Professor of History

The Encounter in Samana

2011-08-22T15:51:00.001-04:00

Primary Sources:

Washington Irving:
http://bit.ly/nty7Qg

Columbus Diary:
http://bit.ly/o4Ntyr

Third Group of Reviews in May

2011-05-23T04:28:00.012-04:00

Neter@s,

What is better than May showers? Five more reviews, of course. This productive month brings you another set of fine discussions of books. In addition to works concerned with Mexico and Argentina, these reviews involve the topics of the Atlantic slave trade, the literature of the early modern Atlantic, and the Haitian Revolution. We are proud to include a review in Spanish and reviewers from various disciplines. We hope you will find them interesting and useful.

Chris Bongie (Queen's University) does more than write a good book review. He takes Jeremy D. Popkins latest book as a prism to offer a glimpse of developments in Haitian Revolutionary Studies. That he begins with an otherwise inconspicuous source should show the reader that this essay delves into deep waters. Popkins’ book, Bongie tells us, does the necessary task of highlighting the importance of the year 1793 and the burning of Cap Français, then the most energetic city of the Caribbean. The book is a model of well-written scholarship; it did not earn the Pinkney Prize for nothing. But with his signature style, Bongie brings out the political in the writing of this book, which seems to deliberately lack such a dimension—a lack that Bongie claims is itself political. Both, the book and the review are must-reads for those interested in the history of the Haitian Revolution.

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31431

Stephen Allen (Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey) reviews Kevin B. Witherspoon’s book at a time when scores of people around the world are feeling nostalgic and even drawing parallels between today and the year 1968. In _Before the Eyes of the World_ Witherspoon explains how the 1968 Summer Olympics coincided with several interests and currents that helped produced the sensational events characteristic of that fateful year. It is a history of sports, politics, race and international diplomacy. To a certain extent, this book is a welcome study of the Cold War and the 1960s radicalism outside of the United States— far too many scholars see this period only through U.S. centric lenses, ignoring Bogota (Congreso Eucarístico), Mexico City (Olympics), and the 5 countries that declared independence from colonial powers that same year. Yet, as Allen tells us, despite its value, Witherspoon fails to make this study truly comparative or shared history; his accent stays in the U.S. rather than on Mexico.

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31733

Srividhya Swaminathan (Long Island University) takes on the delicate task of reviewing the reissue of Seymour Drescher’s _Econocide_. There is no more striking question in the study of the Atlantic slave trade than the one posted by Eric Williams. Williams studied the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade through the eyes of an economist. His answer, first published in his doctoral thesis (1938) and in a 1940 article (_ The Journal of Negro History__), rocked the establishment. Ever since, all significant work on abolitionism has wrestled with Williams’ “Decline Thesis.” Drescher comes to the picture in 1977 as the champion of the idea that the British were well-intended, and that in pursuing abolitionism they actually committed economic suicide, hence the term “Econocide.” An interesting point of the republication of this work is that David Brion Davis, a long-time warden of Williams’ thesis, opens the book with a story of Drescher’s contribution to the debate. Swaminathan, however, tells in this review that Williams’ thesis cannot be entirely dismissed. She also tells us how Drescher contributed to complicate the picture and bring Latin American History into the discussion.

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31617

Luis A. Intersimone (Texas State University at San Marcos) considers Raanan Rein’s _In The Shadow of Perón_. How can you explain the broad and steady political support for populists like Juan Perón? Some readers may refer to the leader’s charisma and the cultural legacy of caudillismo as explanations of Latin American populism. The implication, which many early U.S. writers proposed, was that the emotional masses had little judgment when following such leaders (basis to which they assigned their supposedly lack of democratic abilities). But Rein, Intersimone tells us, explains that that is not the case; that masses are not irrational after all; that there is more to them than meets the eye. Rein takes the case of Perón’s leadership to demonstrate his point. But the focus is on those leaders that connected Perón to the masses. Rein does not diminish Perón’s charisma, however. Instead, he raises the importance of those on whom Perón relied, and shows, in splendid details, how Peronism’s personality cult actually worked to defeat its politics.

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31720

Amanda Clark (Virginia Tech) examines a book about accounts of Whites taken captives by non-Europeans: Lisa Voigt’s _Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic_. The book is about literature and history. The narratives that Voigt inspects here range from those that are widely known, as el Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and John Smith’s Pocahontas, to less known ones like Francisco Nuñes de Pineda’s “Cautiverio Feliz,” and José de Santa Rita Durão’s “Caramurú.” Clark tells us that one of Voigt’s contributions is her emphasis on Ibero-American literature. This is a welcome feature because English sources have dominated early modern Atlantic studies for many years. Voigt’s main argument is that despite the authors’ bravery and apparent challenge to imperialism, all of these narratives worked to sustain the imperial project. By offering to the Western World narratives that described how was being a captive among barbarians these ex-captives not only reinforced the non-Western “Otherness,” but also justified their colonialism. Clark, however, goes even further by making the case that these sources were less effective than what Voigt suggests and that the empires’ control over the production of knowledge was more effective than assumed here.

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=32970

We are grateful to these excellent reviewers who contribute with their
time and expertise. I also want to thank the team of editors who help
me behind the scenes to keep the H-LatAm review project running.

Sincerely yours,

Dennis R. Hidalgo
H-LatAm

May's Second Set of Reviews

2011-05-17T20:15:00.008-04:00

Dear Neter@s,
In our second bouquet of reviews this month we offer you analyses of five books covering the countries of Chile, Mexico and the Andean region. They also deal with the topics of U.S. and Latin American Historiography, colonial medicine, modern propaganda, presidential politics, indigenous political systems, and cultural anthropology. We invite you to take pleasure and benefit fromtheir reading. I offer you simple summaries to whet your appetite

Susan E. Ramirez (Texas Christian University) offers us a close analysis of the peculiar work of cultural anthropologist Denise Arnold and archaeologist Christine Hastorf in the book _Heads of State_. In this book Arnold and Hastorf look at the symbolic power of heads in the Andes, and elaborate a hypothesis about cultural practice and indigenous political systems. In the review, Ramirez tells us she found merit in the discussion on the importance of heads in centripetal versus centrifugal polities. Also useful was the discussion on the Andean heterarchichal system of organization, teeming with overlays, multiplicity, and mixed ascendancy,but concurrent with patterns of relation. This argument relates with recent scholarshipthat point to a less centralized system of politics in the Andes than previously thought. Ramirez, however, found that from the historian point of view the book opens itself to a huge gap in time full of anachronisms, which tends to take some issues for granted (i.e., the concept of the Ayllu). Nevertheless, this is a book Ramirez recommends reading.

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31882

Peter Villella (University of North Carolina in Greensboro) reflects on Sherry Field’s _Pestilence and Headcolds_. How would life be in a time when everybody, from the top-level ranks of society to the least known person, is dreadfully concerned with death? What underlying epistemologies would we find beneath the plethora of health and wellnesspractices people used to survive? Field’s book focuses on colonial Mexico and looks at the cultureof sickness and health in the time when epidemics and the loss of life were unprecedented. This is also the time in which people lived in the midst of two apparently opposing cosmologies; one informed by indigenous belief in the supernatural sources of illness and the other acquainted with the medieval humorism of Galenus. Field’s main contributions, according to Villella, are in the synthesis of thescholarship and in the broad interpretative framework. Despiteits structural limitations (i.e., extensiveness), the reader can learn about a world in which a cut, a minor infection and even a sniffle could be ground for distress.

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31466

Thomas Schoonover (University of Louisiana at Lafayette) reviews Helen Delpar’s book, _Looking South_. Delpar’s contribution to scholarship is one that present historiography in a different package: as a narrative of the history of US people fascinated with the study of Latin America since the 19th Century. This is a study of both US, and Latin American History, but seen principally from the eyes of US writers. Here we learn about why the more formal and scholarly interest in Latin America began after the works of people like William H. Prescott and Washington Irving. Delpar informs the reader about the development of professional and academic institutions that led to the current forms of Latin American scholarship in the US. Schoonover argues that in telling us personal narratives Delpar has made historiography enjoyable to read.

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31628

Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney tells us about a book that Silvia Borzutzky and Gregory B. Weeks have edited, which sheds light on why voters in Chile chose a government of the right to replace Michelle Bachelet. But this is not a pundit book attempting to explain in vain the inscrutable course of presidential elections. Instead, it is a collection of fine scholarly essays querying the historical post-Pinochet period. The focus is the Bachelet’s administration, as the book title would reveal: _The Bachelet Government_. That she was the first Chilean women president is just one of the many points of interest of her presidency. She also openly attempted the impossible: to promote a more equal society while still adhering to most of the neoliberal policies of her predecessors. As it happens often with political histories, the consensus of these authors is that the realities are more interesting and more complex than what they appear from a distance. At the end, you may not know everything with certainty, but after reading this book, Pieper Mooney affirms, at least you gain a better insight on why the nation took the direction it did in the last election.

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31660

Andrae Marak reviews a book about the production of propaganda, governmental and otherwise, in post-revolutionary Mexico. The word propaganda often masquerades the manipulation of people’s opinions. Monica A. Rankin, however, uses a less narrow definition in her book, _¡Mexico, la patria!_. In it, she looks for patterns in the messages aimed at large Mexican audiences within the span of three periods: before WII, during WII and post-WII. The book offers suggestions, but avoids gauging the propaganda effects on people. It also brings new light into the U.S. and Mexico’s relations. Most interesting to me is how Rankin shows the symbolic (and discursive) co-option of the Mexican Revolution. In the 1940s, with the purpose of promoting national unity, the Ávila Camacho government successfully propagated the idea of the Mexican Revolution as a positive historical event that had set the nation on a democratic process. Taken as a whole, the nation-building messages behind all propaganda schemes, either from the right or from the left, were aimed to both industrialize and homogenize cultural Mexico. Marak recommends Rankin’s work as necessary for those studying post-revolutionary Mexico and those wanting to explore modern propaganda production.

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=32059

I want to thank our competent reviewers and dependable H-LatAm editors who have loaned me a “second pair of eyes” to read the reviews.

Cheers,

Dennis R. Hidalgo

Reviews: The First Five of May 2011

2011-05-02T22:15:00.019-04:00

Neteros,
The first week of May welcomes us with five exciting reviews. They cover the topics of (1) autobiography as a form of historical journey in Jamaica, (2) little known, but notable Cuban art, (3) an attempt to understand paramilitary and death squads, (4) the role of enslaved soldiers in the wars for independence, and (5) an essay on a contentious book about the Catholic Church in Latin America. True to our international appeal, we continue publishing reviews in Spanish (and seek to publish in French and Portuguese) and search for diverse and able reviewers, even outside of the United States (and aim to review more works published abroad too).

Damion Blake (University of West Indies and Virginia Tech) introduces the reader to a form of literature similar to “testimonios” that do more than describe life in colonial Jamaica from the perspective of the subaltern. Yvonne Shorter Brown’s _Dead Woman Pickney_ blends historical scholarship with the personal in a way that makes the history of colonial Jamaica accessible and attractive to readers of all types. The focus is on the author’s quest for her mother’s past, and through her pursuit we learn about gender, race, coloration, and class in the last decades of British colonialism on the island. A postcolonial narrative, Blake highly recommends this poignant and entertaining book for the classroom and for research as a form of primary source.

