oral history Archives - Not Even Past

Audio Archive: Spanish Flu in the Texas Oil Fields

This article was originally posted in the Briscoe Center for American History’s Newsletter.

In 1918, Spanish influenza ravaged a war-weary world, killing as many as 40 million people across the globe and over half a million in America. In the oil fields of Texas, the flu was particularly vindictive due to poor working conditions and a lack of health care. The Oral History of the Texas Oil Industry Records include interviews with roughnecks, rig managers, mule skinners, and Red Cross workers who witnessed the flu firsthand. Below are four excerpts from the collection.

Black and white image of the main street of Desdemona, Texas crowned with cars and horse-drawn wagons

Walter Cline, Red Cross worker in Burkburnett, Texas

“And we had what you and I now know to be the worst flu epidemic we’ve ever had in the United States. I was serving as field director for the Red Cross at the time in charge of Red Cross field operations at Call Field near Wichita Falls. . . . We got the government to assign some doctors and nurses to try and relieve the situation. . . . We asked the people of Wichita Falls to contribute in order that we might find shelter and food and warm clothing and medicine for the people, many of whom were suffering from flu and exposed in covered wagons and under these tarpaulins. . . . In one place, you’d find a mother dead, with a little six or eight months old baby crawling around over her breast, trying to open her dress. And you gather her up and look around and her husband is sick over there and a little boy. I think on our first trip west of Burkburnett, we gathered up some six or eight dead men, women, and children, and they continued to die until we found temporary shelter for them.

The people in Wichita Falls were most generous and helpful. They shipped lumber and bedding and food and clothing by carloads. As I recall it, the railroad hauled it to Burkburnett free of any freight charge, and the teamsters, the oil field haulers, hauled it out to where it was needed without any charge. And it was possibly one of the saddest sights I’ve ever had to experience . . . it was rather saddening to see thousands of people, and there were thousands of them, suffering and dying and little we could do about it. We finally stopped it . . . we had a reputation for taking care of the folks that couldn’t take care of themselves. They parked along the riverfronts and pitched camp and we tried to feed and shelter them and give them medicine and take care of them through the winter. And it was rather a severe winter.”

Burkburnett lies close to Wichita Falls in northeast Texas. In 1912 oil was discovered west of Burkburnett, but a much larger find was made in 1918, drawing approximately 20,000 people to the area. “Of course, there was a tremendous influx of people,” recalled Cline. “Crop conditions had been very poor over most of southern Oklahoma and western Texas, and there were thousands of families who were suffering for enough food and clothing and shelter to carry them through the winter months.” Many of these families found work in Burkburnett. But they also found the flu. By the end of 1918, the oil field was producing 7,500 barrels per day, and twenty trains ran daily between Burkburnett and Wichita Falls. These figures suggest managers prioritized profit over public health. Due to the transient nature of the working population, it is not clear how many people died. The oil boom died out by 1930.

Black and white image of a wagon loaded with oil equipment and a car stuck in a muddy road in a small Texas town

G. Lawson, oil rig worker in Ranger, Texas.

“I was in Ranger when they had this flu epidemic, and that was about the most pitiful thing that I have ever seen. I have seen parents carrying children down the street on their shoulders unable to raise their heads, taking them to the doctor’s office. Seen caskets just piled up—bodies in them I suppose—ready to be shipped out. That was one of the hardest things to see.”

Born in West Virginia, Lawson worked in oil fields across the United States and Mexico wherever he could find work. In 1917, he came to Ranger, Texas. Ranger, between Fort Worth and Abilene, was an agricultural town. Hard hit by drought, locals initiated a successful search for oil. By mid-1917, McClesky No. 1 reached a daily production of 1,700 barrels. The discovery kicked off an oil boom that radically transformed both Ranger and the surrounding Eastland County. Unsanitary conditions caused by makeshift housing and torrential rain led to outbreaks of typhoid. In 1918, when Spanish flu began to spread, the town was ill-prepared. However, work in the oil fields never abated, no doubt one of the reasons the flu hit so hard. By 1919 there were 22 oil wells in the area. By 1921, most of the wells were spent.

Black and white image of five men standing underneath an oil rig

Fred Jennings, rig manager in Goose Creek, Texas

“The people died [in Goose Creek, Texas, east of Houston] and they just died so fast here till they didn’t have no undertakers. You’d just have to put them in pickup trucks and haul them to Houston. Just put them in a pine box and bury them any way you could. That went on—well, that was 1918. That was through the winter months of 1918, when the flu epidemic was so bad . . . and men—I saw one man working and walk home and was dead in thirty minutes after he came home with that flu.”

Born Gonzales County, Fred Jennings settled in Goose Creek in 1916, eventually working his way up from roughneck to rig superintendent. In 1917 Ross S. Sterling, president of Humble Oil and future governor of Texas, pioneered a railroad connection to the Southern Pacific line at Dayton, leading to a boom—“30,000 people into the area overnight,” according to Jennings. In his interview, Jennings discusses the conditions in the town before and after the flu epidemic. Topics covered include strike action, the declaration of martial law, fist fights, gunfights, the poor treatment of women, and the arrival of the Ku Klux Klan.

Black and white image of a mule train moving through a small town in the South Texas Oil Fields

Plummer Barfield, mule train operator in Jefferson County, Texas

“Even as late as ’19 and ’20, well, we were pretty short-handed during the flu epidemic around the cemetery because—especially in the fall and the early spring of ’19 and the early spring of ’20, when the epidemic was at its worst, why, people was just afraid to get out. And I’ve had— conducted several funerals that there wouldn’t be nobody there but maybe a brother, or maybe a son or the father of one, or a gravedigger and myself in any number of cases. And the preachers, at one time here, all of our local preachers were sick, and everybody worked to death in this neck of the woods, and you just couldn’t get nobody. Lots of times we wouldn’t have enough for pallbearers. . . . But those things couldn’t be helped and they understood, . . . people that had been sick didn’t have any business out. . . . And most of them was afraid they were gonna be sick and they wouldn’t get out unless they had to. So it was pretty severe in this neck of the woods for about six months.”

Plummer Barfield grew up in Jefferson County. He worked in livery stables for much of his life and ran mule trains that carried supplies to a variety of oil fields between Beaumont and Houston during the 1910s and 1920s.

About the Oral History of the Texas Oil Industry Records

Created in the 1950s, the Oil Industry Records project was commissioned by Estelle Sharp. Her husband, Walter Sharp, was one of the early Spindletop drillers. Mrs. Sharp saw the need to gather the recollections of those who worked during the early Texas oil boom. The collection includes 218 taped interviews that have since been transcribed. The Briscoe Center is in the process of digitizing the entire collection and making it available online.

You might also like:
Making History: Houston’s “Spirit of the Confederacy”
Documenting Slavery in East Texas: Transcripts from Monte Verdi
Remembering the Tex-Son Strike: Legacies of Latina-led Labor Activism in San Antonio, Texas

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

The Odds are Stacked Against Us: Oral Histories of Black Healthcare in the U.S.

