A MAGAZINE OF THE AMERICAS VOLUME 27 • WINTER 2018 • HTTP://LACC.FIU.EDU

Documented: The Colonial Archive and the Future of the Americas

Hemisphere Volume 27 I DIALOGUE ACADEMIA DISSEMINATE LINKAGES BUSINESS MEDIA TOPICS Hemisphere LEARN INDUSTRYDEBATEETHICS VOLUME 27 • WINTER 2018 • HTTP://LACC.FIU.EDU INFORMATION CONTENT DEPTH

CULTURE INVESTIGATION STATISTICS UNRAVEL LOCATION IN THIS ISSUE CULTIVATE TRAINING EXCHANGE POLICY REVEAL SPARK NEWS ANALYSIS INSIGHT INTERPRET INTERNATIONAL REALITY EDUCATION FREEDOM LETTER FROM THE EDITOR FINANCE NETWORKS ILLUMINATE TEACH DECIPHER BEATS Frank O. Mora...... 3 GOVERNMENT INTERPRETATION LETTER FROM THE GUEST EDITOR EXPLAIN ILLUMINATE

EXAMINATION PUBLISHING RELIABLE FORUM Bianca Premo ...... 4 LEADERSHIP INTERACTIVE SOURCES RESEARCH ARTICLES Opening the Colonial Archive by Anna More and Bianca Premo...... 7 TRUTH

EXPOSE Finding Order, Inspiration and José Martí in the Libros de Pasaportes by David Sartorius...... 11

On Being Disciplined and Counted in the Early Modern Circum-Caribbean LACC: by Karen Graubart...... 14

Celebrating Thirty-Nine Years of Excellence “Good Writing”: Other Archives, Languages in Contact, and a Letter to the King of Spain Working hard to ensure that people following Latin America and the Caribbean by Ivonne del Valle have access to dependable, accurate and current information about the issues Translated by Alejandro Múnera and Anahit Manoukian...... 19 that matter most. The Common Exceptionality and the Exceptional Commonality of Black Thought LACC supports enhanced understanding of hemispheric politics, business, by Gregory Childs...... 23 society and culture through: On Women in Mexican Archives n Academic research and teaching by more than 200 LACC faculty experts by Jessica Delgado...... 29 n High-quality analysis available as events unfold Religion and Emotion in the Archives of Empire n Interdisciplinary projects that reach audiences across the globe by Jennifer Scheper Hughes...... 33 n Critical training programs to educate a new generation of leaders A Miami Field Report from the Colonial Past: Iglesia-Museo de Nuestra Señora de la Merced/The Chapel of Our Lady of Mercy at Corpus Christi Parish, Miami by Carol Damian...... 36

Peasant Archives and Identity Documents in Peru by José Ragas...... 40

Archives as Activism at a Hispanic-Serving University: A Conversation with Catherine Nolan-Ferrell Forging linkages across the Americas through education, research, outreach, and dialogue. and Agnieszka Czeblakow...... 44

lacc.fiu.edu @FIULACC /FIULACC Hemisphere FROM THE EDITOR Dear Hemisphere readers: EDITORIAL STAFF I was delighted when Bianca Premo, Professor of History at FIU, approached LACC about supporting her Founding Editor Anthony P. Maingot participation at La Patrona Collective for Colonial Latin American scholarship. She had already attended a meeting at Editor Frank O. Mora Princeton University (March 2017) and a practicum sponsored by the University of Notre Dame in Rome (July 2017), and LACC sponsored her attendance at a meeting of the Tepoztlán Institute on Transnational History (August 2017). Guest Editor Bianca Premo All of these intensive sessions delved into questions about critical approaches to colonial Latin American history and Associate Editor Liesl Picard reinforced the importance of support of emerging scholars to ensure this important work continues. Copy Editor Alisa Newman After the success of these sessions, Professor Premo approached LACC about supporting an expansion of La Patrona Archivos Graphic Designer Genesis Cajina meetings by organizing an open seminar at FIU, , in Spring 2018. LACC welcomed the opportunity to support and host some of the world’s leading scholars of colonial Latin America to discuss what the Production Manager Yessenia Abolila historical record reveals and what it hides, and how records affect the stories we tell and the lives we live. Following the seminar’s success, LACC decided to dedicate its next issue of Hemisphere to archives to share new, cutting-edge EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD scholarship with a broader audience. Uva de Aragón Ana María Bidegain I was very pleased that Professor Premo accepted my invitation to serve as the guest editor of this special edition David Bray José Miguel Cruz of Hemisphere. The issue brings together participants ofLa Patrona Collective and other scholars of colonial Latin Jorge Duany Eduardo A. Gamarra A. Douglas Kincaid Sarah J. Mahler America to “open the archives.” One of the objectives of opening the archives, as Professors Premo and Anna More Andrea Mantell Seidel Félix E. Martín assert in the feature, is to tell the human stories of the colonial disempowered and use those to better understand Allan Rosenbaum Mark B. Rosenberg Richard Tardanico Victor M. Uribe-Uran today’s disenfranchised. Interestingly, despite the years, the stories of marginalization and exclusion are quite similar. Furthermore, this approach to examining the archives reveals far more than past accounts and parallels to the present; in many ways, it also provides a window into the future of the Americas. Hemisphere (ISSN 08983038) is published once a year by the Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center, Steven J. Green School of International and Public Affairs, Florida International University. Copyright © 2018 by the I want to give special thanks to Professor Premo for her hard work as the guest editor of this wonderful issue Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center, Florida International University. All rights reserved. Printed in the and for her tremendous intellectual and administrative contributions to FIU and the field of Latin American and United States of America. Caribbean Studies. LACC remains committed to supporting interdisciplinary research and will continue to use Hemisphere is dedicated to provoking debate on the problems, initiatives, and achievements of the Americas. Responsibility Hemisphere to explore central theoretical, epistemological and public policy issues facing the Americas. for the views expressed lies solely with the authors. Editorial, Circulation and Advertising Offices: Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center, Florida International University, Modesto A. Maidique Campus, DM 353, Miami, Florida, 33199, Tel.: 305-348-2894, Fax: 305-348-3953, E-mail: [email protected], http://lacc.fiu.edu, @fiulacc Frank O. Mora Director & Professor Cover Image and Page 5: Matrix on eighteenth-century papal bull, used by permission of the Archivo Diocesano de Toledo, Spain. Photo by Bianca Premo. Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center Florida International University

Hemisphere Volume 27 3 FROM THE GUEST EDITOR

We live in an age of skepticism about the value of the “Humanities,” filled with debates about its utility in the marketplace and how much public funds should underwrite its study. In such times, dedicating one’s life to dusty papers from defunct empires requires constant self-examination. The contributors in this issue do not shrink from thinking about the value of this work, or from value itself as topic of debate. What counted as valuable in the past? What counts now as valuable about the past? Who gets counted, who gets documented, then and now? Framing the question this way makes it obvious that the topic of archives is urgent. Archives are ways of thinking that actively shape our hemisphere and its future. As the contributors began to craft their essays in early 2018, debates raged about US immigration quotas and the value of people from different countries of origin. One afternoon, I joined an excited audience at the Little Haiti Cultural Center in Miami for a discussion and exhibit: “Visionary Aponte.” José Antonio Aponte, a carpenter of African descent, had been arrested in early 19th-century Cuba for conspiring to overthrow the Spanish government. An ordinary man, he had assembled his extraordinary ideas — some gleaned from his small library, some inspired by the Haitian Revolution, others from his own past — into a leather-bound book. Officials found it hidden in a trunk. Aponte’s book — his archive, if you will — contained drawings of cosmologies, historical figures, and more. A military official grilled Aponte about the drawings for three days. But the officials did not quite understand his complex ideas and drawings. All that was visible to them was the threat he posed. And now the book is gone. Historians cannot locate it. The “Visionary Aponte” artists filled the void of Aponte’s book with their own imaginations. With the gracious permission of Edouard Duval-Carrié and the assistance of Drs. Ada Ferrer and Linda Rodríguez, this issue of Hemisphere features some of the artists’ pieces, reminders that the archive is incomplete without our own interpretations. This is the essential work of the Humanities. Surely, science is involved: a tangible record, a logic for the preservation of artifacts. The imprimatur of institutions on the archive is also enormous, attested to by the cover image: a document in Latin from the archives of Toledo, Spain with the metal matrix and wax seal of the Catholic Church still attached. But science and seals aren’t all they seem. Before her untimely death, the historian of colonial Mexico María Elena Martínez prodded us to use our emotions and imaginations in the archives. By this, she meant that we must pay greater attention to how papers and artifacts touched actual humans and their lives. She wanted us to use archives to remember, relive, experience. We rely on our emotions to determine “fact.” Now, more than ever, we must approach Latin America’s past and the hemisphere’s future with our hearts and minds. We must enter archives ready to be numbed by what overflows, grapple with what we do not want to see, and feel heartache for what is undocumented. Only human imagination will fill in the blanks. Only human humility can stand against the idea that people from Latin America, or anywhere, can be reduced to just marks on a page, mere numbers.

Bianca Premo Professor Department of History Florida International University

4 Hemisphere Volume 27 Hemisphere Volume 27 5 Opening the Colonial Archive by Anna More and Bianca Premo

istory and the from access. Opening the archive archives most often with the state. archives that house ultimately allows us to rewrite not Although there are archives that serve its inner workings just the past, but also the present organizations or communities, when are closed to all and its possibilities. these are deemed important they may but a few. In fact, be donated or engulfed by a state despite the ostensibly “public” In this introduction to the issue, archive. At an impossible, imaginary Hnature of most local and national we present how such an approach point in this process we might archives, closing off history often has can change our reading of one imagine a singular, all-encompassing discrete archive: a file currently archive: the complete archive. been the very purpose of building located in Seville in the Archivo archives. The types of documents General de Indias, the largest The Archivo General de Indias, archives hold, their order, and our repository of records from the like all archives, has a history. It was access to them all conspire to control Spanish empire. This file charts the created in the eighteenth century as the historical narrative before it is appearance and disappearance from a repository for documents related even written. When we forget this, the late eighteenth-century Spanish to the Spanish empire. It centralized we risk assuming that the historical bureaucratic record of an ordinary and combined a number of previous record is a transparent window onto Peruvian woman named Tomasa archives in one place as part of a the past. We also ignore archiving Maldonado. Through our dialogue, larger attempt to manage the empire as a process in which documents which is one between a historian more efficiently. Realizing that are added, misplaced, reshuffled, and a literary reader, we find the Archivo General de Indias was altered or destroyed. Without glimpses of how Tomasa’s story came established at a specific moment in thinking about the archive, we to be written and safeguarded, and history reminds us that archives are reproduce what others before us use our imagination to reorder not generally built as spaces where have considered history. the pages and speculate on the researchers might access documents, missing parts of her archive. Along even if that is what they become. As the essays in this issue of the way, we explore how Tomasa Rather, an archive often exists to Hemisphere show, scholars of created her own archive from serve a practical purpose. The state colonial Latin America are working state papers, and how her archive uses archives to protect political hard to “open” the archive. By this, inspires critical approaches to continuity or institute laws. It uses we mean using archives to write “the” archive that can bring history the archive to categorize subjects histories or tell stories of those who closer to present politics. and to follow them through key were not empowered by colonial moments in their lives, such as birth administrations. Opening the Archival Enclosure or death. archive also means understanding The most immediate image of the archive itself as a historical an archive is a building, usually Not all societies have written institution built to serve a specific architecturally designed to signal archives, and those that do might purpose and place contents in a its importance as a monument. dedicate more or fewer of their specific order. That, in turn, brings Archives are built, often explicitly, resources to them. But in the some witnesses to the past to the for a unique purpose: to safeguard end, all archives exist because forefront, while obstructing our written documents. A secondary of political choices at certain view of others. Finally, opening the goal of the archive is its own historical moments, with certain archive means searching for ways to completion; the more extensive political intentions. The decision make documents more accessible the archive, the more power it to abandon, disperse or entirely Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain. Photo by Karen Graubart. to social groups usually excluded accrues. For this reason we associate close off archives altogether is a

