the only clue that sheds light on the complaint making process. Other traces point to the intervention of a host of different offices, officers, and clerks before the letter reached its final destination. For example, certain stamps and signatures suggest its passing from a local police station or lawyer in El Quiché to the Department of Technical Investigations in the capital, Guatemala City, and then back to the Chief of Police in El Quiché. The back and forth journey of Julio’s letter from the local town to the capital and back was a reflection of the centralized but also dispersed nature of the Police bureaucracy.

Indigenous Ixil people exhume the remains of their disappeared loved ones from a killing field in Guatemala (via Wikimedia Commons).

If Julio had known about the back and forth movement of his denuncia, he still might have hoped his complaint would remain intact. What he had no control over, however, was the fact that the content of his denuncia had to be diluted as it passed through Police offices. A separate cover letter attached to the complaint appeared in front of it. The Inspector General had stamped it, and it also included many clues to suggest that it passed through the hands of one or more clerks in the Inspector General’s office. For example, a one-sentence summary of the contents of the letter appears conspicuously scribbled sideways on the margins, indicating that some clerk in the Inspector General’s office or in the Chief of Police of Quiche’s office wanted to make approaching the document more efficient for the next person who was to read it.

What do these tentative conclusions say about the ability of Julio to make his complaint heard? Efficiency and conciseness were important priorities for police clerks. The diluting of his denuncia and its passing through dispersed offices created distance between the person making the complaint and the highest office where the record ended up. This gap then, contributed to the difficulty for people like Julio to reach authorities and be heard in a more authentic way.

The Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive was discovered in 2005 (via AHPN).

Julio was not likely to receive an answer to his complaint. Like many others, it passed through a complex process of formalizing and diluting while physically moving through a network of intermediaries that was hierarchical and centralized yet dispersed and secretive. Guatemalan authorities rarely responded to inquiries about disappeared or illegally detained family members or friends. This official silence by the police was not simply the product of inaction and indifference. It depended on a concerted effort by various bureaucratic actors to process information and, in so doing, alter its meaning and significance. Over the course of the civil war, thousands of heartfelt denuncias fed an enormous police archive that represented police repression and secrecy.

In a country such as Guatemala with a legacy of state institutionalized violence and impunity, the millions of denuncias such as Julio’s letter, uncovered in the National Police archive, are important tools for seeking justice. Sometimes, they can help uncover links to other documents that serve as further evidence. Thinking about how intermediaries are an integral part of institutional secrecy, we can deconstruct the image of the police state as a homogenous entity. We can locate the responsibilities that rested on the shoulders of important actors at different levels of the authoritarian infrastructure.

Sources:

Digital Archive of the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive. For reasons of privacy and safety, I have chosen not to cite the specific location of this document.

Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional, From Silence to Memory: Revelations of the Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional (Eugene, OR: University of Oregon, 2013).

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Two documentaries on Guatemala’s violent civil war.
Great Books on La Violencia in Guatemala.
Virginia Garrard-Burnett on La Violencia in Guatemala.

History of Modern Central America Through Digital Archives

By Vasken Makarian

What happens when historians take a pause from using archives to write history and instead delve into the science of producing digital archives? If you are a traditional historian, you might cower at the bombardment of technological know-how that comes your way. Look a little closer however, and you soon find that archival science is an intellectually and theoretically rich field. Engaging with digital archives and digital history is a great way for scholars to re-think how they and archivists alike, select, categorize, and publicize historical data for educational and scholarly purposes. As historians increase their use of digital platforms, it can be helpful for all historians to take a step in the archivists’ shoes.

In the spring of 2016, students of Dr. Virginia Garrard’s course, “History of Modern Central America through Digital Archives” had this opportunity. The course bridged traditional historiography with an introduction to digital archives and digital history. Students came from a wide array of disciplines, from Information Studies to History. For their final project, they could choose between writing a traditional research paper or designing a digital history project, or both. This mix of both worlds allowed for a hybrid conversation that melded traditional historical debates with sensitivity to the way scholars and archivists produce and organize knowledge.

Biblioteca_Nacional_de_Guatemala_Luis_Cardoza_y_Aragón

The National Library of Guatemala, a more traditional place for historians to conduct research (via Wikimedia Commons).

Students eager to get up-to-date with newer digital history platforms were not disappointed. Homework assignments ranged from digital primary source scavenger hunts to analyzing pre-established digital scholarly interfaces, such as the Latin American Digital Initiatives Collection (LADI). The class introduced students to up-to-date digital projects like interactive maps, self-correlating databases, and archival metadata. Students also worked in groups to grapple with the challenges of making digital archives more accurate and efficient.

One of these challenges involved selecting the right “subject terms” that help users search for content in digital databases. To facilitate the search process, students needed to produce terms that were neither too narrow nor too broad, and that represented the “aboutness” of their subjects. Just how efficient, accurate, and unbiased these terms appeared influenced the way users would receive and write about history. In one instance, I had to produce English subject terms for a short and vague Guatemalan newspaper about a desaparecido or forced disappearance. Choosing between terms like “assassination,” “murder,” and “homicide” prompted me to scrutinize the meaning, political implication, and contextual relevance of each term. These questions added a nuanced perspective to my research as well.

Forced disappearances were common during the Guatemalan Civil War (via YouTube).

