Lozano Long Conference Archives

A visceral turn: Dr. Zeb Tortorici and queer alterities to the archives

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.

En el marco del homenaje al centenario de la Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, la Conferencia Lozano Long 2022 propició un espacio de reflexión sobre archivos latinoamericanos desde un pensamiento latinoamericano con el propósito de entender y conocer las contribuciones de la región a las prácticas archivísticas globales, así como las responsabilidades éticas y políticas que esto implica. Pensar en términos de archivística en tiempos de COVID-19 también nos brindó la imprevista oportunidad de re-imaginar la forma en la que se llevan a cabo conferencias académicas internacionales. Como parte de esta propuesta, esta publicación de Not Even Past se junta a las otras de la serie escritas por estudiantes de posgrado en la Universidad de Texas en Austin. En ellas los estudiantes resaltan el trabajo de las y los panelistas invitados a la conferencia con el objetivo de socializar el material y así descolonizar y democratizar el acceso a la producción de conocimiento. La conferencia tuvo lugar en febrero de 2022 pero todas las presentaciones, así como las grabaciones de los paneles están archivados en YouTube de forma permanente y pronto estarán disponibles las traducciones al inglés y español respectivamente. Las grabaciones de la conferencia y los artículos relacionados se pueden encontrar aquí.

…Soy ese amor que negarás para salvar tu dignidad
Soy lo prohibido…
(Roberto Cantoral, 1970)

The first time I engaged with the work of Dr. Zeb Tortorici was in 2019, at the end of a Texas fall when the idea of a worldwide emergency as COVID-19 seemed improbable, if not impossible. At the time, I was meeting with my future PhD advisor, Dr. Laura Gutierrez, at UT Austin, to explore research into queer disgust, the performance of pleasure, excess, and queer rejection to LGBTT+ hegemony in México. Dr. Gutierrez told me about a book she considered helpful for my research. The book was Sins Against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain (2018). This book would become my introduction to the work of Dr. Tortorici, his affective approach to archived documentation, and the methodological shift to queering archives in the search for possibilities for censured queer alterity.

Once I had the book in my hands, I examined it with care and attention. A medium-sized book, not too heavy, yet not insubstantial. A black and red cover showcased an image of what looked to be a winged devil speaking to various demonic creatures. Navigating the book’s pages was as fascinating as exploring the aesthetic composition of its exterior. Dr. Tortorici introduces the book by re-telling an event from my hometown, Monterrey, in 1656. Lorenzo Vidales, a local thirteen-year-old, was found engaging in bestiality with a goat, an act the civilian and religious courts punished by having Lorenzo whipped and expelled from the city of Monterrey. The death penalty served as a warning and promise for him if he ever thought of returning to the city. Even when the event belongs to the municipal archives of Monterrey and, therefore, to our national and regional historical memory, it is, in no way, part of the collective knowledge of those of us who grew up at La Sultana del Norte, as Monterrey is known. It was too repulsive, too nefarious; and simply too deviant to have a place in the official narrative of the city, a space constructed around industrial myths where the will and determination of the industrial catholic bourgeoise made the desert fertile.

*State Archive of Nuevo León. Images taken by the author.*

Having the opportunity to speak to Dr. Tortorici in person shortly after encountering his work doubled my excitement and curiosity about his research into excess and memory. The start of that conversation, which I hope to continue over the years, was marked by what I felt to be a meeting of kindred spirits of a sort who haunt archived excess and academic curiosity. These spirits surely welcome gracious archival accidents. So are the questions and conceptual possibilities that archival accidents allow. What I found most valuable, however, as I venture into my own research on the possibilities of excess in performance art in Monterrey, were the questions of embodied viscerality and excess, and its trans-temporal archival presence.

Dr. Tortorici’s research has a particular connection to my own work on the visceral and excess and to my analysis of queer possibilities in the face of hegemonic normalcy. For context, two special issues of A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (to which Dr. Tortorici contributed) give theoretical weight to embodied and archival vicerality by defining it as “a phenomenological index for the logics of desire, consumption, disgust, health, disease, belonging, and displacement that are implicit in colonial and postcolonial relations.”^[1] Tortorici’s contribution adopts a microhistorical lens to show how vicerality can structure and baffle archival impulses. Incidents of necrophilia, fellatio, masturbation, and erotic religious visions from colonial Mexican archives reveal the layered and complex “gut feelings” of historical actors – including the archivists and historians who registered these events.^[2] In short, although Dr. Tortorici’s work covers an earlier period than my scholarly interests, I was eager to engage in dialogue with him—especially when it comes time to sort out affective approaches that queer the archives and confront the excessive elements that have been intentionally overlooked.