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31425

Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier (Université Laval) writes in Spanish about a collection of Cuban art that was rescued from the Fidelista’s censuring project. The Ramos Collection in Zeida Comesañas Sardiñas’ _Great Masters of Cuban Art_, a bilingual book, is the product of years of clandestine safeguarding and intercontinental collectors’ chase. Here the reader would find Cuban paintings dated from the 19th and 20th centuries. The Ramos Collection, Boudreault-Fournier tells us, is a must for all those interested in Cuban history and art history in general.

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31693

Daniel Breslau (Virginia Tech) offers a decidedly scholarly review of Julie Mazzei’s _Death Squads or Self-Defense Forces?_ Breslau informs that differently from other works on paramilitaries, Mazzei’s work is refreshingly comparative and theoretically useful (a combination not easily found together). The focus is on assorted groups in Chiapas, Colombia, and El Salvador. Mazzei proposes a nuanced view of paramilitaries as more than covert detachments of national militaries. Mezzei’s study shows that (apparent) nonstate militarized action consistently came about when reformist governments tried civilian rule and transparency. Despite problems inherited in the comparative system, Mazzei’s work is an important contribution in the field of terror, civilian and military studies.

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31845

Jesse Cromwell (The University of Texas at Austin) focuses on Peter Blanchard’s

_Under the Flags of Freedom_. In a highly readable analysis of the book, Cromwell explains why Blanchard’s book is indispensable for the study of the Wars for Independence and of Blacks in Latin America. Blanchard’s archival research spanned through Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, England, Peru, Spain, Uruguay, and Venezuela. And his contribution goes beyond showing how enslaved Blacks assisted on both sides of the conflict and the motivations that led them to enlist. Blanchard also shows the underpinnings of the institution of slavery and its longevity; how slavery lasted for about a generation even after the wars have ended. Cromwell puts Blanchard in a historiographical context, and affirms that in spite of some criticism, this book now fills a gap in Abolitionism and Black studies in Latin America.

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31743

Jayeel S. Cornelio (National University of Singapore) takes the arduous task of bringing into a scholarly discussion a book meant for pious readerships. Edward L. Cleary’s _How Latin America Saved the Soul of the Catholic Church_ attempts to show how the Catholic Church in Latin America has not only changed itself, but transformed the global church. Cleary’s enthusiasm for the Latin American Catholic experience is obvious throughout the book, and Cornelio patiently leads the reader through each of these steps. The Church, according to Cleary, continues to grow, continues to lead, and has a consistent and strong voice for justice: it has come out of the shadows by appropriating certain tenets of popular religiosity and social justice (read Theology of Liberation?). But, as Cornelio reminds us, that is not the entire story. There are some sinister corners that Cleary clearly missed, and these are necessary to highlight for us to have a complete picture of the Church in Latin America. Cornelio does even more than provide this standard criticism as he also shows us that a worldly broader portrait of the Church should include the Global South.

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31951

My sincere thanks to the reviewers for their contributions and for the support from H-LatAm editors.

Cheers,

Dennis R. Hidalgo

H-LatAm Reviews

About Haiti, Brazil and a Commodity Chain

2011-04-30T14:48:00.011-04:00

Date Posted: Sun, 30 Apr 2011 08:33:00 -0400
Last of April’s Reviews

Today we present to you three reviews. One is about the momentous yet inscrutable Caribbean Revolution in Haiti (perhaps more significant now after the devastating 2010 earthquake). Another is about Brazil’s remarkable recent political history and foreign relations. And the last review is about cocaine, and though spotlighting the Andean region, it covers much more than that. So, with them we have a fair representation of Latin American geography.

Erica Johnson (Florida State University) first tells us that the book, _The Tree of Liberty_, is worth reading because it helps illuminate the many perplexing and subtle repercussions of the successful Haitian transformationfrom colonial slavery on Hispaniola. The editor of this collection, Doris L. Garraway, have gathered an exciting team of interdisciplinary scholars to examine cause and effect, literary consequence, and (most stimulating to me) the tracking of rumors and dissemination of ideas among Black populations outside of Haiti. At the core are concerns from scholars like Michel-Rolph Trouillot and David Patrick Geggus, who during the 1990s tried to initiate deeper understanding and interest on the Haitian Revolution and its impact throughout the Atlantic. Johnson gives us a close analysis of the original essays in this collection, helping to place them into its historiographical context.

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31511

In the second review, Shawn Smallman (Portland State University) informs us about Brazil’s potentially new boom through an examination of Sean W. Burges’ book. Smallman explains how _Brazilian Foreign Policy after the Cold War_ is among the best of a number ofpublications trying to explain Brazil’s political and economic resurgence in the last two decades. Smallman guides us through the book, shows the tricky research approach Burges had to do, and proves its value within its historiography. And as Smallman persuasively writes of Brazil’s economic discipline and political surprises, he also explains how the book’s limitations are as important as its strengths. This book, Smallman argues, is both accessible and a required reading for all advanced students, but even policymaking and those casually interested in Brazilian affairs should consider reading it.

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31664

Elaine Carey (St. Johns University) reviews the third book in this group, a work that has received significant attention even outside of scholarly circles. Carey tells us how Paul Gootenberg’s _Andean Cocaine_ is not your ordinary story of the miracle drug. It is rather a compelling account produced by a first-rate, multi-archival research. Gootenberg wrote a nuanced account of a currently controversial commodity chain (with all of its emotional baggage) as a product of a historical development. By observing how the plant became a national hope, then a medicine and next a narcotic (vice), we grasp a deeper understanding of not simply individual struggles, but of the particular nature of this epoch’s political economy. As Carey reminds us, there is a difference between coca and cocaine, and if we are able to distinguish these words’ historical contexts, we may come out of this reading a bit more enlightened. Carey’s review is an excellent introduction to the book, which she shows to be relevant to the entire hemisphere’s history.

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=32733

I offer my sincere thanks to the reviewers and to the editorial team behind H-LatAm’s review project.

The One Left Behind Is Now With US

2011-04-17T18:32:00.002-04:00

Dear Neteros,
A review that got delayed last Friday is now available.

In it, Norberto Barreto Velázquez performed a most difficult and yet necessary job of going through Julian Go’s dense book and distilling its essentials. Go, in an attempt at comparative history, looks at the elite’s in the Philippines and Puerto Rico as they struggled, maneuvered and adapted to living under the new American colonial masters. Barreto Velázquez’s review is a must-read for those interested in the subject of U.S. imperialism and those working on similar comparative works. Differently from the book itself, the review is readable and sensible. The fact that it is in Spanish shows our commitment to publish in languages other than English.

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31576

Thanks Norberto.

http://pucp.academia.edu/NorbertoBarreto

Cheers,

Dennis R. Hidalgo

"The Broad and the Deep," introduction to H-LatAm reviews

2011-04-16T04:03:00.014-04:00

Dear Neteros, We are happy to present four reviews for your enjoyment. As a group, they hint at the full length of interests implied in Latin American History. Both major periods are here represented, as well as South America and the Caribbean region. Our luck is such that among these reviews you will even find two essays attempting to do more than just examining a book.

1- In the review entitled, “Bolivia(s) Ascending,” David Sheinin opens up for us a collection of essays about Bolivia’s recent history. He does more than just reveal the publication’s links to the current administration. Sheinin is critical, but he also helps us see Evo Morales outside of the polarizing rhetoric that have characterized the recent events in Bolivia, and appreciate both his administration’s appeal and limitations.

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31614

David M. K. Sheininhttp://www.trentu.ca/history/publications_sheinin.php

2- Matilde Zimmermann provides us with a sense of the current debate over theinvasion of Bay of Pig or or Playa Girón by interlacing the critical examinations of two recent books. One of the books is a valuable Spanish translation, with a stimulating analysis, which reflects the author’s relative advantage on the island of Cuba. The other book is also predisposed, but toward the U.S., where the author originated. Both books mostly rely on different caches of sources, and as such they are more useful together than in isolation,
which is why Zimmermann tied them in tandem.

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31785
Matilde Zimmermann
http://www.slc.edu/undergraduate/study/history-social-sciences/history/faculty.html

3- The essay on Lascasian Studies is also an attempt to appreciate the field rather than just a single book. In here Lawrence A. Clayton focuses on three fairly currentbooks to draw attention to larger and older patterns of thinking about Bartolomé de las Casas. In this relatively longer essay, Clayton considers most major works about the “Defender of the Indians” to offer a heartfelt sympathetic line of reasoning in favor of Las Casas’s legacy. Meant to incite discussion, this essay takes a definitive position in a debate as old as the man himself.
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31181

Lawrence A. Clayton, University of Alabama
http://www.as.ua.edu/history/html/faculty/clayton.html

4- In, “Evolution of the Cuban Revolution,” Frank Argote-Freyre uses his familiarity with older versions of Balfour’s profile on Castro to assess the newness in the latest edition. By studying Castro we also study the Cuban Revolution, and in Balfour’s
book we are reminded about key points like how in the internal debates within the Cuban Revolution José Martí was more important than even Karl Marx. Argote-Freyre offers an engaging and impartial assessment of the book.

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31445

Frank Argote-Freyre, Kean University
http://www.kean.edu/~history/faculty.html#FRANK_ARGOTE-FREYRE

Thanks, again to my colleague editors Peter Blanchard, John F. Schwaller and Matthew D. Rothwell.

Sincerely yours,

Dennis R. Hidalgo
H-LatAm Review Editor
Virginia Tech

H-LatAm Reviews: On Crises, Transnationalism, and Madness

2011-03-22T01:49:00.007-04:00

Dear Neteros,

Today we offer you reviews of books on three of the largest human ecologies of Latin America. These reviews range from mental illness in the southern cone, to the overflowing of Caribbean culture, and all the way to rhythms of crises in Mexico. The books are a monograph and two collections of essays. They are mostly concerned with the national period.

In the first review, Luis García Fanlo tells us about a book that unravels Buenos Aires’ madness as part of nation building. The Nineteenth Century brought more than immigrants and science to explain normalcy. There was a sinister positive design for homogeneity. To be crazy was not simply a mental illness, but also the unwillingness or incapacity to fit conceptual molds of citizenship. Fanlo tells us that Jonathan Ablard’s book, _Madness in Buenos Aires_, fills a niche in the history of psychiatry. In short, through careful archival research, the book’s author shows how cultural, political and social factors helped determine the capacity of the state to define and provide mental services. The reader may reasonably ask how would Ablard’s approach compare to Foucault’s study on madness and how was Argentina different from, for example, Brazil?

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31688

While exploring _Constructing Vernacular Culture_ Kate Houlden shows us a book on the edge of inter-disciplinarity that studies the Caribbean region through an array of provocative angles. This is a collection of fifteen tightly written essays meant to push the envelope. The authors propose to look at the Caribbean not only through the islands, but also beyond them to include the diasporic communities, to examine the migratory culture through the volatile vernacular and to include the electronic world as more

than an abstract venue of connection (among other views). Hardly any aspect of the trans-Caribbean culture goes unchallenged; even gossip is shown as a form of agency. And yet, the reviewer carefully reveals where the essays are at their best and where they could have been better. The historian may find this collection of studies a tease or a stimulus to move beyond geographical and traditional approaches to studying Caribbean History (the late nineteenth-century Antillean leaders/writers like Martí, Hostos, and Betances would be grateful).