A less somber yet strangely satisfying task involved creating a sound bite archive from Radio Venceremos—an underground anti-government radio program from 1980s El Salvador. Here, students created an archive of background noises: shouts, singing, frogs, birds chirping, gunfire, alarms, helicopters, and static. Rather than paying attention to content, they recorded language dynamics, the environment, and materiality. This innovative way of organizing data allowed them to get at more subtle information, such as timing, emotion, background events, secrecy, and level of danger. This was detective work at its finest and “tech-savvyist.”

Outside of the Radio Venceremos studio (via Wikimedia Commons).

Of course, walking away with new skills in digital media was not the be-all and end-all. Thinking more deeply about digital archives illuminated urgent theoretical questions relevant to scholars and archivists alike. To whom do historical records belong? What biases do archivists and scholars convey when presenting data? Do living (or even dead) historical actors want others to publicize information about them? How do we reconcile the desire to uncover histories, with the risks and inconveniences public knowledge poses for historical actors and their communities?

Personally, this course contributed to thinking about my dissertation on Guatemala’s recent civil war, which spanned from the 1960’s to the 1990’s. The legacy of the civil war carries over to present-day Guatemala and presents political and ethical roadblocks to the publication and presentation of records. Emerging data may appear rich for archiving, as the recent Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive demonstrated. However, historical records are living things that carry emotional, political, and economic consequences for present-day actors. As this course demonstrated, archives are anything but a mere compilation of sources. They require much human configuration, strategic organization, and logistical coordination. On the other hand, they demand sensitivity to the ethical, political, and intellectual problems of producing knowledge.

Before Hamilton

By Peter Kunze

In a recent interview with Fusion about how Hamilton (2015) “revolutionized” Broadway for performers of color, the Tony Award-winning lead, Leslie Odom, Jr., recalled,

“I saw a reading of Hamilton at Vassar. There’s four men of color on stage, singing a song about friendship and brotherhood, and it undid me. I had never seen anything, anything like that. And I just knew that this thing was so special, and that the world needed to see it.”

obama_greets_the_cast_and_crew_of_hamilton_musical_2015

Members of the Hamilton cast greet President Barack Obama in 2015, Leslie Odom, Jr. is in the center, in a blue coat (via Wikimedia commons).

There’s no denying that the decision to cast Hamilton with actors of colors—save King George—was an important decision worthy of praise. (The show has also faced criticism, though, for leaving real-life people of color out of the musical retelling.) Odom’s comment, however, should be treated with a healthy skepticism, because it unintentionally obscures the long history of musicals by, about, and for people of color. While Odom celebrates the representational politics of Hamilton, he overlooks the long history of people of color writing, producing, directing, and starring in a theater of their own, on and off Broadway. From the Chitlin’ Circuit to El Teatro Campesino, people of color have long found creative expression on stages across the United States, often when they were excluded from more mainstream venues. Diversity on Broadway remains an important issue and it’s hardly the progressive beacon one may hope. Nevertheless, several key shows and performers paved the way for Hamilton, including Lin-Manuel Miranda himself.

lin-manuel_miranda_philippa_soo_leslie_odom_jr-_and_christopher_jackson_white_house_march_2016

Lin-Manuel Miranda, Philippa Soo, Leslie Odom, Jr., and Christopher Jackson perform at the White House, March 2016 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Musical theater historians note that the Broadway musical is one of only two native-born art forms; the other is, of course, jazz. The defining moment of musical theater’s maturation for many such scholars is the 1927 premiere of Show Boat, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s adaptation of Edna Ferber’s bestseller. Perhaps the most iconic moment in the show is when Joe, the African American stevedore, looks out over the Mississippi and bellows, “Ol’ Man River,” a moment immortalized on screen by Paul Robeson. Show Boat’s legacy rests upon its status as an “integrated musical”—that is, a show that seamlessly integrates the spoken dramatic portions (the “book”) with the music. Rather than musical interludes, characters break into song at moments of dramatic tension or comic relief. Sixteen years later, in 1943, Oscar Hammerstein II, now partnered with Richard Rodgers, produced Oklahoma!, which furthered the efforts to unite songs, lyrics, book, and choreography to create a serious work of dramatic literature. Critics at the time praised the arrival of a new American art form—one, of course, that was years in the making and deeply indebted to various European and American cultural traditions.

This narrative of artistic progress, promoted in large part by Oscar Hammerstein II himself, has been challenged in recent years. Last theater season, George C. Wolfe staged Shuffle Along, or, the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed, not so much a revival as a metamusical about the making of the original show (the Tony Award nominators recognized the show in the Best Musical rather than the Best Revival of a Musical category.) Wolfe argues this popular show was an important forerunner of the “integrated musical,” but equally important, it reminds us of the rich tradition of African American theater and people of color theater more broadly.

pearl_bailey_moms_mabley_the_pearl_bailey_show_1971

Moms Mabley and Pearl Bailey performing on The Pearl Bailey Show, February 1971 (via Wikimedia Commons).