6 Hemisphere Volume 27 Hemisphere Volume 27 7 political one. All of these decisions, or leave out. They might even stripping of [the Subdelegate’s] as a judge’s sentence or official compelling that a bureaucratic layer Atlantic, a king’s scribe “extracted” whether active or passive, reflect include the very subjects of jurisdiction by the Crown’s Attorney decision, which was deemed the is needed to assure that documents the parts he found to be important the impact of political priorities the documentation — colonial [and] Protector of Indians, [the important part. Then the material are safeguarded first of all from to present to the ministers of the on access to history. While states subjects, like conquered natives or Subdelegate] advocates for his shifts chronologically back in those with political interests and Council. A gatekeeper, an editor, that fear being held accountable enslaved Africans, or ordinary city [authority] to hear the case that was time, “closer” to the original present power. But anyone who he decided what was important and for the past may try to eliminate dwellers — who can affect the way pursued in his Court on behalf of documents and perhaps even gains access to an archive has the left the rest out. documents by shutting down the documents develop. the Matrimonial union of Joaquín closer to the people whose lives same potential power over history. archives, these actions also foreclose Jordán and his Wife, María Tomasa they touched. The official story, The archive is the consummate site If we think of the power that the possibility of writing history in In opening up the archive of Maldonado.” The title makes clear focused on lawyerly disquisitions, of democracy and it always holds the king’s scribe had to edit and a way that justifies or explains their Tomasa Maldonado, we see that that the main interest of the official interim judgments and high-level out the possibility of being made shape Tomasa’s file, it becomes own traits, laws, or approaches to the process of archiving was never who organized the documents is brinksmanship, is intertwined with to work on behalf of those not clear how archives can determine problems. With no official archive, fully planned and controlled by the the powerful people embroiled in the everyday details of ordinary represented by the state. what becomes history. The scribe moreover, other sources may be state. Tomasa herself understood the the dispute, namely the Subdelegate disputes, chronologies that take controlled the order in which the found to explain the past. Even if power of documents and intervened and the Crown’s Attorney. Only place both inside and outside of And we must not forget that story was presented, the logic, and a state is fearful of accountability, to bend the process toward her own secondarily does it mention that the the institutions that produced anyone can store documents that even the priority given the conflict such as after a period of dictatorship needs and purposes. root of the dispute was the “case that the documents, and on and off can be used later to tell divergent between judges. But his power was or violence, the risk of losing an was pursued in his Court” involving the page. The result is dizzying, stories of the past. In fact, Tomasa not absolute. The documents from archive can be greater than the risk Entering the Archive Joaquín and Tomasa’s marriage. As and skipping pages is dangerous, had her own archive, of sorts, Tomasa’s file suggest that she was an of keeping it. The manuscript file of the Jessica Delgado discusses later in the since in doing so the reader is and in many ways the dispute she active participant in her own case, indigenous woman Tomasa begins issue, women were ubiquitous in likely to miss a turn of events, the had with her husband, Joaquín, even sowing disorder in the archival As scholars of colonial Latin with the end of the case. The top the colonial records, but the use of introduction of a new judge into was about who had access to her process through her dogged America, a period that covers pages are those written during the passive voice here — the title tells the affair, or a procedural move archive. In their pueblo in Lurín, a insistence on using the courts anywhere from the sixteenth last stages of her suit and contain us that the case “was pursued” rather that will defy any attempt to put six-hour walk from Lima, Tomasa of the empire for her mundane through the nineteenth centuries, official correspondence between than that Tomasa pursued it — is the past into chronological order. had a box locked with a key, and dispute. In fact, Tomasa and her we benefit from the relatively powerful men who spar over their typical of how women’s historical Even so, gaps and silences remain. the box contained money — 400 incessant filings bothered the judge abundant archives of the Spanish jurisdiction over Tomasa’s lawsuit. activity can be subsumed under But what if the gaps and silences, pesos, she said. She wanted that hearing her case in Lima. The case and Portuguese imperial states. We have no idea if the collection male textual authority. the missing pages or the reordering money, at least in part, to pay for only reached Spain because Tomasa The Archivo General de Indias of papers was ever read after having itself tell a story? a civil lawsuit against Joaquín for filed petition after petition, and is only one of the archives that been catalogued alongside millions Unless a researcher casts a being a philanderer, for failing to when the judge became impatient we as historians can consult. of others in the same archival wide net and happens upon a Reordering the Archive provide for her, and for being a with her, she threatened to recuse Archives exist in churches, in series. The series, generically called key term, or just gets lucky, a As stated earlier, documents are drunk. Joaquín took the keys from him and go to another judge. local government holdings, in “Government, Lima,” is focused case like Tomasa’s often remains fragments of time, plucked and her and hid the box in the ceiling This was an offense to the first private collections on plantations, on imperial officials and their hidden among the thousands of guarded from the maelstrom of life. rafters of their house. Not to be judge’s honor and thus, he took his overseas in distant libraries or in bureaucratic affairs. Given the documents organized in categories Often they are repetitious or aim deterred, Tomasa broke through complaint to the Council of Indies the central repositories of imperial subject matter of this case — an that pertain to the colonial state’s not to document expansively but the roof of their house and took the in Spain. Tomasa’s persistence had government. But despite the ordinary marital spat between an administrative functions and not selectively. When they are stored, money so she could ride to Lima meant that her ordinary dispute availability of numerous avenues indigenous couple from a town 60 to the subjects caught up in the they must be ordered for retrieval, on her saddled-up mule to sue her made it all the way to the cupula of to search for documentation of miles south of Lima in the 1790s imperial bureaucracy. The case with a taxonomy that relates them husband. At different points in Spain’s imperial administration. the past, the record remains scant — it is unlikely that many scholars does not appear in a keyword to other documents of the same Tomasa’s ongoing dispute with her for many territories and entire of past generations would have search in the AGI database. type. This taxonomy, or order of husband, we might imagine that This is not the only way that populations. At any moment and deemed these papers important Premo discovered it completely by associations, is not itself a history. her box also contained the papers Tomasa sowed archival disorder. place, specific interests determined enough to read and sort through. chance when scrolling through an The taxonomy of documents is she paid various legal writers to Neither Tomasa nor Joaquín could what was recorded and stored, inventory of papers filed away in incomplete; as historians, we must draw up for the suit. Those papers read, and at one point in their what could be seen and what was For the purpose of cataloguing, the “Government” series. create narratives by connecting were produced in various places, conflict, it seems Tomasa told her considered important. The king of the case was summarized, as most archival fragments which are only one by one, and collected to husband that the judge’s writing Spain did not personally oversee cases and correspondence in the Even when such a case is partial witnesses to the past. become a “case” when she turned at the bottom of one of the pages and control the documentation empire were, with a relatively found, reading it is an exercise, in them over to a judge in Lima. of her suit, which probably just of the colonial project and the thorough title naming the parties many ways, in reading backward Additionally, the power of the Whether all of those papers ended contained some bureaucratic storing of its artifacts. Throughout and the issues they litigated: “On and excavating. If reading a file archive lies in its restriction of up in the file today in Seville is scribbling, was in fact, an order for the archival process, a range of the [affairs] brought before the sequentially, scholars must begin access to a select few. Those who doubtful. When the papers arrived his arrest. Joaquín’s pleadings to historical actors make discretionary Subdelegate of the District of the at the end, often starting with have automatic access are the state before Madrid’s Council of Indies the judge to be left free appear in decisions about what to include Cercado of Lima as concern the the last action of a series, such magistrates, and this power is so after their long voyage across the the file, but are baffling and out of

8 Hemisphere Volume 27 Hemisphere Volume 27 9 place since no such arrest warrant democratize “documents.” This Cited or For Further Reading: was issued. Only by imagining what may include aiding access and “Sobre lo representado por el the documents were from Tomasa’s circulation, understanding the Subdelegado del Partido del Cercado Finding Order, Inspiration vantage point did her clever use of social process of the production of de Lima acerca del despojo de legal papers, in her own way for her documents, searching for the stories jurisdicción que le ha hecho el Fiscal own purpose, make sense. Only behind this production, and filling Protector de Yndios, avocándose and José Martí in the Libros by thinking about why Tomasa in what was not written, even if we el conocimiento de la causa que continually sued, why she would must do so speculatively. se seguía en su Juzgado para la want to amass her own archive and unión del Matrimonio de Joaquín de Pasaportes control her own chest of papers, Opening up the archive of Jordán y su Muger María Tomasa by David Sartorius did it become clear that she had Tomasa’s case is therefore important Maldonado,” Archivo General de harnessed the power of the legal for reasons that go beyond the Indias, Gobierno, Lima, 967, 1798. documents — their seals, their restitution of one subject’s story signatures, their enchanted words — to the historical narrative of the Aguirre, Carlos and Javier Villa- his past January I de pasaportes out on a table, figure. Less prominent individuals to her own troublemaking cause. colonial Americas. If we invest our Flores. From the Ashes of History: experienced a fleeting surrounded by some of the archive do not fare as well; there’s nothing energy in the battle to open the Loss and Recovery in the Libraries moment of fame in staff and a few researchers. Word neutral or democratic about the way Imagining the Archive archive it is because we believe that and Archives in Latin America. Cuba’s national archive had traveled fast: a Cuban historian that archives make historical actors Tomasa’s file is compelling the present draws upon the past, Raleigh, NC: Editorial A when I came across a who documents Martí’s biographical accessible in the present. For scholars not only because she is a subject whether explicitly or implicitly. Contracorriente, 2015. bit of new information about José details was waiting to see the skeptical of studying history as “but whose life was less likely to be Actions, opinions and identities are TMartí, the nation’s foremost patriot, passport entry. He explained that the biography of great men,” as the documented by the Spanish established with reference to the past. Derrida, Jacques. Eric Prenowitz, author and independence leader. although the date of Martí’s passport philosopher Thomas Carlyle put it in imperial state, but also because trans. Archive Fever: A Freudian Tracking down Martí in the archive appears in several studies, he had 1840, archives raise thorny issues of she saw the documents themselves Let us return to the scene of Impression. Chicago: University of had never been my main mission. never found an archival document representation, exclusion and research as legitimating her version of Tomasa breaking through the Chicago Press, 1995. I was working my way through that corroborated its existence. methodology. A lone reference in events. The documents churned roof of her house to get her box. the weighty libros de pasaportes, Throughout my years of research in a passport book may be the only out by Spain’s church and state Now imagine that the roof is not Stoler, Ann Laura. Along the Archival registers of passports issued in Cuba, scholars there who know the glimpse of someone otherwise absent bureaucracies captured many her home in a pueblo in colonial Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Havana between 1828 and 1898, archive well have generously shared in the written record, and that subjects whose lives happened Peru but the imposing structure Colonial Common Sense. Princeton: and I wanted to test how thorough tips and leads, and the people who glimpse may not tell us much. For no to intersect with an inquisitor, of the Archivo General de Indias Princeton University Press, 2010. they were. Slogging through the work at the archive have gone out of other person in the passport books a missionary or a magistrate in Seville. Finally, imagine that 40-pound book covering just their way to help me make the most can we look to piles of archivally charged with producing evidence it is the roof of “the” archive, in two years of the Ten Years’ War of my too-brief visits. I was thrilled grounded biographies — as well for an institutional purpose. the sense that philosophers and (1868-1878, Cuba’s first war for to find this small way to reciprocate as twenty-six bound volumes of Tomasa’s desire for control over her theorists of history mean the independence), I remembered that documents, her active seeking out term, an abstract institution that by sharing the reference from the complete written works — to flesh Martí had been sent to Spain as of officials, and her strategic use of would shut out all but her most passport book, and I certainly didn’t out the details of a life in the way her papers tell us a great deal about disciplined entry into the historical a prisoner in January 1871. Had mind the unexpected acclaim at the that we can with José Martí. the process of building archives, record. That Tomasa defied that he received a passport to make archive for my research prowess. But even those that are monuments of discipline while appropriating the the voyage? After scanning about this was not the kind of research I What led me to the passport the Spanish imperial state. Tomasa’s state’s papers for her own purposes 80 pages, I found his name listed had come to the archive to conduct. books in the first place was an file shows that it is possible to think helps us imagine narratives of our among the people issued passports interest in migration, the stories of and act outside of the order that present and future that, by analogy on December 21, 1870. At the end Archives and their contents can people who came to and from the powerful men assign to archives to or distant consequence, pay of a tedious research day, I placed serve manifestly empiricist purposes: island. Much of Cuban history can tell different stories and to direct homage to her active participation the book in the reserve area and They provide data, establish facts be told, at least in part, as a story the authority of the archive to in breaking open history. mentioned what I had come across and constitute evidence. Even of human mobility. What would reversals of social power. to the reading room staff— hoping, competing arguments about the the history of the island look like Anna More is Professor of Hispanic in part, to convince them that past usually adhere to commonly without Spanish colonization, If democracy can only be served Literatures in the Department of Literary bringing me those heavy books every understood rules that privilege African slavery, Chinese indenture, by opening up the archive, the Theory and Literatures at the University day for two weeks had somehow archival documentation (and other U.S. intervention, Caribbean archive is also the only safeguard for of Brasília, Brazil. been worth the backaches. firsthand sources). The historian intra-island migrations, railroads, democracy. In this sense, opening seeking to find proof of every detail passenger steamships, tourism up the archive means expanding Bianca Premo is Professor of History at I arrived at the archive the of José Martí’s life looks to archives and a wide array of linkages to the one’s research and imagination to Florida International University. next morning to find thelibro for certainty about an already famous United States, including, of course,

10 Hemisphere Volume 27 Hemisphere Volume 27 11 José Martí and other historical figures in passport registry, Registro de Pasaportes principa en 6 de noviembre de 1869, used by permission of the National Archive of Cuba. Photo by David Sartorius.

mobility than the international cover Havana, they cannot explain husbands or fathers, whose passports travel documentation. Tales of system that exists today to issue how other ports — Santiago, covered all of their household forgeries, substitutions and lost and passports to citizens. And just in Matanzas, Cienfuegos and smaller dependents. Markers of social stolen documents help qualify the case the point needs to be made, it coastal towns — regulated the difference that mattered a great deal success of the passport system, as can distort the big historical picture comings and goings of people. Most on the island, it turns out, were just do documents about illegal African of global migration to focus, as important, the books only rarely as important when traveling to or captives denied any documentary most attention usually does, on the list enslaved Africans on the rare from it. As steamship service reached identity and stowaways who United States and Europe as the occasions that they traveled alone, or Cuba at midcentury, connecting deliberately traveled without papers. primary authorities that regulate when they were counted among the Havana even more closely to New borders and human mobility. (nameless) servants accompanying Orleans, Charleston and New A second response to these the recipient of a passport. The York (and to other port cities on questions is to suggest that archives Locating the Cuban passport books are silent about the illegal the island as well), the size and serve purposes beyond empirical books in the opaquely titled transatlantic slave trade that brought frequency of the books themselves verification: They can be as useful Miscelánea de libros collection in the more than 300,000 Africans to the increased dramatically, which for raising good historical questions national archive helped me see the island even after an 1817 treaty with speaks both to the greater traffic as for answering them. I’m still big picture during the nineteenth England prohibited the commerce. and an expanding standardization curious to learn more about the century, at least from the vantage No state fully surveils its subjects, of maritime travel. Insights like dozens of African-descended Cubans point of the palace of the captain but the incomplete and uneven these abound in the passport books, who obtained passports late in 1823 general (the island’s highest- nature of recordkeeping in colonial despite their gaps and silences, as an to travel to Africa (permanently? ranking colonial official). They also contexts figures among the main emerging passport system attempted where, specifically? how did they presented a research conundrum. reasons that historians over-associate to regulate mobility in nineteenth- know each other?), or about the While I was no longer reliant upon the development of the passport century Cuba. four men who arrived in Havana scattered examples of individual with national citizenship and the from Spain in 1854 with borrowed passports, I now struggled to find twentieth-century bureaucratic state. In the end, though, do these passports, their transgressions meaning in the thousands of entries observations accomplish anything revealed when port officials noticed that filled each of the dozens of Book by book and page by page, more than the resuscitation of that no man matched the physical books. On its own, for example, however, an image comes into state designs? Do we really need description listed on his document. there is nothing especially revealing view of how the Spanish colonial the passport books to clinch the The questions that emerge about the listing for Martí. It administration over a 70-year period argument that racial and gender revolve less around the individual identifies him as a native of Havana made documentation important distinctions stratified Cuban society? biographies of these people than and as someone destined for the to people in transit to and from Do the passport books help us what they reveal about the politics “Península” (Spain). The notation Cuba. The production of the understand any better the lives of and materiality of mobility in “O. Supr” — orden superior — records contained in archives today people less prominent than José Cuban history. Answers may emerge makes clear that this voyage was was a historical process in its own Martí, or is the scholar Saidiya from more archival visits, or by not of Martí’s own choosing. But right, and the paper trail left by Hartman correct that “to read the turning to other types of sources, it says nothing about his political Cuba’s passport system reflects the archive is to enter a mortuary”? One but even without demonstrable exile? With contemporary travel Throughout the ebbs and flows sympathies, his prison sentence, his structures and priorities — and response to these questions is to certainty there is value in identifying restrictions in mind, what began of Cuba-U.S. travel restrictions, transfer from a prison on Isla de anxieties and aspirations — of recall that the paper trails generated the problems and tensions that for me as a basic empirical question policymakers and critics alike Pinos, or anything else that led to a government as wary as it was by the passport system were not expand the scope of our inquiries. — what kind of paperwork have have referred to international his departure for Spain. dependent upon mobility and exclusively relevant to a governing Scholars depend on issues like people needed to travel to and from travel as a right of citizenship, migration. It matters, for instance, elite; every person listed in the these to ignite our curiosity about Cuba? — became a wide-ranging power materialized in people’s For the most part, José Martí that passports only covered a single passport books received a piece the past, at least as much as stories project when I realized that there passports. Yet alongside letters of blends in with the other people voyage and could be issued to of paper that carried significance about the comings and goings of was no evident or easy answer. And introduction, sailor’s certificates whose names fill the passport book. foreigners, more suggestive of a as they went out into the world. national heroes. accounting for the circumstances and other documentation, No juicy anecdotes or contextual provisional request for safe passage Travel accounts and other sources of people’s travels, rather than passports have a long history that background accompanies the lists of than a durable right of citizenship. illustrate this well, as do other David Sartorius is Associate Professor of taking them as a given, raised new precedes the development of nation names, the kind of information that It matters, too, that the only racial archival documents about the use History at the University of Maryland. questions about the politics of states. A look at the structures might suggest why people traveled, markers that appear in the libros de and misuse of passports. Reports documents that prompted a fresh of migration during the colonial what authority or protection a pasaportes identify people of African of Chinese indentured workers approach both to the archives and to period, before Cuba’s borders passport conferred upon them, who descent, and that women almost seeking what they called “Go- familiar Cuban stories of migration became national ones, reveals a far was being denied passports, and on never received their own passports Abroad Papers” attest to cross- and mobility. wider range of practices regulating what grounds. Since the books only if they were traveling with their cultural (mis)understandings about