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31721

Timothy J. Henderson cracks open _Cycles of Conflict, Centuries of Change_ a loquacious book of loosely assembled essays centered on a comparative rubric of Mexican revolutions or crises. The editors are concerned with the possibility that there is a spiral pattern of some sort revealed in the years of 1810 and 1910. (A colonialist could even add the years 1519, 1610s and 1710s). Are we seeing here a (rather dismal) vision of the future? The book brought together a group of well-known Mexicanists who, while exceptionally redundant, do manage to suggest new approaches and directions for the study of Mexican revolutions/crises. Yet, I still wonder if there aren’t enough commanding events in Mexican history for the historian to create countless of other rhythmic patterns?

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31471

A big thank-you to the reviewers for their time and for sharing their analyses with us:

Luis García Fanlo, Universidad de Buenos Aires

https://profiles.google.com/106846042918531195240/about

Kate Houlden, Queen Mary, University of London

http://qmul.academia.edu/KateHoulden

Timothy J. Henderson, Auburn University Montgomery

http://www.aum.edu/profile_ektid9416.aspx

And thank-you also to the team of editors from H-LatAm who assisted me in preparing these reviews for publication:

Peter Blanchard

Matthew Rothwell

John F. Schwaller

Sincerely yours,

Dennis R. Hidalgo

“A Strong Tree Protects its Timoun (Children).”

2010-04-17T15:39:00.002-04:00

Circles of Hope, written by Karen Lynn Williams and illustrated by Linda Saport, Eerdmans Books, 2005.

It is not easy to find children's books with an appealing and compellingly timely story. This story is both beautiful and powerful. Children reading or listening to the narrative would learn about the plights of other children in Haiti, and their struggle to cope with unique challenges. After the January 12, 2010 earthquake these challenges have only grown worse, but, as this book tries to show, there is still hope.

The story is about a boy named Facile whose father has taught him the value of trees. He had planted a mango tree in honor of Facile’s birth, and this tree was now generously giving away fruits, shade, and preventing landslides. The father, however, had to leave to find work.
After the birth of his sister Lucia the boy decides to plant his own tree as a gift for her. But without his father around the task becomes really difficult. In fact, three times Facile attempted planting a mango tree without success. The first twig was eaten by a rambling goat. The second was swept away by rains. And the third was scorched by scrub fires.

After each failed attempt Facile asked a grown family member, “How can I plant a tree that would grow strong?” Every time he asked he received an answer that revealed the local Haitian techniques and means to handle the challenge of reforestation. Indeed, deforestation is a conspicuous yet subtle issue throughout the book, illuminating in this way the current environmental crisis in Haiti.

Close to the end, the boy learns from his uncle that he needed éspéré (hope) to make the tree grow. Facile himself also had the brilliant idea of using the many ubiquitous stones to build protective walls around the sprouting seed. Lucia’s tree finally began to grow tall and strong.

And one day, after a long absence because of work in the city, his father arrived home. Facile’s mother, who had sought medical treatment for the baby in the city, arrived too. They were all gladly greeted by the young mango tree that Facile had planted close to the house. Soon the boy’s ingenuity spreads around the community. Other trees, enclosed and sheltered by ordinary stonewalls, began to grow on nearby mountain tops, bringing back the green look these mountains used to have.

With gorgeous illustrations that resemble kids’ drawings, the narrative delicately touches on some of the current Haitian troubles. The abounding dust due to the scarcity of trees, the impact of showers on rootless soil, and the prevalent practice of scrub fires are some of them. The book also deftly considers the labor conundrum and the want of medical care that many households confront in rural sections of the country.

The happy ending with trees budding around mountaintops is not the only positive concept in the story. Facile’s evident resourcefulness and persistence in the face of constant disappointments are simply inspiring. The way in which the boy draws strength and ideas from family members also shows how the extended Haitian family plays such an important role in raising kids. But most importantly, the story reveals how the Haitian people possess the know-how to solve their own problems independently from foreign interference.

Haiti's Earthquake and the Environmental Crisis

2010-01-20T10:12:00.000-05:00

I thought I should post a link to an older entry considering the current crisis in Haiti:
http://dennishidalgo.blogspot.com/2009/06/haitis-environment-and-social-justice.html

Fanon on National Consciousness

2009-10-27T20:11:00.010-04:00

The purpose of this entry is to help you navigate through FrantzFanon’s chapter on National Consciousness and help you get ready for classroom discussion.

Fanon wrote this book in the three-year period in which he helped lead the psychiatric hospital in colonial Algiers, and as he wrote articles for revolutionary papers, and collaborated with the Algerian resistance. He did not have the assistance of an editor, the service of a computer or the disposal of a vast library (or the Internet for that matter). He engendered this work while he slept about four hours a day, hardly ate, and was under constant surveillance.

This is a work of painstaking pondering that comes from the meeting of considerable intellectual sweat, and hardcore, real-life political experience. At its heart, this chapter is a poignant demonstration of profound compassion for the unprivileged.

As an intellectual that trusted the people, Fanon main interest was to share with the Africans, who were on the brink of catapulting from colonialism, what he already knew about being a postcolonial, and what he thought will happen in the near future; all through the eyes of history. In fact, the Latin American past hanged predominately in Fanon’s head. Most Spanish America had over a century of postcolonial experience already, and Fanon wanted all Africans to avoid the pitfalls rendered clear through Western Hemisphere’s history.

Fanon objective was clear. He wanted to help deliver the promises of nationalism and avoid the “crude and fragile travesty of what might have been”. He had come to the conclusion that the hope of the postcolonial nation was not foreign investment or better relations with wealthy countries, but the mobilizing of its “revolutionary capital, which is the people”. In other words, the national leaders will achieve true independence only by trusting their own people.

But the main obstacle to the promise of nationalism was in fact the national bourgeoisie. These were the wealthy nationals who wanted to run the country after the exit of the colonial government. The problem was that they could not “rationalize” popular action.

The bourgeoisie has been crippled by colonialism; they had no economic power, no imagination and no political will. They were merely invested in small businesses, agriculture, and the liberal professions. They had neither financiers nor industrial magnates. They were “not engaged in production, nor in invention, nor building, nor labor.” Unfortunately, this caste had become the intermediary for the economic forces of the richest countries, and had neglected their role as national enablers. Thus, they could not deliver real independence, which in turn explains why postcolonial nations remained hanging as colonial drapes.

Read this chapter with these questions in mind:

What was Fanon's problem with producing only raw materials, nationalizing industries, promoting tourism, competition with other poor countries (as opposed to cooperation), chauvinism and tribalism?

Pay close attention at Fanon’s relentless assault on the national bourgeoisie. What was his problem with this “little greedy caste”? On the other hand, what is the responsibility of a strong bourgeoisie?

How do religious revivals may fuel racial rivalries?

What is the meaning of this phrase: “a racism of contempt: it minimizes everything it hates”?

How could African unity be achieved? What are the problems with a single party? What are the (harmful) pillars of regimes in underdeveloped countries?

Explain Fanon’s ideal: intellectuals collaborating with the masses against the national bourgeoisie.

What is the role of political party?

How Brasilia might have been a good example?

Note the industrialization and development against nature.

What was Fanon’s mood towards the plight of the African women?

What was his take regarding obscure language? And what does the unyielding black market said to him?

For Fanon, what produces the wealth of the rich? And what is the role of the education of the masses?

What are the pitfalls of youth’s pastimes, sports and national consciousness, and the quest for heroes?

What can the army bring to the construction of the nation, and what are the dangers of having the army involved in politics?

What do you find useful and revelatory in Fanon’s long essay?

Fanon ended the chapter with something that we may find controversial. He thought that a nation that is just coming out of colonialism should cultivate a sense of strong nationalism before developing social consciousness. In other words, people should feel united and develop a feel for national responsibility before demanding social justice. What do you think of this?

Postcolonial Ecofeminism (Robert J. C. Young)

2009-10-12T01:04:00.006-04:00

You would not come to this class to read and learn about what you would normally get from standard media. So, the title of Monday’s discussion should not be a complete surprise. Its newness may require that you would read and meditate about these issues more carefully than you would with more familiar topics. These types of topics, nevertheless, would surely help you appreciate the human experience on the other side of nationalism.

You already know that in this context postcoloniality means the people’s ambivalent experience and subordinate position even after independence from a colonial power. In other words, it is that state in which a former colony has nominal sovereignty because the former master (or new foreign ones) has not left entirely or has taken on new forms of domination. The struggle for freedom, thus, continues, not so much by pushing the foreign away, but in redefining the social structures that continues to promote inequality and subordination, which colonialism donated to the new nation (“inherited from colonialism”).

But what do ecology and feminism have to do with postcoloniality?

Robert J. C. Young’s challenge in chapter 5 is simply asking us to appreciate the perspective of the women who struggled against colonial and later postcolonial domination in India and other parts of Asia and Africa. Their experience is not totally transferable to other postcolonial female experiences because each group had faced different set of trials and had had different types of needs. Rather, it is the overarching theme of resisting a modern patriarchal nationalism that puts them together in the same crowd.

The section titled “Gender Politics in India” illustrates how notions about traditional roles for women are hard to reject. Even Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the great reformer who appropriated ‘feminized’ modes of struggle, came at times to reinforce, instead of reject, conventional Hindu and puritanical Victorian concepts of women and femininity. Young vindicated Gandhi, though, by showing that he genuinely realized that women’s politics were more radical than most nationalism. It argued for equitable relations between men and women, sustainable connections to the land, and a life-style and medicine that encourage collective health. These are the contributions of postcolonial women and their politics.

In “Gender and Modernity” Young threw us several ideas about modernity that could easily mystify if you fail to pay close attention. On the one hand he wrote technology and a politics of egalitarianism defines modernity. On the other, he asserted that (mythical) cultural nationalists and their obsession for a fabled past, where women stayed at home and were submissive, is all part of modernity. But his more interesting contribution, by far, was that there are several types of modernities, that there are different types of Third World modern experiences, and that even the West represent a diversity of modernities (think about how different is New Zeeland from the U.S.). The best explanation of modernity, however, is Young’s, and it appears in this section: the interaction of the West with the Rest.

Women’s struggle for equality and sustainability is the epitome of the postcolonial predicament according to the section “Women’s Movement after Independence.” While nationalist movements sought desperately to present a unified face during the conflicts against the direct colonial rule, after impendence, the same nationalists (i.e., Religious nationalisms) who preached equality and freedom tried relegating women to submission. Since the role of women actually degenerated with the “nation,” postcolonial feminism had been at the forefront of a “politics of egalitarianism that supports diversity rather than the cultural uniformity demanded for nationalism.” (99)

The section “Feminism and ecology” shows how “macho” nationalism continued with the same colonial politics of exploitation. It reinforced the same old social hierarchy; it exploited workers, women and the environment. Like the colonial government, the new nations colonized forests and minds in responses to market-oriented and scientific notions of the time. This brought deforestation and desertification to local economies and otherwise clean ecosystems.

All of this colonization was for the short-term commercial values of the marketplace, “trying to control nature just as patriarchy tries to control women.” (102) Women, however, because of their experience as cultivators and family enablers possessed repositories of knowledges about balances in nature and the effects of ecological disruptions. It is no wonder, then, that it were women activists who began the Chipko (tree huggers) movement and developed a philosophy of politics that resisted centralization, corruption and exploitation. Instead, they promoted justice, self-sufficiency, and empowerment of local knowledges.

In the section “What makes postcolonial feminism ‘postcolonial’?,” Young asked if postcolonial feminism amounted to a separate strand within postcolonial thought. His answer was simply no. In this section Young addressed the malleability of postcolonial theory by explaining how feminism is at its core, and thus inseparable. It is also applicable to a wide variety of politics, and even though they might not include obvious gender perspectives, they all work from the same paradigm: the pursuit of collective justice and equality. These struggles may be waged inside the nation or in exile, as the examples of Radia Nasraoui and Gisèle Halimi shows.