The African American musical, in particular, has a long and storied history dating back before and including Shuffle Along. Performers like Moms Mabley, the Nicholas Brothers, and Lena Horne were featured in Broadway revues, and while Porgy and Bess (1935) was developed by white creators, the opera had an all-black cast and remains a landmark in American music. The late 1960s into the 1970s saw several all-black musicals, including Hallelujah, Baby! (1967), Raisin (1973), Your Arms Too Short to Box with God (1976), and Ain’t Misbehavin’ (1978). The most popular was The Wiz (1975), running for over 1600 performances and serving as the basis for the Diana Ross film (1978). Pearl Bailey led an all-black revival of Hello, Dolly! in 1975, furthering the practice of non-traditional casting that has sparked a good deal of debate on Broadway in recent years. In the 1980s, August Wilson began writing the “Pittsburgh Cycle,” a series of ten plays documenting black life during each decade of the 20th century. Of course, some of these shows had creative teams including or dominated by white talent, but the effort to stage black lives should not be dismissed. Many of these shows introduced or showcased the leading black talent of their respective eras.

Screenshot from The Wiz, 1978 (via Youtube).

The early 1990s saw shows like Once on This Island (1990), Five Guys Named Moe (1992), Jelly’s Last Jam (1992), and Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk (1996), showcasing the talents of performers like Gregory Hines, Savion Glover, and LaChanze. It also saw the debut of Audra McDonald, perhaps the pre-eminent Broadway star of her generation, having won six Tony Awards for her work in plays and musicals—more than any other stage actor ever. Shows with multiethnic casts, including Rent (1996), The Lion King (1997) and Ragtime (1998), offered a more inclusive theater and vision of America. Nevertheless, Latinx and Asian American performers on Broadway unfortunately remain less visible than their white counterparts. In recent years, the romanticized stereotypes and misguided multiculturalism found in The King and I (1951), West Side Story (1957) and Miss Saigon (1991) have been countered by a musical theater about and by people of color, including Allegiance (2015), Fela! (2009), and Miranda’s earlier effort, In the Heights (2008). Miranda also translated the lyrics of the Puerto Rican characters into Spanish for the 2009 bilingual revival of West Side Story, directed by the show’s original book writer, Arthur Laurents. Unable to compete with the spectacle and backing available to megamusicals, these shows often had relatively short runs. Hamilton, however, may be the first contemporary show to weather the storm and emerge as a long-running success on par with The Producers (2001) or The Book of Mormon (2011). In fact, Hamilton was the highest grossing show last year, followed closely by The Lion King.

In the Heights won the Tony for Best Musical in 2008 (via Playbill).

At this point, it has become nearly impossible for mainstream critics and commentators to discuss Hamilton without resorting to hyperbole. It has received winning endorsements from President Obama to Oprah Winfrey as well as Tonys, a Grammy, and a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. To be sure, these accolades for creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, his production team, and the cast were well-deserved. Yet in appreciating the original contribution of Hamilton, we must not forget the shows that paved the way—shows Miranda has acknowledged in interviews and in Hamilton itself—to understand the rich, albeit complex, history of representation on the boards and behind the scenes of Broadway.

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Charlotte Canning writes about internationalism and US theatre during the 2oth century.
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Historical Objects: Latin America

“Colonial Latin America Through Objects” is a class taught by Prof. Jorge Cañizares that offers a view of a region’s past by exploring material remains: currencies, playing cards, musical scores, water mills, comets, relics, mummies, coded messages, to name only a few of the 50 objects studied. The class introduces students to a region from unusual angles that upset deeply seeded assumptions about Hispanics.

The students are required to produce two online museum exhibits. The five best exhibits for the mid–term are sampled here. These five exhibits address unusual aspects of colonial Latin America through their material culture. Click on links to see full exhibits (and credits for images).

The history of conquest as described in sixteenth-century indigenous codices by Tymon Sloan

Bernadino De Sahagun, Illustration of the Mirror-Faced Bird, La Historia Universal De Las Cosas De Nueva Espana,1577 Ink on Paper Medicea Laurenziana Library, Florence, Italy

Bernadino De Sahagun,
Illustration of the Mirror-Faced Bird, La Historia Universal De Las Cosas De Nueva Espana,1577
Medicea Laurenziana Library, Florence, Italy

Cranial Deformity and Identity by Aaron Quintanilla

Native Drinking Cups of the New World by Riley Reynolds

Ancient Zapotec Chocolate Vessel (Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art)

Syncretism and Marian Representations by Lily Folkerts

Our Lady of the Rosary of Potama (Anonymous, 17-18c, New Mexico History Museum)

Las Bolsas de Mandingo: Deconstructing Misconceptions of Traditional African Religions in the Luso-Atlantic World, by Maryam Ogunbiyi

Manuscript showing syncretism of African and Portuguese Catholic representations

Mapping Newcomers in Buenos Aires, 1928

by Joseph Leidy

Published in 1928, the Guía Assalam del Comercio Sirio-libanés en la República Argentina, or, the “Assalam Guide to Syro-Lebanese Commerce in the Republic of Argentina,” contains tens of thousands of names and addresses for shops, services, and professionals from among or affiliated with the Syrian and Lebanese communities of Argentina. “Syro-Lebanese” here corresponds with the Spanish siriolibanés, a term that gained some popularity throughout Latin America after WWI to designate a community wherein árabe (Arab), libanés (Lebanese), and sirio (Syrian) were associated with particular political movements. It also contrasted with turco, with which Levantine migrants were (and continue to be) labelled, having initially come with Ottoman documentation.

The guide features both cities with significant populations of siriolibaneses, like Buenos Aires, Santiago del Estero, and San Miguel de Tucumán, and the rural areas where many Syrians and Lebanese established themselves, including future Argentine president Carlos Menem’s father, who owned a store in the small town of Anillaco in La Rioja providence. The first map below presents the locations of the 1,633 entries for the city of Buenos Aires, providing a snapshot of the commercial and social geography of Arabic-speaking immigrants and their descendants in Argentina’s capital.

