migration Archives - Not Even Past

Review of Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890-1950 (2022) by Jennie N. Shinozuka

Jeannie Shinozuka’s new book, Biotic Borders, is not only a “history of bugs and other bothers,” [209] but also a demonstration of how ecological actors played a fundamental role in shaping sociopolitical responses to Japanese immigration to the US from 1890-1950. The book shows how racialized invasive species furthered American nationalism in the name of biological security. The othering of invasive species along racial lines and legitimate alarm over environmental destruction contributed to the consolidation of American biotic borders. This review of Biotic Borders highlights how ecological fears were deeply intertwined with racial politics of the era.

Frequently, these invisible eco-invaders—mostly agrarian insect pests—were used by American citizens and government agencies as an excuse to take action against an equally invisible ‘yellow peril’—the increasing number of Asian migrants—through discriminatory agriculture policies, scientific racism, accusations of treachery, medical discrimination, and the consolidation of borders. Indeed, Shinozuka argues that the erection of “‘artificial barriers,’ such as plant quarantines and other regulations ‘redrew’ imaginary lines determined by national boundaries.” [55] In this way, the transpacific ecological borderland enshrined at the end of a romanticized Western American frontier contributed to nationalist notions of a biologically native American utopia, and ultimately, an emergent American empire.

Drawings of frogs, snails, and insects from Japan, early nineteenth century.
Source: Library of Congress.

Throughout the book, Shinozuka uses ‘immigrant’ in reference to human migrants and the non-human plants and animals that crossed the Pacific during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The human immigrants were the large numbers of Japanese and Japanese-Americans who struggled against pervasive anti-Asian hostility in the United States. The non-human immigrants consisted of the hundreds of Asiatic plant species, and the insects that lived within their fibers, that were shipped and sold in the US to meet a growing demand for Japanese-style gardens and “Asian exotics.” [9] As these two types of ‘immigrant’ became entangled in the American imagination, so too did American hostility towards all foreign species, human or not. However, the word ‘immigrant’ is not the only parallel Shinozuka draws between these two subjects of her book. Biotic Borders is a compelling attempt to connect these two histories, which Shinozuka argues are inextricably bound together.

As agriculture in the US became professionalized and monoculture became standardized, the fear of invasive species, imported via increasingly globalized transportation networks, exploded. Entomologists empowered by newly-established government agencies like the Department of Agriculture and the Bureau of Plant Industry sought to uncover the origin of invasive insects. Yet by searching for their non-native origins, these scientists racialized the insects, giving them names such as the Japanese Beetle or the Oriental Scale and facilitating two-way comparisons between humans and insects: the personification of insects and the dehumanization of humans. In turn, these racialized species provoked widespread biological xenophobia, spurred on by the real fear of economic destruction in the agrarian sector, and by a growing desire for environmental border control to protect an illusory vision of American biological nativism. The fear of racialized insects shaped hostility towards similarly racialized human immigrants.

Dr. Wm. A. Taylor, Chief Bureau of Plant Industry, Dept. Agrl, circa 1920.
Source: Library of Congress.

Each of the eight chapters of Biotic Borders is loosely centered around a particular cross-border ecological crisis or invasive species. Chapter 1 focuses on the San José Scale (Quadraspidiotus perniciosus), Chapter 2 on the Chestnut Blight (Cryphonectria parasitica), Chapter 3 on insects at the US-Mexico border, and so on. However, the predominant thread of the book is dedicated to the experience of Japanese immigrants during the growing, racist, anti-immigrant hysteria prevalent at the time. In Chapter 4, Shinozuka explains how Japanese Americans were classified as “unhygienic,” [103] were accused of price fixing and unfair business practices, and were accused of bearing responsibility for hookworm and foodborne illnesses.

Chapter 5 shifts focus to Hawai’i. As a gateway between the US and Asia, Hawai’i became a central focus in securing ecological borders. Shinozuka uses the chapter to demonstrate how scientific authority was deployed as a tool of empire. The remaining chapters cover a growing anti-Japanese paranoia during WWII, including a discussion that joins the incarceration of the Japanese American population and the widespread use of chemical pesticides to combat Japanese Beetle infestations.