12 Hemisphere Volume 27 Hemisphere Volume 27 13 granted laws nor ways of living.” The or destroy their homes and fields. But de Bayano in the north, acting as a lack of dominio — of legal oversight, the idea that indigenous communities military presidio against corsairs as On Being Disciplined and Counted of proper authority, of civilizing could have limited self-governance well as runaway slaves, and two in structure — leaves them free to hide became central to the economic the south, Santa Cruz and Santiago runaway slaves as well as to commit policies of Spanish colonialism. del Príncipe. Each town was outfitted in the Early Modern Circum-Caribbean crimes rather than work: “Their The (usually) men who served as with a Spanish priest and judge as well by Karen Graubart occupation is simply to steal, rob community leaders drew upon their as its own Black authorities. and commit infinite offenses, against legitimacy to collect a head tax for the Spaniards as well as Indians, taking crown and send Indians to mining Monsalve tells us in his Memorial away their property, their wives, and camps or other forced labor. By the that he had significant experience n 2008, UNESCO placed the Spanish Americas: a desire to the transactions that underwrote killing them, taking away all they turn of the 17th century, most Indians with such processes, having been the small town of San Basilio tell foundational stories of people of the creation of such Black towns. have. This is their occupation.” were taking Spanish abusers to court some of the towns’ “first priest.” de Palenque, Colombia, on African descent defying slavers. Penned in a crabbed but neat hand rather than rebelling against them. While the existing records do not its Representative List of the by Dominican priest Miguel de The solution is to establishdominio , mention Monsalve, we have no Intangible Cultural Heritage The main problem with Monsalve around 1608, the papers or authority over free Blacks, and Monsalve’s plan for Peru, then, reason to doubt that he assisted in of Humanity. In its statement, contemporary liberatory narratives are part of a group of memoranda Monsalve does so by analogy with was to bring reducción — previously these communities. The towns were IUNESCO recognized San Basilio’s of Black towns in the Americas is (memoriales) the priest sent to the barbarous Indians who inhabit only applied to indigenous polities formalized with a ritual in which the history as a settlement founded in that they are imaginative responses King Philip III and his Council th the Americas. Here he follows in — to free men and women of African cimarrón leaders officially requested the early 17 century by runaway to the sparse and overwhelmingly of the Indies, suggesting colonial the footsteps of another Dominican heritage. The plan was formulated the king’s pardon, offering their and slaves (cimarrones). African depreciatory documentation about reforms. Monsalve was an unusual priest, Bartolomé de las Casas, and a in Panama in the 1570s, in a very their subjects’ vassalage via the Real cultural ways have survived into their past. There were many such character: a priest who tended to the Mexican bishop, Vasco de Quiroga, different kind of crisis. Panama was Audiencia, or royal high court. The the present, including a creolized Black towns across Spanish America, souls of formerly enslaved Africans who in the early 16th century used a transport linchpin between the court’s leader, as royal representative, language, whose grammar reflects with historians and anthropologists in Panama; wrote treatises on Thomas More’sUtopia as a model earlier Caribbean and Mesoamerican then granted them liberty and Bantu, and West-Central African- telling us they date back to the late preserving indigenous communities, for reorganizing dispersed and settlements and the mineral and vassalage on the grounds that they influenced cooking, musical, sixteenth century. Slaves frequently limiting shipwrecks and ending fragile indigenous communities human wealth of South America. agreed to live in peace, justice and medical and spiritual practices. ran away and, in regions with the fraud by silversmiths; and ended up into Catholic towns. Their idea was Spanish traders, officials and settlers obedience. Adult males could appear UNESCO highlighted San Basilio right environmental conditions, managing a mining concern in the to take indigenous communities would land at the ports of Nombre at the court to receive their and de Palenque’s historical status and hid in communities of various sizes, Peruvian viceroyalty. The untitled suffering from epidemic disease, de Dios or Portobelo on the northern their family’s freedom papers, an act unique culture to draw attention sometimes called palenques (after 1608 treatise brings together these overwork and the effects of coast and trek south to Panama City, which would not only protect them to threats against it, including the palos, or fencing, used to mask disparate interests, beginning with ongoing warfare and place them where they could embark upon ships from re-enslavement (a common the Colombian armed conflict, the sites). Some palenques survived the description, “Information, which in protected urban environments, to sail down the Pacific coast. Slaves problem) but also register them as economic globalization and racism. for decades, eluding or fighting off the Dominican Friar Miguel de called reducciones, that would allow were among the important cargo that taxpayers and residents of the town. military incursions. They became Monsalve offers to Your Majesty so them to labor more effectively made this journey, and many escaped This census also created a map of While UNESCO was cautious “Black towns” (pueblos de negros) that there are no Black cimarrones, for the Spaniards and convert into the mountains between coasts, who belonged in the town, making it in its description of San Basilio’s often only because Spanish officials or runaways (as they are called in to Catholicism. The towns were where they joined runaways from the possible for the authorities to identify place in history, bolder claims calculated that the cost of attacking these Indies), which will result in an drawn up on grids, with important cities and towns. In 1549 there were newcomers, including additional have been made for the town. The them or ignoring them was too increase in the royal rents of more buildings at their center: church, an estimated 1200 cimarrones — men, runaway slaves. head of the city’s cultural council high, and instead offered them than 200,000 ducats of rent…” jail, city council. Their everyday lives women and children — and they called it the “first free (Black) terms to regularize themselves. would be governed by Indian elites, were considered a nuisance. In 1574, The new vassals, under their town in the Americas.” Articles Accounts of these towns frequently In short, Monsalve proposes to according to their own customs King Philip II issued orders across captains, were immediately on Reuters and web- and video- elide the terms of negotiation with resolve two problems at once: the insofar as these did not conflict the viceroyalties requiring free people redeployed to hunt for cimarrones features on Al-Jazeera have repeated colonial authorities, which usually need for income for the royal coffers with Spanish law, and a Spanish of African descent to pay a head who had not accepted Spanish that story, and Smithsonian notes involved payment of a sizeable and Spain’s lack of control over the administrator and a priest would tax (called tributo), as Indians were terms. The men returned to the more circumspectly that “[l]ocals head tax, submission to structures Black population of the Americas. preside over the entire structure. required to do. He also proposed that mountains and jungles, bringing claim that in 1713 the inhabitants imposed by the Catholic church While his opening sentence names cimarrones who came in peacefully word of the benefits of peace and declared it the first independent and Spanish agents of justice, and cimarrones, his real concern are the By the 1570s, reducción had become would be placed in reducciones as free, capturing those who refused. Two community in the Americas.” The agreeing to capture and re-enslave free men and women of African a widespread model for resettling tax-paying citizens. Those who refused Spanish administrators brought in shaping of San Basilio’s narrative other runaways. descent who “don’t recognize the King communities in the viceroyalties of would be hunted and, if captured, free Blacks from Panama City to as a unique victory of cimarrones nor know who he is… do nothing in New Spain and Peru, with mixed killed or sold back into slavery. By help build the town, which included against an imperial slaving system In the national archives of Spain, the King’s service, nor a single thing results: Indigenous communities often the early 1580s, three Black towns two houses to jail captives, who were reflects a common thread in the in Madrid, is a sheaf of handwritten for the utility of the republic. The returned to their places of origin, had been founded and populated punished and returned to slavery, history of the African diaspora in pages that reveal the baseness of cause of this is that they have not been leading Spanish authorities to burn by former cimarrones: San Miguel often in Peru. By the end of 1582,

14 Hemisphere Volume 27 Hemisphere Volume 27 15 nearly all the known palenques had to explain new leaders, but more been dismantled, though Spanish often men and women were elected administrators complained that to local offices. Monsalve’s treatise runaways never ceased to find new is unique in refusing any role for terrain to hide in. Black leaders — either inherited or elected — at least in the early iteration Monsalve’s proposal for the of the town. Instead, he suggested free Blacks of Peru extended this appointing a Spanish governor experience. Instead of capturing and to judge or collect tribute. The reducing runaway slaves to become governor would also oversee the farmers and taxpayers, he argued that placement of apprentices, ensure free people of African descent should that Black citizens attended church be forcibly removed from their urban and worked, and visit the homes of homes and placed in new mining single men and women every week towns under strict enclosure and work to make sure that unmarried couples discipline. Arguing that they preferred were not cohabitating. crime, sexual libertinage and laziness to hard work and formalized families, The refusal to allow for self- he called for a strict resettlement governance, a cornerstone of colonial program. First, he stated, all the “free relations with indigenous peoples, Black men and women, mulatto men stemmed from Monsalve’s deep and women, and people of mixed distrust of African-descent peoples, African-indigenous descent” in all the very reason for reducing them. of the Spanish kingdoms should be “They are our capital enemies,” registered and brought together into he stated, citing the uprisings and sites on the outskirts of cities, where expeditions against cimarrones in they would be assigned living space Santo Domingo and Panama. He and build their own permanent ordered that no Black citizens have homes. The term “permanent” here weapons save for a bow and arrows was key: While the King’s vassals by to defend against enemies and round right enjoyed freedom of movement, up runaway slaves. For the sake of Monsalve wished the new Black towns security, even those weapons would to place limits on Black mobility. In be kept in a locked box in the Spanish those towns, Black citizens would take governor’s house, to be accessed as up occupations, as farmers, artisans necessary. Those who captured and or shopkeepers, and their children returned runaways would be paid a would be required to apprentice fee by the masters, unless the cimarrón in professions once they reached had committed a crime requiring the appropriate age. death penalty, in which case the city itself would pay the slave trackers. Monsalve’s Black reducción differed This use of Black violence against from the indigenous one in key ways. Black runaways was Monsalve’s Because African-descent peoples in proudest contribution: “Thus the the Americas did not have a local whole world would be rocked, and no aristocracy with claims to territory, one would dare to flee nor even stir, their leaders could rarely claim for they would know that they would elite status. Indigenous elites could be captured and punished rigorously, receive patents of nobility, and enjoy giving the land great security and privileges such as exemption from calm,” he proclaimed. tribute and permission to ride a horse or carry a weapon. In Black towns Monsalve’s plan was never put into elsewhere, narratives of kingship action. The resettlement of indigenous Port of Panama with view of the mountains. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public and royal blood sometimes emerged polities into reduced towns had been Library. "Panama." The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1700. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47d9-7aad-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