GIS data was imported from Google Maps. Some street names and numbers in Buenos Aires must have changed between the 1920s and the present, when coordinates were matched with addresses. However, these changes should not have had a major impact on this map, as most of the city’s main road infrastructure – on which the majority of the above entries are concentrated – have not changed significantly since the late nineteenth century.

A closer view with major avenues shows Syrian and Lebanese businesses throughout the city. Since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Buenos Aires had sported a vigorous transportation network and was known as the “City of Trams.” Unsurprisingly, then, the establishments listed in the Guía could be found on and around most major thoroughfares. Concentrations, however, are evident (1) on Tucumán and Lavalle Avenues in the Balvanera neighborhood, (2) Reconquista in today’s downtown Retiro and Centro neighborhoods, and, to a lesser extent, (3) along Rivadavia in the late nineteenth century suburbs of Flores and Floresta and (4) on Patricios between the working-class neighborhoods of Barracas and La Boca.

Many Syrian and Lebanese migrants to the Western Hemisphere established themselves initially by peddling various goods to rural markets. These mercachifles, or peddlers, played an important role in bringing urban consumer goods to rural Argentina, following burgeoning railway networks and often setting up permanent storefronts. Within the urban context of Buenos Aires, Syro-Lebanese businesses also spread throughout the city to market dry goods and consumer items. Tiendas, or “stores,” in green on the map below, are around 1,000 of the 1,633 addresses listed in the Guía. The vast majority of these were also mercerías that sold sewing supplies and could be found in the city center as well as the surrounding neighborhoods. Much of the city’s population must have had access to these corner shops.

The guide also includes around 350 businesses involved in the sale of clothing products, mostly tejidos, or general textiles, in addition to specialty shops like camiserías (for shirts), sederías (silk), and artículos de punto (knit woolen clothes). These are displayed in blue below; green dots indicate auxiliary industries, such as mercerías and confecciones (alterations).

Importers, like the textile businesses, were located for the most part in two downtown neighborhoods, (1) and (2) above. For example, the advertisement for Tufik Sarquis & Hno, on Reconquista Avenue in the Centro, shows the company to have commercial connections to European textile centers Paris and Manchester and a number of registered trademarks. Import businesses are displayed below in yellow.

Communal institutions, such as societies, publications, and religious institutions, in addition to professionals (mainly lawyers, dentists, and doctors) generally clustered around the downtown Reconquista Avenue, where much of the siriolibanés import and textile businesses were concentrated. Here, the Syro-Lebanese elite built a public life from commercial prosperity. Communal institutions are shown below in blue, while professionals are in purple.

This important area, pictured in detail below, provides a portrait of the urban layout of this Syro-Lebanese public sphere. The newspaper al-Mursal was affiliated with the nearby Misioneros Libaneses Maronitas, or the Lebanese Maronite Mission, while Bunader Y Rustom published the Lebanese periodical Azzaman. On the other hand, Imprenta Assalam, in addition to publishing the guide itself, issued the periodical Assalam, while community luminary José Moisés Azize, founder of El Banco Siriolibanés and president of El Club Siriolibanés, would later issue the first daily bilingual Arabic and Spanish newspaper in Argentina, El Diario Siriolibanés.

The only communal institutions that lay outside of downtown Buenos Aires are the Sociedad Islámica de San Martín (San Martín Islamic Society), the Sociedad Siriana de Socorros Mutuos (Syriac Mutual Aid Society), and La Natura, later Natur-Islam, a newspaper with a pan-Islamic political and religious orientation. That these religious minorities among Syro-Lebanese immigrants (the majority of whom were Maronite and Greek Orthodox Christians) are peripheral in a geographical sense is mainly indicative of the smaller size and financial weight of these communities. Note, as well, the Círculo Social Israelita, or Jewish Social Circle. The Guía features many Jewish and joint Jewish-Levantine businesses; connections between merchants of both communities was likely common, especially when many Jews from the Syrian city of Aleppo migrated to Argentina in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

As a whole, the Guía Assalam gives us a sense of the social and economic structure of the Syro-Lebanese community in Buenos Aires on the eve of the Great Depression. Importation firms, communal institutions, and professional services were based in certain downtown areas of the city, while textile and dry goods stores spread throughout the urban landscape. The guide also captures the diversity of Syro-Lebanese commerce, which included Sunni Muslims, Jews, Druze and various Christian sects and their respective communal organizations. At the same time, the Guía on its own fails to provide sufficient information for the typical migration history. It lacks, for example, the birthplaces or origins of the men and women it lists, unlike an otherwise similar 1908 Syrian Business Directory from the United States. Only when paired with other sources, like censuses, would the guide tell us much about family or hometown networks and the fates of migrant businesses over time.

The Guía Assalam is, nonetheless, a fascinating document on its own merits. What prompted the creation of this “ethnic yellow pages,” and what prompts similar efforts like the Syrian-American Directory mentioned above? The answer lies in part in an effort to control and project communal reputation. The guide serves as a means for the Imprenta Assalam, the guide’s publisher, to advertise the community’s commercial reach throughout Buenos Aires and the rest of Argentina. An introduction to the guide explains the Assalam-affiliated Oficina Consultativa del Comercio Sirio, or Consultative Office of Syrian Commerce, as follows:

There are no textile trading firms that do not have hundreds of Syrians among their clientele. Being as we are the most well-suited to know the community as a whole, we are, precisely for that reason, the most consulted to provide our opinion with respect to the commercial capacity of such clients.