By Thomaia Pamplin

Thomaia J. Pamplin is a graduate student at the University of Texas MD Anderson/UTHealth Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. Pamplin’s research focuses on the elderly, black community in Houston and their interactions with the healthcare system. She hopes her research will advance Narrative Medicine, a field that highlights the importance of knowing patients beyond their symptoms and causes. Pamplin aspires to be a doctor who lives up to that ideal in her own career.

Distrust in the U.S. healthcare institution has been pervasive in the black community for many generations. Although young African Americans may be far removed from atrocities like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which hundreds of black men were inoculated with syphilis without their informed consent and without any treatment, the mistrust seems to be handed down through subsequent generations. This lack of confidence in the healthcare system is reflected in studies that show the black infant mortality rate in the U.S. is twice as high as white infant mortality. The excess risk experienced by African-American infants reflects factors that are unique to the black experience in the U.S., including area-level poverty, differential access to pre-and perinatal care and other socioeconomic differences.[1] Studies have also shown that patients’ perceptions of their health care providers’ attitudes toward their ethnic or mental health status affect a patient’s decision to even pursue healthcare provisions.[2] Stereotypes like “the strong black woman,” also pressure women to not seek help or when seeking help, to feel as though better care is provided for non-black patients.[3]

Unidentified subject, onlookers and Dr. Walter Edmondson taking a blood test as part of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (Photo Credit: NARA, Atlanta, GA via Wikimedia Commons)

The Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis at the University of Texas reported that “Blacks of all socioeconomic levels are disproportionately affected by stress-related diseases that translate into a radicalized life expectancy.” They also found that throughout the U.S. there is a shortage of mental health professionals especially serving in low-income areas. There is a wide gap between the life expectancy of Black and White people in the U.S.; this gap “can be attributed to higher death rates among Black men and women due to heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes perinatal conditions, and homicide.” Many of these ailments are the leading causes of death for other marginalized groups in the U.S. Some of the recommendations this report makes is to expand Medicaid, health communities’ model, increase representation of black healthcare professionals, strengthen the social and economic structure of these communities, and promote health in all legislative policy.[4]

There are roughly one million practicing physicians in the US and less than 6 percent of those physicians are African-American.[5] Meaning that for the 44 million black residents of the U.S., there are about 60,000 black practicing physicians.[6] That is one black doctor for every 700 black patients. This is not to say that only African-American physicians can treat African-American patients, but distrust in healthcare institutions could potentially be alleviated by having providers be of the same ethnicity as the patient.

As the statistics of black health disparities rise and the need for healthcare intervention is increasing, the black church in the U.S. has the potential to mobilize people to seek medical care. Studies have shown that health interventions in black communities through the church have been successful, especially in early cancer detection.[7] Women play a “cornerstone” role in black churches and one study of Pastors’ perceptions on the health status of the black church and African-American communities found that “African-American women focus much of their time and energy caring for others within their church and less on their own health and well-being.” [8]

One way to understand the causes of racial health disparities, and the role of women in health care, inside and outside of black churches, is through oral histories, such as the interviews I conducted among lower-income women from a small congregation in southeast Texas. Two of their stories follow.

Black Nurse in North Carolina, March 1962 (via DPLA)

All Eyes on Mindi
“I remember being in school, in the classroom and not understanding what was being taught,” Mindi told me one day at a public library in South Texas. As she talked, I noticed big brown eyes peek from the edge of the wall near us. Glancing at me then, at her mom’s back, Mindi’s daughter was intimidatingly protective for a forty pound, four-year-old. Her thick, black hair was twisted in pink bow berets, somewhat resembling her mother’s short locs. The little girl skipped away after gathering the intel she needed.

“I was never bold,” Mindi told me “I was quiet and shy. And then I didn’t want to hurt people’s feelings… but now I can’t be that way anymore.”

Most of the 33-year-old mother’s career has been in education which is unsurprising when you hear her musical Texan accent. It sounds like at any point she can sing a song about a task, which would probably motivate all the kids in the library to start working.

“I would have blackouts and zone out,” Mindi continued. She had never been diagnosed with a learning disorder; however, these episodes did affect how the future educator learned. “What the teacher would say went over my head… I would have to focus ten times harder and read chapters twice over…I was always the one who needed the curve.”

In adulthood, the blackouts occurred at the worst of times, but the third incident was the most frightening. One day, while Mindi was driving her car, she had a blackout seizure and struck a pole. She didn’t drive for eight months after the accident. This incident forced her health to become her family’s top priority.

In June 2016, four months before her first seizure, Mindi’s eldest son, twelve-year-old Jay, moved out of her home and into his grandmother’s. “I was always so excited to have a family of my own, so what really caused the sickness is when I felt like I lost my son…My family was separated, my body just–” She paused, her hands were in front of her chest, the back of her hands faced me as one cupped the other. She moved her chest forward as if the words could be pulled from her, but instead, she relaxed her body, took a breath, and restarted. “He was there, but I felt like I was grieving him. I felt like I took it too hard.”

Mindi attributed the conflict she had with her son to her personality, “my son took advantage and ran with it…He would run away from home over the slightest thing. If I asked him to wash the dishes and I’m asking him for the third time, I’m not going to ask as nicely. Then bam! [He’d] run away.” She recalled how he would talk back to her but not to her husband, she didn’t believe he respected boundaries with her, but in actuality, she recalled, “those boundaries weren’t set with him, with my husband, or with my coworkers. I had to go and do that at the age of 32.”

Mindi began to see neurologists in efforts to treat her seizures. She took numerous tests, but the results would always come back normal. “I remember being hooked up to all these gears, and the physician would be doing random things to try to make me have a seizure.” He tested her as if she were epileptic, though Mindi knew that was not the case. “I just felt like based off my symptoms, he should have done different things to make me have a seizure…Rather than doing all the things by the book. I thought he should have gone outside of the box…read a little deeper into my demeanor.”

“I remember asking God to help me. I don’t want to be a victim. Deuteronomy 30:19, God says we have the power to control the mind. So, we get to choose.” Mindi internalized this idea; she would tell herself, “Mindi, you can’t be quiet and shy, speak up. If this didn’t work, then go to another doctor.” She became firmer with her physicians because her triggers were continuously overlooked by them, until finally, she met with a specialist who she felt saw her condition for what it was. “I felt like the ball was back in my court,” she said. “My best doctor is the psychiatrist that I’m seeing now. When he diagnosed me, he didn’t use all these medical terms. He put it into a form that I could understand, he explained that it was a chemical imbalance…He explained what my brain was doing and why. I wasn’t just blown off…I actually feel like I have a personal relationship with him…He wanted to see my symptoms and I was able to actually have a full-blown anxiety attack in front of him… His approach seemed more fact-based rather than assumption, that’s what I liked.”

“I have a lot of eyes on me. They’re waiting on my next move” Mindi said of her family as her daughter dashed into my view again, glancing at the both of us. According to Mindi, her increased self-advocacy has even affected the way her children communicate. “If they ever feel some type of way,” Mindi said, “they say it, and I can now give them an answer on their level to make them understand.” For her mental health, Mindi said “I can’t let anything linger. I can talk now freely…open[ly] and honest[ly] and however you receive it, I’m sorry that’s how you receive it because I have to say it for myself.”