16 Hemisphere Volume 27 Hemisphere Volume 27 17 complex and its outcome uncertain. The story of San Basilio is a free people of color across the Iberian Removing tens of thousands of free lesson in “reading around” as an Americas illustrates both the truth of people from their jobs and homes archival strategy. For us, it is far that archival problem as well as the “Good Writing”: across the kingdoms was a vast easier to recognize the town as a site entangled story of humanity that lay undertaking which had little to argue of Black liberation than to read it beneath it. for it. The free Black population of as embedded in multiple histories Other Archives, Languages in Contact, most Iberian American cities was of the Spanish empire. Historians Karen B. Graubart is Associate Professor entirely integrated into the local overwhelmingly define themselves in of History at Notre Dame University. and a Letter to the King of Spain economy and its removal would have geographic terms, as historians of the created violence and unrest as well as British Empire, of Cuba, of Florence. by Ivonne del Valle undermined aspects of everyday life. The archives make this even more For Further Reading: Translated by Alejandro Múnera and Anahit Manoukian Colonial administrators continued problematic, as materials from the Kenneth Fletcher. “Colombia to target free African-descent Iberian imperial world can be found Dispatch 4: Palenque: An Afro- peoples to pay taxes and provide in imperial centers (Lisbon, Seville), Colombian Community,” unremunerated labor, including in other parts of the metropolis Smithsonian.com (October 28, isolated and unsuccessful attempts to (Madrid, Rome), in national archives 2008) https://www.smithsonianmag. n one of the most cited texts reasons — to register disputes about The kind of content that calls into move small groups to mining centers. of the independent nations (Lima, com/travel/colombia-dispatch- among scholars who study land, or to demarcate territories and question the archive’s constitution, But the main success of the pueblo de Ciudad de Panamá), and in far-flung 4-palenque-an-afro-colombian- archives, Archive Fever. A jurisdictions — but they also evince or the existence of only well-known, negros came from negotiating with provincial, ecclesiastic and municipal community-87781979 Freudian Impression (1995), the scope of colonial institutions well-established archives, is the cimarrones and offering limited self- archives. But placing documents — Jacques Derrida, writing and their jurisdiction, under which subject of this brief essay. governance in exchange for tribute and archives — against one another Carol Jopling, ed., Indios y negros about Freud’s archive, analyzes what indigenous peoples had to fashion payment and rounding up missing yields unexpected results. en Panamá en los siglos XVI y XVII. Ian archive is, in general terms, and documents to fight for their lands. Guamán Poma slaves. Across the Circum-Caribbean, South Woodstock, VT: Plumsock problematizes the question of its However, it is only recently that and “Savage” Writing particularly in Panama, Mexico, To understand San Basilio in Mesoamerican Studies, 1994. ownership; namely, who has the historical documents are being Very few cases so clearly illustrate Colombia and Hispaniola, Black Colombia, it must be read alongside right to claim it. Derrida raises the read in another way: to showcase this tension as El primer nueva crónica towns emerged as sites of policing and documents exposing the history of Jane Landers. “Cimarrón and Citizen: tension between what is “proper” indigenous ideas about land, social y buen gobierno (1615) by Guamán enclosure, though their residents also indigenous reducción in Peru as well African Ethnicity, Corporate Identity, to the archive and what calls it into relationships and their place in the Poma de Ayala, perhaps the longest experienced them as spaces of freedom as runaway communities in Panama. and the Evolution of Free Black question, citing the Greek word colonial world. In one sense, these “letter” someone has ever written, and self-governance. By doing so, I have found the links Towns in the Spanish Circum- arkhé or arché, which simultaneously maps are contained in both the now published in two volumes that between the thematic divisions that Caribbean,” in Jane Landers and Barry denotes a commencement and colonial archive (they document include the nearly 400 drawings and San Basilio de Palenque’s freedom, historians often employ, connecting the Robinson, eds., Slaves, Subjects, and a commandment. That is to say, the Hispanic colonial regime in more than 1,000 pages addressed then, was predicated on its people’s celebratory histories of Black towns to Subversives: Blacks in Colonial Latin every archive initiates something, Mexico) and the national one (they to Philip III, King of Spain. It is an willingness to act as loyal vassals the skirmishes against palenques, as well America. Albuquerque: University of tries to give form to something that register the past of contemporary extraordinary text. In it, Poma not to the Spanish empire. It probably as native and labor history. New Mexico Press, 2006, 111-146. is amorphous, and also implies a Mexico). But at the same time, only gives an exhaustive account emerged as a palenque in the early duty, the obligation of continuing they erode the archives that contain of the Andean past and the serious 17th century, and did not receive The popular narratives about Black Daniel Nemser. Infrastructures of something that begins in a certain them by exceeding their original problems of the new colonial legitimation and its residents’ pardons towns are correct in that palenques Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in form. Some archives were created to purposes, their commencement government, which had turned the until about 1717. The terms of that were evidence of the failure of Colonial Mexico. Austin: University of control a territory, for example, and and their commandment. They region “upside down,” but he also treaty reveal it as another in the long authorities to keep enslaved property Texas Press, 2017. others, to know how to govern new are something else: glimpses of the considers some possible solutions. The program of reducciones, in this case under control, and of the humanity or old populations. indigenous universe that could document, however, never reached placing the new town in the isolating that could occasionally overwhelm Jean-Pierre Tardieu. Cimarrones de not, and cannot, be fully contained its addressee in the 17th century. jungle that had served the inhabitants the more common characterization of Panamá. La forja de una identidad This tension is well understood by in any archive. They represent an It was not “found” until the early as cimarrones and requiring that they African-descent peoples as property. afroamericana en el siglo XVI. Madrid: those who study the colonial period. anarchic principle, Derrida would 20th century, in a library (another continue to police the region for other Archives preserve documents that Iberoamericana — Vervuert, 2009. It compels us to reflect upon which say; in this case, the limitations kind of archive) in Copenhagen. runaways. They seem to have been were generated to manage those texts belong in the archive, in which of the colonial and national Even though any of multiple more than successful with that aspect very human populations. They “Visiting the first free black town of languages and for what purpose. For institutions that seek to include historical circumstances might have of their status. A 1772 description are not organized to reveal Black the New World in Colombia,” Al example, most of the maps made by them in their scope, to domesticate prevented the text from arriving at states that the town included 178 agency or unveil radical programs for Jazeera English video (December 28, Mexico’s indigenous peoples, full of them. In another sense, they might its destination — pirates may have families, with 396 souls and 90 slaves, liberation, though those existed. But 2016) https://www.youtube.com/ words in Nahuatl, appear first in the be the commencement of another stolen the document, to cite only one men and women who were captured those stories are embedded in other watch?v=8gaXfr9WNwo archives of the colonial government. archive: an indigenous one, alien to possibility — the fact that the text in their own flight or were purchased foundational stories. The story of They are in the Archivo General de anything colonial and even perhaps never reached the king reminds us by palenqueros. Miguel de Monsalve’s plot to resettle la Nación for a number of possible to the nation as it is constituted. of what is literally excluded from the

18 Hemisphere Volume 27 Hemisphere Volume 27 19 archive and that, from this distance, Poma’s atypical case matters century. This long silence or, rather, bilingual, but not completely, as if calls it into question. precisely because, as Antonio de our long deafness, should nonetheless neither language really belonged to Nebrija pointed out in the first remind us that in this very moment them. That was exactly what I said: From a contemporary point grammar of the Castilian language, we are surrounded by spoken and “Neither of these languages belongs to of view, it is not only logical published in 1492, language written documentary juxtapositions them.” I said this while at the same but also an act of poetic justice goes hand in hand with empire. like those in his text. time thinking about effective ways of that the king never read Poma’s Power can only expand on its own helping students gain access to a more chronicle. Although Poma was an terms, in its own language and This is a reality for those of us standardized Spanish. Lorena said the educated indigenous person who in its familiar, discursive genres who teach languages, literature and same problem occurs at Universidad intimately understood colonial (chronicles, letters, declarations, history, not only in the United States Michoacana de San Nicolás de institutions and their functions, maps, etc.). In this sense, Poma’s but also in Latin America. Here I Hidalgo in Morelia, Mexico, where his lack of mastery of Hispanic text is a sort of turbulent zone think of my students in a course on she works. Some students whose genres is evident. He does not for the commencement and the Latin American colonial literature native language is P’urhépecha don’t seem to know that writing requires commandment (the dominance of who read Poma and El Inca Garcilaso have a strong command of Spanish. formalisms and the use of a proper the Spanish empire) constituted by de la Vega, a highly educated mestizo This is generally true of children and tone, especially when addressing a the colonial archive. It represents who wrote on behalf of the Incas of young people who have either not king. He includes rude, insulting another truth. A new perspective the Andes from Spain. Some of them been educated in their mother tongue words, mocking the subjects he is of an emerging Andean world can “command” a number of languages (like the students at the university in dealing with in his commentaries. be found in the interstices where and discursive genres (like El Inca), Michoacán) or who had to stop their He constantly shifts between Quechua and Spanish merge, where whereas others are remarkably unruly education in one language without genres (chronicle, allegation, legal forms not typically intertwined (like Poma); but because of this they finishing it, to continue in another document, history, ethnography, share the same paragraph, and where should not be given less credit, or one. As we know, it is very difficult poetry), sometimes in the space of a popular language comes together thought of as having less to teach us to fully learn a language — especially couple of pages. He mixes Quechua with the formal and legal language professors, who think we control our the peculiarities of its written form — with Spanish, often without of the 16th century. This was not language with ease. And even though unless one has used it since infancy. translation or explanation, and one only a bilingual (or trilingual, our students and the thousands of To learn two languages simultaneously is left with the impression that the including Aymara), disorganized and boys and girls who are “between and in far from ideal situations Quechua he uses is full of profanity. muddled world, but a real one, full languages,” “between nations” (precarious economic conditions, of vitality for the future. Poma’s text and “between histories” in schools poor access to high-quality education, It is in this sense that Poma’s articulates the truth that emerges across the Americas may never be etc.) is even harder. writing is “savage,” without negative from a colonial violence that put intellectuals like Poma and El Inca, connotation. Quite the opposite; like into contact, in conditions of drastic their voices continue to represent a I share this anecdote because I the indigenous communities that inequality, languages and imaginaries true perspective on history. Merely imagine it to be commonplace. Poma and other mestizos and Spanish that were not in contact before. attempting to tame the “savage” We believe one either masters a cronistas considered too barbarian Poma’s was a world where it was grammar of our students or even our language or does not. It is for this to be conquered and assimilated possible to depict Adam and Eve as own, while we let the same brutality reason that we study literature, into the Inca or Spanish empire (the peasants, and where dogs and horses that forces many to cross borders for the fascination of seeing what Chiriguanos, for instance), Poma’s constitute important personae and and mix languages continue, seems a language can do. And it can do set of relations is troublesome for acquire proper names. not only an absurd act, but also a lot, as the cases of Sor Juana, the colonial archive. Perhaps this an insensitive and small-minded César Vallejo and so many other is the reason why the letter never Even if Philip III had received one, equivalent to rejecting Poma´s canonical Latin American writers reached its addressee and why it is the letter that was so urgently sent chronicles for being “poorly written.” show. Beyond the social or political possible to think that Poma wrote to him from across the ocean, he content of any text, it is possible for another epoch and for other would not have understood it, nor Who Owns Language? to appreciate the language itself, readers. When he fails to comply would he have known what to do A few years ago, I was telling as a language that has enough “El Primer Mvndo, Adán, Eva,” from Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615). with the internal exigencies of the with it. His empire, his literacy, and Lorena Ojeda, a friend and colleague, confidence to do things one would Reproduction with authorization of the Royal Danish Library. discursive, linguistic, legal genres the discursive genres that both he how many of my students at the think impossible. An example is he is using, it reminds us that there and his councils commanded were university in California where I am “Altazor” (1931), a poem in which was a whole universe outside of the insufficient and superfluous for fortunate to work do not seem to Vicente Huidobro creates worlds colonial archive that could hardly be understanding what Poma had to have “a good command” of either that defy gravity and every familiar integrated without destabilizing its say. Poma’s writing has barely begun Spanish (in many cases, their native rule simply by playing with Spanish. very foundations. to say what it has to say in our own language) or English. They are This is how language fascinates and

20 Hemisphere Volume 27 Hemisphere Volume 27 21 that neither the Real Academia de la Lengua nor any other institution policing a language (or all of them The Common Exceptionality and together) can stop or contain what is already occurring. For this reason, it seems important to understand the Exceptional Commonality of what is happening, to see with other eyes and listen with other, less institutional, more historical ears to Black Thought the writing and speech that surround us. Far from appealing to a foolish by Gregory Childs piety, we should do this in the name of a future and archives yet unknown. n 1798, Luís Gonzaga, a series of interrogations had led them who left them behind were not only During class, when I think I am free man of African descent, to Aponte, and upon arresting and extraordinary but also merit further teaching in Spanish, a language that was arrested for promoting confiscating the papers in Aponte’s study, precisely because we seem to at some point did not exist and that rebellion against slavery and home, officials in Havana found a have no code or language of black took written form mixed with Latin, colonialism in Bahia, Brazil. notebook containing drawings of artistic production during times of Arabic and other languages; when I The rebellion was announced everything from the Nile river to slavery that would help us register think I am teaching about a country, Ithrough handwritten bulletins that black troops defeating white troops. and read their productions in any Mexico, that also did not exist until were placed in the most public Aponte, like Gonzaga, thus became easy or stable manner. For quite recently, I feel a kind of vertigo. I do spaces of the city of Salvador. a name associated with leading a some time, the canon of writings not know what possibilities exist in Gonzaga, well known as a writer seditious rebellion, and both were produced by enslaved people of these mixtures between languages of petitions for military soldiers, ultimately executed for their roles in African descent has been reduced and histories, between people who was quickly suspected and arrested. these revolutionary movements. to a few well-distributed and come from different places. Whatever Upon his arrest, colonial authorities published texts, almost exclusively those possibilities are, we will not be discovered a collection of notebooks Historical interest in these in English. Examples include able to see them. But it is for that that contained a diverse array of two men lies not only in their Sojourner Truth, David Walker, very reason, for what cannot and writings, from poems to alchemy executions, however, but also in the Phyllis Wheatley or Olaudah should not be contained — for the recipes and descriptions of African stories of the books they produced. Equiano. Earlier generations of force of history is immense — that I diplomats arriving on the shores of For reasons that remain unknown scholars who read and studied these correct my students’ papers with the Brazil. When authorities saw the and unexplained, the notebooks writers as exceptional were largely knowledge that as I am correcting handwriting in these notebooks, were either lost or destroyed after following the dictates of the writers them, I am also waiting, for they were convinced that they had being deposited in colonial archives. themselves, many of whom appealed intelligence and aesthetic pleasure, as caught the writer of the bulletins. Subsequent generations of scholars to some notion of exceptionality well as intellectual clarity, sometimes Gonzaga was thus tried not only as have long wondered how they when marketing their work. This is come to us in imperfect grammar. a conspirator for rebellion, but also were lost and what could they have perhaps most explicit in Equiano's as a seditious black imperial subject meant for historical research. How text, from the word "interesting" The archive that commences with who publicly promoted ideas of did the men who possessed them in the title to the first pages where Guamán Poma de Ayala and other disloyalty to the crown. amass the knowledge to produce he refers to himself as a "particular similar works is barely starting to such works? How did they learn to favorite of heaven," all while waxing “Camina El Avtor con su hijo don Francisco de Ayala. Sale de la prouincia a la ciudad de los Reys de speak. Perhaps it has come to join In 1812, José Antonio Aponte, read and write? How were they able poetic about his lack of vanity. Lima a dar qüenta a su Magestad. Y sale pobre, desnudo y camina enbierno,” from Nueva corónica y together, as my student suggests, also a free man of African descent, to compose these texts in societies buen gobierno (1615). Reproduction with authorization of the Royal Danish Library. with the unruly writing of our was arrested in Havana, Cuba, for where literacy in Spanish and However, as Francis Smith seduces us. This does not mean that with strong traces of bilingualism, students, and our own writing, to say fomenting rebellion against slavery Portuguese was sparse and limited Foster argued some time all of us who are professors and mixed registers and modes of existing something that will only be clear to and Spanish rule. Prior to Aponte’s even among the white population? ago, while exceptionality and teachers have absolute control or in two cultures that I write this — future generations. arrest, five separate rebellions had uniqueness were the catchwords mastery over language, but rather documents that would not arrive erupted across the island. The Underlining the entire ensemble one needed to get published, just that we appreciate it and, above today into the hands of a king. This Ivonne del Valle is Associate Professor timing and places of these rebellions of questions is the presumption as essential was commonality: all, would like our students to gain is not to suggest that we need to of Spanish at the University of prompted officials to wonder that these expressions of intellectual belonging to a group that contained access to this universe. stop teaching grammar or certain California, Berkeley. whether they were part of larger production must have been members who might be equally It is in the name of documents registers; instead, it is to maintain conspiracy to bring down slavery. A exceptional and that the individuals capable of intellectual production.