Let me zoom out briefly from my first reading of Sins Against Nature and my exciting first conversation with Dr. Tortorici about our shared research interests, to offer a brief overview of his research trajectory. From there, we can begin to explore how his understanding and work with the archives of “No” are opening up archival possibilities for radical alterities to institutional respectability. By archives of “No”, I refer to that which is too excessive to be archived, or even remembered by institutions; therefore rejected on a “anti” archive category, a “No” category .

Manuscript text of a sodomy trial in Monterrey — *Archivo Historico Monterrey / Causas Criminales Vol 10 B Exp 958 / 1704 / Contra Lorenzo Aspitia por haber cometido el pecado Nefando.*

Dr. Tortorici is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literature at New York University. His research interests center around queer colonial history and archives in Latin America, with particular attention to pornography, dissident sexualities, pleasure, desire, and censorship. In addition to several prestigious fellowships and visiting professorships, Dr. Tortorici also has a remarkable publication record. Sins Against Nature won the John Boswell Award from the Committee on LGBT History and the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize. Dr. Tortorici’s work recognizes the value of intellectual community building for advancing valuable scholarly projects. This includes his co-editing different volumes on Ethno-Pornography, Centering Animals in History, Trans*historicities, and Medical reproductive knowledge in 18^th-century Latin America.

Dr. Tortorici’s work in many ways represents a navigation of the archives of the “No.” As a historian of the “No”, his focus and methodology have centered on looking for different moments of non-history, non-citizens, and undesirable non-humans.^[3] He hopes to guide academic curiosity toward that which has been historically silenced and those who have been double censured by the creators and the user-researchers of archives. A methodological turn toward the “No” should not be understood within the limits of orthodox archival order and logic but rather as queer interruptions to academic normalcy. His approach to queering the archives is not reserved solely for diverse expressions of gender and sexuality. The implications of his questions around archival materials productively open broader alterities to the colonial order, which, in turn, make the “nefarious” episodes of the “no” histories he reconstructs transcendental.

Perhaps somewhat ironically, “pleasure,” despite the positive affect it connotes, nevertheless overlaps with the realm of the “No.” I’m fascinated by Dr. Tortorici’s work on pleasure for presenting a platform to speak of something that has been purposefully ignored, surveilled, and exoticized, and as a response to imposed contemporary archival respectability. Dr. Tortorici’s research opens a space for queer pleasure, embodied desires, and the erotic. His efforts are even more admirable precisely because they must work against the structural limits imposed by institutions holding archival traces of these pleasurable moments.

Book cover Sexuality and the Unnatural in Colonial Latin America

The good news is that visceral rejections of queer pleasure hold the key that can free over-silenced stories. Queer embodied conversations with archived pasts must be understood primarily as that: conversations. Dr. Tortorici leads us towards these conversations, which must necessarily turn towards careful coded dialogues that those queering archival research can affectively understand. These embodied visceral conversations inherently involve provocations, consumptions, and reactions. In this sense, Dr. Tortorici reveals how queering colonial archives means showing how archives hold and censure stories of consumption that have provoked disgust within those who created the archive. These visceral tensions open a “beyond time” affective encounter with those who study and translate queer codes of the archive and engage in visceral dialogues with the present, past, and future. Dr. Tortorici is careful to point out the need for accurate translations of queer viscerality. The provocation censured, persecuted, and archived during the colonial period does not have the same affective meaning for contemporary audiences. These conversations, therefore, are very much in the translation.

I keep returning to a term Dr. Tortorici brought into our dialogue: imagination. In order to affectively navigate and queer the archives there is a need for radical imagination. Radical imaginaries permit deeper explorations of the “what if?” These historical possibilities, in turn, contribute to queer contemporary life beyond utopia. In this sense, Dr. Tortorici’s radical imaginaries regarding the archive contribute to a greater genealogy of academic shifts toward radical archival work. I am thinking here of Black feminist scholars such as Saidiya Hartman, Tina Campt, and Riley Snorton, who have opened up radical affective possibilities for queer archives of color.

Dr. Tortorici was featured in the panel “Histories of Collecting and Collecting Stories” for the 2022 Lozano Long Conference, titled “Archiving Objects of Knowledge with Latin American Perspectives.” It is my sincere hope that this introduction may help situate his work as it continues to expand discussions of radical queer archival alterities.

Cuir norteño from Monterrey (México), member of the House of Majesty. PhD student at the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies. Currently, he’s a Student Resident at CIESAS Noreste (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social). He is interested in the possibilities for cuir radical futurity-building via excess, cuir rejection, and alternatives to hegemonic LGBTT+ respectability. He is the father of Carmela, a calico cat.

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.

[1] Sharon P. Holland, Marcia Ochoa, Kyla Wazana Tompkins; On the Visceral. GLQ 1 October 2014; 20 (4): 391–406. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2721339

[2] Zeb Tortorici; Visceral Archives of the Body: Consuming the Dead, Digesting the Divine. GLQ 1 October 2014; 20 (4): 407–437. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2721375

^[3] For the history of the “no,” I am referring here to the work of “unthinkable” histories like those examined by Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995) Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History.