In the last section, “The untouchables: caste,” Young readily admitted that postcolonial struggle is not limited to the legacy of the colonies. There are older vices that plagued modern society. In the Indian example, we see the caste system, which is much older than the British colonial government. The plight of the Dalits is its most explicit case injustice. “A quarter of the Indian population is made of such Dalits.” And they do most of the menial jobs, and live segregated from the rest, with little access to anything we normally see as good from modernity.

In class I want you to think seriously about the meaning of feminism and its opposite, namely, patriarchalism. How women’s social position as historically close to the land and responsible for sustaining families shaped their politics differently to that of men.

You should also ponder over the dark side of macho-nationalism, its insistence on cultural uniformity. Most importantly, I expect you to deliberate on the reasons and causes of nationalisms continuing with the same unfair hierarchies imposed by colonial rules, and with the exploitations inaugurated by the colonial masters.

How do you fit Young in Benedict Anderson's frame of thought? What parts correspond, even if slightly, and what elements are diametrically apart?

Sara Chambers's Letters and Salons

2009-09-28T10:02:00.000-04:00

Letters and Salons

Beyond woman’s comprehension

We have stories about heroines, but not much about women thinking about the nation because their ideas were less public than their actions and whatever they wrote have been left out of literary canons. Though the record is hardly there, women were a cornerstone in the construction of national communities in LA. Sáenz, Sánchez, and Arriagada show that through correspondence and friendship, women played an important role as mediators.

Like Benedict Anderson thought, the writing and reading was a catalyst to the imagination of nations, but in the women’s case, it was through the writing and reading of correspondence, and through the socialization in salons. In this way women became intermediaries working toward national unity, and occasional critics of the excess of masculine-driven nationalism.

They were pioneers because the stereotype and the society’s drive was to mold women to the subordinate role of domesticity. Women who publicly thought were ridiculed and demonized. The only positive tendency of domesticity was that women were trained to raise loyal and virtuous citizens.

Even other women writers who published on feminine journals advocated the idea of domesticity for women while, contradictorily, violating themselves such a role by publishing their work. It was on the more private arena of letters that middle-class and elite women vented their frustration more freely.

This study relies mostly on unpublished documents in the form of letters. These letters could not be considered strictly private since they were also meant to be read in public and shared with others.

Sara C. Chambers add an important twist to (or challenge) Anderson’s thesis of the imagined community not only be including women in the creation of the national, but also by arguing that the imagination process happened through social interactions at smaller and tangible communities of “writers, readers, conversationalists, and political conspirators.”

The author does not make the connection directly, but her insistence in the fact that males’ leaders focused on the abstract while women focused on the concrete relationships of friends may be one of the most important contribution of this study since for most people who were not elite male, this was exactly the case.

Sáenz developed its sense of patriotism for Ecuador not from an abstract idea, since she had lived most of her life in Peru and Colombia, but from her personal acquaintances and from her exilic perspective. It is interesting that despite her being the most politically educated and democratically oriented of the three she still supported a military leader who sought to change the constitution to expand his tenure in power. Her contribution was not limited to influencing Simón Bolivar and Juan José Flores, but one that helped create a sense of national identity that favored order over other merits.

Sánchez’s, like Sáenz, spent time in exile, but differently from Sáenz, this augmented her patriotism because she revolved around like-minded people. Moreover, since she did not have competing (provincial) loyalties, as Sáenz had, and Argentine’s early national history was simpler than that of Ecuador and Colombia, it was easier for her to imagine an Argentine that was more homogenous than that of Sáenz. Still, her sense of national identity was rooted in her relationships with other Argentines, and not in any abstract idea of the nation.

Arraigada was the least euphoric patriot of the three. She lived in a southern isolated province, and this isolation may have influenced the way she imagined the nation. It was because she had the least of friends that her extended network did not yield a broader vision of the nation. This distance from the locus of power, however, allowed her to make a more critical appraisal of Chile than the other two writers. Chambers thought that her choice of reading, the romance novel, may have also influenced her lack of strong attachment to the new nation.

All three women, Chambers argued, are not representative of their class, but they are neither unique. This means that through her lives we can get an insight into the role of women in the formation of early national identities. It was not their radicalism that put these women apart, but how they managed to carve a niche of substantial independence in order to affect politics and ideology that make them special to history. Their ideological contribution was the argument that tolerance and negotiation was better than confrontation and personal ambitions.

Editing your paper: Anderson's last chapters

2009-09-22T18:52:00.004-04:00

These are rephrased comments I shared with one of your classmates about his essay. They may help you all as you rework your own.

Another encouraging fact of your essay is that you are trying to make a unitary entity around an issue (with subcategories), and not a fragmented outline with the different themes found in the chapters. This is the way to go: to gather all the data around one single issue and make sense throughout the essay based on it (thesis). I see your intention and attempt, but, as you alluded in your email, it needs serious work. This means that you have to think hard about the way you organize your essay around a single issue or concern.

It is usually helpful to begin with a sort of question or problem. For example, what IS Anderson’s main contribution in chapters 8 to 11 to the understanding of the creation of nations? There must be something in these chapters (Patriotism and Racism, The Angel of History, Census, Mao and Museums, Memory and Forgetting) or at least of key group of issues, which you could put together that would be the heart of your essay. As soon as you have that center, your essay will flow easier and smoother.

Let me give you a recap of what we have seen yet and how the last chapters may fit within the broader view.

Anderson’s book follows the modernization argument (“we are progressing and becoming better, thus, the present is mostly better than the past.” You can imagine why I would have problems with this assumption) in explaining the creation of nations. This means that for Anderson nations developed as a necessary component of industrial society, though neither "economic interest, Liberalism, nor Enlightenment could, or did, create in themselves the kind, or shape, or imagined community" (65).

Differently from others who have written about nationalism, Anderson stressed the impact of culture and the role of print capitalism in developing new nations. In regards to culture Anderson contended that pre-national culture was a broad religious society (“imagined religious communities” like Mediaeval Christianity). Nations replaced this religious culture with their own distinctively imaginary national cultures (national hymns, and a plethora of new hallowed ceremonies), which gave citizens a rationale for dying for a nation (before people died mostly for their religious communities).

For Anderson print capitalism is at the core of his premise. According to him, print capitalism, publishing in vernaculars, was the catalyst in spreading consciousness of similar identities, and thus, creating, somehow involuntarily (in other words, it was not the intent of print-capitalism to create nations) these new national cultures.

Chapters 8 to 11 help the reader understand how these new national cultures become so effective in polarizing people. These chapters deal more specifically with the nations’ powerful love and attraction, and their specific and narrow interpretation of history, with the creation of new monuments and numbering of people.

Below are more links you may explore. The idea of reading these links is not to take-in everything they say. Instead, the idea is to allow what you find in these links to stimulate your thinking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagined_Communities

http://www.lai.at/wissenschaft/lehrgang/semester/ss2005/rv/files/anderson.1983-1991.pdf

http://www.nationalismproject.org/what/anderson.htm

http://www.japanfocus.org/-Radhika-Desai/3085

Official Nationalism and Imperialism

2009-09-10T14:11:00.006-04:00

The incompatibility between nationalism and imperialism.

This is an entry for Anderson’s chapter, “Official Nationalism and Imperialism.” This may be his most thoughtful chapter yet. It feels long because it is long; and it is long because he made a sincere effort to evidence (though always on the shoulders of secondary sources) the historical arguments for this chapter’s thesis, namely, that the popularity of nationalism in the early 19^th century pressed the empires to appropriate it to avoid demise. Yet, since nationalism is incompatible with imperialism (his illustration of the thin skin over a large beast), it determined the destruction of old polyglot empires (in the case of Britain and Japan it was a radical transformation that rendered the monarch virtually useless). The emphasis here is on the Russian, Austrian-Hungarian, Ottoman, British and Japanese empires, and Hungarian and Siam's kingdoms.

Pay attention to the Pals and gastarbeiters (and compare it with the American Creoles), to the vernacular (again), to the program for education and greater political inclusion. How all these empires compare in regards to their official policy of nationalism? But, that seems contradictory: isn’t nationalism supposed to come from below? So, how this contradiction played a role in dismantling the empires? Is this a lesson to learn regarding the dangers of playing or trying to “manage” nationalisms from above?

On Familiar Grounds

The familiarity of Anderson’s argument might escape you among the many interesting stories about the falling and conquering national empires. But if you look carefully at familiar themes, concerns that the author continues to bring up, you may notice that the vernacular and the imagination cut across chapters.

In the previous chapter the new European nationalisms of the 19^th Century came into being because the bourgeoisie started reading, and this led to them imagining being part of a larger group of equals (the print media and capitalism). In this chapter the European Empires tried holding the nationalist tide by choosing a vernacular and elevating it to the status of state language. The reason for this was not simply as a reaction to nationalism, but for what could be seen as practical purposes. It seems ironic that the emperors that tried hard to make their empires work were the ones that ultimately sent their empires crumbling.

Look for example at the choosing of the German vernacular as the state’s language (the most logical choice for effective governance); it had the unintended effect of awakening all sorts of nationalisms among the Hapsburgs’ possessions, which ended breaking the empire (this chapter did not make reference to the 20^th Century, but it was this rivalry against the Germans in the former Hapsburgs’ possessions that set the stage for the bitter nationalist wars of the 20^th Century—the latest being the Balkan Wars, in which the U.S. troops were involved in the 1990s).

Imagination continued being the main and yet most subtle of Anderson’s proposition. In the previous chapter he argued that people began imagining a common nation with the reading of the vernacular; that national myths and legendary histories (which pretended to show readers that their nation was actually ancient) arouse the interest of people linked together by a vernacular, and led to the first stage in the formation of a nation.

In this chapter Anderson, again, showed how the way people imagined as a group itself, though they had not met each other, through the vernacular divisions created by imperial policies. In other words, the empires’ attempts to create state-languages forced imperial subjects to identify themselves with either the chosen imperial language, or with the ones left out.

The Newest of the New

The most original, and in my opinion, most important contribution of this chapter is appreciation of nationalism as a form of reaction to threats. With a broad comparative view Anderson gave its reader a clear sense of how the ruling classes took on the hobby of nationalism in order to maintain power and survive.

Though the Hanoverian (British), Romanovs (Russians), Hapsburgs (Vienna-Hungary) and Meiji (Japanese) converted, with varying degrees of success, to nationalism because of the threat of popular nationalism or external pressures, the most appalling example is that of the Magyar’s aristocracies. They resisted Vienna’s reforms for fear of losing power, and in turn created what today we could easily considered as fake nationalism.

The most unique and interesting case of nationalism from above, however, came from Siam (Thai). Chulalongkorn defended his kingdom from the same Western threats that had swallowed the entire continent of Asia (except Siam and Japan) with pure negotiation. He pitted European imperial powers against each other, and imported a politically powerless class of mostly Chinese, to work on his imperial projects.

But this political bonanza did not last long. After his death, Chulalongkorn’s son, Wachirawut, felt he had to promote a repressive nationalism against the second generation Chinese. He did not turn against the Westerners, but against the laborer immigrants that had established themselves there. This was the time, again, to promote the previous models (US and French) of nations, and enforce education, and the establishment of a state language.

Significant

We are starting to see the negative side of nationalism, particularly if it falls in the hand of a ruling or one with expansive pretensions (i.e. Japanese).