The Guía simultaneously displays the informational capabilities of the Oficina Consultativa and attests to the commercial success of Syro-Lebanese businesses. More than just a directory of use to other Syrians and Lebanese, then, the guide represents the positioning of Assalam and its Oficina Consultativa as a conduit for interactions between the community and the wider Argentine economy and society.

Whose Classical Traditions?

By Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Whose classical traditions? That is the question implicit in the Classical Traditions in Latin American History conference that took place on May 19^th and 20^th in London. We convened to investigate the ways in which classical traditions endured in a region that is rarely associated with classical antiquity. These definitions are, by and large, the product of the northern European Renaissance and were established and developed in places like the Warburg Institute. Such understandings of the classics are so narrow that they explicitly exclude all of late antiquity and the descendants of these societies, namely, the medieval Arab caliphates, the Ottomans, and the low and high European Middle Ages. Is the global south in the Americas a rightful heir to the classical traditions as defined by the Warburg Institute? Given the questions and papers of this conference, it seems, the answer still is up for grabs.

Is a region whose systems of education forced Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, Ovid, and Virgil down the throats of preschoolers, highschoolers, sophomores, masters, and doctors for at least four hundred years a rightful heir to the legacies of the Greek and Roman classical ages? What are those legacies? I, for one, find classical Rome reproduced with far more fidelity in current conceptions of time, space, hierarchy, labor, family, the sacred, and community in Quito, my home town, than in London, where I am visiting for six months. Every day.

Is the Christian culture of late antiquity part of the classical traditions? Do systems of education that held Origen, Jerome, Augustine, and Ambrose as intellectual giants qualify as rightful heirs to the intellectual values of classical Rome and Greece? What are those values? Do the Franciscan, Augustinian, Dominican, and Jesuit inheritors of the radical Aristotelian materialism of the twelfth-century university scholasticism of Aquinas, Dun Scotus, and William Ockham qualify as rightful heirs? Do the tens of thousands of youths trained for 300 years at the universities, academies, and courts of Lima and Mexico (and at dozens of other colleges and universities throughout Spanish America) in scholastic realism and nominalism, the Justinian code, and the Decretales, that is, the Corpus Iuris Commune and the Corpus Iure Canonici, qualify? Do the Mompoxiano (Mompox, Cartagena de Indias) Juan Suarez de Mendoza and the political culture he embodied in the mid seventeenth-century Spanish Monarchy qualify?

Suarez de Mendoza was one of the most renowned publici iuris Caesarum Professoris in Salamentesi Academia. He was also the author of the most influential European text in classical Roman tort and property law, his Commentarii ad Legem Aquiliam, published in Salamanca in 1651 and reissued in Lyon and Ambers all the way into the late eighteenth century. Suarez de Mendoza dedicated his work to the Count of Castrillo, the President of the Council of the Indies. Suarez de Mendoza saw himself as a Roman Senator wearing togas in Madrid’s academies and amphitheaters, helping administer an empire larger than Rome’s. But Suarez de Mendoza was not a fluke. Andrew Laird’s paper cites the cases of the Augustinian Alfonso de la Veracruz and the Jesuit Antonio Rubio, whose commentaries on the Logic and Physics of Aristotle penned in the mid and late 16th century at the University of Mexico became textbooks for European liberal arts colleges and universities. Veracruz and Rubio, however, were originally trained in Salamanca and Alcala. Andrew therefore forgets to cite the case of those Peruvians and Nuevo Granadinos who were actually trained at local universities and whose Latin texts in logic, ontology, theology, and jurisprudence became standard textbooks all over Central and Western Europe, as well as Goa and Manila. Andrew is not alone in that forgetting.

Veracruz-dialectica aristoteles-mexico-1554

Cover of Alfonso de la Veracruz, Dialectica resolutio (Mexico, 1554)

For a moment consider some of these long forgotten figures. Gabriel Alvarez Velasco, a Nuevo Granadino from the small college-town of Tunja, whose Latin texts on the rights of widows, orphans, and the downtrodden, De Priviliegii Miserabilium, became the standard European textbook on the legal privileges of miserable (His Judex Perfectus and his Epitoma de Legis Humana were also European bestsellers for some 100 years). Or consider the case of the Riobambeño brothers Alfonso and Leonardo Peñafiel who competed with Francisco Suarez to be the most influential 17th century Jesuit logicians, philosophers, and metaphysicians in the global Jesuit order. The Peñafiel bothers’ countless texts (including the multivolume Cursus Integri Philosophici , the Disputationes Scholasticae et Morales, and the Disputationem Theologicarum) moved endlessly from the printing presses of Antwerp, Cologne, and Lyon into the Jesuits colleges of Goa, Sri Lanka, Manila, and Prague. Or take the case of Diego de Avendaño, educated in Cuzco, who became one of the most influential and original European canonists of his generation. He was also one of the most influential European scholars on Aristotle and a leading biblical exegete. His exquisite commentaries on Psalm 44 and 88 were printed in Lyon and Antwerp in 1653 and 1668 respectively under the provocative titles of Epithalatium Christi and Sancta Sponsae (the wedding of Christ and his pious wife, the church) and Aphitheatrum Misericordiae (the global manifestation of Christ’s Mercy). Avendaño’s biblical scholarship can only compete with that of another son of the University of San Marcos, Lima, the Augustinian Gaspar de Villarroel. Villarroel’s 1636 Madrid typological and literal interpretation of the Book of Judges, Ivdices Commentariis, was based on the four different versions of the text: Greek (Septuagint), Latin (Jerome’s vulgate), Hebrew (Masoretic version) and the Aramaic Targum. This was one extraordinary Limeño Jerome.