Bibliography

Collections, F. L. (2017). Fales Video Archive . Obtenido de Sex in the Archives: Seeking Sex, Procuring Porn: https://vimeopro.com/nyutv/fales-library/video/208568051

Tortorici, Z. (2014). Visceral Archives of the Body: Consuming the Dead, Digesting the Divine. GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 20(4), 407-437.

Tortorici, Z. (2018). Sins Against Nature: Sex & Archives in Colonial News Spain. Duke University Press.

University, N. Y. (s.f.). Zeb Tortorici. Obtenido de https://as.nyu.edu/faculty/zeb-joseph-tortorici.html

The New World and Beyond: A Review of New World Nature

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.

Focusing on the development of early modern nature and science, New World Nature is a delightful online resource for anyone interested in the Spanish Americas, the history of science, and an innovative comparative approach to history that connects the Spanish Americas from Europe to China. Website creator Dr. Mackenzie Cooley at Hamilton College intends for New World Nature to be a platform to highlight her multiple projects and collaborations. This website demonstrates how scholars in the humanities can maintain an organic online presence and a shared space for research.

New World Nature makes several significant contributions. The first is creating a research tool for the Relaciones Geográficas, a corpus of responses collected for the 50-question survey sent to Spanish Americas in the 1570s during the reign of Spanish King Philip II.[1] Various Relaciones Geográficas in the Spanish empire are known, originating from Peru and the Caribbean to even Spain. The section “Searching the Relaciones Geográficas” offers René Acuña’s magisterial critical editions from Mexico, Guatemala, Tlaxcala, Michoacan, Antequera, and Nueva Galicia. As a result of collaboration with student researchers on translation and data management, this tool not only assisted Cooley’s students in their research but is also helpful for others who are interested in these documents.

The second contribution is its organic approach. Rather than an end product of a particular project, the website highlights Cooley’s ongoing scholarship. After introducing the Lesser Antilles archives at Hamilton College and the Relaciones Geográficas, New World Nature spotlights Cooley’s body of work which includes her book, The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Humans, and Race in the Renaissance, her current research on sex, medicine, and empire this academic year, as well as Natural Things: Ecologies of Nature in the Early Modern World co-edited by Cooley, Anna Toledano, and Duygu Yildirim. This edited work has resulted from the project Natural Things/Ad Fontes Naturae, an ongoing endeavor in global natural history that the aforementioned trio of scholars co-founded during Cooley’s graduate training at Stanford University.

*A digital archive on the Relaciones Geográficas*

The third main contribution of New World Nature is its comparative approach that will appeal to audiences in various geographical fields. Beyond the Atlantic connection between the Americas and Europe, the comparison between the early modern Spanish and Chinese empires brings forth an innovative – and previously overlooked – perspective in the scholarship of the early modern world. In addition to the works mentioned above, Cooley has also co-edited another volume, Knowing
an Empire: Imperial Science in the Chinese and Spanish Empires, 1500-1800 (under review). Through a pioneering comparison between the Relaciones Geográficas and local gazetteers (difangzhi), a centuries-long Chinese genre, this work connects early modern Spain and China via the broad themes of empire, science, and local epistemologies.[2] This work argues for the striking parallels between these two seemingly unrelated genres, offering a model of comparability and emphasizing the polycentricity of power. It also challenges the linear progression to modernity by seeking to understand the development of early modern Spanish and Chinese knowledge production that differed from the European experience. This work is a powerful intervention in the scholarship of the early modern world that connects two of the biggest empires of the time.

The team behind this website further speaks to the collaborative and global nature of this project. Through the efforts of the Australian designer Katie Dean, New World Nature features great images from the Relaciones Geográficas that immediately grasp the readers’ attention.[3] Cooley has also been working with a team of student researchers with various academic interests at Hamilton College, including Latin American history, history of medicine, race, human rights, and archaeology. Cooley and her team have traveled to Europe and Latin America for research and co-published their works.

While an exciting series of works, two minor suggestions for the website might be helpful. The first is to feature an introduction that provides a road map highlighting the resources and multiple projects mentioned above. A quick orientation of the website content would help readers (especially first-time visitors to the website) more easily understand the rich resources available. Related to that, reframing and expanding the “About” section would help reflect the website’s growth and scholarship over the years. The second suggestion would be to highlight Cooley’s manuscript-in-progress more explicitly on the website.

New World Nature has created a visually appealing platform that not only aids in the research on the Relaciones Geográficas but also introduces multiple exciting works that help interested readers to further understand the dynamic nature of the early modern world.