22 Hemisphere Volume 27 Hemisphere Volume 27 23 Artists Renée Stout and Jean-Marcel St. Jacques imagine a series of pages from the now-missing book of paintings by José Antonio Aponte, the intellectual rebel of African descent executed by Spanish colonials. These artists respond to Aponte’s testimony about his rendering of history as distinct from History. The briefly in New Orleans) but arrested century. Rosa, like Ursula, became intellectual production during interrogation proceeded: “…Asked again why he mingled the destruction of the army of Senaqerib with the invasion of Tarragona when nothing connects in Cuba for being in possession of a mystic and left behind a text she slavery was far from rare. one with the other, he said: that even though the two events to not go together, he included that of Senaquerib by reason of History, like everything else in the anti-slavery literature, Davison’s called Sagrada Teologia do Amor book….” Aponte, Laminas 44b-45, 2017. Mixed media on paper. Courtesy of the Visionary Aponte Exhibit. stack of pamphlets, newspapers de Deus Luz Brilhante das Almas It is perhaps more productive to see and writings disturbed Cuban Peregrinas (Sacred Theology for the works like the notebooks produced The two sides of this tension fact that David Walker addressed published writers of African descent authorities enough that they had Love of God, the Luminous Light of by Aponte and Gonzaga as unique could perhaps not exist without his appeal to the colored citizens of in Latin America. It is not, however, him arrested and isolated until a Wandering Souls). within their own societies but not the other, for how could enslaved the world and not a more general the belated recognition of already passing ship could be found to take necessarily exceptional in the long men and women plead for the audience, making the assumption pre-existing and published texts him back to the British island. We These names do not exhaust history of slavery in the Americas. The commonality and the normativity that people of color would be able that is helping us move beyond the also now have the diary of Ursula the findings that have come to distinction between the two terms lies of black intellectual production to read, or at least discuss the ideas narrative of exceptionality. As the de Jesús, a mystic and visionary us through scholars’ efforts to in the fact that uniqueness often refers without first convincing white- he had put on the page, despite the opening paragraph of this piece who lived in a seventeenth-century dig deeper into the archive. And to originality, while exceptionalism owned publications and publication poor literacy rates of the era? suggests, it is the ongoing discovery Lima convent and who wrote about this doesn’t even begin to pull often refers to abnormality. In the houses that they were unique? How of unpublished texts in a variety of her life and ecstatic visions. We out the patterns, commonalities case of Aponte, it was the method many times in classes on slavery in Of course, engagement with locales throughout the Black Atlantic know also of the case of California, and discontinuities among these of composing his book that catches the Americas do professors point published black writers and artists that signals a new opening of an an enslaved woman in Mississippi assorted writings that converge to the eye of historians, scholars and out that, even though Equiano in slave societies has continued to archive of black thought. who used the mobility and the demonstrate that this is indeed an artists. Pictures of Ethiopian, Haitian portrays himself as unique, he grow with research and the passage of “comings and goings” associated archive of black intellectual history. and Spanish kings were interspersed also starts his narrative by talking years, and thus we are no longer only In addition to the attention with her labor as a laundress to But to do so, we will need to move with drawings of the Nile River about the rich social and political talking about Walker, Truth and the now given to individuals like José collect prints and pieces of anti- beyond understanding the discovery and of black armies defeating white culture of West Africa, in effect others who make up the small canon Antonio Aponte and Luís Gonzaga, slavery literature that she kept in her of such texts as exceptional. It is armies. José Antonio Aponte’s artistic going straight to the matter of of authors. Now we also include the papers of men like Jorge cabin. There is also Rosa Egipciaca, not necessary to claim that graphic execution was original, but its radical refuting racist notions about the writers such as Juan Francisco Davison have also been added to an African-born woman who was and literary representations by black politics strove toward commonality: exceptionality of Africa with regards Manzana from Cuba and Machado our discussions. Originally from enslaved in Minas Gerais, Brazil subjects living under slavery was his art was meant to communicate his to "civilization?” Or, what about the de Assis in Brazil as examples of Jamaica (and having also lived in the first half of the eighteenth quotidian to recognize that black vision of freedom to black associates

24 Hemisphere Volume 27 Hemisphere Volume 27 25 and co-revolutionaries. It was a The archive does not readily yield Luís Henrique Dias Tavares. A production of knowledge that was this information, nor does it seem sedição intentada na Bahia de 1798. meant to inform and teach those he that colonial officials themselves Bahia: EDUFBA, 1975. hoped would join him in a rebellion considered the possibility that against slavery. In the case of Luís Aponte and Gonzaga did not work Luís Henrique Dias Tavares, Da Gonzaga, his notebooks not only alone. Once Brazilian and Cuban sedição de 1798 à revolta de 1824 na contained poems and alchemy recipes, interrogators decided that they had Bahia (Bahia: EDUFBA, 2004). but also translated and copied tracts caught the culprits behind these of speeches from France, including two revolutionary moments, they Olaudah Equiano. The Interesting portions of mystical, “occult” books were content to understand these Narrative of the Life of Olaudah that contemplated the relationship men as the master ideologues of Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the between Egyptian cosmology and their respective attempted uprisings. African, Written by Himself. New Roman mythology, what we now call They certainly asked other men York: W.W. Norton & Company, Neo-platonic thought. Copies of some they interrogated if they had seen 2001, 27. of the same excerpts were found in the books in question, but at no the homes of Gonzaga’s revolutionary point did they ask whether Gonzaga István Jancsó. Na Bahia contra O associates and even the former owner and Aponte had any help in the Imperio: história do ensaio de Sedição de of one of his accomplices. composition of their works. 1798. São Paulo: HUCITEC, 1996.

Both notebooks, through their Rather than adopt the optics of Ursula de Jesús and Nancy E. Van unique and different modes of interrogators by seeing Aponte and Deusen. The Souls of Purgatory: The expression, reflect the singular mental Gonzaga as exceptional, I propose Spiritual Diary of a Seventeenth- world of these two men. There are that we view them instead as unique Century Afro-Peruvian Mystic. also openings into a world of textual thinkers who were able to create Albuquerque: University of New sharing in late colonial Latin America common, legible expressions of Mexico Press, 2004. that contributed to what might be black intellectual discussions around called a submerged and secret world questions of empire, freedom Ada Ferrer. Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba of black thought. Aponte seemed to and racial politics. Considering and Haiti in the Age of Revolution suggest as much himself when asked their works in this light may be a Cambridge: Cambridge University by interrogating officials why he way toward thinking about black Press, 2014, 271-328. made the book. It was for “reasons intellectual history that considers not of history,” he said, a phrase that only the ways that grand political Francis Smith Foster. Written By Ada Ferrer perhaps rightly reads as events or repeated and reinterpreted Herself: Literary Production by Aponte’s last challenge to the colonial edicts from Europe impacted black African American Women, 1746- regime, a final act of defiance that thought in the Age of Revolution. It 1892. Bloomington: Indiana allowed him to keep the meaning is also important to begin thinking University Press, 1993. of some of his drawings to himself in new ways about how works that while denying this privilege to the appear to be the product of singular, colonial regime. isolated thinking may have been the product of ongoing collective That Aponte and Gonzaga wrote conversations and exchanges. and depicted the political world around them more vividly than Gregory Childs is Assistant Professor other people of African descent they of Latin American History at were in conversation with is what Brandeis University. distinguishes their work, not the formation of the ideas that animated For Further Reading the works themselves. There is Matt D. Childs. The 1812 Aponte In this piece, Teresita Fernández imagines the complex cosmology of José Antonio Aponte, the intellectual rebel of African descent executed by Spanish no telling how much of these Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle colonials. During his interrogation, he described this now-missing painting as “…the planet Jupiter in the sign of Sagittarius, its star bright, Father he of notebooks may have been composed Against Atlantic Slavery. Chapel Vulcan, the first blacksmith, who was cast with a kick to the Pyrenees [?] mountains, and looking for the best metals, he found gold, made a forge, and through and in conversation with Hill: University of North Carolina fashioned rays sending them to his Father to return to his grace, of which he still had hope…” Aponte Láminas 10-11, 2017. Pyrite, oil, graphite on wood Press, 2006. panel. Courtesy of the Visionary Aponte Exhibit. other enslaved and freed peoples.

26 Hemisphere Volume 27 Hemisphere Volume 27 27 On Women in Mexican Archives by Jessica Delgado

rdinary women fill From 1900 to his ouster in 1911, guards could effectively monitor large the Mexican colonial this prison served as a tool of his numbers of incarcerated people. archives: poor women, repressive regime, and subsequently, indigenous women, during the revolution that followed, Before a researcher takes the noisy women of African former Díaz supporters (including walk to the galleries — the soles descent, and women who lived the building’s architect) were of her shoes squeaking or clacking Otheir lives without money, status among those incarcerated there. It loudly, depending on footwear, she or privilege. This statement sounds continued to operate as a prison has already participated in several like fiction to most people who ask until 1976, when it was remodeled rituals of discipline, inclusion and about my work, given the limited and repurposed to hold the state’s exclusion. Like many archives, amount, and relative newness, of colonial and national archives. The access to the AGN requires scholarship about women’s lives in General Archives of the Nation registration, and registration requires colonial Mexico. But I can assure opened in 1980, and though the credentials, affiliation or, at the very you that it is true. Women’s names, building has undergone renovation least, a letter of presentation and women’s words, things that happened and expansion, historical materials recommendation. to women, things women did, ideas are still stored in what were once cells about women are abundant in where prisoners slept. These letters accompany a written every archival collection for colonial description of our projects, detailing Mexico. Finding them, however, is The cells containing documents our reasons for consulting the like finding a needle in a haystack. have never been accessible to archives and the collections we hope And understanding them — researchers; rather, we sit in creaky to see. This exercise tends to induce reckoning with them and taking the chairs at rows of tables, waiting anxiety in most researchers, since the risks necessary to interpret them and — patiently or impatiently — for full scope of a project is not always try to make some sense of them — archivists to bring us requested evident in the beginning, nor is the sometimes feels even harder. material. We are cordoned off from full range of materials one might the places where these artifacts reside eventually need to consult. Following To engage in historical research by a long counter, behind which the submission of these materials, at the General Archives of the the archivists receive our written researchers are called for interview Nation (AGN) in Mexico City is petitions and disappear from view with one of the reference staff. This to personally encounter layers of to find and fetch the fragments of is an opportunity to seek guidance institutional and cultural power the past we want to behold, handle from a knowledgeable and usually in the documents and books, and and try to understand. The rooms helpful archivist and to learn the in the building itself. The archive’s that house these tables, counters ropes of the consultation room, where physical structure and location itself and storage cells are called galleries, digital and printed finding aids are are saturated with more than 100 and there are seven in total. These made available. Since this encounter years of state power, sometimes galleries are laid out like seven spokes usually occurs prior to having gained brutal. The building that has served extending out from an enormous full access to the archives, there is as the repository of the Mexican circular center with a high ceiling pressure on the researcher to sound state archives since 1980 was built and slippery stone floors. The credible, and like she has a right to be originally as a prison to house space is designed in the form of a there. It is unclear how many of these enemies of the dictator Porfirio Panopticon, with observation areas processes are actually exclusionary Palacio de Lecumberri. Photo by Frank Scherschel/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images. Díaz in his tumultuous final decade. circling high above it from which ones; I have not personally heard of

28 Hemisphere Volume 27 Hemisphere Volume 27 29 any scholar being denied access to the intellectually. This would be true archives. But, speaking for myself, even without the aforementioned the registration rituals evoke strong rituals of entrance and credentialing, feelings of petitioning a skeptical which serve to further reinforce authority for access to something existing differences. fiercely guarded and protected. I often found myself reflecting Once the researcher gains on these differences as I waited for approval, she or he pays a nominal my documents to arrive and looked fee, submits official government- around at the other researchers issued identification and proof of waiting and working alongside me, current residence, and gives the ID and I brought those reflections office several small photos. After a with me as I turned to my work. waiting period, this office issues an I thought about these differences official researcher ID, which the staff as I found women’s names, words, members recommend be laminated actions and experiences scattered at one of the nearby shops that sell across worm-eaten, water-stained candy, chips, pens and notebooks. papers that had not been indexed in Laptops and other devices must any way that related to the women. then be registered and stickered, and I thought about these differences as promises of proper behavior agreed I learned which indexed categories upon in writing, signed and dated. tended to lead to papers with Every day upon arrival, the researcher more women’s names, words and must pass through three security actions scattered across them. Over points, staffed by credential and bag time, day after painstaking day, I checkers — some armed with guns learned not only about how these and some overseeing heavy, bound women’s names, words and actions entrance and exit logs. Only after came to be recorded, but how the these shared rituals of belonging, pages that bore them came to be potential exclusion and ongoing in these particular boxes, files or regulation are we allowed into the leather-bound manuscripts, and main circular and spoked building, how these boxes, files and leather- with its many doors flanked by yet bound manuscripts came to be more armed security guards who organized, labeled and mapped. And check our credentials, computers and as I learned all of this, I continued papers as we enter and exit. to think about the differences highlighted by our collective and These processes, spaces and individual experiences with security historical resonances discipline, check points, credentials and echoing socialize and impact each researcher footprints on Panopticon floors as differently depending on our researchers make our way into the personal biographies, experiences inner chambers of this former prison and circumstances. In other words, holding the ephemeral record of a through these embodied experiences, long-ago past. scholars at the AGN do not come to our work in the same frame of mind Without exception, the women or sense of permission, entitlement named in the archives had gone and capability. When we sit down through procedures and rituals at those tables and plot out the meant to discipline and regulate Incarcerated woman with child standing in the women's cell block of the Black Palace of Lecumberri prison in Mexico City, Mexico, 1950. The large prison, painstaking work ahead of us for the them precisely at the moment these located on the northeast border of Mexico City’s Federal District, served as both a national penitentiary and the central jail of Mexico City from 1900 to day, we do so from differing starting documents were produced. Without 1976. Photo by Frank Scherschel/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images. points, emotionally, physically and exception, the physical environment