The Treatment of Not “Very Important People”
I met with Canjie in her home in southeast Texas. Her living room had dark hardwood floors and a giant widescreen TV on the wall. The evening news was on. Canjie is a woman in her 60s. She’s tall and has a short wispy afro, along with a sweet small grin that frequently lights up her face when she greets you or laughs.

Canjie learned the importance of self-advocacy after the first time her mother became drastically ill. “She always had heart trouble,” Canjie told me. One day, about twenty-seven years ago, she called her mother from work, only to hear mother “talking out of her head,” unexpectedly she seemed mentally unwell. Canjie told her, “Momma, get ready I’m coming down there.” She drove from Houston to San Antonio, even though her mother insisted she not come. When she arrived in San Antonio, Canjie’s sister and son took her mother to see her primary care physician, a man she had been seeing for decades. “She trusted him,” Canjie remembered. Though to her family, Canjie’s mother seemed to clearly be in pain and very confused, the doctor said nothing was wrong with her. The next day, they took Canjie’s mother to see the same physician because she was increasingly unwell. Her son and the doctor argued, they “almost got into it,” Canjie said, because of the neglect her mother was receiving even after being in his care for years. Canjie remembers the older white male doctor condescendingly shaking his finger in her 24-year-old son’s face and her son angrily told him to take his finger away. Canjie’s sister had already put their mother back in the van they had come in. They had to return home quickly because a shooting had erupted in the area, “there was always some shooting going near [my sister’s] house,” where Canjie’s mother stayed.

They decided to take her to the ER, the next day “[we] found out her gall bladder was about to burst.” She remembers the ER doctor saying, “Oh yes, we’ve got to do surgery.” He also told them that their mother would not have much time to live without treatment. This incident motivated Canjie throughout her life to advocate better for herself and loved ones. “These doctors…they’ve got a lot of patients and it’s just about a job for them,” she said.

Her mother did pass away eventually, and afterwards, Canjie decided she wanted to find the doctor that had so egregiously dismissed her family. She found that he was illegally prescribing drugs to his family and other people, “so they had arrested him,” she reported. “This man was not right,” she told her family, “he didn’t give a damn about Momma. He was just making money…She made it through that, but it was a mess, I promise you that.”

Texas Hospital, 1970 (via Wikimedia Commons)

In most clinics, Canjie believed people were “being treated like cattle.” She recalled going to one’s doctor’s office, giving a few details of symptoms to a medical assistant, then only being in contact with a doctor for less than five minutes, before he diagnosed her and described her medication. She also believed that she was prescribed medication too quickly at times. “My potassium was low,” she recalled, “and right away, [my physician] wanted to write me a medication, and I said ‘No, let me see what I can do.’ So, I came home, and I started eating bananas every day. When I went back to him, my potassium was normal. I would’ve gotten that medicine for nothing.” This was 15 years ago, and she has never had a problem with potassium insufficiency since.

She does have favorable healthcare experiences, including a primary care physician, Dr. S. “What I liked about him [was] we could talk. He didn’t rush you. You know, these doctors get you and try to rush you out because they have the next patient to get [to] because of insurance [companies] and stuff. Well Dr. S, he was on that same kind of insurance, but he would sit you in his office and talk to you for 30 minutes. He didn’t rush you out… you’d have the time to ask him all kinds of questions.”

“I really loved being his patient,” she continued, “I liked his nurse. I liked the whole experience, but he decided 20 years down the road…that he wanted to do the VIP program. That’s where doctors have specific patients that pay them and have 24 hours access to them. So, they pay them not only what the insurance pays but outside of that… another $2000 a month or something of that nature,” she explained. Dr. S asked Canjie if she wanted to join the program, but she declined. “It’s for the chronically ill,” she said, “and rich [people]” she added lightheartedly, “not for me, you know?” As she said this, I searched her face for anger or disappointment, but there was no trace of resentment for not being included as a “Very Important Person” with her favorite primary care physician.

Conclusions
Mindi faced a problem that many parents and teachers experience, the weight of being responsible for many children’s upbringing. She was responsible for the development of her own children, as a Sunday-school and dance teacher, her community’s children, and as an educator, dozens in her district.

Her personality was such that her own needs and desires were not prioritized by others or herself at times. But with the intensity of her seizure condition increasing, her priorities changed. It was a very difficult road to becoming a better advocate for herself in every sphere, especially as a patient.

Mindi is typical of trends seen in black churches where their female members take on a heavy load of responsibility to others that can become detrimental to their own health. One reason Mindi wanted to share her story with me was to encourage other women with similar lifestyles, to start saying “no” more often, to take on less responsibility, and to prioritize their own health in order to live a better life.

Canjie’s experience demonstrates the difficulty of achieving good results even with advocacy. She learned to be a better advocate when her mother’s health was in danger. She used that knowledge to cut the costs of her own healthcare treatment and find physicians who she thought treated her well. Ultimately, Canjie settled for lesser healthcare experiences because her favorite physician could no longer afford to see her or anybody who could not pay the “VIP” price.

What’s at stake here is the survival of marginalized people. There is an incredibly difficult road to advocating enough for one’s self or family. The amount of advocacy needed is drastically different among different groups of people. The doubled mortality rate of black infants compared to white infants shows this. Even with evident advocacy, good treatment is still inaccessible for certain people.

There are dozens of stories like Mindi’s and Canjie’s that have been publicized and many generation’s worth of stories that have not reached the public.

This research was supported by the UT College of Liberal Arts Engaged Scholar Initiative.

References:
[1] Lauren M. Rossen, Diba Khan, and Kenneth C. Schoendorf, “Mapping Geographic Variation in Infant Mortality and Related Black–White Disparities in the US,” Epidemiology 27: 5 (2016). doi:10.1097/ede.0000000000000509
[2] Akhavan, S., Tillgren P., “Client/Patient Perceptions of Achieving Equity in Primary Health Care: A Mixed Methods Study,” International Journal of Equity Health 14:65 (2015). doi:10.1186/s12939-015-0196-5
[3] Nicolaidis, C., Timmons, V., Thomas, M.J., et al., “’You don’t go tell White people nothing’: African American women’s perspectives on the influence of violence and race on depression and depression care,” American Journal of Public Health. 100:8 (2018):1470–1476. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2009.161950
[4] Michelle Roundtree, “The State of Black Lives in Texas Health Report Health Report,” The University of Texas at Austin Institute for Urban Policy Research & Analysis. March 2019
[5] Kaiser Family Foundation. “Professionally Active Physicians.” https://www.kff.org/
[6] United States Census. https://www.census.gov.
[7] Slade, J.L., Holt, C.L., Bowie, J., et al. “Recruitment of African American Churches to Participate in Cancer Early Detection Interventions: A Community Perspective,” Journal of Religious Health 57:2 (2018):751–761. doi:10.1007/s10943-018-0586-2
[8] Gross, T.T., Story, C.R., Harvey, I.S., Allsopp, M., Whitt-Glover, M., “’As a Community, We Need to be More Health Conscious’: Pastors’ Perceptions on the Health Status of the Black Church and African-American Communities,” Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities 5:3 (2018):570–579. doi:10.1007/s40615-017-0401-x

To learn more, consider these suggestions for further reading:
“The Never-Ending Mistreatment of Black Patients” by Jessica Nutik Zitter (The New York Times)
“The State of Black Lives in Texas Health Report” by Michell A. Roundtree Ph.D., et al, March 2019
“Doctors Don’t Always Believe You When You’re a Black Woman” by Joanne Spataro (VICE)
“Black Women are Dying from a Lack of Access to Reproductive Health Services” by Lathasa D. Mayes (TIME)
“America is Failing its Black Mothers” by Amy Roeder (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health)

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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.