Biotic Borders is a thoroughly researched book. Shinozuka uses a variety of sources, including oral histories, to weave together human and non-human narratives. However, occasionally the exact relationship between the human and insect migration is obscured. Whether nativism was a driving force in the creation of ecological borders or whether the creation of ecological borders contributed to growing nativism is unclear in her telling. Similarly, the causal relationship between alarm over Japanese immigration and alarm over plant and insect immigration is sometimes confused. This said, what is clear from Shinozuka’s book is that these processes mirrored each other, and that through one, we gain a better understanding of the other.

By the end of the book, Shinozuka weaves the historical questions of globalization and racism with contemporary challenges. Citing the recent example of COVID-19, she demonstrates how politicians fixated on the Chinese origins of the virus, compared the pandemic to Pearl Harbor and 9/11, and—just like at the end of the nineteenth century—racialized a biotic invader. The book concludes with a direct disagreement with environmental historian Peter Coates who once argued that the brand of “botanical xenophobia” and “eco-racism” [217] presented by Shinozuka had largely dissolved by the late twentieth century. To Shinozuka, as globalization accelerated, science played an increasing role in “the transnational flow of bodies, agricultural products and livestock, and pollution” [219]. She argues that this role is too often obscured when immigration is discussed in a vacuum. Despite its somber content, the book ends with a hopeful note that Biotic Borders could serve as an example for an interdisciplinary, open-ended dialogue about questions of science, racism, nationalism, and ethics.

William Dinneen is a pre-doc research associate at the University of Pennsylvania’s PDRI-DevLab. He graduated with a bachelor’s in history from Emory University where he wrote a thesis about the environmental restoration of the Rocky Flats nuclear facility.

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

Review of Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration (2018)

In Undocumented Lives, Ana Raquel Minian explores the inner world of undocumented Mexican migrants in the United States from 1965 to the present. While detailing the harsh realities that these migrants faced, Minian also demonstrates how the migrants’ perceptions of their lives differed significantly from those of the state and how the draconian migration policies of the United States and Mexico were not just detrimental to the interests of the migrants but also of the governments. Foregrounding the voices and the choices of the migrants, Minian argues that while the undocumented Mexicans in the United States maintained transnational connections between the United States and Mexico, they were unable to claim full belonging in either place. By displaying the subjectivity of the undocumented lives, Minian challenges the dominant rhetoric in the present day that often characterizes migrants as agentless people who are completely subjugated by the power of the nation-state without their own sets of priorities, sense of belonging, emotionality, and other elements that are fundamental of being human.

By foregrounding the perspectives of undocumented migrants, Minian contests common stereotypes. She shows that most Mexican migrants simply wanted to look for work in the United States and were not drug dealers. They did not gain social benefits from the U.S. government and instead created their own transnational welfare system that supported their communities in Mexico. Women preferred to stay in Mexico and raise children rather than giving birth in the United States to produce anchor babies. Gay men also preferred to stay in the more conservative Mexico rather than moving to the more liberal United States.

Perhaps the most significant myth that Minian debunked was that undocumented migrants had a fixed place where they could call home. Although many believe that Mexican migrants had full substantive citizenship in Mexico, making their migration to the United States unnecessary, such an assumption, as Minian shows, is far from the truth. In Mexico, the poor economy damaged these migrants, depriving them of reasonable livelihood and making emigration the only viable option for them to survive. Meanwhile, the Mexican government did not treat these migrants as full citizens and instead considered them to be superfluous to the country. Following such logic, Mexican officials believed that out migration could alleviate the pressure of domestic unemployment as these “extras” departed Mexico and competed in the U.S. job market. Therefore, while the undocumented migrants encountered discrimination in the United States as “illegal aliens,” they also faced marginalization in the country of their citizenship and were unable to establish roots in their communities in Mexico.