Shery Chanis is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at UT Austin. She researches Ming China (1368-1644) and its connection with the early modern world. Chanis focuses on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her current project analyzes the Chinese elites’ ordering and descriptions of the southernmost maritime province of Guangdong that were attentive to the people both inside and outside of its physical boundaries. She has presented her research at UT Austin, the Newberry Library in Chicago, the AHA Annual Meeting (poster session), and the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom. She has also published on H-Net and Not Even Past.

Mackenzie Cooley is an Assistant Professor at Hamilton College and is a historian of science and ideas in early modern empires. Her research focuses on the natural world and the Columbian Exchange. In 2021-2022, she was a Deborah Loeb Brice Fellow at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. At the Lozano Long Conference, Dr. Cooley participated in a panel entitled “Modern Institutional Networks Visualize Early Modern Archives: The Case of the Relaciones Geográficas y Topográficas.”

I wish to thank Dr. Mackenzie Cooley for the wonderful email exchange and for her thoughtful and enthusiastic input for this piece.

[1] The Benson Latin American Collection at UT Austin houses part of Joaquín García Icazbalceta’s Collection of Relaciones Geográficas of Mexico and Guatemala from 1578 to 1586. See https://www.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.html?appid=1fcabf740a844d9d80d5bf0248416f47. For more on Relaciones Geográficas, see Barbara E. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). For additional analyses and bibliographical references on the Relaciones Geográficas and a more personal story, see Rafael Nieto-Bello’s recent piece on Not Even Past (https://notevenpast.org/bringing-together-the-relaciones-geograficas-and-topograficas-of-the-spanish-empire/).

[2] Co-edited by Cooley and Huiyi Wu, Knowing the Empire in Early Modern China and Spain (under review) features essays from an interdisciplinary group of scholars including Maria Portuondo, Barbara Mundy, sinologist Joe Dennis, digital scholar Shih-Pei Chen, Mario Cams, He Bian, Marcella Hayes, and Stewart McManus. This volume follows the “Knowing the Empire” Conference in November 2019 at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, sponsored by the MPIWG’s Department III under the leadership of Dagmar Schäffer. (https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/event/knowing-empire-imperial-science-early-modern-chinese-and-spanish-empires). The conference was inspired by Shih Pei Chen’s work on early modern Chinese local gazetteers (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343605827_Local_Gazetteers_Research_Tools_Overview_and_Research_Application) and Huiyi Wu’s research on the appearance of Jesuits and the partial transmission of their European knowledge in these sources.

[3] Dean is also a design collaborator in Cooley’s co-edited Natural Things: Ecologies of Nature in the Early Modern World, which includes twelve essays that explore the relationships among natural philosophy, science, medicine, and European colonialism to chart the expansion of natural science from 1500 to the early 1900s.

Coding Viceregal Art: Project Arca and Spanish Visual Culture Within the Digital Humanities

The opening page of Project Arte Colonial greets the user as a digital museum rather than a website. High-resolution baroque paintings slide past the eyes as vivid colors – reds, creams, and browns – fill the screen. Scrolling down, one discovers three options to continue into the site: themes, authors, and regions. The first tab reveals a series of virtual halls organized into categories such as allegories and emblems, angels, and Christology. The second provides an algorithm to filter based on the painter’s last name. The third presents an interactive map in which scholars may simply click on a geographical area to access the works produced in those regions. Utilizing these filters, visitors create their own personalized experience within one of the largest public databases of Spanish colonial art on the internet.

Created by Dr. Jaime H. Borja Gómez in 2015, ARCA collates almost 20,000 paintings produced in colonial Spanish America between 1530 and 1830. Borja Gómez is profesor titular (Associate Professor) at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. He received his PhD from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, Mexico in 1997. His research focuses on visual culture in colonial Latin America where he examines the role of viceregal painting in New Granada. In 2021 alone he published two books, Esencias y pervivencias barrocas. Colombia en el Nuevo Reino de Granada Los ingenios del pincel. Cultura visual en América colonial, as well as three other articles and book chapters that highlight visual trends throughout the viceregal period.

In addition to his contributions to traditional scholarship, Borja Gómez has worked to promote the value of the digital humanities within the broader academic sphere. His latest project, Arte Colonial (ARCA), is a culmination of these efforts. His presentation at the 2022 Lozano Long Conference seeks to further explore the meanings of the website to academic and public scholarship. Created only five years ago, ARCA attempts to respond to the ways in which technology has changed the social sciences, particularly fields such as anthropology, history, and art history.

According to Borja Gómez, the rise of the internet and digital culture has impacted scholarship not just by providing unprecedented public access to knowledge but also by changing the formats through which historians may present their findings. In addition to traditional publishing routes, scholars can increasingly engage in virtual, visual discussions through coding websites. Because of this, researchers should be able to locate files easily and discuss conclusions within the new technological realm.

