South America Archives - Not Even Past

The Quilombo Activists’ Archive and Post-Custodial Preservation, Part II

Carlitos da Silva was an activist and community leader from São Pedro, one of 88 settlements founded by descendants of escaped slaves known in Portuguese as quilombos, located in the Atlantic Forest of Brazil’s Ribeira Valley. During the early 1980s, amid an onslaught of government projects to develop the Ribeira Valley through hydroelectric dams, mining, and commercial agriculture, da Silva defended his community against Francisco Tibúrcio, a rancher from São Paulo. In 1976, Tibúrcio falsified a deed to usurp lands belonging to the residents of São Pedro, a practice known in Brazil as grilagem. When da Silva and his neighbors refused to leave, Tibúrcio dispatched thugs to intimidate residents, burning down homes and setting loose cattle to trample the community’s subsistence garden plots (roças). Several families relocated to the sprawling shantytowns of Itapeuna and Nova Esperança, joining thousands of refugees from rural violence throughout the Ribeira Valley. Yet many others, including Carlitos da Silva, fought back.

A 1982 newspaper clipping documenting territorial dispossession of peasant communities in the Ribeira Valley.

Supported by Liberationist sectors of the Brazilian Catholic Church, da Silva and his neighbors pursued legal action against Francisco Tibúrcio and his associates. In 1978, they formed a neighborhood association, claiming collective ownership to their lands based on usucapião, equivalent to the English common-law term “adverse possession,” meaning “acquired by use.” Their militancy coincided with a wave of activism throughout the Brazilian countryside, as indigenous peoples, landless workers, and descendants of slaves pressed for agrarian reform and reparations. Large landowners, flanked by rural politicians and the police, responded with repression. On the morning of July 2, 1982, assassins gunned down Carlitos da Silva in the doorway of his home, in front of his mother, wife, and young children. Francisco Tibúrico had sought to crush the São Pedro neighborhood association by silencing one of its leaders. Yet the assassination of Carlitos da Silva became a rallying cry, emboldening the descendants of quilombos throughout the Ribeira Valley to fight for land rights and social justice.

“We were threatened. Some of us left [São Pedro] and others fled the region altogether,” Aurico Dias of Quilombo São Pedro told me in a 2015 oral history. “But thanks to our faith in God, we were able to rise up again, quickly, and discovered the courage to take back what was ours.”

I learned about Carlitos da Silva’s story while conducting archival research at the Articulation and Advisory Team to Rural Black Communities of the Ribeira Valley (EAACONE, formerly MOAB, the Movement of Peoples Threatened by Dams), an Eldorado-based civil society organization that defends the territorial rights of quilombos residing in the Atlantic Forest of São Paulo state and Paraná. During my first trip to EAACONE in 2015, I found a dossier documenting the history of political activism for communal land rights in São Pedro, a village established during the 1830s by a fugitive slave, Bernardo Furquim, and his companions, Coadi and Rosa Machado, near the banks of the Ribeira de Iguape River. The dossier was the tip of the iceberg. For more than thirty years, MOAB/EAACONE’s staff has compiled historical documentation—property deeds, baptismal records, court documents, photographs, and oral histories—to strengthen the legal claims of quilombos to their ancestral lands. In 1994, the quilombo community of Ivaporunduva brandished land titles belonging to Gregório Marinho, a fugitive slave, as historical evidence of their long-term territorial dominion when its residents sued the Brazilian government for its failure to apply Article 68, a constitutional provision that accords land rights to the descendants of maroon communities. The lawsuit, the first of its kind in Brazil, paved the way for thousands of quilombo communities to enlist history and genealogical memory to demand collective land rights.

1861 land title belonging to Gregório Marinho

These archival materials documenting the history of the African Diaspora in Brazil are at risk. Government officials have enacted deep cuts to public education, museums, and state archives in the aftermath of the 2008 global economic crisis. Although the National Archives in Rio de Janeiro and the Public State Archive of São Paulo have digitized vulnerable materials, many archives and museums throughout Brazil have fallen into disrepair. The electrical fire that tore through Rio’s National Museum in 2018 destroyed priceless artifacts and historical patrimony pertaining to indigenous peoples and Afro-Brazilians.

Collections documenting underrepresented populations in Brazil, especially quilombos, are politically vulnerable, as well. In 1890, two years after abolition, finance minister Rui Barbosa ordered the treasury to burn all records related to slavery, in part to stave off the demands for the indemnification of slave owners, but also to suppress the historical claims to land rights and reparations that quilombola activists assert today. In 2019, President Jair Bolsonaro declared war on rural activists, pledging to amend the Brazil’s terrorism laws to prosecute members of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) and vowing never to cede “another centimeter” of land to quilombos and indigenous communities. Amnesty International has reported sabotage, arson, and hacking of human rights activists and progressive civil society organizations throughout Brazil. In light of the dire political situation confronting traditional peoples in Brazil over the past several years, and given EAACONE’s gracious support for my research, I wanted to give back. Then fate intervened.