Minian further shows that without attending to the motivation and the reality of the Mexican migrants, the U.S. government devised and implemented faulty immigration policies that were detrimental to both the migrants as well as its own interests. Minian points out that Mexican migrants frequently engaged in circular migration to maintain their transnational belonging. Therefore, their movement between Mexico and the United States was frequent and few wanted to stay in the United States permanently. However, because policymakers failed to understand such migration pattern, not only did they formulate laws that created excessive hardships for the migrants and their families, but they also, ironically, harmed the interest of the U.S. government. Between 1965 and 1986, the U.S. government legislated multiple immigration laws that aimed to reduce the number of undocumented migrants within the United States. However, these laws, by the hardening of the U.S.-Mexico borders, actually increased the number of “illegal aliens” as the Mexicans ceased to circularly migrate because they were afraid of being detained and deported at the borders.

Demonstrators with signs, most in Spanish protesting the Simpson-Mazzoli immigration bill in Los Angeles, Calif., 1983 — *Demonstrators with signs, primarily in Spanish, protest the Simpson-Mazzoli immigration bill in Los Angeles, California, 1983.*
*Source: UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections*

Despite encountering severe discriminations in the United States, national unbelonging in Mexico, and the local pressure to exit, Mexican migrants challenged their marginal status in all three spaces. In the United States, these undocumented people fought for their rights and protested their “illegal alien status” with help from various organizations. Meanwhile, they demonstrated their importance to the Mexican economy by funding welfares in their hometowns. While physically distant from their families, they preserved their transnational households through letter writing, photo exchanging, and circular migration. By asserting their rights and presence, these migrants maintained partial belonging to the United States, Mexico, and their local communities.

Minian’s work points to the importance of using oral historical interviews to uncover the stories of those whose voices that are so often absent in the archives. To present the history of undocumented migrants from their own perspectives, Minian discovered and examined privately held documents including letters, photographs, and pamphlets. By using these personal/family documents, Minian successfully foregrounded the perspectives of the migrants. She also supplemented her research with an impressive 250 oral historical interviews with the migrants and their families. While oral history can be problematic as the interviewee might withhold, distort, or simply forget certain information, Minian mitigated such issue by distilling the broader patterns within these accounts rather than focusing on any single story. A collective experience narrated from the migrants’ perspectives therefore emerged. Undoubtedly, these methods are useful for future historians looking to incorporate the voices of the marginalized in their studies. Overall, insightful and groundbreaking, Undocumented Lives will appeal to scholars interested in migration studies, borderlands history, and Mexican American studies.

Jian Gao is a third-year PhD student at UT Austin. His primary research focuses on the transnational history of Chinese in Mexico during the first half of the twentieth century, and his secondary research focuses on the global dynamics of Latin America during the Cold War era. His works have appeared in The Latin Americanist, Asian Journal of Latin American Studies, The International Report on Drug Studies, and most recently History Compass. His papers have won multiple awards from Latin American Studies Association (LASA), Rocky Mountain Council on Latin American Studies (RMCLAS), Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies (SECOLAS), and the World History Association (WHA).

Digital Archive Review – Más de 72

by Ashley Nelcy García, Department of Spanish and Portuguese

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

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

Screenshot of Más de 72

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

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

via Más de 72

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

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

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

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

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

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

From There to Here: Matthew Butler

Map of West Germany (in blue), where Dr. Butler was born (via Wikipedia)