30 Hemisphere Volume 27 Hemisphere Volume 27 31 in which they testified, responded cases, the circumstances of their around which archives are built. Once to questions, silently submitted to writing were almost always regulated visible, I see them everywhere. They observation, or listened to words or mandated by a confessor, father, are hidden in court cases, invoices, Religion and Emotion in the directed at them or someone else husband or other patriarch. Putting property disputes, wills, bishops’ nearby were exercises of domination these exceptional women aside for the papers and hospital records. They are and authority. The power dynamics moment, the archives are in fact full buried in files that don’t name them, Archives of Empire in these interactions had an impact of reflections of ordinary colonial organized by people who did not see on women’s choices, behavior and women. Poor women, indigenous them. They are woven throughout by Jennifer Scheper Hughes words and how they were heard, women, women of African descent countless documents that were not remembered, documented, organized appear in every archival collection written about them, by authors, and indexed. The differences among housed in the colonial section of notaries, judges and secretaries who them — race, age, economic and the AGN, even if these reflections had forgotten them by the time the here is a nearly religious oceans of history: “Here, the Indians discipline of praying over sacred social status, relationship to the are often faint, always fragmented, ink dried. sort of reverence are all dying. Send African slaves”? scripture in search not of scholarly church and religious practice, and mediated by mechanisms of that descends when Is one to sit, rise or fall before such a understanding but rather of divine geography, and individual life control and authority that distorted, So I return again to my first one enters a colonial terse missive that so baldly works the connection. This sort of “reading” circumstances — shaped the depth curtailed and, to a certain extent, assertion: Ordinary women are archive: a solemn regard conjoined suffering of peoples across does not resist but rather rouses and nature of this impact. fabricated them. everywhere in Mexican colonial for the sources and their miraculous hemispheres? The archive affords an emotion. We are brought to tears archives. But it takes a lot to find Tand simultaneously inevitable intimate confrontation with grave with elation at feeling touched by The immediate context of women’s Researchers — some of us them, and still more to try and make survival over centuries, perhaps too violence. As Saidiya Hartman writes, God through the divinely inspired appearances in these documents was already worn out by the exercises sense of them. To accomplish this, for the ghosts that haunt the pages “to read the archive is to enter Word; moved to despair at how God’s rarely documented except in oblique of disciplinary authority we had we have to pay attention not only of the unresolved histories of empire, a mortuary; it permits one final presence so often eludes us; or finally, and partial ways. It therefore becomes to move through before we even to these women of the past, but histories of violence, cataclysm and viewing and allows for a last glimpse slain by grief at our own miserable important to imagine these contexts arrived at these documents — might to ourselves as well. How do our loss. Archival labor is readily legible of persons about to disappear into human condition as reflected back at as best we can. When a woman feel overwhelmed at the prospect histories intersect with these women’s? as ritual action. The body of the the slave hold.” us through text. But the historian of presented a petition about an abusive of making sense of women’s lives What relationship do we have to the scholar, habituated as if to prayer, religion, like other secular scholars, husband before an ecclesiastical in the colonial past under these genealogy of power that connects sits in stillness before the document From the perspective of Religious is compelled to read in a critical or judge in a diocesan court, or when circumstances. To do so means their circumstances and the ways their raised on its foam stand as if on a Studies, one could say that there is analytical frame — to vacate the she spoke about someone else in an confronting the layers of power head stories were documented, ordered dais. In the archive, the researcher nothing new in the recent “archival text of emotion in staid, restrained Inquisition case in which she had on: the historical forces that shaped and contained to the structures of works in hushed silence, head bowed. turn” that is reshaping many fields. opposition to the sentimentality of been compelled to testify, or when women’s words and controlled their access, discipline and legitimation By temperament I am fairly restless, With its Protestant-normative ethos, lectio divina. We have thus inherited a she herself was the accused in either bodies; the interlocking institutional in the production and management so I often fail at this obligatory the field has always privileged text profound disciplinary ambivalence to of these judicial settings, the physical histories that partially documented of knowledge? And how do we exercise. After a few hours the and word over a range of other text and archive. processes that took place during or their experiences and then relegated enter, move through and sit in the required discipline of stillness begins sources for knowing things about immediately prior to the recording them to the miscellany of the same spaces where their partially to betray me (or I it): I rise to stand, past and present practice. Only Searching the imperial archive of her words shaped what she said. archive; and the contours of the documented lives are stored? If we to stretch, to peer at the 400-year-old recently and somewhat begrudgingly for word about religious belief And these processes were themselves academic professions that have do not turn away, if we pay attention script from a different angle, willing has it begun to engage bodies, oral and emotion in the context of determined in part by who she was in devalued their stories. to the stories being etched in our it into legibility. histories (that is, verbally rendered colonial cataclysm is an exercise in the eyes of those enacting them. registration materials, bound in the stories, archived), objects of material exegesis. Mundane letters of ecclesial It is tempting not to look that archive’s entrance and exit logs, told At the Archivo General de Indias culture and, perhaps even less administration are the documentary It is a characteristic of early modern closely. And yet, it is also exhilarating, in our exchanges with security guards, in Seville, staff personnel found my tangibly, emotions, feelings and maintenance of bureaucracy. At women’s history in general, and once we recognize the sheer volume laminated in our archive credentials, unsettled archival practice nerve- affects. Yet these too may archive the same time, we know that they the history of women in colonial of these fragments: splintered shards and echoing off the walls as we walk wracking. A guard was sometimes and communicate history. I have contain evidence of the collateral Mexico in particular, that the only of lives lived, like broken glass to the work rooms, we will learn that posted near my table, hovering written elsewhere, for example, violence of ordinary acts of colonial evidence we have of their lives and reflecting small and distorted images. the past still echoes into the present close by to keep an eye on me, as about how religious images serve rule. For the scholar of religion, choices comes from interactions When these images and fragments with the forgotten memories, buried in perplexing agitation I stood, sat as archives of community memory these same materials are also often with authorities and institutions are gathered up by the tens, twenties names and muffled words of the and stood again before my text. in local communities throughout self-evidently Christian texts, marked by sharply unequal power and hundreds, patterns begin to women that fill these archives. Sometimes the physical agitation Mexico and Latin America. characterized by a superabundance dynamics. The evidence goes beyond surface. The variety of women’s life reflected the content within. How of religious meaning and resonance elite women, such as literate nuns circumstances begin to take form, Jessica Delgado is Assistant Professor of is one to respond when beholding a Approaching texts in a confessional accrued over two millennia. These and the rare, wealthy laywoman and the women themselves start to Religion at Princeton University. hastily penned letter sent centuries frame, that is, with the eyes of faith, can be mined in an almost scriptural who found the opportunity to write emerge from the shadows of the ago from the New World to the evokes a range of religious emotions. search for religious attitudes and about her experiences. Even in these institutions, authorities and categories Old, a simple plea that contains Lectio divina is the monastic understandings. Consider, for

32 Hemisphere Volume 27 Hemisphere Volume 27 33 example, a letter sent from a pastor of their results of their labor and Bibliography in Mexico to the king to request “confined their publications to Cook, Sherburne and Borah, that a campaign to raise funds from the question of numbers,” even Woodrow. Essays in Population indigenous parishes be delayed as they asserted their lingering History: Mexico and the Caribbean. after a particularly destructive interest in other forms of analysis University of California Press, 1971. epidemic. In the context of the of human experience. Devoid of mundane affairs of administration, sentiment or affect, theirs was an Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two the beleaguered pastor appeals to empiricist engagement with the Acts,” Small Axe: A Journal of the colony as the corpus mysticum, archive of imperial cataclysm. Criticism 26 (2008): 1-14. the mystical body of Christ, now Even as they counted, quantified badly harmed in the most recent and enumerated the indigenous Hughes, Jennifer Scheper. “Cradling demographic crisis. The king people who died in the colonial the Sacred: Image, Ritual, and Affect and his Christian emissaries are mortality crisis, they succumbed to in Mesoamerican and Mexican thus theologically compelled to the regulatory power of the archive Religion, History of Religion 56:1. tend to the mystical body of the and, at least in their publications, August 2016. colony, now broken and wounded. distanced themselves from the If the colony is mystical body, implications and significance of Reddy, William. The Navigation of then colonial administration is an these deaths. They distanced us in Feeling: A Framework for the History exercise in tender ministration as the process. of Emotions. Cambridge University if to the broken body of Christ. Press, 2001. The archive reveals the potency The archive’s power, then, resides of tender attachments to uphold in its capacity to police and patrol spiritual (and other) regimes. the boundaries of emotion and reduce human suffering to so many The bureaucratic apparatus marks captured on a page. One of captured in the archives of empire the most potent modes of reading has a sort of brutal neutrality that against the grain, of subverting the can be seductively numbing for the effacing power of the archive, might researcher — an attitude that has be to enter the colonial archive now become fixed in the habitus of armed with affective approaches the archival scholar. The affective to reading and narrating history. regime of the colonial archive Rather than accepting that the surfaces emotion only to contain it. archive is empty of affect, what if We might say it creates an affective we allowed emotion, our own and regime, that it makes emotions that of historical others — others visible at the same time that it limits whose feelings haunt us even from their expression. After the middle of the distant past — to penetrate our the twentieth century, demographers sources and our selves? What I am of the Berkeley School combed proposing is, I think, something archives and radically revised beyond existing approaches that upward estimates of the indigenous pertain to the relatively recent population of the Americas before pursuit of the history of emotions. the arrival of Europeans. Sherburne I am suggesting that we allow the Cook and Woodrow Borah (1971) manuscripts that we engage to be illustrated the size of the indigenous illuminated with emotion, empathy Homenaje a María Elena Martínez. Photo by Elliot Young. As Martínez, a historian of colonial Mexico, taught us in her work, the protocols of the population at the time of European and presence, and that we occupy archives—including the required use of medical gloves and masks-- can militate against our emotional and physical connection to the past. contact. Their conclusions were the archives with our bodies, in all suggestive of an entirely new their discomforting disruption. scale of human suffering under foreign rule. But Cook and Borah Jennifer Scheper Hughes is an associate explicitly eschewed the political, professor of History focusing on religion at ethical and emotional implications University of California, Riverside.

34 Hemisphere Volume 27 Hemisphere Volume 27 35 A Miami Field Report from the Colonial Past Iglesia-Museo de Nuestra Señora de la Merced/ The Chapel of Our Lady of Mercy at Corpus Christi Parish, Miami by Carol Damian

here is a jewel in Eventually, the project will include the power of the Roman Catholic downtown Miami a museum, library, and research church. Clergy recruited workers that houses one of and conference center, with the by ensuring them that, that if they the most important consecrated chapel as its art museum, helped build the cathedrals, their collections of colonial concert hall and main focus. sins would be forgiven. A cathedral art and documents in the United is the largest, most grandiose of TStates. Five miles east of Miami Andean churches, with their churches. The seat of the bishop, International Airport, Allapattah magnificent Baroque interiors, its stained glass, statuary, and gold has long welcomed immigrants were the inspiration for the chapel and silver details are meant to be from South and Central America museum. It has a coral rock façade impressive and maintain public and the Caribbean. Mostly known from the Dominican Republic; faith through spectacle. As the for bodegas, textile manufacturers marble floors from Brazil; and years passed into the Renaissance and the University of Miami’s carved and gilded wooden columns and the Baroque, church building Jackson Hospital, Allapattah is and a hand-carved cedar ceiling became even more grandiose. Priests now also home to La Iglesia-Museo from Bolivia. Its Solomonic columns who ventured to the Americas de Nuestra Señora de la Merced were carved in Cochabamba, had an even more difficult task, (Chapel of Our Lady of Mercy) at Bolivia; local craftsmen made needing first to convert and then Corpus Christi Church and future the other carvings, gilding them maintain faith, and the beauty of cultural center. Ten years ago, Father with gold leaf. The people of the the decorations of Andean Baroque José Luis Menéndez, pastor of neighborhood laid the foundation, churches assisted them with Corpus Christi Church, and several built the walls, and installed the their efforts. The Andean priests of his Peruvian parishioners were marble floors and altars, carved doors employed the same sophisticated inspired by an Andean-style church and other decorative details. It is truly system of labor distribution in they visited in Lima to build a chapel a community project, completed the community, with artists and of similar type. That endeavor has over a decade by hardworking people craftsmen contributing their special evolved into the Florida Colonial who devoted their time when they areas of expertise to a project. Heritage Project, and today, with were available, reminiscent of the way more than 150 colonial paintings communities built churches in the Andean Baroque churches and sculptures from Ecuador, Peru, Age of Cathedrals. are exuberant in every detail, a Colombia, Bolivia and Mexico, La reflection of the extraordinary Iglesia-Museo de Nuestra Señora During the Gothic Period (13th wealth that emerged in the region de la Merced is the beginning of to 15th centuries) in Northern in the 17th and 18th centuries an endeavor dedicated to reviving, Europe, building a cathedral was not thanks to mining, ranching, forestry restoring and exhibiting masterpieces only an economic necessity to draw and the export of exotic products of colonial art, as well as numerous people to cities that housed relics to Europe. Recent converts were Latin American, and specifically brought back from the Crusades, especially devoted to the new Main altar — Iglesia-Museo de Nuestra Señora de la Merced, The Chapel of Our Lady of Mercy at Corpus Christi Parish, Miami. Cuban, historical documents. but also an act of mercy that showed Catholic religion (even as it often Photo courtesy of Colonial Heritage of Florida.

36 Hemisphere Volume 27 Hemisphere Volume 27 37 remained syncretic and uniquely Americas, the altar also has a marble she will be the mother of Jesus. mining towns of Bolivia. It was Andean). Expert indigenous altar table held up by hand-carved On the other side of the chapel is made in 1789 by a Jesuit priest craftsmen quickly adapted to the polychrome angels, complimenting an altar dedicated to the Virgin trained as a silversmith in Italy who demands of the Church to build the cherubs flying above the of the Immaculate Conception, took his trade to the highlands, with houses of worship in cities, remote paintings. The Archangel Michael surrounded by her symbols and remarkable results. towns and villages. The closer a hovers at the very top. Michael is rising to the heavens on a crescent town was to a mining operation, the Prince of the Archangels, the moon, as described by St. John The chapel’s many other treasures the more silver and gold were protector of faith and the will of the Evangelist in the Book of include polychrome woodcarvings available, and the more extravagant God. He is a perfect guardian for Revelation. The fourth altar holds from South America and a dramatic the churches and their decoration. the Virgin Mary and her chapel. a painting of the Trinity: Father, image from Guatemala of the To this day, a seemingly simple, Life-sized statues from Bolivia of Son and Holy Spirit, done in the Virgin Mary, crowned as the Queen unadorned church in the middle of Saints Peter and Paul flank the uniquely Andean style of presenting of Heaven with a silver halo. The mountains and bleak surroundings altar in carved niches, adding to its the three holy personalities in the diversity of the artworks from the will transport the visitor to world of religiosity. The outer niches house one image of Jesus Christ. All four countries that local residents once spiritual beauty with gold and silver statues of angels, now missing their paintings are from 18th-century called home is a direct reflection ornamentation and altars, painted wings. A team of artisans completed Peru, as are the majority of the of the demographics of Miami, a and gilded ceilings, and extraordinary the planning: designers, sculptors, works in the chapel. Peru, especially crossroads of hemispheric culture. statuary throughout. painters, gilders, woodworkers, and Cuzco, had one of colonial Latin a priest to present and interpret the America’s most successful programs As a former Professor of Art The more remote a church was Eucharistic program. The chapel for artistic production. Cuzco History and Director and Chief from a metropolitan center, the is dedicated to the Royal, Celestial is considered to be the home of Curator of the Patricia and Phillip more creative the artisans and and Military Order of Our Lady the first school of painting in the Frost Art Museum at Florida builders seem to have been. With of Mercy and the Redemption of Americas (17th century) because International University, I am few European architects and artists the Captives (Latin: Ordo Beatae of its successful organization of the curator of the art collection on hand, local Amerindians led the Mariae de Mercede Redemptionis indigenous artists to create a unique, for the project. Along with other way, following an Andean aesthetic Captivorum, abbreviated O. de M.), syncretic style adorned with gold volunteers, I regularly lead private mixed with European, especially also known as the Mercedarians, stencils and special symbols of the tours and have begun a series of Spanish, models. The artisans a Catholic mendicant order Andes. Artists still work in Cuzco concerts and other celebrations added their own embellishments established in 1218 by St. Peter today in the same barrio of the city in the acoustically perfect venue. and personal touches in keeping Nolasco in the city of Barcelona. Its and in the same manner as their Undoubtedly, once it is finished with old and new beliefs. The members, priests and nuns, wear ancestors. The chapel contains and open to the public, it will be result is a dazzling effect with white habits with a red scapula more than 20 works from Cuzco, a a much sought-after location for ornate decoration, sparkling gold and the white cross emblem of the representative selection that offers Main altar — Iglesia-Museo de Nuestra Señora de la Merced, The Chapel of Our Lady of Mercy at special ceremonies and receptions. leaf, and paintings of the Virgin Order, found throughout the chapel. opportunities for discussion and Corpus Christi Parish, Miami. Photo courtesy of Colonial Heritage of Florida. The participation of the local Mary, Christ, the saints and angels appreciation, as well as examples community, not only as artisans displayed to create a total Baroque Four side altars are dedicated to from Baroque Europe that represent but also as musicians and singers, is experience, unique for its Andean particular saints or images of the the same exuberant aesthetic. beautiful interpretations of the most mirror frames typical of colonial another aspect of parish outreach. interpretations. Virgin Mary. The one closest to venerated Catholic personality and Peruvian craftsmanship. Father Menéndez describes the the entrance is for Santa Rosa de Currently undergoing incorporate symbols that announce One of the chapel’s most chapel-museum as demonstrating The most extravagant feature Lima, the Patroness of Peru and conservation is a painting of the her association with the Inca Coya, extraordinary examples of Baroque the beauty of the people living in of the chapel of La Merced its indigenous people, and the first Virgin Mary by Diego Quispe or Queen, and Pachamama, the sculpture is a life-sized silver statue Allapattah and their pride in their in Allapattah is the altar. A saint canonized in the Americas. Tito (1611-1681), an indigenous Andean Earth Mother. The three of the Archangel Asiel from Bolivia. diverse hemispheric cultural roots, combination of statuary and gilded Celebrated in a large painting that Cuzco artist. He was one of the personalities merge through a He is depicted with an arquebus and he welcomes their participation. columns frame two paintings: Our shows her as the Bride of Christ, few artists to sign his name to his symbolic repertoire that includes (an early muzzle-loaded firearm) Lady of Mercy (La Merced), to whom receiving a wedding band from the works; most of his fellows were flowers, jewelry, textile patterns, instead of the sword usually Carol Damian is Professor Emeritus of the chapel is dedicated, and Our Child Jesus and crowned with the anonymous members of workshops. birds and other indigenous holy associated with archangels and Art History at Florida International Lord of the Earthquakes, an image roses that identify her, Santa Rosa The paintings of the Cuzco references unrecognizable to the guardian angels, marking him as a University. of Christ on the cross special to wears the Dominican habit of her artists, often characterized by gold Spanish priests, who saw only the warrior and guardian protector of Cuzco, Peru, that commemorates order. Another altar is dedicated stenciling, usually depict Spanish Catholic symbols. Three small God’s treasures. Made of repoussé a miraculous event in the 17th to the Virgin of the Annunciation, Catholic religious figures from an paintings of the Virgin Mary from silver with semi-precious stones, the century. Inspired by Spanish retablos depicted innocently facing the indigenous perspective. Images 16th-century Cuzco feature gold angel is a masterpiece, displaying a found throughout Spain and the Angel Gabriel as he tells her that of the Virgin Mary are especially stenciling and elaborate wood and technique prominent in the silver