The Public Historian: Giving it Back

By Edward Shore

Dear dissertation advisers and doctoral candidates,

Remain vigilant for signs of Mid-Degree Existential Crisis (MDEC) among graduate students. Common symptoms include sleeplessness, semi-facial paralysis, and hair loss. MDEC is known to occur most frequently in doctoral candidates who have returned to Austin, Texas, after a year of dissertation fieldwork in Brazil. Physicians have prescribed Melatonin, Botox, and Propecia. If you or a loved one suspects that a PhD student is suffering from MDEC, please intervene immediately.

Signed, a distressed fifth year PhD candidate.

I discovered that I was suffering a Mid-Degree Existential Crisis during my third viewing of Star Wars: The Force Awakens earlier this month. I had dragged my partner, Cristina, to the AMC Arizona Center 24 Multiplex to experience JJ Abrams’ interpretation of the space-western saga on the second night of our honeymoon in Phoenix. Cristina gazed spellbound as our young heroine, Rey, the scavenger from Jakku, discovered the Force and defeated the villainous Kylo Ren in a climactic lightsaber duel on Starkiller Base.

“Rey is totally Luke Skywalker’s daughter,” Cristina whispered in my ear.

“This is why I married you,” I thought to myself. But then, as Resistance fighters routed the First Order, a panic attack overpowered me like a Darth Vader chokehold. I struggled to breathe. My heart pounded. My palms grew sweaty. This could mean only one thing: spring semester was right around the corner.

Allow me to explain. Last October, I returned to Austin after nine months of dissertation research in Brazil. My project retraces the historical emergence of Article 68, a 1988 constitutional amendment that extends land rights and recognition to rural black communities descended from fugitive slaves known as “quilombos.” I underscore the law’s importance as a harbinger for the nation’s affirmative action policies, while also analyzing its impact on popular struggles over land, resources, and citizenship in the Brazilian countryside. In addition to archival research, I recorded oral histories of quilombo activists living in the Atlantic Rainforest of São Paulo’s Vale do Ribeira, the last preserve of endangered species and wildlife in Brazil’s most heavily industrialized state.

Picture of Quilombo of Ivaporunduva and the Ribeira de Iguape River in São Paulo, Brazil — Quilombo of Ivaporunduva and the Ribeira de Iguape River, São Paulo, Brazil. Courtesy of the author.

The Instituto Socioambiental (ISA), a São Paulo-based NGO that defends the social and environmental rights of so-called “traditional peoples'” in Brazil, including quilombolas (communities of quilombos), indigenous groups, and rubber tappers, sponsored my research. I lived and worked for six weeks at ISA’s satellite office in Eldorado, a small town of 5,000 inhabitants located in the heartland of the Vale do Ribeira. I shadowed my friends, ISA anthropologists Alexandre Kishimoto, Raquel Pasinato, and Frederico da Silva, who assisted quilombo communities in organizing an oral history project, a farming cooperative, and a “seed bank” of rare subsistence crops that quilombolas and their ancestors had planted in the valley for over four centuries. The experience was exhilarating. It contributed immensely to the conceptual development of my dissertation. Most important, my sojourn in the Vale do Ribeira impressed on me the urgency of using scholarship to advance the social rights of Brazil’s marginalized quilombo population. I had never felt more alive than I did in the field.

Fall semester 2015 was a different story. Re-entry to university life was excruciating. I hit rock bottom. Brazil had offered shelter from writer’s block, fellowship rejections, and the pessimism of a shrinking job market. Back in Austin, I sat at my desk determined to write my first chapter. But the words never came. I tore through dozens of yellow legal pads full of scribbled notes, half-baked insights, and aborted first drafts. Anguish from writer’s block grew so severe that I developed a spasm in the left side of my face that required eight Botox injections near the eyelid to paralyze the nerve. I doubted if I would ever complete a first draft of a chapter, let alone graduate and realize my lifelong dream of becoming a professor. Mid-Degree Existential Crisis is real, even if it’s not. Trust me.

Somehow I persevered. I’m no closer to completing my first chapter today than I was last December. Still, I remain more resolute than ever to write my dissertation. I am finding motivation in a new love for public history and a burning sense of social responsibility.

Picture of Cachoeira do Meu Deus in Quilombo Sapatu, São Paulo — Cachoeira do Meu Deus, Quilombo Sapatu, São Paulo. Courtesy of the author.

My informants in the Vale do Ribeira helped me to realize that writing a thesis and reporting on my findings at academic conferences and in academic publication was not enough for me. They challenged me to make my research public to support quilombos in their efforts to achieve their constitutional rights to land and citizenship. Although the Brazilian government recognizes over 3,000 rural black communities as “quilombos,” fewer than 160 possess title to their lands. Big Agribusiness has largely succeeded in preventing the titling of quilombo lands while conservatives in congress have challenged the constitutionality of Article 68 in federal court. How could historical research empower quilombos to overcome injustices perpetrated by powerful landowners, multi-national mineral companies, and their own government?

I recently posed this question to my friend at ISA, anthropologist Alexandre Kishimoto. His response surprised me. Last August, I assisted Alexandre in recording video testimonies of quilombola leaders in the communities of Ivaporunduva, São Pedro, and Pedro Cubas. The initiative was part of a wide effort to publicize the Eighth Annual Seeds Festival sponsored by the Instituto Socioambiental in Eldorado. Since 2008, representatives from the sixty-six quilombo communities in the Vale do Ribeira convene in Eldorado in August to trade handicrafts, crops, and other agricultural goods. ISA inaugurated the Seeds Festival after local forest rangers prohibited quilombos from planting subsistence gardens in the Atlantic Rainforest. The results of the ban were devastating. Communities that for centuries had planted mandioc, rice, and beans suddenly faced food shortages. Entire species of crops vanished. Malnutrition skyrocketed. With the help of ISA, quilombos in the valley have recovered several varieties of lost seeds. The project has also strengthened the communities’ campaign for land while also pressuring the state government of São Paulo to alleviate onerous restrictions on subsistence farming. Yet change has continued to advance slowly.

Quilombola activists at a demonstration against the proposed construction of hydroelectric dams on the Ribeira de Iguape River in Adrianópolis, Paraná. Courtesy of the author. — Quilombola activists at a demonstration against proposed construction of hydroelectric dams on the Ribeira de Iguape River in Adrianópolis, Paraná. Courtesy of the author.