In March 2015, during my first research trip to the Ribeira Valley, I received an email from my dissertation adviser, Seth Garfield, with exciting news. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation had invited LLILAS Benson to apply for a grant to build local capacity in Latin America to preserve vulnerable human rights documentation and to make the resulting documents digitally accessible. The project embraced a post-custodial approach to archival collection. According to the Society of American Archivists, post-custodial practice requires that “archivists will no longer physically acquire and maintain records, but they will provide management oversight for records that will remain in the custody of the record creators.” Through this model, LLILAS Benson establishes contractual partnerships with smaller, underserved institutions with archival collections, including community archives and civil society organizations based in Latin America. Partner institutions maintain ownership of their original materials and intellectual rights over digital copies, while LLILAS Benson provides funding, archival training, and equipment to produce and preserve digital surrogates. Additionally, LLILAS Benson promotes online access to the collections through the Latin American Digital Initiatives (LADI), a digital repository for historical materials pertaining to human rights in Latin America, which launched in November 2015. Designed to be mutually beneficial, the post-custodial model aims to democratize the traditional power dynamics of archives by repositioning LLILAS Benson as collaborative partners and centering communities as contributors and owners of their own documentary heritage.

Homepage for Latin American Digital Initiatives (LADI), a digital repository for human rights documentation in Latin America supported by LLILAS Benson and UT Libraries.

The University of Texas at Austin has long been a pioneer in the area of post-custodial archival preservation and human rights. In 2011, LLILAS Benson, UT Libraries, and the School of Law’s Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice partnered with the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive (AHPN) to create an online digital repository of their collection. The existence of the archive, long denied by the Guatemalan government, was uncovered in 2005, and contains nearly 80 million documents relating to the National Police, including their activities during Guatemala’s brutal civil war (1960-1996). Although the collection was physically fragile and remains politically vulnerable, its relationship with the University of Texas at Austin assures its continued viability, providing critical evidence in trials related to human rights violations committed by the National Police and other state actors.

This collaboration laid the foundation for an innovative project, funded by the Mellon Foundation, to digitally preserve and provide online access to three archives in Central America: Center for Research and Documentation of the Atlantic Coast (CIDCA, Nicaragua); the Museum of the Word and the Image (MUPI, El Salvador); and Center for Regional Research of Mesoamerica (CIRMA, Guatemala). In Spring 2015, LLILAS Benson announced a “call for partners” to support post-custodial initiatives with partners in Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil, with particular emphasis on archival collections documenting human rights, race, ethnicity and social exclusion. I excitedly shared the news with my friends at EAACONE and the Socio-environmental Institute (ISA), a São Paulo-based NGO that defends the social and environmental rights of traditional peoples in Brazil and a longtime ally of MOAB/EAACONE.

Although my colleagues in Brazil were intrigued by the project, they voiced serious concerns related to privacy, access, and power. EAACONE is hardly a traditional archive. In fact, the collection serves primarily to furnish historical evidence to support quilombos’ legal battles for land and resources. While EAACONE grants access to their archive to vetted researchers, the organization was understandably reluctant to publish any sensitive materials that might jeopardize ongoing cases. Furthermore, their members underscored the necessity of maintaining intellectual and physical control of their collections in their original context. They pointed to the sordid legacy of imperialist collecting practices, whereby researchers from the Global North extracted documentary heritage from communities in the Global South and re-concentrated them in museums and archives in Europe and the United States. In a similar vein, members of quilombos have long lamented how scholars have conducted academic research in their communities, only to withhold their findings or publish them in English. EAACONE and ISA were eager to participate in the post-custodial project, but only if it promoted collaborative partnership to advance the territorial and socio-environmental rights of quilombo communities.

Vanessa de França, teacher and community activist from Quilombo São Pedro, speaks at the University of Texas at Austin at the 2017 Lozano Long Conference, “Revoluciones Alimentarias.”

We took their concerns to heart. Over the next four years, I worked with Rachel E. Winston, Black Diaspora Archivist at LLILAS Benson, to build trust and foster partnership between EAACONE, ISA, and LLILAS Benson. “There is something very powerful in helping to facilitate a community’s efforts to document themselves and their experiences. To that end, one of the things that has to be examined very carefully is the equity of the partnership,” Winston later reflected. “This is something that, at its core, has to serve a meaningful purpose for our partners and the larger institutional goal of providing online access to vulnerable, underrepresented, important documents.”

In November 2015, LLILAS Benson invited Frederico Silva, an anthropologist at the Instituto Socioambiental (ISA) in Eldorado, to participate in a workshop in Austin, Texas, alongside representatives from archival collections in Mexico, Colombia, and Central America. Two years later, in Spring 2017, I invited Silva and Vanessa de França, a teacher and community activist from Quilombo São Pedro, to Austin to participate in a roundtable discussion about threats to quilombola agriculture and food security at the Lozano Long Conference. Last summer, Rachel Winston and I traveled to Eldorado to deliver our pitch to EAACONE and ISA personally. We assured their full autonomy in selecting materials for digitization and publication, guaranteeing that sensitive documentation would remain inaccessible to the public. In August 2018, members of EAACONE and ISA voted to accept our proposal, joining the Process of Black Communities of Colombia (PCN, Colombia) and the Royal Archive of Cholula (Mexico) as members of LLILAS Benson’s second post-custodial cohort in Latin America.