The heroic spirit of nationalism paints better memories when it is the engine behind an oppressed, ignored, and marginalized group. It is then seen, and often even justified as the case of the little guy against the mighty, David versus Goliath. It is then the case for asserting justice.

But, when an already powerful group harnesses the energy and creativity of nationalism, the destructive possibilities are countless. That is what the 20^th Century came to show.

Questions

What did Anderson mean with lexicographic revolution?

What is the link between this revolution and the imagined communities’ wish for territory?

What are the differences in forms of governance and risks between an absolutists (divinely appointed) monarchy, and a nationalist one?

What were the roles of Thomas Macaulay, and Sergei Uvarov?

What was the main risk that monarchs would have if they would try turning their empires into nations?

How Siam’s early nationalism differed from Japan’s?

Language and models in the formation of nations

2009-09-08T13:14:00.005-04:00

As the one before, this entry is meant to serve my students as a launching pad to an enriching reading experience. Here I will comment on Anderson’s chapter 5, Old Languages, New Models, and will offer a set of questions that would hopefully help my students arrive at the classroom prepared for discussion. Reading this entry, however, will not suffice. You will need to carefully read the chapter in order to make sense of this entry and to engage others in the classroom.

My initial caveats first.

1) The historian may find Anderson frustrating because, even though for the most part he focused on the 19^th Century as the historical period that gave birth to the modern notion of a nation, he moved through time without the same painstaking concern that historians commonly have. Historians prefer to attend matters in chronological order because we are anxious about historical details, and want to learn how earlier events had an impact on what followed.

That is not to say that Anderson did not acknowledge the power of sequenced events; he did in fact, by recognizing that the unpopularity of the ancient Latin in Europe opened the door to vernaculars, and that the realization that Europe and Western Culture was not that unique set the stage to notions of equality. But he still came across as a scholar who is more concerned in proving his thesis than in allowing the historical data to shape the theory. An example of this was when he assumed that modernity came to all Europe at once, or when he moved from American nationalisms in the 19^th Century back to European Proto-nationalisms of the 16 to 18^th Centuries.

2) For someone, like me, who have worked hard to overcome the damaging effect of Eurocentric thinking and have come to realize, in its own skin, the destructive results of the ideology of progress, I find Anderson’s liberal use of the terms “backward” and “advanced” really irritating. It seems to be a malaise with him. In the previous chapter (Creole Pioneers) he made subtle condescending remarks about Spanish-America when repeatedly he referred to the region as a-historical: nothing really happened there, and everything was calm and in stupor.

In this chapter (5^th) he referred to groups of people like Bulgarians, and Celts (i.e., Irish and Scottish), in other words, those who were not French and English, as backward. This implies as if the developments that were happening in Britain and France (i.e., increasing pollution, labor abuses, increasing dependence on mechanization and a love affair with imperialism) were actually encouraging signs of advancement. Writing “history” in this way has a violent effect on the minds of the readers because it “normalizes” and “reifies” those forms of categorization. It requires a healthy dose of energy and critical thinking to come out of Anderson’s book without looking at those people as lesser than, or as greater than.

Remember that other structural criticism of Anderson’s thesis will come at the end of the book.

The thrust of Anderson’s argument

This chapter argues for a concept of a nation formed around the development of an increasingly wider readership and the expansion of middle classes, or bourgeoisies throughout Europe (In the previous chapter he already have argued for a different type of nation-ness among the American Creole, which happened in the US between 1776 and 1782, and in most of Colonial Spanish America from 1808 to 1820s).

The bourgeoisie radically transformed the map of Europe from the 1820s to the 1920s.

From one perspective, Anderson’s argument is very tight. After the 1500s, the rise of the vernacular came hand in hand with the proliferation of for-profit presses. Secular as well as religious books, pamphlets and journals (similar to what today would be “newsletters”) rushed into the markets. And who consumed these publications? First, it was the educated elite, but then an increasing number of people began reading more. And who were they?

It was the bourgeoisies, who had the money, the interest and the need to read. Can you imagine an illiterate bourgeoisie? Asked Anderson. Impossible. Indeed, this was the first vernacular imagined community, according to Anderson. Middling groups within a specific vernacular territory, who would have no other form of connection among themselves (as opposed to the nobility, which would be linked to each other through marriages and interest in government), learned of each other existence through the print-media, and thus, imagined itself as part of a community that went beyond their local village or burg (city).

But the practice of community-imagining did not produce a global bourgeoisie’s nationalism. It became national because the presses were not multi-lingual. They published in the vernacular, and thus, the English bourgeoisies came to see itself differently from the French one (they lacked the links that often connected the English to the French nobility). Additionally, new state apparatuses began establishing state-languages out of the vernacular, and this completed the formation of an imagined community: one that read and was ruled by the same vernacular.

Essential to Anderson’s argument is the astonishing growth of the middle class (a sign of the spread of capitalism). Its members became “missionaries of nationalism” (spreading the model), and forced the nobility to new governing terms, namely, the nation, with its quasi-religious symbolism and rituals.

Therefore, Anderson’s argument is inseparable from Eric Hobsbawm’s claim that the bourgeoisies dethroned the old nobility (ancient-regime) and forced the arrival of the industrial and capitalist modernity in the 19^th Century. Anderson, however, added to Hobsbawm’s thesis the notion of an imagined community linked through reading vernacular and through education.

With education came not simply the ability to read the vernacular, and thus, the connection to an imagined community of vernacular-speakers, but an “awakening” of everything local and national. Anderson provided examples of the Ukrainians, Finish, and others “awakening” to their nationalities through the reading of vernacular literature and the “realization” of a “national” history.

But, what role would the lower classes, workers and illiterate peasants have in this nation created by the well-read bourgeoisie? They were mostly not readers, so their loyalty to the bourgeoisie’s nation could be seriously doubted. This is where the promotion of education and public schools come to play such an important role in the creation of these new nations. The more that a people reads, particularly myth-laden nationalistic literature, the more they become a nation.

There is no space in Anderson’s hermetic argument for a nation without a common language and a large literate population. So, the nationalist-missionaries more successful were those who could find ways to convey the message to the illiterate masses and could spark among them enthusiasm for education. He gave examples of ineffectual nationalists who failed to convince the masses to assail the power of the nobles. The masses, then, preferred to support the status quo and “killed gentlemen.”

Questions:

Why is the rise of the vernacular so important in the appearance of the nation?

What are the roles (more than one) of capitalism in the production of the modern nation?

How did Anderson’s arguments fit within Hobsbawm’s Marxist historicism?

What roles did the education of the masses played in the creation of nations?

Considering the factors Anderson gave in this chapter for the creation of nations in the 19^th Century, what types of nations could you picture in your mind? How are these nations that Anderson has been trying to describe?

Do you sense some sort of classism and paternalism toward the non-elite and non- bourgeoisie in Anderson argument? If so, how and why?

The Creole Consciousness

2009-09-05T19:30:00.011-04:00

My Senior Seminar Class is studying about Nation Building in the 19^th Century Caribbean. The emphasis will be on Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Haiti’s national ideologies of the time. But before arriving to the writings of the leaders and intellectuals of these countries we are studying some major works on nationalism and histories of the period.

The purpose of the following entry is to serve as a commentary and an introduction to the reading of chapter 3 and 4 of Anderson’s Imagined Communities. This is the 1991 edition reprinted by Verso in 2006. The chapters’ titles are 3) The origins of National Consciousness, and 4) The Creole Pioneers (follow this link for a more comprehensive overview of Anderson and his book).

We should begin by acknowledging that despite any limitation of Anderson’s thesis (and that of his many propositions), he has forced the scholarly community to reframe the idea of nationalism and nation-building, and help us reconsider many aspect of political and anthropological history, which used to be taken as given. At the end of this book we will read and study a few reviews that have criticized, and by doing so, have dig deeper into the subject, giving us a clearer view of the enigmatic historical process of nation-building.

As with all major works that purported to offer broad explanations of deep historical process, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities is rigged with problems and critical historical errors. However, his concepts still illuminate, and his propositions challenge us to both accept and accept partially, and/or to contest them. And in order for us to develop healthy and honest postures of our own regarding his statements on nationalism we need to first read the original and learn his positions directly from him.

Wikipedia has an entry on him that may serve you as an introduction, but keep in mind that this entry (as with everything in Wikipedia) is an ongoing form of knowledge, and we are supposed to soon supersede it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagined_Communities

Sample of a Protestant pamphlet. Heavy use of printing, in the form of publications like this one, was a common Protestant strategy during the Reformation.

In the Third Chapter, Anderson’s main focus was on the development of the Print Media in conjunction with Capitalism as the propeller of proto-national consciousness. Look carefully at how he explained that both, Print Media and Capitalism, laid down the foundations for a collective sense of imagined community, which slowly came to supplant the Imagined Sacred Community—meaning: the Catholic community at large. Keep clearly in mind the period of time in which this is happening: the slow end of Feudalism, the birth of the “early modern age,” at the turn of the Renaissance, and the beginning of the exploration age and the beginning of absolute monarchies in Europe—he assumed that you would be familiar with the bare-bones of World and Western History.

Absolute monarchs believed that they owned their political powers to divine appointment rather than to common people wishes.

Become familiar with the meaning and significance of vernaculars, class differentiation and religious rivalries in Europe, the end of the “sacred imagined community,” and what he termed as “unselfconscious” processes (I will ask about this in class).

In the Fourth Chapter, Anderson tried hard to explain that not everything of importance in World History has happened only in Europe (in the 1991’s Preface he mentioned how horrified he was to notice how most people in Europe had ignored this chapter when he published it first in 1983, so in 1991 he renamed it as such: “Creole Pioneers,” to make greater impact). It were the Creoles, American-born Spanish and British descendents, which first created modern nations. Why and how come? These are the two most important questions he tried to answer in this chapter, and by doing so, he gave the reader a crash-course in comparative colonial history of the Americas (Spanish and British Colonial Americas).

As you read this chapter, keep in mind the differences and similarities of both histories (south and north), and how the issue of race, and distance (separation of the Atlantic, for example), made such an impact in creating a new group, which could be seen as a class and as an ethnic group: The Creoles. Take into account, also, how the late Bourbon administration in Spain, an enlightened monarchy, tried to make the empire more efficient and by doing so it pushed the American Creoles aside and helped create a sense of nationalism in colonial Latin America—which is somehow similar to what happened in British America (try noticing the way Anderson belittled the Spanish Empire).

Come prepare to class to discuss these issues, to produce your own questions and answer new ones.

The Case for a Green and Global Caribbean History

2009-08-20T18:10:00.010-04:00

We should consider studying Caribbean History from an environmental and global perspective because the region is just part of a whole, and only as such could we make better sense of it. Should a student attempt to study a relatively “short” history, say about 500 years, of any given region without first firmly being acquainted with the histo ry of the world, such student will invariably develop a terribly incomplete and unclearview of that region’s past.

This is so because neither history happens nor it is understood in a vacuum. The Caribbean owes its existence, its names and its history to what happened before “written history” (prior to 1400s) and to what happened around the world afterward as much as what happened in the Caribbean itself. In other words, it is part of a milieu (context); what environmentalists would call a “historical ecosystem.”

When the word “Caribbean” is invoked, images of sugar, slavery, pirates, and tourism would come to most people’s minds. But, even while these terms fail miserably to encompass the wholeness of the region, either past or present, they are in every sense the product of global forces interacting in the region. So, the specific makes sense solely within the broad, and the general only adds up with the particular.