Alexandre responded to my question by urging me to produce English subtitles for ISA’s promotional videos on the Seeds Festival and to share them with the university community and the public at large. He believes that pressure from the US academy could force local authorities in São Paulo to lift restrictions on quilombola agriculture in the Vale do Ribeira. He also hopes that such a small act might also lead to closer collaboration between ISA, local communities, and the University of Texas to advance the constitutionally guaranteed rights of Brazil’s quilombos. This is why public history matters. This is why I get out of bed in the morning to write my dissertation. This is how I won my battle with Mid-Degree Existential Crisis.

Sound Maps: The New Archive (No. 6)

By Henry Wiencek

In the study of history, it’s easy to fall back on national identities: “Irish music,” an “English accent,” “American Exceptionalism” are just a few examples. But a closer examination of the local cultures—music, dialects, history—that exist within nations demonstrates how misleading those generalizations can be. Just look through one of the British Library’s “Sound Maps” and you’ll be convinced. This remarkable site takes many of the library’s 50,000 recordings of music, regional accents, and oral histories and arranges them geographically on Google Maps. The project is at once global and local—each sound map is an aural window into a unique part of the world. You can hear birds chirping in Algarve, Portugal, a folksinger perform in Carlistrane, Ireland, or the local dialect in Morton, Mississippi.

One of the most fascinating—and addictive—features on the site is “Your Accents,” a global map of the world’s seemingly endless variety of dialects. The map features recordings of people from across the globe reading the same English phrases, allowing listeners to discern how each locality articulates “scone,” “garage” and “schedule” among other richly pronounceable words. The most immediate differences are apparent along national lines, as English, Indian, American, and various other accents contour the words in unique ways. But the map goes even deeper—revealing the astonishing regional differences that exist within those nations. Although people from Brighton and Leeds ostensibly share an “English” accent, the sonic differences between them are vast.

Other sound maps use the same technology to tell far more sobering stories. “Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust” archives oral histories of that traumatic epoch. Again using Google Maps, the page arranges survival stories based on geographic origins: individuals from France, England, Germany, Poland and even Azerbaijan are all represented. These unique and deeply affecting histories underscore the striking heterogeneity of the Holocaust’s victims and survivors. They were rich and poor; came from big cities and small towns; and identified as religiously devout and irreligious. By mapping their oral histories, the British Library visually captures that geographic and experiential diversity. And by letting them speak, reinforces the kinds of variations that get flattened out or even erased when reading text on a page.

The British Library’s “Sound Maps” is an invaluable tool for anyone interested in hearing what the world sounds like. Cultural historians and preservationists will take particular interest in the collections of music and dialects—time capsules of old folkways quietly vanishing in a globalizing world. Readers may note the site’s emphasis on English speaking regions, especially the UK, but the geographic breadth of its collection remains deeply impressive. These maps do not just capture the sounds of the world, they capture its most compelling minutiae: the small town pubs, the remote jungles, and the fascinating people.

Explore the latest finds in the NEW ARCHIVE:

Charley Binkow on iTunes’s salute to Black History Month

And Henry Wiencek finds a new way of looking at Emancipation

Photo Credits:

Screenshot from “Your Accents” sound map (Image courtesy of the British Library)

Screenshot from “Jewish Survivors Of The Holocaust” sound map (Image courtesy of the British Library)

Quebecois lumbermen making music with a violin and sticks, 1943 (Image courtesy of National Film Board of Canada)

Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation by Donald Raleigh (2013)

by Andrew Straw

Recalling his formative years as an American baby boomer and the influence the Cold War and the Soviet Union had on his worldview, Donald Raleigh asks what life was like for people his age in the Soviet Union? What were their concerns about the future? How did they spend their time and what did Cold War ideological battles mean for their daily lives? As historians exhaust the biographies and psychological studies of leaders to gain insight into authoritarian societies, scholars such as Raleigh are increasingly turning to evidence from everyday life to complete our understanding of non-democratic states. These new efforts are important because there is no denying that authoritarian governments were common in the twentieth century, lasted for several generations, and some, like the authoritarian government of North Korea, continue to affect global affairs in the new millennium. It is also increasingly evident that popular participation, and not just dictators’ decrees, helped build and dismantle authoritarian regimes.

In Soviet Baby Boomers, Raleigh borrows the US term referring to children born after World War II to examine the Soviet Union. This Soviet cohort was born leading up to Stalin’s death in 1953 and during the transfer of power to a more reform-minded leader, Nikita Khrushchev. Unlike their parents and grandparents who experienced the horrors of revolution, two world wars, Stalin’s terror and disastrous modernization policies, this new Soviet generation grew up in the “normalized” Soviet Union. The secret police, one-party dictatorship, and communism remained, but surviving the Soviet system now meant finishing university dissertations, pursuing various personal goals, and using the black market economy to improve personal fortunes. In fact, Raleigh makes the important argument that “the Soviet System’s very success at effecting social change” caused the post-Stalin generation to become cynical about the system. The Soviet welfare state provided the foundation for an educated and urbanized professional class who supported reforms in the 1980s. By that time, the enthusiasm for a normal Soviet life had withered away as Soviet citizens were increasingly able to compare their standard of living to more robust Western economies, thus highlighting the absurdities of Soviet communism. And yet, most people were not active in the dissident movement throughout the 1960s and 1970s despite widespread sympathy for it. It was not until Mikhail Gorbachev initiated the policies of “glasnost” (openness) and perestroika (economic liberalization) that the baby boomers expressed their revolutionary ideas in public, elected officials that took reforms farther than Gorbachev imagined, and prepared as best they good for the positive and negative consequences of the market economy and democracy.

Raleigh’s research centers on students who graduated in 1967 from two magnet secondary schools that specialized in English in Moscow and Saratov. Through interviews, the author examines how these students experienced events in post-Stalin Russia such as Khrushchev’s liberalization after 1956, the Cold War, the Brezhnev “stagnation,” the Soviet-Afghan War, and Gorbachev’s reforms. Many of Raleigh’s discoveries might surprise American readers. For example the interviews reveal an almost total lack of “true communist believers.” Many respondents simply claimed that by the 1970’s any sensible person could see the economic absurdities in the communist system. Simultaneously, Western popular culture, from the Beatles to consumer goods, strongly influenced Soviet knowledge of the outside world and conflicted with negative portrayals of the West. Yes, students still had classes on Marxism, but the attempt to “brainwash” Soviet baby boomers failed. Official decrees and the aging Politburo were the target of popular humor that exposed Soviet absurdities; Westerners were not the only ones to poke fun at Brezhnev. The Communist Party continued to play a role, but several interviewees claimed that they joined the Party only because of career opportunities and the residual fear of the state police and prison camps. At the same time, many admitted that they probably could have had successful careers if the hadn’t joined the Party.