*The ARCA site allows visitors to sort art by category, theme, author, and region.*

Digital visual offerings have historically focused on European databases and have neglected to provide comprehensive access to the valuable works produced in the Americas during the colonial era. Although Borja Gómez notes that sites such as the Project on the Engraved Sources of Spanish Colonial Art (University of California – Davis) provide access to approximately 3,000 viceregal works, the collection sheds light on only a portion of the paintings produced at that time.[1] ARCA draws much needed attention to the artistic diversity developed over three centuries of Spanish imperial rule. In doing so, it offers critical public access to images previously only seen by those with the means to travel to museums throughout Latin America.

Although the sheer number of sources available on ARCA is striking, the website also provides immense value to both academic and public scholarship for its interface as a whole. It is rare that such a profound image database also possesses a seamless, aesthetically pleasing design. The organization of ARCA guides both specialists and enthusiasts of baroque visual culture through the process of locating and analyzing an image. The fact that both secular and religious images proliferate the collection demonstrates the wide-reaching value of the website. As Borja Gómez admits, doing so “treats the paintings as an archive rather than individual objects.”[2]

Casta painting with 16 categories of racial mixing — ARCA classifies more than 900 images as secular. Among them are various examples of casta paintings, like this one from Tepotzotlán, Mexico.

Understanding the image as an archive represents a critical facet of ARCA’s purpose. In addition to bringing visual culture into the digital age, this approach re-centers paintings as a fundamental primary source. Too often scholars focus on written documents to ground their analyses. Yet, portraits and group scenes provide critical information regarding the ways in which people moved and engaged with each other during the colonial era. As Borja Gómez states, one can study “the different systems of bodily norms and values in colonial America” through the analysis of visual sources.[3] Thus, ARCA forces visitors to reconsider the nature of primary sources and how paintings reveal critical information regarding not only the author but also the society in which it was produced.

Throughout the last two years of the global pandemic, digital research has surged among graduate students and faculty alike. Travel restrictions prevented scholars from accessing important sources. Project Arte Colonial and the continuing efforts of Jaime H. Borja Gómez have provided invaluable access to colonial Spanish resources to individuals across the world who are unable to conduct research in-person. The digital humanities have become critical components to fields across the social sciences. ARCA works to create an easily accessible gateway that simultaneously serves veterans and newcomers of remote research. Historians must adopt new and diverse ways to engage with the public and other scholars through the medium of technology.

Haley Schroer is a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American history. Her work focuses on the intersection of race and material culture in colonial Latin America. Her dissertation, “Sartorial Subversions: Appearance, Identity, and Sumptuary Legislation in the Spanish Empire,” examines the rise of racialized clothing laws throughout the seventeenth century. Schroer has received support from P.E.O. International, the Fulbright Program, The Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship Program, and The Conference on Latin American History’s James R. Scobie Award. She is currently a Doctoral Student Fellow with the Institute for Historical Studies.

[1] Borja Gómez, Jaime H., “Proyecto Arca: Pinturas colonials, gentos y contenidos digitales,” Sextante, Universidad de los Andes, https://sextante.uniandes.edu.co/index.php/ejemplares/sextante-6/corrientes/proyecto-arca-pinturas-coloniales-gestos-y-contenidos-digitales.

[2] Borja Gómez, Jaime H., Los Ingenios del Pincel, (Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, 2021).

[3] Borja Gómez, “Proyecto Arca.”

Archiving the Brazilian Dictatorship: Dr. Inez Stampa and the Memórias Reveladas Reference Center

The 2022 Lozano Long Conference at UT Austin brought together historians from the United States and Latin America for conversations around the “archival turn” in history, a reflexive movement to examine how traces of the past in the form of documents and other artifacts arrive in the archives. In line with this theme, Dr. Inez Stampa of the Brazilian National Archives presented about her work with the Memórias Reveladas Reference Center, a critical node for an international network of non-governmental organizations and research institutions, including both historians and members of other disciplines, interested in interrogating the legacy of Brazil’s 1964-1985 military dictatorship. A social worker by training, Dr. Stampa understands her work with archives in relation to a broader process of transitional justice–a term referring to the judicial and political measures put in place “to redress legacies of massive human rights abuse” (International Center for Transitional Justice, 2021). This process is especially important in Brazil, as many continue to downplay or deny the atrocities committed under military rule.

*The Revealed Memories database cooperatively gathers information on the archival collection related to political repression in the period from 1964-1985*

In 1985, military rule in Brazil gave way to a civilian government, ending a period of censorship and political repression that restricted access to the archives and threatened dissenting voices in the Brazilian academy with imprisonment or exile. The documents from Brazilian national security organizations from the dictatorship remained protected under the custody of the Brazilian Intelligence Agency (ABIN). Dr. Stampa, who completed her undergraduate degree in sociology in 1988 at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, described an absence of information about the history of the dictatorship in her early education, along with an atmosphere of fear surrounding discussions of the recent past in her university classes. This was despite growing agitation by victims of dictatorship-era human rights violations for justice. After the closure of the Brazilian Social Assistance League (LBA) in 1995, she pursued a position with the National Archives, cognizant of the importance of reckoning with the past for society writ large and of the silences surrounding the recent past.