Sugar became the foremost cash-crop in the Caribbean not because people there wanted to consume excesses of it. In fact, it had little to do with the wishes of the locals and lots with the intentions of the colonial masters. Even though the sugar cane was first cultivated in India many centuries ago the Europeans found it most convenient to plant it in their nearest tropics to satiate their growing sweet addiction. Indeed, a scandalously close look at the production of sugar in the Caribbean reveals the foreignness of its industry, and yet, its impact in the region is literally immeasurable.

Enslaved Africans too arrived in the Caribbean by and large as a result of Europeans’ commercial convenience. They were neither looking forward to the “middle-passage” as a recreational trip nor were they happy at the sight of the islands’ shorelines. European merchants, instead of creating slaving plantations in Africa, where well-armed natives firmly controlled the land, found it easier to ship slaves to the Caribbean, which they controlled (against the Native Americans’ will, of course).

It is true that pirates in the Caribbean were named Buccaneers because they learned to cook meat from locals. This in itself may flaunt them as the personification of Caribbeanness. Then again, they were actually foreign- born who had come to the region with a foreign requisition on behalf of a global task. Yes, they turned up in the Caribbean chiefly to help destroy the mighty Spanish Empire at its weakest spot. And since they had been, as a rule, disinherited individuals in Europe they had no better place

to make a name for themselves. Therefore, in a twist of irony, European social and imperial histories would certainly help understand pirates in the Caribbean.

Similarly, tourism in the Caribbean has become the most important industry in the region, but not because the people there are innately servile and had nothing better to do. It has been, instead, in large measure because the unstoppable economic forces from the industrialized world. Their push has help determined these places as the most suitable for “first-world” countries’ overworked middle-class to once a year let off steam. So, the extremely popular Caribbean tourism owes its success to its pristine beaches as much as it does to the economics shaping the labor history of the industrialized West.

Perhaps no influence on the Caribbean has been more significant than simply its natural milieu and the way humans have related to it, in other words, its geography and environment. The powerful and dry trade winds, which initially seek out the arctic flowing from the South Atlantic, are soon thrust toward the Caribbean islands by the blustery weather of the Sahara Desert streaming west. The sandy currents pierce the Caribbean archipelago from the bottom to enter the Mexican Gulf where it heats even more. It then exits warm and gasping for the North Atlantic, squirting through the Florida Straits at 2-5 knots. At this speed it squeezes out from between the coast of Florida and the island of the Bahamas, as an uncontainable monster, swiping first through the Havana harbor, and producing one of the world’s greatest ocean currents, namely, the Gulf Stream.

This powerful stream, which has for many centuries warmed the otherwise cold Europe, had also pushed back frustrated European sailors from reaching the Americas. No wonder lost fishermen and daring sailors prior to 1492 never returned. It took a brainy yet holy fool like Christopher Columbus to find out about the foyer which the Saharan breeze unlocks a few hundred miles south of Europe. As he suspected it, after reaching the Canary Islands the wind flowing west irremediably drove Columbus four times towards the Caribbean islands.

It must have felt like a modern highway in a Ferrari. But for those attempting an entrance through the north, it was not until the 1600s, when the European navigational technology could face against the challenge of the ocean winds that Europeans would attempt to cross the North Atlantic. It was then, more than a century after Columbus, that northern Europeans began colonizing the American northern hemisphere—what today is the United States and Canada. So, the Caribbean opened up the European experiment in the Americas thanks, but no thanks, to its environment and the way people related to it.

And now, I will make perhaps a controversial argument. Global History as it is commonly presented in popular university courses is already obsolete. This is so neither because the traditional White men of history are irrelevant, nor because women and other ethnicities are not being included in the global narrative. They are, sometimes. Instead, it is because the more we learn about science and nature the more we learn about how human history is ultimately shaped by the interaction with the environment. Up to just recently, history courses overlooked this cardinal point. We should attempt to correct the flaw by addressing the subject of global natural history from the outset.

As important as world history, the history of the Caribbean is also vital to understand the histories of the Atlantic, North America, Africa, Europe and Latin America. These groups of islands and the continental shores that embrace these waters have been enormously influential in most historical developments concerning the four continents around the Atlantic Ocean. The people who have inhabited the Caribbean have been affected and have affected profoundly the events in Latin America, North American, Europe and Africa. So, the study of Caribbean History would help us learn more about ourselves and others in reference to global history as well as to the present.

The 88 and David Minge

2009-07-02T00:17:00.008-04:00

In 1825 David Minge (“meengee”), who must have been about 17 years-old, took all the way to Baltimore. That was some trip if you

consider that he had to get on a comfortless carriage in his Virginian North Bend plantation, cross through swampy Charles City to get to Richmond, and travel to Charlottesville, and then Manassas on very bumpy roads, to perform next a last leap over several miles of Maryland small farms and spots of wilderness before finally arriving to Baltimore. The harbor was not as attractive as it is today, but the city was almost as livable as Richmond, which he was very familiar with. So, why would he have wanted to journey all the way to Baltimore?

David was a teenager with lots of power now. He had just earned a degree from the College of William and Mary, the most reputable university in the South. David was healthy and strong—he was going to live a full life of 76 years—and was handsome and well spoken. David ancestors had been eating well since they arrived in Virginia from Wales in the 17^th Century, and were well connected with the southern high society. To anybody in t

he street he would have looked like a privileged gentry’s male in his prime, a bit humble, but well-dressed and refined, with a charming southern accent. What a catch. But he did not come to Baltimore seeking a bride nor was he looking to the liberal north for a casual tryst.

Though it was obvious from the distance that David was not like your average White male, his charm and bearing were the least of the surprises for the Anti-Slavery radical Benjamin Lundy, who a few years before had come himself all the way from Ohio to Baltimore to broaden the reach of his diehard activist paper, “The Genius of Universal Emancipation.” There was something else that was going to splash on Lundy’s face like fresh water on a desert.

David had just inherited 90 slaves in addition to lots of cultivated land in arguably the best location in Virginia: The Tidewater, where the nutrient-filled water of the James River makes a broad opening toward the sea. It was the perfect location for plantations because the land was fertile enough to plant practically anything. It was at Richmond’s waterway entrance to the ocean and thus could move along cash-crops to virtually any place in the long chain of Atlantic trade networks.

And the Tidewater region was the perfect place for plantations that depended on slave labor because there were no mountains, caverns or hiding place, but small swampy dots easily enclosed by headhunters. It was also near to one of the least cosmopolitan and most conservative cities of the union, Richmond. Whites from all social classes were engaged in imposing the social order based on race differentiation. In other words, with nowhere to escape, the enslaved had to submit or find other less intimidating forms to resist the system.

David could be cocky, then. His future could be as one of his ancestors who had served in the House of Burgesses, state assemblies, and in the Federal Government. But he came to Baltimore not to talk with commercial agents or bankers, but to visit Lundy’s unrem

arkable office, from where his paper emanated like today’s current online blogs—yes, Lundy was like an activist blogger. The question still stands: what would this young fortunate man wanted to do in Baltimore?

He had come all the way from the South to liberate the enslaved Blacks he had just inherited. Why would he do that? In what manner was he going to free them? What were the repercussions of his act?

The Great Divide: The first steps in the fabrication of the Eurocentric “me” and the non-White “other.”

2009-06-28T17:11:00.010-04:00

It was during the third decade of the 16^th century, in the midst of the European Renaissance and of the religious Schism, which non-Catholics prefer to call The Protestant Reformation. Leo Africanus, a man that toddled the worlds of the Christian West and Africa, who was between Christianity and the Islam, published then the first modern ethnographic work about Africa. Since he knew both Europe and Africa well, and had been both Christian and Muslim, he could interpret both universes fairly well. In his effort to “explain” Africa to the European mind he emphasized the similarities: how both were not that different (though some critics have correctly made him responsible of helping in "creating" the false concept of "Africa" as a particular place).

But as the European world expanded beyond its original physical borders, and Europeans saw themselves masters of the rest, they found Africanus's description of the African person insufficiently disparate. There should be more striking differences between the Christian and the Muslim, between the civilized European and the barbaric African. The African and the European, no matter how pale the former would be, should be fundamentally distinct, different in kind, and altogether entirely dissimilar. Otherwise, how could you justify the swelling number of slaves being transported from Africa to the Americas, and some even taking residence as subservient individuals in marginal sectors of European cities? How can you call yourself a "master of equals"? That title did not ring attractive. Enter the Spanish adventurer and writer, Luis del Mármol Carvajal, with a revised edition of the Description of Africa. The first part came out in 1673 (BTW, there is no entry for Mármol in the English Wikipedia as of today).

Differently from Africanus, Mármol stressed the differences between the African, who is more African as he becomes darker, and the European, who is more European as he is more refined, Christian, and of course, lighter. In a recent article Mar Martínez Góngora tells us that Mármol helped initiate the imperialistic discourse, which Edward Said studied, that consisted in circulating a series of knowledges, real and imaginary, about the “Orient.” In other words, this is arguably our first Orientalist. I am not going to spoil the reading of this article, just to encourage you to read it. It is in Spanish, though, but a very readable one. Let me know if you would like a copy.

Mar Martínez Góngora, “El Discurso Africanista del Renacimiento en La primera parte de la descripción general de África de Luis del Mármol Carvajal,” Hispanic Review (spring 2009): 171-189.

Haiti’s Environment and Social Justice

2009-06-03T02:47:00.007-04:00

Haiti presents us with a complicated environmental and social justice problem. Columbus marveled because of its slush and green, but as many popular films and books are displaying, brown has been replacing the green lately.

Though it is true that French colonialism exploited its agriculture as no other colonial power did in the Western Hemisphere, the intense harvesting of trees for lumber export after independence and the essential usage of domestic charcoal have been the main reasons for its depleted forests. With little industrial base Haiti had relied heavily on its woods for everything, starting with family residences, institutional buildings, to badly needed woods for export.

Unfortunately, with a chronically exhausted central government, Haiti had not been able to follow any meaningful conservation or replanting policies. And international interventions have not helped much either. Whereas the United States occupation in neighboring Dominican Republic helped spark interest in Dominican nature conservation (one of the few positive effects it had), the U.S. occupation of Haiti did exactly the opposite. Later international intrusions like the one that wiped out the Haitian Pig population (pay attention to a similar case in Egypt and the Coptic Pigs) followed the same pattern of worsening of the peasant condition and thus of the forest conservation: the poorer the peasantry is, the poorer the forests are.

Haitian history is also differently from most other histories in the sense that the Haitian peasantry successfully resisted (to a large extent) the seizing of their lands from large Hacendados (the elite resorted to other means for exploitation). Pétion began land redistribution, and Boyer continued it. So, one legacy from the Revolution that has persisted has been the image of the peasant with its own plot of land, which explains why Haiti did not have to go through the same profound land-reforms that other Latin American nations experienced.

But these little plots of lands have had to be split in even smaller pieces as families grew. Moreover, with a governing class unconcerned with the peasantry (watch the Agronomist), the growing population had no other place to go, but to the city slums, while the peasant only had its plot to rely upon. The fierce grasp peasants had on their land made it even more difficult for any government to practice conservation. That the peasant relies only on its land, make our cause for action even more desperate: this is an endangered species, namely, peasants owning their own land, but losing it to environmental degradation.