Street life in the Soviet Union, 1955 (Image courtesy of flickr/Malmo Museer)

Many of the interviewees are nostalgic about the past. A majority fondly remembers the good aspects of the Soviet welfare state (free education, medicine, housing, summer camps), especially when compared with the economic and social disasters of the 1990’s. Raleigh does an excellent job displaying how nostalgia is tied to the reasonable expectations of any modern welfare state and does not indicate that baby boomers would like to return to the Soviet-style governing. However, when asked about Vladimir Putin’s presidency, most interviewees spoke positively about the ex-KGB officer’s stabilizing effect on Russia since 2000. Raleigh also examines some of the darker memories of this period, such as the prevalence of Soviet anti-Semitism in society. For example, Soviet Jews were often overrepresented in the top primary schools when compared to other ethnic groups, but then experienced discrimination when applying for university or searching for a job.

The limit of Raleigh’s study is clear from the beginning: the group of students he selected to interview comes from the well-educated Soviet elite in two central cities. This limits Raleigh’s ability to draw larger conclusions about Soviet society and the reader is left wondering how commonplace such experiences and sentiments were for other Soviet citizens. The late 1940s, 50s and 60s were years of massive migration to the urban centers, but the book focuses on well-established urban families and does not offer any contrasting experiences of first generation urbanites. At other points, Raleigh highlights interesting facts, such as the underrepresentation of Tatars in Saratov schools, but then provides no explanation.

Muscovites street dancing in 1991 (Image courtesy of Abbeville Press)

In his defense, Raleigh readily admits the limitations of his sample of interviewees, and does an excellent job showing the differences between life in Moscow (the Soviet capital) and Saratov (a large, provincial city that was purposely closed to the outside world). Furthermore, the author argues that this elite cohort of students had a privileged place in Soviet society that made their actions key to giving Gorbachev’s reforms momentum. Another issue that oral histories inevitably invoke is the fact that interviewees’ memories of events change over time and people often lie. Raleigh responds to this point by asserting that he is not only interested in the facts of Soviet life, but in what the Soviet Union represents in the baby boomers’ memories today. He carefully interrogates suspicious responses to draw out misrepresentations of certain events or topics.

In sum, for Soviet historians the author provides a vital starting point for further research and comparison on Soviet life after Stalin. For the casual reader, Raleigh demonstrates how people lived their lives under an authoritarian state by maneuvering within the bureaucracy, sustaining their families, enjoying the comforts not available to earlier Soviet generations, and placing themselves in the position to help dismantle their authoritarian state.

Lady Bird Johnson interviewed by Michael Gillette

By Michael Gillette

I had already conducted the first five oral history interviews with Lady Bird Johnson when she telephoned my LBJ Library office one day in the spring of 1978. Her first words were “Hello, Mike. How would you like to do something zany?” Before I could speculate what she could possibly mean by “zany,” she explained: “Would you like to accompany me to my fiftieth high school reunion in Marshall, Texas?” I eagerly accepted the invitation.

The trip was an extraordinary adventure in time travel that added rich context to her oral history narrative. The reunion with old Marshall High School friends brought out her youthful spirit and warmth. As she addressed the gathering, I thought of her graduation fifty years earlier when her shyness was so excruciating that she was relieved to learn that her class ranking—the third highest–spared her from having to give a speech. But now, as the former first lady delivered an eloquent, humorous, nostalgia-filled speech, she spoke effortlessly.

The East Texas trip took us to several landmarks of her youth. We walked around the stately antebellum Brick House, where she was born. We stopped at the beautiful, lonely country Scottsville cemetery where her mother was buried when Lady Bird was five years old. We climbed into jon boats and ventured onto Caddo Lake amid the haunting majestic Cypress trees, laden with Spanish moss. I could readily see how she had developed her love of nature in such a spectacular setting.

In August 1977, almost a year before our trip, I had begun the series of oral history interviews with Mrs. Johnson that would ultimately comprise forty-seven sessions. Our interviews usually took place on weekends at the LBJ Ranch, where interruptions were minimal. My oral history staff and I would prepare a chronological outline for each year, along with a thick file of back-up correspondence, appointment calendar entries, and press clippings. Mrs. Johnson would review the entire folder of material to refresh her memory and make notes before we began recording each interview. Over a span of fourteen years, I conducted the first thirty-seven interviews. After my transfer to the National Archives in Washington in 1991, Harry Middleton, the LBJ Library director, continued the interviews.

In 2011, two decades after my departure from the LBJ Library staff, I learned that the library was preparing to release Mrs. Johnson’s long-sealed interviews in May of that year. I immediately prepared a book proposal to Oxford University Press, which had recently published a new edition of my Launching the War on Poverty An: Oral History. Once Oxford approved the project, my task was to edit her 470,000 words into a manuscript of less than half that length in time to publish it before Mrs. Johnson’s centennial in December 2012.

Lady Bird Johnson: An Oral History consists of three concurrent tracks. The first track presents her perceptive observations of life in two capital cities during a span of four decades. As a witness-participant, she vividly describes the events and personalities that shaped our world. The second track is the phenomenal political rise of Lyndon Johnson through a combination of good fortune, consummate political skill and resourcefulness, and incredibly hard work. The third and most compelling track is the transformation of a shy Southern country girl into one of the most admired and respected first ladies in American history.

If the picturesque rural setting of her youth fostered a love of natural beauty, her isolation also imposed self-reliance and a love of reading. There simply wasn’t much else to do. Her education was pivotal to her transformation. Two years at St. Mary’s College in Dallas instilled an appreciation of the English language, a measure of independence, and an enduring religious faith. Next came her four years at the University of Texas, which brought not only academic rigor, but also an active social life that she had never enjoyed before. In Austin she became more confident, more aggressive, and more willing to extend herself.

But a glimpse of Claudia Taylor’s life in mid-1934 suggests that something is missing. She is smart, intellectually curious, and shy but popular with many friends in Austin. Although she is not beautiful, her charm and appealing presence make her attractive to a succession of college beaus. She has just graduated with her second degree, majoring in Journalism. She has also earned a secondary teaching certificate, but she seems to view teaching as an opportunity to travel to exotic places rather than a vocation. She has also taken typing and shorthand courses so that she can, if necessary, secure a job as a secretary.

And yet she has no real plans for her future. Instead of pursuing a career, she takes a graduation trip to New York and Washington and then moves back to Karnack to spend a year remodeling the Brick House for her father. Her plan is, in her words, just “to see where fate led me,” as if she were a mere spectator of her own life. What is missing here is ambition; ambition that gives drive, direction, and purpose to life.

But Lady Bird’s life dramatically changes on September 5, 1934, with a chance encounter while she is visiting her friend Gene Boehringer in the state capitol. Suddenly, a young man named Lyndon Johnson walks in. He asks her to have breakfast the next morning. After breakfast and a day-long drive around the hills of Austin, he asks her to marry him.

The introduction of this powerful, unexpected force creates a terrible dilemma for Claudia Taylor. She is pressured to make the most important decision of her life within a span of less than three months. She barely knows the young man, and the fact that he is 1,200 miles away during most of their brief courtship makes it difficult to become better acquainted. But she must agree to marry this young man and move to Washington, or he will drop out of her life forever as quickly as he entered it. Her fear of losing him ultimately prevails over her innate caution.