Last fall, collaborators in Eldorado and Austin prepared for the implementation of this ambitious, transcontinental project. With funding from the Mellon Foundation, EAACONE hired two full-time archival technicians, Leticia Ester de França and Camila Mello de Gomes, to process, digitize, and describe the collection materials. De França is a student and activist from Quilombo São Pedro, who has worked with ISA and EAACONE to support the training of quilombola youth leaders. Mello de Gomes is a geographer from Piedade, São Paulo, who has long collaborated with EAACONE and quilombo communities to support human rights, youth education, and the collective mapping of traditionally occupied lands. In Austin, David Bliss, Digital Processing Archivist at LLILAS Benson, researched and ordered scanning equipment and software to meet the needs of our partners, developing a detailed scanning workflow to guide EAACONE’s team through every step of the digitization process. Itza Carbajal, Latin American Metadata Librarian, developed schemas and templates for the capture of metadata, the information displayed alongside archival materials to describe their content and historical context. Under a post-custodial framework, Carbajal will work with de França and Mello de Gomes to produce their own metadata to describe the contents of EAACONE’s collections. As a CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation, I translated workflows and digitization manuals into Portuguese while serving as a liaison between LLILAS Benson and our collaborators in the Ribeira Valley. In February, Rachel Winston and I traveled to Brazil with Theresa Polk, Head of Digital Initiatives at LLILAS Benson, to deliver equipment and co-teach a week-long seminar on digitization and metadata for EAACONE’s team.

Back row, from left to right: Rachel E. Winston, Rodrigo Marinho Rodrigues da Silva, Edward Shore, Sueli Berlanga, Ângela Biagioni; Front row, from left to right: Tânia Moraes, Theresa Polk, Leticia de França, and Camila Mello de Gomes.

The training was the highlight of my professional career, an exercise in community building, collaborative research, and transnational solidarity. Accompanied by Raquel Pasinato and Frederico Silva of the Socio-environmental Institute in Eldorado, we met with EAACONE’s team—Sister Maria Sueli Berlanga, Sister Ângela Biagioni, Rodrigo Marinho Rodrigues da Silva, Heloisa “Tânia” Moraes, Antônio Carlos Nicomedes, Leticia Ester de França and Camila Mello de Gomes—to exchange stories and talk politics over a cafézinho. The group gave us a tour of the archive, displaying historical maps, nineteenth-century land deeds, and photo albums capturing popular demonstrations against the Tijuco Alto hydroelectric dam project during the 1990s. Sueli Berlanga, Sister of Jesus the Good Shepherd nun, attorney, and co-founder of EAACONE, shared pedagogical materials from her early experiences as a community organizer in the countryside, unveiling lessons plans she used to teach literacy and promote conscientização (similar to “consciousness raising”) of the historical legacies of slavery in Brazil. Meanwhile, our teams installed equipment and prepared a work station. Mello de Gomes, de França, and members of EAACONE practiced scanning various kinds of fragile materials—posters, maps, photos, and bound books—creating TIFF files for storage on external hard drives and generating checksums to detect errors that may have occurred during digitization or storage.

Sister Maria “Sueli” Berlanga displays pedagogical materials to promote conscientização (“consciousness raising”) about the history of slavery and white supremacy in Brazil.

Among the materials that EAACONE chose to digitize was the Carlitos da Silva dossier. Leticia de França, a resident of Quilombo São Pedro, identified her relatives in the newspaper clippings, photographs, and testimonies documenting Carlitos’ assassination in 1982 and the murder trial of Francisco Tibúrcio. In capturing metadata for the dossier, she and Mello de Gomes stressed the importance of recording the names of every quilombola who was affected by the violence and who fought for justice for Carlitos da Silva and his community. “Our greatest challenge is to remember all the people whose work has gone unnoticed, those who appear [in the documents] and those who have managed to preserve all this information for so many years, so that today, the archive remains intact to be digitized,” de França reflected. “Now those documents that capture the history of our struggles can be passed onto the communities themselves.”

Camila Mello de Gomes, Leticia de França, and Rodrigo Marinho Rodrigues da Silva capture metadata for newspaper clippings pertaining to the Carlitos da Silva dossier.

Over the next several months, she and Camila Mello de Gomes will continue to scan and create metadata for more than five thousand documents pertaining to the history of the Quilombo Movement in the Ribeira Valley. They will deliver external hard drives to LLILAS Benson, where the Digital Initiatives Team will process the materials and upload them to LADI. The EAACONE Digital Archive is scheduled to launch this November, together with the PCN and Fondo Real de Cholula digital collections. But the real work is what comes next.