The 2002 electoral success of the Partido Trabalhista (the Workers Party) brought many victims of imprisonment and torture under the dictatorship to power, strengthening cries for accountability and the release of documents from the period of military rule. After nine months of legal and logistical meetings concerning the release of the previously classified material, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ordered the transfer of documents from three now extinct national security organizations to the National Archives in 2005. Four years later, a presidential decree established the Centro de Referência das Lutas Políticas no Brasil (1964-1985) – Memórias Reveladas (The Reference Center for Political Struggles in Brazil (1964-1985) – Revealed Memories). This center was later directed by Dr. Stampa and her husband Dr. Vicente Rodrigues, with the goal of processing the documentation and facilitating public engagement with the material, housed at the National Archives.

*The Brazilian National Archives. Source: Agência Brasil*

With more than 18,000,000 documents from the National Information Service (SNI), the Brazilian National Security Council (CSN), and General Investigation Commission (CGI) and other agencies of the dictatorship, the collection offers a look at the nerve center of the 21-year authoritarian regime. However, Dr. Stampa and Dr. Rodrigues both noted in our conversation, documents from the branches of the military themselves as well as provincial organs of the regime still remain unaccounted for. Moreover, even the documents themselves include distortions of their own. For this reason, Dr. Stampa and her colleagues interviewed victims of the regime and their relatives to help fill in the gaps in the archival record.

Both academic and popular discourse tends to construct the Brazilian military dictatorship as less violent and more restrained than the regimes in Argentina and Chile. Dr. Stampa traces this conception to the regime’s sophisticated organization and pervasive intelligence apparatus, in addition to the low number of casualties relative to Brazil’s neighbors in the Southern cone. On this latter point, she stressed that, “The people doing the calculations don’t include the more than 8000 indigenous victims of the regime, since their deaths occurred for ‘non-political’ reasons–they weren’t communists, they just happened to stand in the way of development.” Faced with a general lack of awareness of the human rights violations occurring under the dictatorship, the goals of the project go beyond simply storing, indexing, and digitizing material. The reference center provided documents to the National Truth Commission established in 2011, distributes a biennial prize for researchers making innovative uses of the archival material, and coordinates with a diverse network of 171 national and international partners to maximize the projects usefulness for transitional justice and engagement with Brazilian history.

Members of the National Truth Commission delivers its final report to President Dilma Rousseff in 2014 — *The National Truth Commission delivers its final report to President Dilma Rousseff in 2014. Source: Isaac Amorim*

Dr. Stampa’s work with the National Archives intersects with her work as a professor at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, a position that connects her with both other academics and students interested in engaging with the archival collection at the Memorias Reveladas reference center. In her own research, she examines the condition of workers under the dictatorship, a complex issue with ongoing resonance today as neoliberal reforms oriented at privatization have undermined protections dating back to the Vargas era, from 1930-1945. Despite efforts under Worker’s Party governments in past decades to establish welfare programs like Bolsa Familia, the position of workers in the service industry and the informal sector have grown especially precarious. The instability of their employment renders things that more well-off Brazilians might take for granted, like healthcare and housing, inaccessible. Dr. Stampa understands the contemporary circumstances as continuing the policies created during the dictatorship, whose understanding of development saw maximizing profits for corporations and the wealthy as the key to national prosperity.

My own research focuses on the transnational history of psychedelic plant science and its intersections with nationalist state-building projects in the late 20th Century, specifically in Brazil and Mexico. The Brazilian military dictatorship occurred in the context of a hemisphere-wide campaign of authoritarian repression and capitalist development projects spearheaded by the United States to prevent the spread of communism. Reactionary elements came to use the word “communism” as a catch-all term for seemingly deviant or non-conforming behavior more generally, particularly drug use. The CIA funded research into hallucinogens like lysergic acid amide, psilocybin, and atropine, all derived from plants found in Latin America, through the MKULTRA program, and numerous governments in the Western hemisphere used the substance as an aid to interrogation. While not knowing of any similar programs in Brazil, Dr. Stampa noted that the Brazilian government also invoked substance use by alleged subversives to discredit them, sometimes planting drugs in their homes or personal belongings to provide grounds for an arrest. The hypocrisy of their rhetoric on drugs manifests in the archival documentation collected by the reference center–one torturer with the federal police later admitted to conducting his interrogations, which sometimes involved violent sexual abuse, under the influence of cocaine.