If opposites attract, one can easily imagine that there was, as she described, “something electric going on” when they first met. The two were strikingly different in many ways. She was conservative, cautious, and judicious; he was liberal, impulsive, and always in a hurry. Her calm, gracious, shy demeanor contrasted with his expansive, demanding, volatile temperament. If she was thrifty, he was given to acts of extravagant generosity. She was essentially private and self-reliant, while he desperately needed people around him. She was a studious reader of books; he was at heart a teacher whose text was experience.

But what did she see in Lyndon Johnson? It was his drive, his forcefulness, his raw, honest ambition to which she was attracted. As she wrote during their courtship, “I adore you for being so ambitious and dynamic.” He gave her what she was missing; he shared with her his ambition, his sense of purpose.

The man whom Mrs. Johnson characterized as “a regular Henry Higgins,” contributed to her transformation in two ways. First, he “stretched” her, as he did everyone around him, challenging her to do more than she thought possible. At his urging, she extended herself to speak in public, to run the congressional office in his absence, to manage a radio station, and to renovate the dilapidated LBJ Ranch. His increasing confidence in her day after day, year after year, spurred her on. He also facilitated her growth by placing her in the daily company of intelligent, sophisticated women and men in Washington during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, as she phrased it, “the society he thrust me into.” She attended and hosted countless teas and dinners for some of the nation’s most informed and interesting personalities, among them: George Marshall, Eleanor Roosevelt, Lady Astor, Tommy Corcoran, Marjorie Merriweather Post, Anna Rosenberg Hoffman, Paul Porter, Oveta Culp Hobby, and Josephine Forrestal. Through the Congressional Club for spouses, the Seventy-fifth and Eighty-first clubs, the Senate Ladies Club, and the Texas establishment in Washington, she participated in an extraordinary, continuing salon for almost thirty years before entering the White House.

The more Lady Bird Johnson changed and grew, the more she influenced LBJ’s life and his fortunes in a high-pressure profession. Her husband reaped the benefits of her warmth and grace as a hostess. Sam Rayburn, Dick Russell, and others who were instrumental in advancing LBJ’s career frequently enjoyed informal dinners in the Johnson home. And as Lady Bird Johnson’s political involvement and sophistication grew, her role in her husband’s rise to power expanded. Throughout his career, her good judgment and soothing comfort kept him on an even keel, while mending fences that he had damaged. Although she was virtually excluded from his first campaign for Congress in 1937, she became increasingly active in each of his successive races, and, by 1948, her role in the 87-vote cliff-hanger against Coke Stevenson was pivotal. When a kidney stone attack immobilized LBJ and he was on the verge of withdrawing from the race, she spirited him away to the Mayo Clinic, while keeping him from the press. She overcame her fear of public speaking to campaign for him throughout the state in the run-off. Finally, in the 1964 Presidential campaign, she rode the Lady Bird Special train through the South to become the first First Lady to campaign independently for her husband.

An apprenticeship as a congressional wife, a Senate wife, and as a frequent stand-in for Jacqueline Kennedy during the Vice Presidential years made Lady Bird Johnson one of the best prepared First Ladies ever to enter the White House. Her experience and skill served her well during the tumultuous 1960s. She assembled a professional staff in the East Wing of the White House and mobilized legions of influential, resourceful women and men to beautify and conserve the nation’s environment. With Washington, DC as their initial focus, they created a spectacular showcase for millions of American tourists could see what was possible in their own hometowns. Next she traveled through the country to draw attention to its scenic beauty and the threats to the nation’s environment. To her, beautification was just one thread in the larger tapestry of clean air and water, green spaces and urban parks, scenic highways and country side, cultural heritage tourism, and significant additions to our system of national parks.

Lady Bird Johnson’s environmental leadership was only one facet of her remarkable legacy as first lady. She also continued her predecessor’s quest for authentic furnishings and important American art for the White House. She recognized the achievements of women with her Women Doers Luncheons. Embracing the Head Start program, she gave it the prominence of a White House launch.

She participated gracefully in an endless succession of presidential trips, state dinners, congressional receptions, and other social events, including two White House weddings. At the same time, she provided LBJ with, in her words, “an island of peace” throughout his heady, turbulent presidency. Finally, she bequeathed to posterity an historical legacy: her White House diary of more than 1,750,000 words and forty-seven oral history interviews, comprising almost another half-million words.

Michael L. Gillette, Lady Bird Johnson: An Oral History

Download video transcript

Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint by R. Andrew Chesnut (2011)

by Janine Jones

During a recent drug bust in Houston, Texas, officers discovered a shrine to a skeleton statuette, robed in green and holding a scythe wrapped in dollar bills in her right hand, tobacco lying as an offering at her feet. Votive candles of various colors surrounded the statuette, as well as regularly replenished glasses filled with water and Mexican tequila. The officers had found Santa Muerte.

In Devoted to Death, R. Andrew Chesnut tells the tale of the recent rise in popular reverence for the Mexican folk “saint of death.” A non-canonized, non-sanctioned saint nicknamed “La Huesuda” (Bony Lady) and “La Flaquita” (Skinny Lady), Santa Muerte rivals Mexico’s beloved Virgin of Guadalupe in popular appeal, yet the majority of her devotees are drug kingpins, gangs, the poor and the dispossessed. Angel of death, protector of the impoverished, and provider of love, prosperity, and healing, Santa Muerte combines the powers of what is commonly considered magic, witchcraft, the occult, and religious tradition. Yet, rather than a lurid exposé of the cult surrounding this patroness of criminals, in his book Chesnut offers an insightful ethnographic exploration of the limits of “true” religion and of the practices outside its borders.

In seven chapters, each named for a color of candle lit to the Bony Lady, Chesnut recounts the rainbow of qualities ascribed to Saint Death, and the gifts she bestows on believers. Prayer requests to her must be accompanied by correctly colored candles, believers explain: red brings love and passion; purple, healing; gold, prosperity and abundance; green protection from – or through – the law. As is common in folk religions, Chesnut explains, the relationship between believers and Santa Muerte is “contractual” and based on reciprocity; devotees expect to be rewarded for their devotion. As “godmother and sister” Santa Muerte mends relationships and nurtures the weak, and as angel of death she metes out justice and vengeance. She is “a supernatural action figure who heals, provides, and punishes,” making her “the hardest-working and most productive folk saint on either side of the border,” in many ways “supplant[ing] God himself with her ability to perform miracles.” Perhaps most surprising, particularly for those who associate religiosity with peaceful, morally-focused living, is that though her devotees come from all walks of life, Santa Muerte has a significant following among Mexico’s notorious narcos. Criminal cartels light black candles to her for protection – both from rivals and from the reach of the law – and for death and vengeance to their enemies. Though she is decidedly not an orthodox Catholic saint, devotees model their ritual observance of her upon traditional Mexican Catholic practices, creating shrines with robed skeleton statuettes, leaving devotional offerings – often of tobacco or marijuana – and, of course, lighting votive candles.