From the very beginning, our collaborators have reflected on how best to use post-custodial digital archives to promote international research, teaching, advocacy, and collaboration to defend the rights of vulnerable communities in Latin America. This week, the Digital Initiatives Team at LLILAS Benson is hosting a symposium in Antigua, Guatemala, where representatives from each of our post-custodial partners will share their experiences and plot future steps.

Rodrigo Marinho Rodrigues da Silva, Camila Mello de Gomes, and Leticia de França.

Camila Mello de Gomes and Leticia de França shared with me their vision for EAACONE ahead of the symposium. Mello de Gomes proposed the creation of a Center for the Historical Memory of Traditional Peoples of the Riberia Valley, based on the EAACONE archive, which would encompass the collections pertaining to indigenous communities, caiçaras (traditional inhabitants of the coastal regions of southern and southeastern Brazil, descended from Europeans, indigenous peoples, and Afro-descendants), caboclos (persons of mixed indigenous and European ancestry), and small farmers. She expressed hope the Center would furnish historical documentation to advance territorial claims and redistributive justice. “As these documents make visible the history of human rights violations that traditional peoples of the Ribeira Valley continue to suffer, I believe that international and scholarly pressure can jointly advance calls for historical reparations and accountability for those responsible for this violence, as well as ensure the care and preservation of an extremely powerful and revolutionary collective memory of the work of MOAB/EAACONE.”

Leticia de França expressed hope that the digital archive will serve as a pedagogical resource for preparing the next generation of quilombola activists in the Ribeira Valley. “I hope [the project] draws more young people into confronting the day-to-day challenges that our communities still face…I hope this makes young people more aware of the importance of preserving each document, every single handwritten draft, that tells the history of the struggle of the quilombola people,” Leticia de França reflected. “All these documents are evidence of the social struggles that we have endured throughout history. Our people never had the support of the rich and powerful. Each victory we achieved was [society’s] recognition of our basic rights. Since we are a humble people, our rights are too often ignored. But with the preservation of this archive, the world will know that every single document that we digitized is a human right that we fought for and won.”

LLILAS Benson and Latin American post-custodial partners in Antigua, Guatemala. From left to right: Itza Carbajal; Albert Palacios; Edward Shore; Jessica López (CIDCA); Theresa Polk; Thelma Porres (CIRMA); David Bliss; Marisol Alomia (PCN); Lidia Gómez (Fondo Real de Cholula); Carlos “Santiago” Henriquez Consalvi (MUPI); Leticia Ester de França (EAACONE); Camila Mello de Gomes (EAACONE).

The author would like to thank the Reed Foundation’s Ruth Landes Memorial Fund, the Mellon ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) for supporting his fieldwork in Brazil, which led to post-custodial collaboration between LLILAS Benson, ISA and EAACONE.

In defining post-custodial theory and practice, the author drew from: Hannah Alpert-Abrams, Itza Carbajal, and David Bliss, “Post-Custodialism for the Collective Good: Examining Neoliberalism in US-Latin American Archival Partnerships,” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 2: 1 (2019).

How Washington Helped Fidel Castro Rise to Power

By Jonathan C. Brown

Fidel Castro had two political assets that enabled him to stay in power for a half century. He possessed the knack of turning adversity into an asset and he knew his enemies, particularly the anti-communist politicians of Washington, D.C. His guile and skill became evident early on as he established his revolution under the gaze of Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy.

fidel_castro_-_mats_terminal_washington_1959-1

Fidel Castro in 1959 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Upon taking control of the Cuban military with his guerrillas acting as the new officer corps, he set out in January 1959 to bring to justice the thugs and killers of the old regime. He ordered Che Guevara in Havana and Raúl Castro in Santiago de Cuba to establish revolutionary tribunals to judge the police and army officers for past human rights abuses. In all, some six hundred convicted men faced the firing squads in a matter of months.

Fidel also instructed the US military mission to leave the country. He accused it of teaching Batista’s army how to lose a war against a handful of guerrillas. Cuba no longer needed that kind of military training, Castro said. “If they are going to teach us that, it would be better that they teach us nothing.”

Castro supporters in Havana joke about US criticism of the executions of Batista’s “war criminals.” (via author)

Cubans applauded these procedures as just retribution for the fear and mayhem that Batista’s dictatorship had caused. But American newspaper editors and congressional representatives condemned the executions as revolutionary terror. Fidel used this criticism to rally his followers. Where were these foreigners, he asked, when Batista’s men were snuffing out “the flower of Cuba’s youth?” Soon thereafter, the guerrilla comandante became the head of government as prime minister.

In his trip to Washington in April 1959, Castro endured the constant questions from reporters about communists showing up his new regime. President Eisenhower found it inconvenient to be in Washington when the new Cuban leader arrived. He arranged a golf game in Georgia, leaving his vice president to meet with the visiting prime minister. It was not a meeting of the minds. Richard Nixon and Fidel Castro differed on just about every subject: the communist threat, foreign investment, private capital, and state enterprise. The vice president tried to inform the new leader about which policies would best serve his people, and he ultimately described the unconvinced Castro as being naïve about communism. Unbeknownst to the CIA, the first Cuban envoys were already in Moscow requesting military trainers from the Kremlin.