The work of Memorias Reveladas today unfolds against the backdrop of a challenging political context. Since the 2015 impeachment of Dilma Rousseff (described by many of her supporters as a coup), subsequent administrations have reduced funding for the project. Moreover, current President Jair Bolsonaro, vehemently opposed to the creation of the National Truth Commission in 2011 and today vocally defends and praises the 1964-1985 dictatorship. With the national press focused on his disastrous handling of coronavirus, he overturned the 2005 decree authorizing the transfer of documents from ABIN to the National Archive on May 11, 2020. Buried in a superficially administrative revocation of more than 300 other decrees, Dr. Stampa and Dr. Rodrigues explained that the order had little impact on their work since ABIN already concluded the transfer of documents. However, they noted that, “If the agency uncovered any more documents that belong in the collection, we’d need another decree to receive them,” drastically limiting the project’s ability to receive and incorporate new documentary material. To learn more about the project, consider watching the recording of Dr. Stampa presentation at the LLILAS Benson Conference, which took place February 24-25, 2022.

Timothy Vilgiate grew up in Colorado and earned his BA and MA in History at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Currently in the 2nd Year of the History PhD program at UT Austin, he studies the intersections between hallucinogenic plant research, national development projects, and discourses about indigeneity in Brazil and Mexico. In his spare time, he enjoys astrology, hiking, and recording music.

The Intra-American Slave Trade Database: A Review and Interview with Gregory O’Malley and Alex Borucki

In 2018, Gregory O’Malley and Alex Borucki published the Intra-American Slave Trade database to the Slave Voyages project, which now records more than 27,000 slave voyages across the Americas.^[1] After enslaved people disembarked from their forced Trans-Atlantic journeys, many more were re-shipped and dispersed across the Americas to French, Dutch, English, Spanish, and Portuguese outposts and ports. Each unit in the database is composed of a single vessel’s voyage between its place of embarkation and disembarkation of captives. Sources such as port logs, merchant papers, and the logs of import duties record the arrival and departure of slaving vessels. The database includes records on voyages dating from the mid-sixteenth century to the later end of the mid-nineteenth century.

Screenshot of the homepage of the Intra-American Slave Trade Database which reads: This database contains information on more than 11,000 maritime voyages trafficking enslaved people within the Americas. These slave trades operated within colonial empires, across imperial boundaries, and inside the borders of nations such as the United States and Brazil. Explore the forced removals, which not only dispersed African survivors of the Atlantic crossing but also displaced enslaved people born in the Americas.

In line with the theme of the 2022 Lozano Long Conference, “Archiving Objects of Knowledge with Latin American Perspectives,” O’Malley and Borucki’s project sheds light on the significance of Latin America in the broader interconnected development of Atlantic Slavery throughout the Americas. Those visiting the database will find that the bulk of the intra-American slave trade was directed predominately towards the Spanish American mainland and Caribbean colonies. Indeed, the mainland Spanish colonies alone received 38% of the total volume of the Intra-American slave trade that crossed colonial boundaries.^[2]

Notable re-export colonies included Portuguese Brazil and British Jamaica, where local merchants transshipped many thousands of enslaved people to other colonies. Such data illuminates the importance of what scholars have referred to as the entangled and integrated nature of the broader Atlantic world. Moreover, the data presented by the database illustrates the centrality of Latin America in broader conversations about the Atlantic concerning archives, slavery, and the African diaspora.

In my interview with O’Malley and Borucki, I asked a series of questions, encouraging them to reflect on some of the project’s significant challenges, insights, and contributions. In what follows is a brief introduction to their work through an abridged recap of our engaging conversation.[3] Borucki’s initial research examined enslaved people working on cattle ranches along the borders between Uruguay and Brazil. While working on his dissertation under the supervision of David Eltis, who was then compiling the first online iteration of the TAST (Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade) database, Borucki came across extensive documentation of trans-imperial slave trafficking leading to the colonies in the Rio de la Plata and Venezuela. Since that time, his focus has been on slave trafficking and the routes enslaved people took, shaping their experiences and identities in Latin America (particularly Montevideo and Buenos Aires). O’Malley’s interest in the intra-American slave trade was also sparked after encountering a profuse body of records documenting inter-imperial slave trafficking between different British imperial colonies.

This court register is an example of the resources available through the Slave Trade database. The photo shows the first page of the court’s register of "Liberated Africans" taken from the "Felicidade The Brigantine," a ship captured at sea by British cruisers and adjudicated at a court established at Sierra Leone under international anti-slave trade treaties. The register was kept as a formal record of emancipation that helped protect the individual from subsequent re-enslavement. — This court register is an example of the resources available through the Slave Trade database. The photo shows the first page of the court’s register of “Liberated Africans” taken from the “Felicidade The Brigantine,” a ship captured at sea by British cruisers and adjudicated at a court established at Sierra Leone under international anti-slave trade treaties. The register was kept as a formal record of emancipation that helped protect the individual from subsequent re-enslavement. The image is reproduced courtesy of the British National Archives. Source: British National Archives, Foreign Office, ser. 84, vol. 231, p. 177.