Worshipers of Santa Muerte raise devotional dolls to the deity in Mexico City (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

An ethnographic work based largely on personal interviews and media research, Devoted to Death is written for popular readers. The lack of historical context, along with scant citations, minimal background research or discussion of devotional practices generally, will frustrate scholars. Still, though it is more of a jumping off point than a definitive work, Devoted to Death opens a new window on the nature of religion. Its unusual subject matter makes it a fascinating read.

Further Reading:

More images of the Santa Meurte from Time

And two Houston Press articles about the Santa Meurte:

“Know your Narco Saints: Iconography of the Drug Trade”

“Santa Muerte: Patron Saint of the Drug War”

Voices of India’s Partition, Part V

by Amber Abbas

Professor Mohammad Amin is a distinguished professor of History who spent his entire career in St. Stephen’s College, one of the founding colleges of Delhi University.

During his years at Aligarh, he was trained by Professor Mohammad Habib (Father of Professor Emeritus Irfan Habib). He remarked that Aligarh was known for its liberal History Department, which “later turned completely red.” His own priorities were in writing narrative histories of the medieval period. He described his own position as a skeptic, “History is not neat and tidy. If you find that you have an answer, I am very skeptical about it. How can there be a rational explanation for the irrational acts of irrational people?”

In this interview, Professor Amin reflects on his experiences at Aligarh during late 1940s, when the Muslim League was dominant and “Aligarh really was bristling with the movement for Pakistan.” Students were being dispatched into the hinterlands to spread League propaganda in 1945 and 1946 as India prepared for elections. Aligarh was considered so important as a center of Muslim opinion-making that, he tells me, if a meeting was taking place in the Union (the seat of student government), stores would close in towns and villages nearby as the community awaited news of Aligarh’s pronouncements on the important issues of the day. This centricity to Muslim opinion was key in placing Aligarh at the heart of the Pakistan movement. Amin, like narrator Masood ul Hasan, describes an atmosphere of youthful enthusiasm in which students were caught up in the political excitement of the time.

During the partition, however, as Amin’s story reveals, Aligarh became a site of suspicion; Muslims were targeted as potential traitors to the state, and Aligarh was especially vulnerable because many students had been active in calling for independent Muslim statehood. Amin mentions that as he returned to Aligarh in late summer 1947, he had been advised to carry a book with the name of a Hindu inscribed inside, so as to distract attention from his own Muslim identity. Trains, as he reminds me, were sites of massacre during the communal unrest that accompanied partition and on both sides of the border trains pulled into stations full of dead bodies. His return to Aligarh in 1947 was tense, but uneventful.

In remembering this, Amin moves directly to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. He connects Gandhi’s assassination to the atmosphere at Aligarh by describing it as particularly “telling.” On the day of the assassination, Amin was headed into the city—the predominantly Hindu city of Aligarh separated from the precincts of the Aligarh University by a railway line and a bridge. By the time they reached the city, now a few kilometers distant from their university and its protective walls, people shouted at them to “Go back!” Though they simultaneously heard that Gandhi’s assassin had been a Hindu, the students felt the threat of violence in the city, and those around them sternly directed them to return to the right side of the tracks.

Amin remembers how important Gandhi had been in preserving a tenuous peace in Eastern India during the chaos of 1947. Having gone on a fast to the death, he refused to break it until leaders of the three major faiths of the region: Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs came together to make a joint pledge to stop the fighting. In the moments after Gandhi’s death, Amin and his friends reaped the benefit of his magnanimity- they returned safely to their school- but they knew, as did those around them, that the situation remained tense enough to go either way.

LISTEN TO THE ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW HERE

READ THE ORAL HISTORY TRANSCRIPT HERE

Photo credits:

Amber Abbas, untitled portrait of Professor Mohammad Amin

Author’s own via Not Even Past

Jama Masjid, “AMU-Aligarh,” Decemer 23, 2009

Author’s own via Flickr Creative Commons

Unknown author, Untitled Portrait of Mohandas Gandhi and Jawharlal Nehru, July 6, 1946

AP Photo/Max Desfor via Flickr Creative Commons

You may also like:

Voices of India’s Partition, Part IV: Interview with Professor Masood ul Hasan

Voices of India’s Partition, Part III: Interview with Professor Irfan Habib

Voices of India’s Partition, Part II: Interview with Mr. S.M. Mehdi

Voices of India’s Partition, Part I: Interview with Mrs. Zahra Haider

Voices of India’s Partition, Part V: Professor Mohammad Amin

Interviewed by Amber Abbas

D-25, Oxford Apartment, Patpar Ganj, New Delhi (November 5, 2009)

Transcript:

Context Notes: During our interview Professor Amin was suffering from allergies and his nose was running constantly. He also had several attacks of sneezing. But he was patient and generous enough to continue speaking with me despite it all.

Professor Mohammad Amin: Going back to what we were talking about Aligarh. At that time, there was a euphoria that Aligarh was so powerful, that it will decide the destiny of the country and the partition of the country and whatnot. And people were carried away. It is a fact that if the meeting was called in the Union, and the bell rang here, shops in Hattras used to get closed. Aligarh mein ho raha hain, Aligarh mein ho raha hain. (Something is happening in Aligarh, something is happening in Aligarh) Pir, ooske bad, kya hogaya?Ooske bad, yeh ho gaya ke (Then what happened? What happened then was–) everywhere people were afraid for their life because it was rumored that people were going to attack Aligarh.

AA: Before partition or after?

MA: (0:05:31.5) After partition. After partition.

MA: (0:05:53.8) We were instructed to carry a book or something like that. And in the book, write the name Mahavir Prasad or Raghav Lal or something or the other. (laughs)

AA: Were you frightened?

MA: Anybody would be frightened! Because there were cases where people were being thrown out of the train. And killing them. Because, after all, there was that, kya nam hain (what do you call it?) spell of madness all over the country. And when people were coming from the other side, compartments full of dead bodies of Sikhs and Hindus. And here, this was going on on mass scale. I mean, I think one thing that tells you most is the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. I was present at Aligarh at that time. We were going to kya nam hain, the shaher (city). [When we reached there] Tho, is vakt jo hein, log bata rahein the “Vapis jao! Vapis jao!” Vahan se ho gaya tab thak avaz har jagey hein, “Mahatma Gandhi ko katal kar diya gaya, mar diya gaya, Godse ne, Hindu ne mara, Hindu ne mara, Hindu ne mara! Ek Hindu, pagal, oos ne, kya nam, mara!” (By this time, people were telling us, “Go back! Go back!” from there. By that time the sound was coming from everywhere, “Mahatma Gandhi has been murdered, has been killed by Godse. A Hindu killed him, a Hindu killed him, a Hindu killed him! A Hindu, a madman, he killed him!”)

Radio also kept on, every five minutes, repeating it. So that was a time. And then before that, leading to that, when the riots were in Delhi, you had Mahatma Gandhi had gone on a fast to the death. And he refused to take anything “Aisa nehin, aap kijiye, you, all the people, Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims, they should come hand-in-hand to me and pledge that they will stop this.”

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