Castro and Nixon following their interview in April 1959 (via author).

Then in the summer of ’59, Fidel began the agrarian reform project by nationalizing plantation lands owned by both Cuban and US investors. Without any fanfare whatsoever, communists took control of the new agency that took over sugar production. Chairman Mao sent agrarian technicians to act as advisers. The US embassy in Havana demanded immediate compensation for dispossessed American owners. Instead, they received bonds due in twenty years.

Fidel knew how to provoke yanqui reactions in ways that exposed the big power chauvinism of Washington. He hosted Soviet officials and concluded a deal to take on supplies of Russian crude petroleum. Castro asked the American-owned refineries to process the oil into gasoline, which the State Department advised them not to do. Castro had his excuse to confiscate the refineries.

A French ship filled with Belgium weapons arrived in Havana harbor in March of 1960. It exploded and killed 100 Cuban longshoremen. Castro rushed to the TV station and denounced the CIA for sabotaging the shipment. He gave a fiery anti-America speech at the funeral service in the Plaza of the Revolution to which a host of left-wing personalities flew in to attend. Simone Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre arrived from France, Senator Salvador Allende came from Chile, and ex-president Lázaro Cárdenas traveled from Mexico. At this event, Fidel introduced his motto “Fatherland or death, we will overcome,” and the Cuban photographer Alberto Korda took the famous image of Che Guevara looking out over the crowd.

Che Guevara in Cuba, 1960, by Alberto Korda (via author)

At that point that President Eisenhower ordered Director Allen Dulles of the CIA to devise the means to get rid of Castro’s regime in which Washington’s “hand would not show.” Agents attached to the US embassy in Havana contacted Catholic and other youth groups who objected to Fidel’s communist friends. They received airline tickets to leave the country and salaries to train as soldiers in Guatemala. Fidel had spies in Miami and Central America sending him progress reports on the émigré brigade in training. Now he had Eisenhower’s diplomats on the defensive. They had to deny Castro’s accusations about an upcoming CIA invasion.

In the meantime, Castro announced plans to socialize the economy, a project that Che Guevara headed up. What was the White House to do? The 1960 election had swung into full gear. The Democratic challenger in the first presidential debates famously said that he was not the vice-president who presided over the communist takeover of the island just 90 miles offshore from Key West. Eisenhower responded with toughness. He lowered the amount of sugar the United States imported from Cuba, and Fidel seized upon this provocation to nationalize the remaining US-owned properties, especially the sugar refineries.

By now, the exodus of Cuba’s professional classes had been expanding over the preceding year until it reached a thousand persons per week. Middle-class families formed long lines outside the US embassy in order to obtain travel visas. President Eisenhower appointed Tracy Voorhees, the man who handled the refugees from the 1956 Hungarian Revolt, to manage the resettlement. He established the Cuban Refugee Center in Miami. A mix of American charities and government offices sponsored evacuation flights, housing, job-hunting services, emergency food and clothing drives, educational facilities, and family subsidies. Let them go, Castro told his followers. He called the refugees gusanos (worms), the parasites of society.

U.S. Embassy in Havana, 2010 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Castro benefited from such American interference. It cost him nothing to get rid of his opponents, especially as the US taxpayers footed the bill. He utilized the former privilege of these gusanos to recruit peasants and workers to the new militias. The huge military parade on the second anniversary of the Revolution in January 1961 featured army troops with new T-130 tanks and army units armed with Czech weapons. Thousands of militiamen marched with Belgium FAL assault rifles.

He did not shut down the American embassy but utilized Soviet-trained security personnel to monitor the activities of diplomats and CIA men. He waited until the Americans severed diplomatic ties in order to be able to pose as the victim of US malice. Eisenhower severed diplomatic relations with Cuba to spare the new president, John F. Kennedy. Anyway, the new president very soon would have to preside over the CIA-planned invasion of the émigré brigade whose coming Castro was announcing to the world.

Now the anti-communist onus had passed to Kennedy. He could not shut down the CIA project and return hundreds of trained and irate young Cubans to Miami. Neither could he use American military forces to assist the invasion. Nikita Khrushchev had already threatened to protect the Cuban Revolution with “Soviet artillery men,” if necessary. Also, citizens in many Latin American nations took pride in Cuba’s defiance of US power. Kennedy too was trapped by his own anti-communist bravado during the election campaign. He changed some of the plans and let the invasion proceed.