Cover of Diego de Avendaño, Psalm 44, (Lyon, 1653)

Villarroel was born and raised in a society entirely invested in his scholarship and that in return made him Bishop of Chile, Arequipa, and finally Charcas (the seat of the silver mines). Peru did not hesitate for one second, unlike the University of London, to channel millions to sustain institutions of humanist learning like the University of San Marcos. Authorities used treasure that came straight from the forced labor of miners in Potosi and Huancavelica. By mid-17th century, San Marcos had a roster of 150 Masters and 100 PhDs educating a community of 1,500 students in the liberal arts, theology, jurisprudence, and medicine. This was the epitome of the classical world: an academy of hundreds of philosophers built on the back of a vast pool of Andean quasi slaves (and free labor too). Then again, it took an empire for the Warburg Institute to emerge.

45. villaroel-Iudices_commentariis- madrid-1636 2

Cover of Gaspar de Villarroel, Ivdices Commentariis (Madrid, 1653)

The question addressed at this conference should be not whether there were “classical traditions” in Latin America, but whether these obvious classical traditions can be questioned out of existence or ruled out as completely marginal to the concerns of the millions of the illiterate and marginalized poor. The three papers under discussion make obvious how deep the classical traditions ran in the cultures of colonial and 19th century Spanish America. Andrew Laird maintains that it was the language of Aristotle’s polity, natural slavery, and barbarism that Spanish clerics and academics used to imagine theories of colonial legitimacy and sovereignty. He argues that it was the language of Lucian’s Saturnalia that allowed the magistrate and bishop Vasco de Quiroga to articulate a vision of two separate legal republics, one Indian and one Spanish. And that it was the language of Cicero (but also of Virgil and Plutarch I might add) that local Mexican academics used to counter the condescending views on the natural forces in, and the alleged dearth of academic institutions of, the Indies, both views held in tandem by European humanists and Neo Latinists like Joseph Justus Scaliger and Manuel Marti. Andrew forgets to cite the influential views of the Flemish humanist Justus Lipsius, whose inability to even consider institutions of learning in Spanish America caused members of the university of San Marcos like Diego de Leon Pinelo and the Franciscans brothers Salinas y Cordova to create genealogies of local academic excellence (see, for example Pinelo’s Hypomnema Apologeticum Pro Regali Academia Limensi, 1648) . These mid seventeenth-century Limeño accounts were not unlike those created by Eguiara y Eguren (see Biblotheca Mexicana sive Eruditorum Historia Virorum, 1755) in mid eighteenth-century Mexico to counter the patronizing views of Manuel Marti.

Nicola Miller, Erick Culhed, and Andrew Laird make explicit that it was the language of Roman republicanism and Greek aristocratic democracy that local learned elites deployed to endow their cities, patrias, and nations with vibrant moral genealogies. Nicola argues that it was the language of Roman republican resistance to tyranny that allowed marginalized popular black poets like Gabriel de la Concepcion Valdes, aka Placido, to wax lyrical against the tyranny of racism in mid-19th century Cuba. Erick maintains that it was the language of decadent imperial Byzantium that allowed late nineteenth century poets like the Puerto Rican Jose Jesus Dominguez, the Cuban Augusto de Armas, and the Nicaraguan Ruben Dario to invent a pan-Latin (Franco- and Hispanophile) culture of literary modernism. Ranging from popular to elite culture, from the Caribbean to Central America, and from the 1500s to the 1900s, the evidence is overwhelming: there were many, vibrant classical traditions all over Spanish America.

Why have these muscular traditions failed to constitute a narrative of a deep-rooted classical culture in Latin America? Weren’t these traditions in Latin America as deep and as significant as those of, say, Italy, Germany, or Britain? And yet my question for this audience goes much deeper: Why have classicists, and the Warburg Institute in particular, rarely looked at the global South to ponder whether the European humanist traditions might have been shaped by the “Latin American” learned communities I have briefly reviewed?

The scholarship on early modern humanism, recognized and celebrated by the Warburg, has painstakingly explored the impact of the indigenous peoples of the Americas on the creation of the Renaissance, itself a variety of many possible classical traditions. This scholarship has studied how Columbus and Luther brought into the glossaries, commentaries, and exegeses of ancient books the new worlds of geography and theology. In this type of scholarship, it is the Indian “savage” (demonic or noble), not the Spanish American Latinist, who is summoned as a heuristic device. It is time, however, to consider new genealogies for Europe’s early modern scholarship. In short, I am pleading, in Kant’s parlance, for a Copernican Revolution.