I can’t claim to have a particularly fascinating or intrepid migrant story, just a slightly convoluted one: I came to the US from the UK in 2008, though I had not lived in “my” part of the UK, England, for five years before that because when I moved here, it was from Belfast in Northern Ireland. Even the “my” feels a bit elective, since I wasn’t born in England but in West Germany as the child of a British services family, and have spent a lot of time living in and studying Mexico. All of this is to say that people can have multiple and cumulative senses of belonging and that borders are often arbitrary things––just as that archaic-sounding phrase, “West Germany,” tells us. I came to Austin to work, then, pure and simple, but expecting that home would soon be where the heart is. Sometimes, actually, I think Texas claimed me long ago because I have always been fascinated by vaquero-culture; I still like the fact that a bus ride to UT down I-35 rolls along the Chisolm Trail. Really I came to Austin because UT has a brilliant Latin American History program with an incredible library and archive, the Benson Collection, largely focused on Mexico. And sunshine, which hasn’t been invented in England yet. I’ve stayed in Texas because I like it (mostly), because my son was born here, and because my students are always teaching me new things. Mexico is also our neighbor: for me it’s a privilege to work in a University that has such historic and actual ties with the country I study, and so many Mexican and latino students.

Others in this series

From There to Here: Julie Hardwick

by Julie Hardwick

Map of the United Kingdoms (via Wikipedia)

(UT History faculty come from all over the world. Here are their stories.)

I came here, aged 21, on 15 August 1984 to join a study abroad program in Wisconsin with every intention of returning to the UK to become an accountant in London – and in fact I had a nice job waiting. Instead I met my now husband of 31 years two days later, and I have been here ever since: first on a student visa as I shifted into a PhD program at Johns Hopkins, then on a green card as the spouse of a citizen, and latterly as a United States citizen. We have two native Texan daughters who have dual citizenship and they are very proud of their American and British roots.

From There to Here: Tatjana Lichtenstein

(UT History faculty come from all over the world. Here are their stories.)

By Tatjana Lichtenstein

Map of Denmark (via Wikimedia)

Being an immigrant has always been part of my story. More than 50 years ago, my parents left their home country in search of a better life. They ended up in the small country of Denmark in northern Europe. And it’s small: if you take a map and draw a line connecting Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio – well, Denmark fits within that triangle – and its population is less than those three cities combined. Like many European countries, Denmark did not have a tradition for welcoming immigrants. It was not part of the country’s DNA. My strange name, my parents’ accent, and our different foods made me stand out. I was a foreigner despite having been born there. Even though we were citizens, my family didn’t quite belong; didn’t really feel at home.

Perhaps because I had this feeling of being different, I developed a fascination with history very early in my life. Much like you and I have personal histories – experiences that we can point to as having shaped us – communities and societies also have stories that define them. To me the past is the key to understanding who we are as individuals and as community members. By the time I graduated from high school, I had decided that I wanted to become a professional historian, a teacher and researcher. After finishing my undergraduate degree in Denmark, I spent two years at Brandeis University near Boston, before I went to the University of Toronto for my doctorate in History.

Over nine years ago, I started my job as a professor teaching history at the University of Texas at Austin. My specialization is war and violence in the twentieth century, specifically the Second World War. It is a great privilege to be a teacher and a mentor to my students. This past January, I became an American citizen and am proud to take on the responsibilities that follows with that privilege.

The Public Archive: Sicilian-American Puppetry

Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students in the Public and Digital History Seminar at UT Austin experimented with ways to make interesting archival materials available and useful to the public; to anyone with access to a computer. Over the Summer, Not Even Past will feature each of these individual projects.

Megan McQuaid’s digital project, titled “Animating Italian Immigration: Sicilian-American Puppetry”, sheds light on the vibrant world of Sicilian puppet theater, or opera dei pupi, in Italian-American immigrant communities through digitized newspaper clippings, posters, programs, and photographs of marionettes.

More on McQuaid’s project and The Public Archive here.

The Public Archive: Texas Czech Culinary Traditions

Kolaches (Credit: Whitney, via Flickr)

Tracy Heim’s digital project, titled “Food Migrations: Texas Czech Culinary Traditions”, explores the experience of migration through the lens of food. Using the online publishing platform Scalar, “Food Migrations” not only offers a taste of Texan-Czech culinary culture through recipe books, photographs, and maps, but also considers the ways immigrant cultures are preserved – and changed – through food.

More on Heim’s project and The Public Archive here.

The Public Archive

Doing History Online and In Public

by Joan Neuberger

Links to their projects can all be found below on this page.