Kennedy and Eisenhower confer at Camp David following the Bay of Pigs debacle (via author)

The Bay of Pigs landing of April 1961 turned into a disaster. A bomber assault by exile pilots on the Cuba revolutionary air force failed to destroy all of Castro’s fighter planes. The few remaining fighters chased the bombers from the skies and sank the ships that brought the brigade to shore. The fourteen hundred émigré fighters killed as many militiamen as possible before they ran out of ammunition on the third day. Castro put 1200 of the surviving exiles in jail. In the meanwhile, neighborhood watch groups in Havana and other cities cooperated with state security personnel in rounding up thousands of potential opponents, most of whom were processed and returned home in due course.

Che Guevara summed up the result of the Bay of Pigs when he “accidentally” met up with White House aide Richard Goodwin at an OAS meeting in Uruguay. Please convey our thanks to your president for the Bay of Pigs, Che said. “The Revolution is even more ensconced in power than ever because of the US invasion.”

More by Dr. Jonathan C. Brown on Not Even Past:

The Future of Cuba-Texas Relations
Capitalism After Socialism in Cuba
A Rare Phone Call from One President to Another

Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment, by Daniela Bleichmar (2012)

by Christina Marie Villarreal

The European Enlightenment occurred as an ongoing dialogue of ideas—a discourse composed of voices from around the globe. As Daniela Bleichmar demonstrates, southern Europe, long ignored in scholarship on the Enlightenment, had a crucial voice in the conversation.

In Visible Empires, Bleichmar claims that Imperial Spain, more than any other contemporary empire, used visual documents like paintings and maps to make the empire tangible and, in this way, “governable.” Images, she argues, made visible the hidden or secret. Bleichmar highlights the Hispanic World’s investment in knowledge production at the peripheries of empire. She emphasizes how scientific investigations, specifically botanist and natural history expeditions, fit into the Spanish Empire’s attempt to reestablish itself as a European political and economic power in the late eighteenth century. Her findings demonstrate how relationships between the center and periphery of empire were often a matter of perspective.

Bleichmar makes use of the long ignored and beautiful visual archive of botanical paintings produced by Spanish expeditions around the Atlantic. She reads these centuries-old detailed depictions of flora and fauna to stress the relevance of vision to governing of the empire. For Spain, these illustrations provided visual evidence of worlds across the sea and of our ability to understand nature. They buttressed Spain’s ownership of the unseen. The Spanish metropole also used this method to understand the racial compositions of distant populations. New Spain’s casta paintings and Peru’s taxonomical illustrations gave the metropole a window into their kingdoms abroad. Simultaneously, the project supplied the peripheries of empire with the agency to codify their populations. While knowledge of its far-off inhabitants gave the metropole a sense of discovery and ownership, the power to produce pictures of their world gave people on the periphery power of their own.

An image from "Flora Huayaquilensis," a visual collection of South America's plants as seen by Spanish botanist Juan José Tafalla during a 1785 expedition through Peru and Chile. ([Juan Tafalla], “Flora Huayaquilensis,” ourheritage.ac.nz | OUR Heritage - See more at: http://otago.ourheritage.ac.nz/items/show/7696#sthash.r8R9WHhx.dpuf)

An image from “Flora Huayaquilensis,” a visual collection of South America’s plants seen by Spanish botanist Juan José Tafalla during a 1785 expedition through Peru and Chile. ([Juan Tafalla], “Flora Huayaquilensis,” ourheritage.ac.nz | OUR Heritage)

During the Enlightenment, intellectuals and others contested and refined the themes of art, science, and knowledge using visual representations. The “correct” representation did not always come from the center or metropole but, as Bleichmar explains, it was often difficult to tell where in the empire botanical Enlightenment projects began. Indeed, knowledge moved in multiple directions. Bleichmar explores how some naturalists understood colonial agendas in ways that differed from the intentions of the Spanish metropole. Consider Basco y Vargas’ pepper initiative in the Philippines. He prioritized his local economic goals over the philosophical inquiries coming from Spain. In this case, the periphery directed knowledge production as Basco y Vargas determined what botanical investigation to support.

Allegiances and relationships to a “center” thus differed depending on local context. However, by suggesting “the goal of this intensive natural history investigation… was nothing less than to rediscover and reconquer the empire at a time of intense crisis,” Bleichmar seems to suggest that Spain held more control over the direction of knowledge production. In addition, the author admits that the only a limited audience saw or studied the visual illustrations produced by enlightenment botanist. These minor inconsistencies leave the reader with a lingering question: to what extent did “visual” knowledge shape the empire at large?

Botanical drawing from “Flora Huayaquilensis” (Pinterest/Carlos Adanero)

Aside from images, Bleichmar also examines the tremendous written archive that preserves the voices of botanist and economists. While historians typically use images in their work without fully exploring the significance they held for their creators, the author’s examination of written sources provides the reader with a fuller understanding of the botanical illustrations. Paired with Bleichmar’s engaging prose, Visible Empires constitutes a thorough interpretation of southern European Enlightenment and provides a fine example of a historical investigation achieved with beautiful visual sources.