I have suggested that the classical tradition of seventeenth-century Spanish American academies and universities was so muscular that it shaped the classical traditions of Europe itself. We have yet to explore the impact that Nuevo Granadinos like Alvarez Velasco had on the European jurisprudence of distributive justice. We have yet to explore the role of Indianos like Suarez de Mendoza in the early modern transformation of property law. We have yet to ponder the influence of the mid-seventeenth-century professor of theology at the Royal University of Mexico, Juan Diaz de Arce, whose Opus Studioso de Sacrorum Bibliorum, book four of his massive two-volume treatise, Quaestionarii Expositvii pro clariori inteligentia Sacrorum Bibliorum (1647-48) was printed separately in Rome in 1750. Opus Studioso became influential with the Catholic curia at the height of the Catholic Enlightenment. Opus studioso was a bold argument on the epistemology of popular prophecy and the centrality of the illiterate in biblical interpretation. It is perhaps time to explore the significance of the Cuzqueno-educated Avendaño and the Limeño-educated Villarroel on biblical philology and exegesis, not only in Salamanca and Alcala but also in Antwerp and Lyon.

Image taken from avednano, Psalm 88 (Lyon, 1666)

Image taken from the cover of Diego de Avendaño, Psalm 88 (Lyon, 1666)

In a world of changing demographics and globalization, I suggest the Warburg Institute would greatly benefit from becoming curious about how Peruvian and Mexican traditions of classical scholarship transformed Italian, French, and German ones. For all the richness and oddities of the Warburg’s holdings, there is not a single copy in the library’s stacks of the works of Diego de Avendaño, Gaspar de Villarroel, Juan Suarez de Mendoza, Adolfo and Leopoldo Peñafiel, Gabriel Alvarez Velasco, and Juan Diaz de Arce. In fact, the Warburg holds not a single copy of the hundreds of texts penned by dozens of Spanish American Latinists that were printed in the presses of Rome, Cologne, Antwerp, Lyon, Prague, and Mainz throughout the long seventeenth century. The Warburg does not even have the token of all libraries with humanist and neo-scholastic collections, namely, the many commentaries on Aristotle by Antonio Rubio, the great “Mexican” metaphysician whose views Rene Descartes sought to slay. It is time to summon back the iconoclastic rebellious spirit of Aby Warburg. I am sure he would have enjoyed the work of Juan Diaz de Arce, that Mexican Latinist who like Warburg revered the epistemological authority of the illiterate.

Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain, By Nancy van Deusen (2015)

By Justin Heath

The conquest of the Americas first gained notoriety through the words of a penitent priest by the name of Bartolomé de las Casas, a compatriot of the Spanish conquerors. As a moral counterpoint to the conquistadors’ lawless expropriation, Las Casas would figure prominently in most textbook histories of the “New World.” From Boston to Buenos Aires, schoolchildren still learn of the Dominican friar’s crusade against the enslavement of indigenous peoples in the Americas. For some, Las Casas’ accolades are well-deserved. Historian Lewis Hanke, for instance, saw in Las Casas the first glimmer of modern humanitarianism, suggestive of a new multicultural awareness in the modern era. Others, such as Daniel Castro, have questioned the motivations of this early ideologue of “ecclesiastical imperialism.” Regardless of one’s opinions of the man, this preoccupation with Las Casas’ role as “advocate” for the indigenous peoples has obscured an important insight into post-conquest society: Native peoples from central Mexico to modern-day Venezuela pursued their own self-interest through legal action, even during times of personal distress and communal hardship following European encroachment.

Depiction of Spanish atrocities committed in the conquest of Cuba in Las Casas’s “Brevisima relación de la destrucción de las Indias”. The rendering was by Joos van Winghe and the Flemish Protestant artist Theodor de Bry. Via Wikipedia

In Global Indios, Nancy Van Deusen questions many such received notions of the conquest. By following the case histories of particular indigenous slaves across the Atlantic, the author takes the reader to a less familiar venue: the courtrooms of sixteenth-century Castile. There, in the administrative heart of the Spanish Empire, the colonized peoples of the Americas would at times resist, at times accommodate, and at all times struggle over the legal parameters that shaped their everyday existence.

From the outset, the Spanish Crown had distinguished “cannibals” from “creatures of reason,” and “barbarous” from “civilized” nations. These formal distinctions, however, did not prevent slavers from abducting all sorts of people across the Americas to sell in the port cities of Spain and Portugal. Imperial laws permitted such transactions, provided that the indigenous captives hailed from the uncooperative “war zones” of the periphery. Individual slaves lucky enough to escape captivity in these port cities quickly sought protection under the auspices of the law. Catalina de Velasco, for example (an acquaintance of Las Casas), asserted her legal exemption from servitude by claiming the ethnic status of a native “Mexican” while her mistress staked a counter-claim that this young domestic servant hailed from Portuguese Brazil, a jurisdiction where no such legal safeguards applied for indigenous peoples. Global Indios focuses on similar trial proceedings, taking note of the various stakeholders, expert witnesses, and legal strategies that shaped conceptions of “indio-ness” (that is, Indian-ness or indigeneity) across the early Atlantic World.

Approaching a new set of questions, Global Indios has many surprises in store for the contemporary reader. The most prominent is the author’s concept of an “indioscape,” a cognitive mapping of the New World and its peoples. By the mid-sixteenth century, Europeans had realized that an entire landmass separated western Eurasia from East Asia. However, the mapping of this supercontinent was far from complete by that time. Relying upon the expert testimony of missionaries and those who had travelled to the New World, the courts pieced together a series of cultural habits and physical traits that roughly differentiated certain environments, regions, and peoples of the New World. In the courtrooms, judicial officials and third-party experts would interrogate litigants, while taking into account their physiognomy and entering it into the legal record.