38 Hemisphere Volume 27 Hemisphere Volume 27 39 examine how subaltern groups Both cases reveal the identify themselves that escaped identify themselves, engage with heterogeneous repertoire of to the government’s radar. Peasant Archives and Identity written documents and, ultimately, identification formats that circulated Turpo kept small pieces of paper subvert political, social and spatial in the Andes. Since colonial times, where he tenuously rehearsed hierarchies of power that both indigenous communities have been his signature until he reached Documents in Peru restrict and dominate in the Andes. embedded in dense and overlapping perfection. Signatures were by José Ragas networks of power and authority important, especially for peasants, Peasant Archives that connected the highlands with to authenticate their approval Although Mariano Turpo and Lima, Madrid, and other imperial in documents on behalf of the Manuel Llamojha Mitma probably centers. Targeted for their souls community, and for their leaders ersonal documents can Their personal archives complicate that trend by expanding its never crossed paths, they both and labor force, the native Andean when addressing a petition to a be analytical tools to the narrative of indigenous identification system nationwide shared similar life and professional population was rapidly integrated certain authority. Beginning in the explore how we engage, citizenship in the Peruvian Andes. and granting every Peruvian national experiences. Turpo and Llamojha into imperial databases, and the colonial period, non-literate subjects manipulate, and store The existence of various artifacts over 18 years of age a Documento Mitma were rural activists born in subjected were subjected to close who could use a quill might sign a histories. Storage is they used to identify themselves — Nacional de Identidad (DNI), which Cuzco and the Mantaro Valley, scrutiny to justify the presence of the document with a cross. Around the crucial to provide a more nuanced not necessarily artifacts designed is the modern successor of the now respectively. As leaders of their Spanish crown, as well as to extract 1920s, Peruvian illiterate peasants Pperspective on how archives are by the Peruvian government obsolete libreta electoral. RENIEC, communities, they not only their labor on rural estates, textile were also experimenting with historically constructed, and — challenges the notion that the entity responsible for civil mediated between the central workshops and mining centers. fingerprints to replace signatures in decenters attention from “national” indigenous people constituted an registration, deployed an impressive government and their fellow For centuries, priests and colonial similar documents, or just learning and “institutional” archives “undocumented population.” It also number of personnel and resources community members but were also local administrators kept careful how to sign if fingerprinting — a to personal collections, where invites us to rethink the strategies nationwide for this task. As a result, “earth beings” — intermediaries records of indigenous subjects. This technique very popular in those identification documents occupy a they and other minority groups the rate of undocumented citizens between Andean deities and system continued operating after years to identify criminals — was special place. It is important also to developed to ensure material proof significantly dropped among native humans. In the course of their the end of the colonial rule, and the not yet available in the countryside. note that personal documents do not of their legal existence throughout populations, and more newborns convoluted lives, both men met indigenous population was exposed By putting their signatures — or — constitute the only artifacts possessed the 20th century. received birth certificates to prevent with presidents, politicians, police to a new set of government entities initials on official documents, officers and other interesting and, therefore, papers. Between they reclaimed legal authority to and archived by individuals. Latin child trafficking. Identity cards characters. Their experiences led the 1820s and the 2000s, internal initiate commercial actions and Americans developed special bonds What Documents Say about Us became a ubiquitous element them to engage with documents, passports, military cards, road defend themselves from abuses by with passport photos, family pictures, For most of its existence as a in daily activities. Due to their which they diligently learned how construction certificates of work proving their literacy. Unsurprisingly, handwritten notes and diaries, and republic and a post-colonial country, prominent status as personal to use and how to forge to advance (conscripción vial) — especially voting these small pieces of paper, along conferred these objects with special Peru legally excluded a vast number identifiers, DNIs are required for their struggle for recognition. cards for illiterates (since 1978), and with calligraphy exercise notebooks meaning and value. of its citizens by denying them the any mundane transaction in Peru. birth certificates, among other papers called mosaicos, made their way into possession of a national document Not having a DNI or even not Mariano Turpo’s personal archive, — were produced for the Andean personal archives. I would like to focus on a the libreta electoral. Created in 1931, carrying one represents a social which was held in a box, consisted population. Not all of them were particular type of personal archive: the libreta electoral was granted death for the individual. of approximately 400 documents obtained voluntarily, but they were Another important piece of those developed by indigenous to a small number of individuals collected between the 1920s and mandatory if the applicant wanted documentation, this one rescued groups over Peru in the last century. who fulfilled the restrictive ideal of While the expansion of identity the 1970s. Anthropologist Marisol to travel (internal passports) or avoid from Manuel Llamojha’s archive, I build on recent studies by Marisol citizenship envisioned by Peruvian cards, especially among vulnerable de la Cadena, who catalogued and the army (conscripción vial certificate). is a small black and white passport de la Cadena, and Manuel Llamojha elites. A citizen was to be a literate populations, is cause for optimism, examined the papers, asserts that Until the late 20th century, the photograph, where he appears Mitma and Jaymie Patricia Heilman adult male who was culturally white it is also necessary to be wary a great number of the documents possession of any of these documents looking at the camera and wearing to understand the historical and lived in an urban setting. Under about the dominance of a single came from legal procedures was not necessarily associated a white shirt. The only information construction of a “peasant archive.” this segregationist criterion, neither document to certify legal identity. against local and regional state with a political right (i.e. voting), we have is a laconic caption De la Cadena offers us the stories of women nor indigenous people could The overwhelming presence of representatives. Mariano Llamojha’s but receiving any of them was an at the bottom of the picture, Mariano Turpo and his son Nazario vote. Women would eventually the DNI and its easy access has collection was probably less vast enduring symbol of exploitation. presumably written by Llamojha, Turpo. The Turpos, together with obtain the right to vote and to bear over shadowed the existence of than Turpo’s and was destroyed Securing a proof of identity in the that says, “En China, 1965.” The Manuel Llamojha Mitma, provide such a document in 1955, while previous documents, practices, and by the police in 1992, during the Andes became tantamount to a photo is a memento from his an invaluable source to explore the the literacy restriction that barred artifacts ordinary citizens employed years of political violence. Falsely concession to the abuse and power of five-week visit as the leader of social and political segregation of the indigenous people from voting was to prove their identity and to accused of belonging to the terrorist the granting institution. the Confederación Campesina indigenous population and the role lifted in the late 1970s. curb state restrictive categories. group Shining Path, Llamojha fled As both personal collections del Perú. Like Llamojha, many personal documents fulfilled in the A close examination of personal to Lima in 1981. He forged a birth show, Turpo, Llamojha Mitma, Peruvians valued these foto carnets complicated relationship between In recent decades, the Peruvian archives, like those from peasant certificate with a false name to pass and many other Peruvians for their affordability and personal them and the Peruvian government. government has sought to reverse activists, offers an opportunity to the strict checkpoint in Ayacucho. developed alternative devices to bond. They were easier to get in

40 Hemisphere Volume 27 Hemisphere Volume 27 41 Documents Today Archives, and how people organize These two prominent rural and imagine these sites through activists’ archives illuminate the their personal items, continue complex interaction between offering invaluable lessons about the indigenous population, the past and the unexpected the government, and personal records of long-term inequality documents throughout the 20th and dispossession. They also may century. It can also help shed provide alternatives for resistance some light on a recent and tragic in the current scenario of the phenomenon: Vulnerable groups criminalization of “undocumented” are losing their social and political citizens by national governments. rights even while obtaining an identification document. In India, José Ragas is an assistant professor at the some reports warn of the failures Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. of the Aadhaar program, which is an ambitious high-tech project developed by the Indian government For Further Reading: to grant a 12-digit unique number Marisol de la Cadena. Earth Beings: to every national citizen, including Ecologies of Practice across Andean those never counted by the state Worlds. Duke University Press, in the past. Designed to centralize 2016. every service citizens receive, from social benefits to access to subsidized Manuel Llamojha Mitma and grain, the hyper-centralization Jaymie Patricia Heilman. Now Peru and compulsory enrollment into is Mine: The Life and Times of a Aadhaar is in fact impeding people’s Peruvian Campesino Activist. Duke access to food and welfare benefits. University Press, 2016. Indian peasants, for instance, are encountering more difficulties in Reetika Khera, “Why India’s Big Fix obtaining grain from the government Is a Big Flub,” The New York Times because their villages lack access to (January 21, 2018) https://www. the Internet, they do not know how nytimes.com/2018/01/21/opinion/ to use the system properly, or they india-aadhaar-biometric-id.html are unable to approach an Aadhaar station to verify their own identities.

In the United States, the enforcement of new voter ID laws that require a document with a photo to exercise the franchise may affect underrepresented groups — namely Black voters — that in A Peruvian retablo, an artistic sculptural genre urban areas where clients simply to romantic interests, and given to them opened new opportunities the past could not obtain proper depicting everyday life in the Andes, shows posed in studios for cartes de relatives as mementos when they to navigate intricate and restrictive documentation or appear in national peasants from the highlands (upper portion of visite, but in the highlands this moved out of town. legal procedures. Llamojha, for and state databases. This situation retablo) and natives from the Amazon (lower service was provided by itinerant instance, had established a solid is aggravated further when certain portion) receiving birth certificates from the government office in charge of civil registries. photographers who visited Getting a document or producing reputation among the local police states decline to accept drivers’ Used by kind permission of the piece’s owner. hundreds of villages and captured a new kind of identity artifact as an expert at counterfeiting licenses in airports and security thousands of faces with their was only one way peasant leaders documents. In a raid in 1948, checkpoints as valid documents for cameras. These photos had endless and the indigenous population detectives confiscated a typewriter, domestic travel, forcing citizens to purposes: they were exchanged engaged with technology and a set of seals, stamps, and numerous present specific documentation to with loved ones, sent inside letters official bureaucracy. Repurposing documents addressed to authorities. obtain a passport.