We built these digital, public projects in four main steps.

First, with the help of UT librarians, the students identified collections related to their research that were not yet available to the public. These collections of documents come from the many wonderful archives on our campus: the Harry Ransom Center, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, the Perry-Castañeda Library, the Briscoe Center for American History, and the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection. Then we digitized them.

Second, we each wrote a series of blog-essays to share our archival finds with the public. Each blog is meant to show something historically significant about our documents and to open them up in ways that any curious reader, without any background in the subject, can understand and appreciate.

Third, we wrote lesson plans based on our documents to allow educators at the K-12 and college levels to bring our archives into their classrooms.

Finally, we each built a website to introduce our topics, to share our digitized documents, and to make our blogs and lesson plans openly available.

Here are the results:

Qahvehkhaneh: Reading Iranian Newspapers: by Andrew Akhlaghi

The coffeehouse, qahvehkhaneh, was an important political and cultural institution in Iran. As men drank coffee, played backgammon, and discussed business, they also listened to impassioned pleas for democracy and reform from newspapers published in the Ottoman Empire, Russian Caucasus, and British India, smuggled into Iran and read aloud. This qahvehkhaneh is meant to spread the issues of one newspaper, Etella’at, to those curious about Iran.

Bureaucracy on the Ground: the Gálvez Visita of 1765: by Brittany Erwin.

This project examines the localized consequences and on-the-ground implications of the royal inspection, or visita general, administered by José de Gálvez in New Spain from 1765-1771.

After the Silence: María Luisa Puga and the 1985 Mexico City Earthquake by Ashley Garcia

María Luisa Puga (1944-2004) was a talented Mexican novelist from the Post-Boom movement whose personal notebooks, manuscripts, correspondence, and related documents are held in the Benson Latin American Collection. On this site you will find digitized selections from Cuaderno 118, which contains both Puga’s coverage of the earthquake that struck Mexico DF (now Mexico City) in 1985 and her reflections on those original pages, written in 2002.

Building a Jewish School in Iran: The Barmaïmon-Hamadan Manuscript by Isabelle Headrick

Where do you go when you want to change the world? For Isaac and Rebecca Bassan in 1900, the destination was Hamadan, Iran, to establish a French-language, Jewish school for the small Jewish community in that city. About fifty years another teacher at the school, Isaac Barmaïmon, wrote an 81-page manuscript that describes the first twenty years of the school’s existence.

Food Migrations: Texas Czech Culinary Traditions by Tracy Heim

Texans with Czech heritage have been able to preserve their culture in America through organizations, cultural events, church groups, and especially through food. Two books of recipes and other documents contextualize the process of migration into life in Texas and create a framework for understanding the Texas Czech culture.

Indian Revolt of 1857 by Anuj Kaushal.

South Asia witnessed an event during 1857 which altered the history of India, Britain, and the British East India Company. The event, known as a mere “mutiny” by the British and as an anti-colonial revolt by Indians, was reported in the English language press around the world.

The Road to Sesame Street by Peter Kunze

The Road to Sesame Street features government documents tracing the development of the Public Broadcast Act of 1967, the landmark legislation that established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, PBS, and NPR. Using materials from the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, this project provides a behind-the-scenes view of the power players, interest groups, and decisions that laid the groundwork for American public media.

Animating Italian Immigration: Sicilian-American Puppetry by Megan McQuaid.

Attending a puppet theatre performance with familiar characters acting out well-known stories gave some Italians living in New York City a regular taste of the homeland they had left behind.

Frederic Allen Williams: Citizen-Artist with a Magic Lantern by Jesse Ritner

Frederic Allen Williams (1898-1955) was a prominent sculptor, lecturer, intellectual, and rodeo rider based in New York City, where he became known for his talks on Native American art, illustrated with magic lantern slides, which he gave in his midtown studio near the then recently built Museum of Modern Art.