Among the many challenges O’Malley and Borucki faced compiling the database, perhaps the most significant was accounting for the issue of the intra-American contraband slave trade. While scholars have widely acknowledged evidence of the commonplace and ubiquity of illicit slave trafficking, accounting for the phenomena in the database posed a methodological challenge. The difficulties in acquiring and assessing records of clandestine slave trafficking challenge the ability to quantitatively account for it since a single slave voyage constitutes a unit in the database. Furthermore, Borucki notes that in many instances, the records that account for enslaved people as contraband lack sufficient details and information necessary for the identification of a slave voyage.

For example, he explains that in Venezuela, the records for the enslaved people who entered as contraband, as documented in individual records, show that they become legalized property through a regulated process called indulto. However, these sources lack information to connect these individuals to a specific slave voyage. Like the issue of accounting for the illicit slave trade, O’Malley notes the lack of data on the intra-American slave trade to the French Caribbean, which he and Borucki recognize as being vastly underrepresented in the database. Throughout much of the colonial period, the French colonies were on the receiving end of this contraband trafficking however, as Borucki observed, the French seldom produced records detailing these networks from their vantage point.

Nevertheless, in tracing the trafficking of enslaved people across imperial boundaries, O’Malley stated that “building the database forced me to reckon with how entangled empires were.” “I thought when I was starting out that I was mostly working on a project of movements of people within the British Empire and especially from the Caribbean to the North American colonies,” he explains. “But during the quantitative work of tracking all of these movements, I came across all of these voyages going out from Jamaica and other places, to Spanish colonies and French colonies.”

In Borucki’s research on Black social organizations and Catholic confraternities in Montevideo and Buenos Aires, he found that many enslaved people were not African-born but were born and trafficked from Brazil. Such communities had forged networks and connections between the Rio de la Plata and Brazil, further illustrating the importance of intra-American slave trading. Likewise, Borucki explains that this project raises questions about the trafficking of slaves and the trans-imperial formation of Black communities––their movement, experiences, and ideas that flow between imperial borders. Together these complicate our idea of trans-imperial connections.

Enslaved people disembarking for sale at harbor in Brazil at some time in between the 1820s and 1830s. Source: “Debarquement”, Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora

For O’Malley, “the thing that’s most striking with the intra-American database, specifically, is the sense of the scope of slavery in the Americas.” Indeed, while the Trans-Atlantic slave trade gives you the immense scale of transatlantic trafficking, “those voyages tend to go to a relatively small number of ports over and over again.” However, the Intra-American database draws our attention to those far-flung outposts, colonial backwaters, and ports, that when viewed together with the TAST data, truly illustrate the ubiquity of slavery across the Americas. In particular, Borucki points out that there was “a very active traffic in slaves in the Pacific “from Panama going down to a Lima, Peru, also across South America, from Buenos Aires going down to the Magellan straits and then north into Lima, and also from Central America going north as well.”

It is his hope that future historians will be able to capture this data, “to have some kind of representation really––– each little archive in Oaxaca, in Michoacán, in the western parts of Mexico have records on enslaved people of African ancestry being moved around to the confines of the Americas.” As new research continues to come to the fore adding new perspectives to the way we understand the broader history of the African diaspora and slavery across the Americas, the intra-American database will continue to be of importance to a wide variety of educators and scholar.

Borucki is a contributor to the upcoming 2022 Lozano Long Conference, honoring the centennial of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, entitled “Archiving Objects of Knowledge with Latin American Perspectives.” Readers interested in learning more about their work are encouraged and invited to attend their panel at the conference entitled “Public, Access, and the Archival Dimensions of Digital Humanities.” For more information, stay tuned for updates at PORTAL, the Llilas Benson Latin American Studies and Collections official online magazine.

Clifton E. Sorrell III is a third year History PhD student at the University of Austin at Texas. He earned a B.A in both African American Studies and History at the University of California, Davis, and is currently studying Atlantic Slavery and the African Diaspora under Professor Daina Ramey Berry. He is broadly interested in the politics of African Diaspora Freedom practice in the Anglophone-Spanish Caribbean in between the 17th and 18th century. His research covers a broad set of questions concerning African diasporic resistance in the inter-imperial geo-politics of the circum-Caribbean, gender, diasporic cultural politics and social recreation.

^[1] “Intra-American Slave Trade,” Slave Voyages. Accessed November 10th, 2021. https://www.slavevoyages.org/american/about#methodology/0/introduction/0/en/

^[2] Ibid

^[3] I would like to thank Gregory O’Malley and Alex Borucki for taking the time to meet with me to conduct this interview. Clifton Sorrell in Conversation with (Authors) Gregory O’Malley and Alex Borucki (Conducted Nov. 9, 2021).

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