42 Hemisphere Volume 27 Hemisphere Volume 27 43 Archives, the seemingly random archivists laboring under the they seen materials that reflect the granting and denial of access, the auspices of national governments histories of their communities, Archives as Activism at a dis/appearing documents, folders and ministries replete with personal ethnicities, places or collective and boxes with fluid numbering biases and national agendas, and to memory. Few even realize that system, minimal description or indigenous and international users the first printing press in the New Hispanic-Serving University: lack of inventories, and a puzzling who use the records for a multiplicity World was established in Mexico arrangement of documents. I knew of personal, political and cultural City around 1539, almost 100 A Conversation with Catherine Nolan-Ferrell that Ecuador’s colonial documents reasons. To combat my ignorance, years before any book printing were far from “neutral,” but I I got my master’s degree in Library took place in the English-speaking and Agnieszka Czeblakow had not considered the effects of and Information Science, focusing on colonies. This is their chance to centuries of institutional processes, archival studies. I discovered a field uncover these marginalized stories internal logic, local descriptive rich with theoretical and practical and to begin to pay attention to the n this piece, we look at from both Mexico and Guatemala AC: I trained to be a historian conventions, interventions or scholarship and provocative insights misrepresentations and devaluing archives not just as things that sought to define citizenship along and to teach at a university level. neglect by archivists, and past and pertinent to any humanistic inquiry of their histories, identities were created but as they are the border. At UTSA, I have been I wrote a dissertation about early future uses. Archives as institutions into “the archive,” including my own and heritage. Students also feel being created. Czeblakow, a actively involved with organizations modern prisons and punishment and the colonial archives as a set of research into colonial prisons and intimidated by the age or fragility of rare books librarian at the for undocumented students and in the colonial Audiencia de Quito documents suddenly became visible their surviving archival records. the materials and the endless rules of University of Texas-San Antonio, was recently named a faculty (now Ecuador), got my PhD in to me as a site in which institutions, archival etiquette. Early experiences Iand Nolan-Ferrell, a historian and contact person for DACA 2011, and moonlighted as an the state, the archivists in charge, and CNF: I have worked with you in Special Collections help them professor at the same institution, students/Dreamers. adjunct while also working as any past/future users attempting to now for three semesters, bringing build up a certain comfort level with dialogue about teaching in the collections manager of an academic access them for a variety of personal students in my History Research handling the materials, navigating archives, power in the archives, and AC: My name is Agnieszka rare books, manuscript and archives or political reasons exercised power. and Methods classes to examine the reading room spaces and rules, their initiatives with students who Czeblakow and I am the rare library in Atlanta. With each use, the documents could archival materials related to and charming the “gatekeepers.” are archiving projects to document books librarian at University of be simultaneously and paradoxically the topics of individual courses the undocumented on campus. Texas at San Antonio Special In 2012, while browsing online capable of silencing and validating, as (modern Latin American history, I find that students often view Collections. I am responsible for for “anything on prisons,” I came well as oppressing or giving voice and immigration, citizenship). books or historical documents as CNF: My name is Catherine curating and promoting access to across an article by Dutch archivist legitimacy to struggles for justice. Instruction and teaching with sources of data and facts about the Nolan-Ferrell and I am an associate our rare book collections about Erik Ketelaar in which he likens archival materials is a central part past, without much consideration professor of History at UTSA. the history and print culture of the not only the architecture but CNF: It sounds like archivists are of your job. Traditionally, we tend to the sociopolitical processes of My main research focus is on the Mexico and Mexico-Texas border also the internal procedures and much more than passive, impartial, to think of archivists as gatekeepers, their creation, dissemination and, Mexican-Guatemalan border, where regions and the culinary history “ceremonies” of archives to prisons silent and invisible handmaidens of guarding treasures hidden away in once within an archival institution, I explore issues of nationality and of Mexico, as well as developing and temples, where surveillance, history. Rather, I am seeing powerful vaults, but in your classroom, “the their preservation or disposal, citizenship, refugees, human rights, print collections related to South knowledge and power can function “puppeteers” controlling and shaping treasures” become the bread and management and subsequent uses. and responses to poverty/social Texas communities and groups often simultaneously to erase, memory, historical research, the past butter of student activities. Why is this stuff here? Who decides injustice. My first book,Constructing traditionally underrepresented silence, memorialize, validate and and the future. what gets saved? Students seldom Citizenship: Transnational Workers in the historical record. I delegitimize the state, communities, AC: I think exposing students to think of archives, records and record and Revolution on the Mexico- help students, researchers and identities and ways of thinking. For AC: Yes. Archivists have incredible archives as institutions and archival keepers as active and powerful Guatemala Border, 1880-1950 community patrons discover and Ketelaar, “the archivist is the link power in shaping how we locate and materials or rare books early in their facilitators of technologies of rule (Tucson: University of Arizona navigate the collections through between these different panoptical see the archive, what it contains, undergraduate careers is paramount and control, white supremacy, Press, 2012) examines how and why reference services, exhibitions and systems and fulfills a role in these what gets saved, what doesn’t, at a Hispanic-Serving Institution. colonialism, symbolic and actual indigenous workers along the border social media. Most of my time, different systems. As priest, as what even constitutes “a record.” Many of our students are first- annihilation, human rights abuses developed strong national identities. however, is devoted to teaching and guard, as guardian? As accomplice of Their labor, however, goes largely generation college students and the and political action. My current research looks at the instruction using archival materials oppression and torture? As friend of unnoticed or unacknowledged. Terry communities they come from have expansion of Guatemalan labor in and rare books, and to thinking liberation and justice? As warden of Cook, another archival theorist, been historically underrepresented, In my work, I seek collaborative Chiapas, culminating with the mass strategically and creatively about a temple sanctuary or a stark prison? once noted that “the archive(s) is a misrepresented and, more often partnerships with UTSA’s faculty to exodus of indigenous Guatemalans how special collections materials As purveyor or with-holder of foreign country to many historians,” than not, erased and silenced in create archival literacy instruction fleeing genocidal violence in their can better support and contribute knowledge-power? Maybe each and and he likened historians to tourists and by the archival record and programs to provide students with country. The influx of an estimated to the University’s mission of every of these roles.” just passing through. I have been cultural heritage institutions. As a immersive, hands-on learning 200,000 refugees both ruptured teaching and learning. that tourist. I was ignorant of result of this, the students haven’t experiences that empower them to and created distinct community Reading his work helped the paths that Ecuador’s colonial been exposed (or welcomed) to become knowledge creators rather identities as refugees, local CNF: Why did you become an me reflect on my own research records have traveled, from their institutions holding rare books than merely consumers. I also want Mexicans, and state authorities archivist/rare book librarian? experience in Ecuador’s National imperial and local creators to or archival documents, nor have to help them realize that archivists

44 Hemisphere Volume 27 Hemisphere Volume 27 45 and librarians are not neutral and or narratives can be highlighted the nation, all citizens (i.e. people of reality; instead, they are a impartial stewards of the historical or silenced through decisions born in the US) have the same constructed “sliver of a sliver of a record or knowledge, but rather about what to record, save/archive rights and responsibilities. Yet this sliver” of a window through which active, subjective mediators and co- and retrieve. Ultimately, archival emphasis ignores the ways in which we can peek into the constructed creators of the archival documents thinking requires students to citizenship exists along a continuum. documentary record of personal or under their custody, and, more evaluate the ways in which historical The records from local community collective memories, experiences often than not, shapers the of state’s analysis expresses power relationships. organizations provided a window and events. cultural and historical practices and By focusing on the biases inherent into how marginalized populations memory. Teaching is a way for me in creating archives, the class in San Antonio (primarily Mexican- CNF: As historians, our goal is “to take visitors off the beaten path highlighted historical memory as a Americans and African-Americans) to hear the voices of those who to the back roads where the real “process,” not a “thing.” refused to accept being categorized are silenced, but often our own country may be experienced,” to as “peripheral” citizens. Instead, biases interfere with our ability quote Terry Cook again. AC: Can you talk about your people forced city action on issues to listen. Harris’s work challenges experience exposing students to such as drainage, education and us to recognize that what to AC: In Fall 2017, you received archival theory readings in your housing, thereby compelling us are valuable documents are a grant from UTSA Special course and bringing them into government authorities to recognize often shunted aside in favor of Collections to develop and Special Collections to work with them as full members of the nation. a triumphant “metanarrative.” implement an innovative, archives- archival materials, often for the One student used documents from We examined a collection that centered pedagogical approach in first time? a neighborhood organization to purportedly focused on Texas. From your course on citizenship. The explore racial hierarchies in San its title, students made assumptions resulting course, History 6813: CNF: My goal as a historian is Antonio. He had access to census about the types of documents it Proseminar on Citizenship and to get students to think critically statistics and knew that there was contained. However, they were Nationalism, not only explored about whose history the archives a “pocket” of working-class people surprised to see that the collection how ordinary people in South Texas privilege. So many students use the in an otherwise elite neighborhood. actually told them much more about practiced and understood ideas Internet for research that they tend His project reflected the tensions colonial Mexico than about Texas. of citizenship and nationality, but to see documents “in a vacuum” — between the “official story” of It was only after looking at the also introduced students to archival disconnected from their archival neighborhood decline and a vibrant, documents themselves that they saw thinking as both a method of context — which leads to problems close-knit community of mixed how the label privileged one side historical analysis and a framework with historical analysis. Documents African-American and Mexican- of the story and silenced the much for political and social struggles. become providers of “factoids” American workers. The official story larger set of documents. Why did you choose the particular used to describe events in the past is one in which brown and black Students gathered in the University of Texas, San Antonio Special Collections reading room, re- documenting history. Photo by Agnieszka Czeblakow. topic of citizenship and nationality? instead of contested narratives people were not “civilized” enough AC: Yes, that collection is called that explain why people acted in to organize, but the materials the The Sons of the Republic of Texas the historical context of Spanish Texas. In small part it is, but it is up CNF: As a historian of mass particular ways at particular times. student saw portrayed a vibrant Kathryn Stoner O’Connor Mexican colonial administration from its to future archivists to begin to listen atrocities and genocide, I am This disconnection creates the exact urban community. Manuscript Collection (SRT). inception to independence. After a for the marginalized voices and repeatedly struck by how peoples’ situation that you just mentioned: The scope and content note in lengthy description of the various bring out the complex provenance histories get erased. After mass Students become “tourists” in the AC: This example demonstrates the archive is perhaps my favorite, types of colonial documentation and subject matter of the colonial violence, access to and dissemination archive, but fail to understand the the power community archives as it illustrates the problem with as well as their subject matter, our and post-colonial documents of its archival existence is often complexities of the archival process. can have to change the official assuming archivists’ neutrality and archivist/storyteller refocused the contained within the SRT while blocked. In this way, ordinary record. Residents’ personal stories, objectivity. In the case of the SRT attention of potential users on resisting “the systemic imperatives to people are truly obliterated by For example, students in memories and photographs collection, the privileging of one one document among the nearly privilege, to exclude, to control.” their oppressors. Kirsten Weld my course had to incorporate serve to not only strengthen the side of the story over another, the 7000 in the collection: “Perhaps explains archival thinking as both a theoretical knowledge on national archive, but also to complicate the erasure of the colonial subject and the most significant document in AC: This semester you are teaching method of historical analysis and a identity and citizenship practices mainstream, dominant narrative historical context of the collection, the collection is a contemporary a class on human rights. I know that framework for political analysis. For with concrete archival content. of a community, serving as a the silencing of indigenous and manuscript copy of the Articles you have been active in community Weld, archives are a “site of social Current political discourse on springboard for citizen mobilization Mexican voices as the source of of Surrender signed by William and campus organizations. Can you struggle” that not only includes topics such as immigration or to unpack and better understand the collections’ provenance is B. Fannin at the Battle of Coleto tell us more about the intersection facts/data, but also reflects archivists’ refugee resettlement draws sharp the narratives and institutions of quite telling. The historical note (Texas) on March 20, 1836.” It is no of scholarship and activism? choices about what they believe to distinctions between “us” (US-born, oppression. This is what South about the collection in the archive wonder that students, faculty and be valuable information. In this, she Christian, white) and “others” African archivist Verne Harris calls provides a brief history of the researchers searching for materials CNF: To me, my research on mirrors Michel Rolph Trouillot’s (non US-born, not necessarily the “archival sliver.” For Harris, Texas fraternal organization and on colonial Mexico overlook this human rights issues in Latin discussion of how particular groups Christian, and not white). Within archives are not simple reflections O’Connor’s biography rather than collection, assuming it is about America requires me to take

46 Hemisphere Volume 27 Hemisphere Volume 27 47 action in my community. I am have remained clandestine due to Existing”: Uncovering the Impact a Liberation Theology Catholic, very real concerns about privacy, of Community Archives.” The and through my parish I became family protection, etc. American Archivist 79.1 (2016): involved in Communities 56-81. Organized for Public Service/ In spite of these fears, students Metro Alliance, a coalition of have created multiple strategies Terry Cook (2011) The Archive(s) congregations, schools and unions, to advocate for their rights. As a Is a Foreign Country: Historians, to work on the campaign for historian who has been privileged Archivists, and the Changing improving educational access to work with DACA students, Archival Landscape. The American for all students. In San Antonio, I believe the significance of this Archivist: Fall/Winter 2011, Vol. that meant increasing access student-led social movement 74, No. 2, pp. 600-632. to dual-language education in will be important for future public schools in order to improve generations. Our national history Duff, Wendy M., and Verne educational outcomes for both has been characterized by the “love- Harris. “Stories and names: archival English speakers and English hate” relationship we have with description as narrating records and Language Learners. While teaching immigrants: We want their cheap constructing meanings.” Archival With more than 225,000 interviews in 34 countries, Latin American history at UTSA, I labor for jobs that US citizens Science 2.3-4 (2002): 263-285. LAPOP’s AmericasBarometer is an unparalleled resource for studies, was approached by undocumented often refuse to perform, but we With more than 225,000 interviews in 34 countries, data, and reports on public opinion. students in my classes who wanted cling to a national narrative that Harris, Verne. “The archival sliver: LAPOP’s AmericasBarometer is an unparalleled resource for studies, a faculty sponsor for a new campus values northern Europeans over power, memory, and archives in organization, which eventually other immigrants. For me, the South Africa.” Archival Science 2.1-2 data, and reportwwws.v oanden publirbilt.edu/lapopc opinion. became a part of the DREAMER DREAMER movement marks a (2002): 63-86. movement. I continued teaching critical juncture in our history. In INSIDEwww.v andeBACKrbilt.edu/lapop COVER about causes and impacts of a few decades, historians will look Jules, Bergis. “Confronting Our migration from Mexico and back and try to make sense of these Failure of Care around the Legacies Central America, and remained debates. Without archiving the of Marginalized People in the involved with Dreamer and DACA DREAMERS’ version of events, Archives.” On Archivy, November ADVERTISEMENT students. In response to pressure we risk silencing them, forgetting 11 (2016). from DACA and other students, the myriad of options we (as a faculty and staff, UTSA now has a society) had, and “remembering” Ketelaar, Eric. “Archival temples, Dreamer Resource Center. an imagined history that serves the archival prisons: modes of power needs of the powerful. and protection.” Archival Science AC: In the human rights course, 2.3-4 (2002): 221-238. you will be introducing students to Agnieszka Czeblakow is the Rare Books archival spaces and requiring them Librarian at the University of Texas at to do archival work. But this time it San Antonio. is slightly different. Can you speak more about the student projects and Catherine Nolan-Ferrell is Associate how the project grew out of your Professor of History at the University role as an activist? of Texas at San Antonio.

CNF: The students in my senior seminar class are working with you For Further Reading: on a project to create an archive Caswell, Michelle. Archiving the for Dreamers/DACA students. Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, Because we are a Hispanic-Serving and the Photographic Record in Institution and have had an active Cambodia. University of Wisconsin DACA organization on campus Press, 2014. since 2006, UTSA students have played an important role in Caswell, Michelle, Marika Cifor, supporting DACA and DREAMER and Mario H. Ramirez. ““To rights in general. Yet, their activities Suddenly Discover Yourself

48 Hemisphere Volume 27 U.S. Department of State Diplomacy Lab at LACC Reaching Out Together to Bring Americans into the World of Foreign Policy

Where? The Diplomacy Lab at LACC is 1 of the 4 original sites in the U.S.

What? The Diplomacy Lab allows students to engage beyond the classroom, develop new ideas and solutions to the world’s toughest challenges, and contribute directly to the policy-making process.

Why? Helps the U.S. Department of State tap into an underutilized reservoir of intellectual capital and bring American people into the world of foreign policy.

How? Faculty-led teams of students at FIU are focusing on U.S. influence in Latin America and the Caribbean and the U.S. Department of State is channeling those findings directly into policy-making.

state.gov/s/sacsed/diplomacylab 17094_11/18 Forging Linkages across the Americas through education, research, outreach, and dialogue. lacc.fiu.edu