More books on Early Modern science:

Jorge Cañizares Esguerra’s review of Shores of Knowledge: New World Discoveries and the Scientific Imagination

Laurie Wood’s review of The Discovery of Jeanne Baret: A Story of Science, the High Seas, and the First Woman to Circumnavigate the Globe

“Captive Fates: Displaced American Indians in the Southwest Borderlands, Mexico, and Cuba, 1500-1800.”

by Paul Conrad

This past May, the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin awarded the Lathrop Prize for Best Dissertation to Paul Conrad, a PhD graduate in early American history. His dissertation, titled “Captive Fates: Displaced American Indians in the Southwest Borderlands, Mexico, and Cuba, 1500-1800,” chronicles the history of Native American capture by Euroamerican settlers in the Greater Rio Grande River Basin.

Abstract:

Between 1500 and 1800, Spaniards and their Native allies captured hundreds of Apache Indians and members of neighboring groups from the Rio Grande River Basin and subjected them to a variety of fates. They bought and sold some captives as slaves, exiled others as prisoners of war to central Mexico and Cuba, and forcibly moved others to mines, towns, and haciendas as paid or unpaid laborers. Though warfare and captive exchange predated the arrival of Europeans to North America, the three centuries following contact witnessed the development of new practices of violence and captivity in the North American West fueled by Euroamericans’ interest in Native territory and labor, on the one hand, and the dispersal of new technologies like horses and guns to American Indian groups, on the other. While at times subject to an enslavement and property status resembling chattel slavery, Native peoples of the Greater Rio Grande often experienced captivities and forced migrations fueled more by the interests of empires and nation-states in their territory and sovereignty than by markets in human labor. Uncovering these dynamics of captivity and their effects on Apachean groups and their neighbors serves to better integrate American Indian and Borderlands histories into central narratives of colonial North American scholarship.

Contemporary view of the Rio Grande, New Mexico.

Map of the Rio Grande River in 1718.

Castle of San Juan de Ulua (Veracruz, Mexico) where Native captives were housed en route to Cuba.

About Paul Conrad:

Paul Conrad is currently an Assistant Professor of History at Colorado State University-Pueblo. He will spend the 2012-2013 academic year at the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University, where he has received a research fellowship to work on revising his dissertation into a book manuscript.

Visit Paul Conrad’s homepage.

Photo credits:

All photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Making History: Robert Matthew Gildner

Interview by Zach Doleshal

For the fifth installment of our “Making History” series, Zach Doleshal talks to Robert Matthew Gildner, a senior doctoral student in history at the University of Texas at Austin. In the interview, Robert explains why 1952 represented a unique moment for indigenous Bolivians, why previous historians have overlooked this history, and how a trip to Holland inspired him to work on Latin American history.

Robert Matthew Gildner is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department of The University of Texas at Austin. He is currently writing his dissertation, tentatively titled, “Integrating Bolivia: Revolution, Race, Nation, 1952-1964,” which investigates the cultural politics of national integration in Revolutionary Bolivia to rethink postcolonial nation-state formation in Latin America. Abolishing colonial hierarchies of caste to transform segregated societies into unified republics was at the heart of Latin America’s postcolonial predicament. This predicament was especially acute in Bolivia. Indians constituted seventy percent ofthe population, but remained politically excluded and socially marginalized by a European-decedent, orcreole, minority still a century after Independence. Following the Bolivian Revolution of 1952, a new generation of creole nationalists sought, once and for all, to break with the colonial past. They uprooted the entrenched system of ethnic apartheid that characterized pre-revolutionary society and integrated Indians into a modern nation of their own making. In subsequent years, artists, intellectuals, socialscientists, and indigenous activists worked to transform Bolivia from a segregated, multiethnic society into a unified nation. “Integrating Bolivia” interrogates the dynamic interplay between state and societyas these diverse agents negotiated the terms of indigenous inclusion and the content of national culture.

Although the government granted political citizenship to indigenous Bolivians, it was the cultural politics of revolution that ultimately determined the limits of ethnic inclusion. State officials created a new national culture for the integrated republic, one that venerated Bolivia’s mixed Andean and Hispanic heritage. Historians recast national history as a multiethnic struggle against foreign economic exploitation. Archeologists reconstructed Tiwanaku, identifying in the pre-Hispanic ruins the primordial origins of Bolivian nationhood. Anthropologists studied rural communities, expanding the definitionof cultural patrimony to include indigenous art, music, and dance. Despite the inclusive veneer of this national culture model, it generated novel forms of indigenous exclusion by subsuming ethnic identity to national identity. This ambitious project to decolonize Bolivia thus operated to recolonize it on new terms. Yet, the Revolution did not result in the devastation of indigenous civilization, as dominant historiographical trends contend. Rather, by controlling their cultural representation in the narrow apertures opened by this exclusionary model, indigenous activists successfully bridged political citizenship and ethnic recognition.