Woven Into History: Living Cultural Fabrics by Alina Scott

The nineteenth and twentieth-century Navajo rugs in this collection aims to provide a platform for respectful collaboration and discourse to recenter the discussion of Navajo culture and commodity production around them and to diversify traditional conversations about Navajo textiles and their communities.

Mercenary Monks by Jonathan Seefeldt

These texts are windows into a thriving monastic world whose varied activities included: raising mercenary armies, caring for widows and child brides, providing credit and other banking services, collecting tax revenue from farmers, providing merit and prestige to an emerging merchant class, and asserting a (short-lived) form of political independence.

Guards and Pickets: The Paperwork of Slavery by Gaila Sims.

The documents in this collection provide a glimpse into the paperwork created to control the movement and relationships of the enslaved, as well as the financial documentation used to make money off the institution of slavery.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the following people for sharing their expertise in digital and public history with us: Dale Correa, Liza Talbot, Ian Goodale, Stephanie Malmros, Christina Bleyer, Albert Palacios, Andrea Gustavson, Elizabeth Gushee, Astrid Ruggaldier, Penne Restad, and Stacy Vlasits.

Dreaming with the Ancestors: Black Seminole Women in Texas and Mexico by Shirley Boteler Mock (2010)

by Micaela Valadez

This outstanding ethnographic history explores the migration of Black Seminole people across the South and Southwest of the United States, highlighting the survival of cultural and spiritual practices by Black Seminole women. Boteler Mock uses ethnographic research and oral history to weave together the long migratory route that Black Seminoles made since the 18th century, that tells us how this group survived centuries of danger and also provides the community with a way to save and pass down that knowledge.

Dreaming with the Ancestors argues that Black Seminole women held on to their African identities, which they melded with the Native American and Mexican cultures that the community encountered during their migration, slowly forming the culture and identity that survives to this day. From the plantations on the East Coast to present day Brackettville, Texas and Nacimiento, Mexico, Black Seminole women would have to deal with multiple adversities including discrimination, prejudice, warring, and the eventual loss of their future generations’ interest in their own history. What Boteler Mock does is provide these young Black Seminoles living in Brackettville, Texas, and to others who have moved on, with a precious piece of literature dedicated to the efforts, resilience, and incredible endurance of the Black Seminole people, especially the women. The authors’ ultimate purpose for this book, and the hope of her beloved friend and critical interviewee, Alice Fay, is that this work would revitalize the younger community to learn and appreciate their history and ancestors courage. I found that the motivation and the actual relationship Boteler Mock had with her interviewees, who would come to be more like family, really made me appreciate the work she did.

Sgt. Ben July, Black Seminole scout for the U. S. Army in Fort Clark, TX.

The methods Boteler Mock uses are key in persuading her audience to understand the importance of women in the Black Seminole community. Her blend of ethnography, archival documents, diaries, memoirs, and oral histories offers both a solid history of Black Seminole culture and identity formation and an engaging personalized account of everyday life that is hard to stop reading. The author’s descriptions of the scenery and her memoir-like introduction make you almost forget the work is also scholarly. But the book also shows how valuable oral history and ethnography are to understanding a community’s history through the experiences of those who have lived it. The mixture of historical background with the memories and stories told by the elders of the Black Seminole community make for a very revealing study of the connections between African, Native American, and Mexican cultures that have come together to form the Black Seminole identity.

Seminole women with their hand-crank sewing machines (via State Library and Archives of Florida)

This book serves not only as an essential study of Black Seminoles or Black Seminole women, but as a study of the interconnectedness of gender, identity formation, and diaspora in any community that is forcefully moved out of its space and must renegotiate its identities to survive. Boteler Mock highlights the importance that women have played in the community but also points towards their importance in maroon and Native American communities as mothers, leaders, spiritual connections to the past and future, and guardians of the culture. This book also shows the understanding that can result from an ethnographer’s honest and sincere treatment of the Black Seminole community. The honesty and openness of the women Boteler Mock interviewed and the lasting friendships they made convinced me that the women trusted her. Any reader should be able to connect with these stories as much as I did.