Currently the lack of enough trees in Haiti is not simply affecting the current peasant economy, but it is washing away the top soil, which is essential for any type of future agriculture and sustainable ecosystem. This means that our inaction not only is affecting the people there today, but will affect the people there tomorrow. We need to help restore the forests, help create the type of conditions in which trees could survive on Haitian soil, and peasants could continue living off their land without being exploited. I feel compel to save one of the few remnants of the Haitian Revolution as well as helping prevent mass emigrations and environmental refugees.

Like most problems in the world, the Haitian environmental degradation stemmed from a combination of external and internal forces. The same type of arrangement has to bring the solution. Haitians and non-Haitians have to work in collaboration to bring an end to the environmental chaos that exists there today. But there are plenty organizations that work on Haiti, sometimes even in opposition. That is why I urge you to support an organization that its main objective is to help save the Haitian environment in cooperation with other institutions, and not in isolation.

Please, consider giving and getting involved with this organization: Reforest Haiti

Jean Pierre Boyer

2009-06-02T19:51:00.010-04:00

This is the first draft of a piece on the Haitian President Jean Pierre Boyer. As such, it is still in pre-publication state, and should not be cited. I welcome, however, feedback and constructive cricicism in order to improve it. Dennis R. Hidalgo

Jean-Pierre Boyer (February 28, 1776- July 9, 1850), the longest serving head of state in Haiti, was President from 1818 to 1843. Boyer personified the Creole liberal politics of the affranchis, better known as free persons of color or mulattoes, whose republican rhetoric concealed a wariness of the masses. His ascension to the presidency stands out as one of those rare moments on the island’s history when transition to power did not result from bloody insurrection. The international community admired Boyer for his diplomacy while the majority of Haitians endured his imposing, but erratic grip. He exerted influence beyond Haiti by attempting to secure the ambiguous legacy of the Revolution. This was a hostile time for the first independent black nation, a time when every single Caribbean colony, particularly the neighboring Puerto Rico, Cuba, and even the southern United States were still thriving enslaving societies. Initially, Boyer appeared to preside over a politically stable country. He averted impending foreign intervention, attracted a measure of international recognition, and experimented with modernizing social programs. However, his career deteriorated as his regime sustained a number of natural disasters, political setbacks, and economic downturns. As a result he grew insular and authoritarian. Ultimately, Boyer’s most notable accomplishments, the French recognition and the integration of the Spanish side, helped drive his administration to the ground. His own political class later found him insufferable, and through Charles Rivière-Hérard, deposed him on March 13, 1843. Disempowered, Boyer escaped to Jamaica and from there into exile in France where he remained until his death in 1850. He left a country in debt and with the promise of the Revolution unfulfilled.

Born in Port-au-Prince, Boyer was the son of a Congolese woman and a mulatto tradesman. Like with many young mulattoes, his parents sent him to military school in France, and at sixteen, enticed by the Revolution, he enlisted in the Republican Army. Two years later he joined Jacobin Léger-Félicité Sonthonax and Saint-Dominguan mulatto André Rigaud in their efforts to export radicalism to Saint-Domingue. Across the ocean they met with a colony transformed by the Revolution in a conflict where blacks struggled to preserve their independence from mulattoes, royalists and foreign empires alike. After defeat in the 1799 War of the Knives, when the mulatto army lost decisively to Toussaint Louverture in Jacmel, Boyer left for France. His ship, however, arrived in the United States instead, seized because of a brief French-American diplomatic dispute. During his short stay in the U.S., Quakers and Masons offered him hospitality after learning about the Masonic regalia he carried. But, although he gave his Americans counterparts a favorable impression, U.S. racism left Boyer humiliated. He will later remember this sojourn somehow bitterly.

From Paris, Boyer enlisted in yet another Saint-Dominguean military venture. It was 1801, and Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother-in-law, Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc led it. Bonaparte had turned his attention to Louverture’s virtual independence, and Boyer embarked hoping that this time the French would recognize mulatto privileges. A year later, with Louverture captured, but with Bonaparte’s anti-revolutionary plans exposed, Boyer did the unthinkable. Together with other mulatto officers who had learned of the French duplicity, he joined the black resistance now led by Jean Jacques Dessalines. In 1804, Boyer partook of the abolition of both slavery and colonial rule, even though his most pressing aspirations had been mulatto interests. Dessalines’ 1806 assassination split the country alongside the color line. The black general Henri Christophe now ruled the north while in the south the mulatto Alexandre Sabès Pétion led a rival state. Christophe evolved into King Henri I, and Pétion into the President of the impoverished Haitian Republic. With little control over these events Boyer stayed at his friend Pétión’s side.

In 1818, hot in the heels of Pétion’s heartrending funeral, senators duly certified Boyer as the succeeding president. Boyer was genuinely concerned with the specter of a French invasion, and accurately recognized the Spanish side as the island most vulnerable part. He quickly began forging secret alliances with generals in the northern kingdom, and businesses in the eastern Spanish colony. His first opportunity for expansion came in 1820, after Christophe’s death. Boyer’s supporters inside the crumbling kingdom summoned him and he easily filled the political vacuum that Christophe had left in the northern capital of Cap-Haïtien.

Not two years had passed when Boyer again expanded. In November 1821, José Núñez de Cáceres had led the Spanish Creole elite to independence from Spain. They called their new nation “Independent State of Spanish Haiti.” The elite, however, had little influence beyond Santo Domingo. The “Haitian Party,” which were Dominicans who had been in contact with Boyer, requested annexation to Haiti, and ultimately carried the day. Boyer preempted his entry into Dominican territory with a deliberately tactful letter and arrived in Santo Domingo with a powerful show of force. In February 1822, city officials not only opened the doors to Boyer, but led in the transferring of power ceremony. Days after taking control, Boyer thwarted French filibusters off the coast of the northeastern peninsula of Samaná, justifying in this way the obligation of his occupation. It did not take long for the insecure Spanish and French elites to emigrate and leave its land behind. In just a few years Boyer had reached the apex of his political life. In both expansions he had managed to cross his army through otherwise unfriendly borders without military conflicts and conspicuous looting. This marked a contrast to previous raucous Haitian expansions.

Legend affirms that in 1818 while in deathbed, Pétion had warned General Joseph Inginac of Boyer’s latent ambitions. After Pétion’s death, however, the equable general still sided with the new president. In fact, Inginac proved as faithful to Boyer, as Boyer had been to Pétion— but longer. Whereas Boyer served Pétion from 1806 to 1818, Inginac was inseparable from Boyer from the start until his overthrown in 1843. Inginac left his marks of erudition in most, if not in all of the new president’s correspondence and writing. After years of debilitating civil war, Boyer had come to embody Haitians hopes of harmony and prosperity. This shows how much Boyer had inherited and learned from Pétion. He watched while in 1816 Pétión assisted Simón Bolivar and prodded him against slavery. Like his tutor, Boyer quickly discovered the convenience of being a President-for-Life rather than a King, as oppose to Christophe, his rival to the north. Like Pétion, Boyer quickly snubbed the idea of a truly but weak democratic president. Instead, like Pétion, Boyer distributed land to win the hearts of the people.

In 1822, shortly after becoming the master of the entire island of Hispaniola Boyer launched his modernization project. He aimed to consolidate the gains of the revolution and to cast Haiti to the world as a genuine modern nation. He performed surgical land distributions designed to increase both political approval and agricultural production. He tried to navigate an imaginary middle between allotting land for commercial cultivation and subsistence agriculture. He eliminated slavery on the east and faced off against the Church. The number of Spanish slaves had never been as high as those of the French in Saint-Domingue, but the mere existence of slavery on the island threatened Haiti’s existence. Boyer was not alone on his stand against the Church. Liberals throughout the hemisphere also viewed its extensive holdings, hefty salaries and cultural monopoly, as the main obstacles toward reengineering modern society. With an unprecedented amount of land and political capital Boyer then consolidated power and redistributed land among his soldiers and peasants. In 1824 he even sent Jonathas Granville to the U.S. to negotiate the immigration of thousands of free blacks whom he then resettled throughout the island.

The last yet most important French offensive came in 1825. Former masters arrived exacting profits lost to the revolution. With warships bullying Haitian ports, Boyer bowed down, and accepted the colossal indemnity of 150 million francs for trading rights and official recognition. The deal opened the doors to Haitian products in France, which had yet to find eager legal buyers on the international market. Boyer’s hope was that with a loyal, happier, and more productive population at home, Haiti would finally spring out of poverty and oblivion. And in fact, with the treaty Boyer lifted forever the French menace, but left the nation scrambling for money to pay the debt. Boyer’s plan for revenue was also his most important legal contribution. In 1826 the Senate approved Boyer’s Rural Code, which was to transform the Haitian economy into a modern industrial agricultural society. Though abolitionists abroad hailed it as an example of Haitian ingenuity, in reality the code was a sort of liberal serfdom. It outlawed vagrancy and allowed certain level of subsistence agriculture, but the emphasis was on keeping peasants tied to the land. The objective was to produce great quantities of cash crop for exportation.

Unforeseen circumstances took Boyer’s plans in the opposite direction when Haitian and Dominican peasants appreciated the redistribution of land, but rejected his enthusiasm for commercial agriculture. The army, which was supposed to police peasants, readily admitted failure, and retired, like the rest, to tend their plot of land instead. Production of coffee, cacao, sugar and tobacco for export plunged severely hurting the government’s coffers. Only lumber continued its exporting frenzy curtailing dramatically the number of forests even while Boyer’s government decried it. While the peasantry became the vast anti-modern sector, the commercial urban class prospered with its new trade freedom, and through a money-less economy. Tax policies meant to exploit a large agricultural production that never happened, quickly trickled down to the peasantry, which sought in turn increasing isolation from government as well as from the middling groups. The commercial class, particularly the Dominicans, presented Boyer with its most difficult opposition. They opposed sharing the French debt and his increasing authoritarian measures. Additionally, Boyer’s diplomatic efforts yielded only minor achievements, leaving him without the international validation and trade contracts he desperately needed to stabilize his government. Under these circumstances the French debt became such an unsettling burden that Boyer and many of his successors spent their tenures trying unsuccessfully to tackle it.

Political upheaval followed discontent toward the French debt and Rural Code. The mood was such that in 1830 Boyer prohibited political meetings to safeguard his damaged authority. That same year a drought curtailed the nation’s agricultural production limiting even further the government’s ability to manage public works. Mounting disappointment with Boyer’s regime brewed, but without public venues the opposition submerged and fragmented. It was not until 1838 when the first significant conspiracies developed. Juan Pablo Duarte led the Dominican bourgeois opposition and helped create the secret society La Trinitaria. Haitian liberals formed The Society for the Rights of Man and Citizen. The insurgents organized, educated and waited for the most opportune moment to strike. The opening came in 1842 when a devastating earthquake shocked the entire island and revealed the extent of Boyer’s crippled and unresponsive government. Because of isolation and the government’s inability to assist those that the earthquake have dislodged, common people perceived Boyer as cruel. In January 1843 the conspirators declared against the regime, and southern peasants supported the coup by denying food to soldiers. Without a functional army, Boyer fled the country on March 13 aboard a British schooner. A year later Dominicans declared independence and create the Dominican Republic. After 25 years of leading Haiti through most of its post-revolutionary period, Boyer spent his last days in France, the same country that facilitated his political demise.

Select Bibliography

Coupeau, Steeve. The history of Haiti. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2008.

Dubois, Laurent. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Harvard University Press, 2005.

Nicholls, David. From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race Colour, and National Independence in Haiti. Rutgers University Press; Revised edition, 1995)

Pons, Frank M. History of the Caribbean: Plantations, Trade, and War in the Atlantic World. Markus Wiener Publishers, 2007.