Robert’s next project will use a transnational study of Andean mountaineering to examine the relationship between the physical environment, human geography, and nation-state formation in Latin America. During the nineteenth century, political leaders in the fledgling Andean republics of Bolivia, Ecuador,and Peru confronted a similar problem: forging cohesive nation-states in ethnically-fragmented and geologically-diverse territories. As national leaders struggled to overcome the daunting human andphysical geography of the Andes, mountaineering played a critical role in territorial integration, the making of environmental policy, and the definition of geopolitical frontiers. This project examines the adventures and imaginations of British, French, and German mountaineers, their engagement with rural indigenous communities, their reliance on local geographic knowledge, and their connections to liberal political projects across the Andes during a period of capitalist incursion and national consolidation.

Robert Matthew Gildner’s research and teaching focus on the cultural, political, and intellectual history of modern Latin America, with an emphasis on the Andean region. His broader research interests include indigenous politics, historical memory, race/ethnicity, and the construction of knowledge. He has been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, the American Historical Association’s Beveridge Award, and Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships.

You may also like:

Jessica Wolcott Luther’s interview for Making History, in which she talks about her dissertation on the history of slavery in seventeenth century Barbados.

Christina Salinas’ interview for “Making History,” in which she tells us about her childhood growing up on the Texas-Mexico border.

A Dangerous Idea

by Miriam Bodian

In 1645, a young Jew who had been captured in Portuguese Brazil was brought to Lisbon and tried by the Inquisition for heresy. He had been reluctantly baptized by his parents in France, where the practice of Judaism was forbidden. His trial, in many ways so much like other inquisitorial trials, is different from any other trial I know of in one respect: The “heretic,” Isaac de Castro Tartas, defended his right to practice Judaism on the basis of a universal natural right to freedom of conscience. This was a bold defense but it ultimately failed; he was burned at the stake in 1647, at the age of nineteen. But his long exchanges with his inquisitors on religious authority and individual conscience are preserved in a lengthy dossier housed today in the Portuguese National Archives, and tell us much about the hopes and fears around this issue.

Anonymous engraver, 17th century. The text reads “Method for burning those condemned by the Inquisition” and depicts the Praça do Comércio in Lisbon, Portugal.

Today, people who live in democratic societies take religious freedom for granted. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most Europeans found the idea of “freedom of conscience” deeply threatening. How could the fabric of society withstand competing religious ideas? What would convince people to live moral lives in the absence of a single, state-supported church? The anxiety Europeans felt about religious freedom impeded the struggle to achieve that freedom. Isaac de Castro’s trial vividly reflects the great divide between the few who supported this idea and the powerful authorities who rejected it. The inquisitors’ views about religious authority is often disparaged; but even in 2011 it is just as important to understand the mentality of the inquisitors as it is to understand the arguments of Isaac de Castro.

Castro defended himself by arguing that even if the inquisitors chose to regard him as a baptized heretic, he was not guilty of heresy, “because an act that is done in accordance with one’s conscience cannot be judged culpable, and the act I have and will continue to do – the act of professing Judaism – is done according to the dictates of my conscience.” Castro supported his argument by describing his experience as a practicing Jew in Amsterdam and Dutch Brazil. These were exceptional environments in which freedom of conscience had been written into law. The inquisitors would have been well aware that Dutch society was thriving and had not been torn apart by the religious diversity of its inhabitants.

The Kahal Zur Israel synagogue in Recife, Brazil was the first Jewish congregation in the New World. It was founded in 1636 during the Dutch occupation of Pernambuco.

But the inquisitors were imbued with a medieval perspective on conscience, according to which individual conscience was “in error” if it differed from the teachings of the Catholic Church. Castro was accused of ignoring the Church’s authority and presumptuously adhering to his own personal beliefs. Confronted with this accusation, he strategically abandoned his argument as an individual and adopted an authoritarian counter-view. He argued that as a Jew by ancestry, and having been circumcised, he was bound to observe the Law of Moses – an argument invoking (Jewish) religious authority that met the inquisitors on their own ground. This concession by Castro,however, proved fatal. The inquisitors argued that baptism, regardless of ancestry, obligated Castro to observe the teachings of the Catholic Church. Having invoked religious authority, Castro had opened himself to attack. If “conscience” meant obedience to doctrines that did not come from within, as he had been pressured to admit, was he not bound to the first obligation he had incurred in his life, that is, baptism?

A great deal of pain, suffering, and experimentation have accompanied the process by which we have come to regard religious beliefs as a matter of individual conscience. But to understand events in our own time, it is important to understand that such an idea is not at all obvious – that for many centuries this was an idea that few could even imagine. An examination of the intense struggle in early modern Europe between those who defended religious authority and those who resisted it brings into focus the great difficulty involved in establishing a principle of religious freedom. It may help us to understand the frequent failure of well-intentioned efforts to impose an idea cherished in the western world, but alien to people conditioned to accept religious authority and to condone the persecution of religious nonconformists.

You may also like:

Historian Richard Kamen’s The Spanish Inquisition: an Historical Revision (1999) offers a nuanced reassessment of the Spanish Inquisition’s role in history.

Yale Professor of Brazilian history Stuart Schwartz examines religious toleration in All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (2009).

Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (1999).

Images via Wikimedia Commons

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