The debate around racial status reveals just how fuzzy these distinctions were, especially during the early phases of colonialism. Establishing the identity of an “indio” often revolved around a series of guided questions and prejudicial observations that informed the European eye toward an ambiguous legal subject. This assessment may imply limited input on the part of indigenous petitioners. However, as the author shows, these litigants were not passive subjects before a foreign legal process. In spite of these hurdles, indigenous litigants formed a successful strategy over the decades. The vast majority won their cases (even if they continued to face adversity outside of the courtroom — in the back alleys, the inn rooms, or the roadways of Spain). Van Deusen’s book analyzes the forced dialogue between colonizer and colonized in the administrative heart of Europe’s first modern empire, where the plaintiffs shaped the line of inquiry. The author infers that these slaves exploited the ambiguities of indio-ness to secure legal protections for themselves and their families.

Nancy van Deusen’s study of indio-ness in the courtroom makes a substantial contribution to the ethno-historical study of slavery. More specifically, her book marks the beginning of a more ambitious perspective that pokes holes in the alleged parochialism of indigenous historical actors. One of the first studies to explore the trans-imperial construction of racial categories in the sixteenth century, Global Indios perhaps raises more questions than answers. That being said, the speculative turn in the author’s reasoning — while problematic in certain instances — also showcases the indispensable role of the imagination in re-envisioning the moral history of our own times. For this reason alone, Van Deusen’s is required reading for everyone interested in the history of racial thought.

Nancy van Deusen, Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Duke University Press, 2015)

Great Books on Women’s History: Crossing Borders

Not Even Past asked the UT Austin History faculty to recommend great books on women and gender for Women’s History Month. The response was overwhelming so we will be posting their suggestions throughout the month.

A number of people suggested books about crossing borders: about people traveling or emigrating to countries foreign to them or about people creating new hybrid identities in the places they lived. Since they don’t fit into our usual geographical categories –and raise interesting questions about those categories — we are lumping them together here in Crossing Borders.

Madeline Hsu recommends:

Emma Teng, Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong (2013)

Teng traces mixed race Chinese-white families in a number of societies and political and social circumstances to complicate presumptions about racial hierarchies and the porosity of racial border-keeping in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. By tracking mobilities through north America, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, Teng demonstrates that intermarriages occurred at higher rates than previously acknowledged, and that intermarriage with Chinese could be vehicles for upward, and not just downward, mobility depending on local circumstances.

Sam Vong recommends:

Lynn Fujiwara, Mothers without Citizenship: Asian Immigrant Families and the Consequences of Welfare Reform (2008)

Fujiwara’s study uncovers the detrimental effects that welfare reform in the 1990s had on immigrant women, particularly President Clinton’s authorization of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996 that aimed to end welfare programs. This book offers a trenchant analysis of the ways welfare reform policies redefined immigrants as outsiders and how immigrant women resisted these attempts at denying their claims to U.S. citizenship and belonging.

Michael Stoff recommends:

Susan Glenn, Daughters of the Shetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation

I’ve used this book in classes and like it a great deal. Here’s a blurb from Cornell University Press:

“In this fascinating portrait of Jewish immigrant wage earners, Susan A. Glenn weaves together several strands of social history to show the emergence of an ethnic version of what early twentieth-century Americans called the “New Womanhood.” She maintains that during an era when Americans perceived women as temporary workers interested ultimately in marriage and motherhood, these young Jewish women turned the garment industry upside down with a wave of militant strikes and shop-floor activism and helped build the two major clothing workers’ unions.”

Jeremi Suri recommends:

Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (2014).

This deeply researched book artfully examines the interaction of race, sex, and gender in the conduct of American soldiers stationed in France and their interactions with French civilians during World War II.

Lina del Castillo recommends:

Magical sites: Women Travelers in 19th century Latin America, edited by Marjorie Agonsin and Julie Levison

This collection brings together several travel narratives written by women brave enough (and wealthy and educated enough) to travel through different parts of Latin America. Some of these writers, like Mary Caldecott Graham and Flora Tristan, found a measure of liberation from a feminine imperial mindset that justified their prescriptions for reform of the societies they encountered. Others, like Nancy Gardner Prince (a free born African American woman who traveled to Jamaica and Russia) tell their experiences from very different perspectives. The narratives these women wrote about the places they moved through show them as women who both threw off the chains of domesticity and convention and nevertheless, were in many ways still bound by them.

For more books on Women’s History:

Great Books (Europe)

Indrani Chatterjee, On Women and Nation in India

Our 2013 list of recommendations: New Books on Women’s History

Race and Status in Colonial Latin America

Classic and New Reading on Race and Status in Colonial Latin America

by Ann Twinam

Magnus Mörner, Race Mixture in the History of Latin America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967.

While Morner proposed a more static view of the construction of racial categories in colonial Spanish America, his work is fundamental to understanding where we started.

Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994.

Cope’s work complicates Mörner’s by emphasizing the fluidity of socioracial categories in Spanish America. He suggested that ““a person’s race might be described as a shorthand summation of his social network.”

Matthew Restall, The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.

Matthew Restall’s many publications highlight the repercussions of Native and African interactions, a theme less researched until recently.

Joanne Rappaport, The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

Joanne Rappaport provides nuanced understandings of the complexities of racial construction, exploring how Spanish Americans created their own socio-racial identities. (Reviewed in depth on NEP by Adrian Masters.)

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