The Hidalgo Family Celebrates Earth/Arbor Day in Blacksburg, VA

2009-04-23T14:35:00.030-04:00

Just today a friend asked me why, considering the controversy around the politics of the environment and the few but loud dissenting voices about climate change, I celebrated the arbor and earth day with my family. In short, I told him that the way I thought about history compelled me to do it, and that if I was to err I would err on the side of precaution.

To use Logic and reason rather than emotion and tradition is what we try to teach our kids. This is the same lesson that my colleagues and I try to impart when we challenge students to study the past through critical analysis, instead of habitual ways of interpreting history. Applying the same thought processes to present times should be so simple choice as to require no further thought. And yet, it is not that easy to view our lives as historical because we are frequently caught in the same web of daily contingencies as the people from the past were.

We indeed live in a historical age, as every other individual in history has lived, and taking responsibility for our actions today is in a way applying logic and reason over emotion and tradition. In scholarly jargon this is akin to the awareness of personal agency. And as students of the past we are certain that our shifting relationship with nature has always had consequences.

We study the long term effect of human actions, and understand that often historical individuals do not realize how their behavior may translate into reverberations for generations to come. But we have no excuse now: because of the long view that history affords us we do notice the cost.

The logic is that even if we did not know the future in its fullest extent we can still figure out its probabilities. If we play with fire we run the risk of getting burned. Reason, the same analytical tool we ask our students to employ, requires us to weigh our prospects carefully.

The scientific community has reached a rare consensus about the human causes of global warming—a consensus that could easily leave other disciplines green with envy. Historians, for example, have not even reached a consensus on fundamentals like the origins of modern racism, and the impact of modernity.

This is not to say that the green consensus is uniform. Most scientists are scholars, and as scholars we tend to perceive the world in complex ways. We are likely to appreciate ideas as in transition and could definitely hold opposing views. Thus, not all of the scientists that have thrown their lot with the green community necessarily think like Al Gore.

Yet, that most scientists admit that the changes in climate and the environment that we are starting to witness are largely our responsibility should move us to action, not because they are unquestionably correct, but because they may just be right.

Scientists have erred before. There was broad scientific consensus on the biological formation of races, and similar support for eugenics. Indeed, most late nineteenth century scientists believed that geography determined race and social temper.

This racialism helped them explain why races living in the southern hemisphere appeared inferior and uncivilized. These premises resulted in large part because of poor empiricism and cultural myopia. They also suspiciously collaborated with Western imperial longings of domination and preservation of the status quo. But it was the scientific practice of unrelenting skepticism in sync with political activism that successfully challenged them.

The scientific community today, however, is not advocating conservatism. In fact, climate-change scientists are launching a frontal assault on the status quo, and reformists, taking their cue from them, are again on the streets holding everyone accountable.

The underlying message resonates with that of the 19th Century abolitionists. They asked their audiences to recognize how the consumption of sugar and cotton related to slavery. Today environmentalists and social justice activists continue to draw attention to seemingly indiscernible links that may also render our society immoral. For example, they say, New Englanders should know that Colombian coal, from one of the most hazardous open pits in the world, fuels their electricity. In other words, you may not know the origins of what you consume, but that ignorance is dearly expensive and cumulative.

That we have chosen to celebrate Earth Day by planting trees and by appropriating measures that will gradually decrease our carbon footprint, should not be seen as illogical fanaticism. It is, actually, the most reasonable course of action: it would be totally reckless to have seen the possibility of disaster and not have done anything about it. If by any chance it happens that our modern way of living turns out to be harmless, and that the green community’s suggestions for change were unnecessary, nobody is hurt, and nothing terrible would have come from this movement for change. What we would have, regardless, is a more politically and socially aware community.

Syncretism and the Day of the Dead

2008-10-28T07:53:00.003-04:00

My brave Virginia Tech students in my undergraduate class, United States in Latin America, are visiting an exhibition about the Mexican Day of the Dead. They are reading Stanley Brandes’ article, “Iconography in Mexico's Day of the Dead: Origins and Meaning.” The following is the introduction to the discussion forum in which they will argue about the meaning of syncretism, history and the Day of the Dead prior to visiting the exhibition.

There is no subject that escapes the scrutiny of a fine historian. Our audiences demand that we challenge ourselves by constantly learning something new in order to provide a healthier understanding of history. While other academicians and professionals focus on their particular narrow area of specialization, that being microbiology or sociology, as historians we have to consider the broadest ranges of human activities in order to make better sense of the past. So, for us history is not simply about wars, constitutions and nations. It is actually an ongoing effort that requires that we sink our noses in a sensational array of topics. No wonder there are a so many subfields in history, and our History Department sports historians of the environment as well as historians of gender and politics.

The topic of syncretism, which at first instance may seem alien to history, falls by necessity on the laps of historians concerned with issues of religion, society and colonialism. These historians are usually called Cultural Historians. By studying and learning about the Day of the Dead (Día de los Muertos), we learn, like them, not just about the history of religion in Mexico, but about the history of social classes, folklore and imperialism/colonialism as well. Thus, a historian may also be a sociologist, a theologian, a folklorist and an expert in imperialism.

Syncretism is a term with a sinister past. It was meant to denigrate and cast non-European forms of religiosities as impure. Its origins came from attempts of European colonial powers and their religious institutions (i.e., Catholic Orders, and Protestant Churches) to keep their religions unpolluted at the time of contact with other cultural groups in the Americas, Africa and Asia. The idea was that as they advanced into native civilizations with the objective of conquering them, materially and spiritually speaking, the European religion that the conquered natives would adopt was to be the “pure” one, and not one that resembled a blend of indigenous and European religiosities.

Thus, the term syncretism meant whatever religiosity or religious practices that looked as a middle ground between Christianity and native religions; one that in the eyes of European observers lacked a cohesive dogma and thus was contaminated and convoluted. Therefore, the Western religious establishment has historically seen the Vodou, Santería and even the Day of the Dead as subversive religiosities because they have challenged the supremacy of the conquerors, and thus their worldview. It should not surprise us that most people in our Western culture would look at exhibitions like the one we are visiting as glamorous while yet bizarre, and keep them at arm’s length.

If you examine the history of the term syncretism critically you may notice its similarities to the European concept of race that operated around the notion that the “White” race was the premier standard from which other races were to be measured. Keep in mind that even though I use here the term race, I assume that we all understand that race is an invention and thus a false representation of humanity: there is no race, but the human race.

Indeed, the idea of a “White” race did not come into being until the Europeans thought the need to differentiate themselves from other non-European people, and in the process they found commonalities among themselves that they did not see before. They were willing to renegotiate all rivalries and reshaped their own identity at the time of expansion. In other words, by perceiving the African as a slave and the Indians as inferior, the French realized that it was better for them to think of themselves as part of a racial elite group that would even include their old German nemesis than to think of themselves as anywhere close to those they were conquering.

And thus, in the face of a new other, the notion of a European that was pure “White” surprisingly remodeled what it meant to be European. Other groups, meanwhile, were impure races, particularly those that came from miscegenation, which is a term that as with syncretism it assumes incorrectly that there is a pure model, either of race or religion that serve as the standard.

Differently from race, the term syncretism today is generally free from its historical negativity. Scholars use it in other contexts beside religion to convey the idea of an ongoing construction of culture and society. For example, in the macroeconomic world of ideas the Keynesian Economics is a syncretic cross of capitalism and socialism, which blends government intervention with free enterprise (which John Maynard Keynes suggested in the 1920s and this year’s economic Nobel winner, Paul Krugman, continues to advance).

Syncretism serves also to explain how a culture adopts from other cultures in the constant process of remaking itself. This is what happens when words from other languages come into a new one the language is a syncretic product because at first these new words are not readily accepted. Words from the French to the English language like déjà vu, or from the English to the Spanish like fax, are examples of this syncretism. And when dishes from other cuisines enter the landscape of our own cuisine, it becomes a syncretic cuisine, one that is exotic by nature, and thus, subversive and even devilishly exquisite.

No matter the context in which it is used, however, syncretism always conveys the idea of a change going against the norm, of being in opposition to the status quo or the powers-to-be. Thus, syncretism is the way in which people commonly thought to be without power do indeed make change happen, particularly in the area of religion and culture. It is also the space in which diverse people express and manifest their particular form of resistance to oppression. And it is through these lenses, the perspectives of those who are struggling to make ends meet and survive, which we should appreciate exhibitions like the Day of the Dead.

Hidalgo’s Doctrine of learning: my first comments coming from Virginia Tech

2008-10-21T11:25:00.009-04:00

While much like any other quality institution of "higher learning," at Virginia Tech I am facing a set of (relatively) new classroom challenges, which have compelled me to re-examine and sharpen the way I think about scholarship, society and teaching.

As pointed out through other mediums, there is here a culture of loyalty, which occasionally borders on conceit, mingled with a cautious yearning for learning. The student body, however, while pleasant and often willing to listen and study, is decidedly more parochial and conservative than in other institutions I have been.

Some of the most traditionalists in my undergraduate class have found me challenging. What has been most difficult for them to wrestle with has been apparently not so much the number of pages to read or assignments to write, but my persistent criticism of a history and illusion of reality that they hold dear.

I do not consider myself judgmental or unsympathetic, and I do not see negativity as a problem with my teaching persona. Instead, what seems to dislocate students is what they see as an unrelenting deconstruction of reality, which at first they think it is just your run-of-the-mill anti-Americanism or plain pessimism.

Thus, I have been thinking of how to project my teaching and whole character in such a way that help them appreciate the value of skepticism without losing faith in humanity and hope for the future. And as I was meditating and trying to simplify my teaching philosophy without cheapening it I came to the most unadorned basis for doing my work:

Every single scholarly inquiry should begin with an intense curiosity fueled by the simple premise that as humans we are physically and rationally fragile, and thus, in a constant process of learning and reevaluating what we think we know.

Juan Pablo Duarte-- A Life

2008-07-15T17:30:00.006-04:00

This is the second draft. From about 1500 words, reduced to strictly 500. Your judicious and well-meant feedback is still appreciated.

Juan Pablo Duarte y Díez was the ideological architect of the Dominican Republic. A visionary, Duarte insisted on autonomy from imperial powers, and today Dominican governments revered his legacy.

Duarte was born in January 26, 1813, in Santo Domingo during the period of España Boba. In 1821, he witnessed the colonial elite’s bloodless independence, which was soon reversed yet by a bloodless Haitian takeover in 1822 under Jean-Pierre Boyer. An uncertain yet crucial portion of the population preferred Haitian rule over the urban elites’. For its part, Haiti sought to protect its historic revolution from predatory imperial powers by ruling both sides of the island.

In 1828, Duarte left for a five-year education abroad, visiting New York, witnessing the 1830 July Revolution in France, and witnessing the effects of industrialization. He learned both liberal and Carlist dogmas, and embraced nationalism to be in effect modern. He returned to his family’s Santo Domingo business in 1833 to find that Boyer’s liberal republic had become a dictatorship. The 1830s were Duarte’s formative years as he translated Western classic works into Spanish, and developed a class consciousness linked to the bourgeoisie in Santo Domingo. His economic complains added to the frustration over limited political participation for the emergent Dominican artisan and merchant classes.

On July 16, 1838, Duarte, with the help of Ramón Mella, and Francisco del Rosario Sánchez, initiated La Trinitaria’s first meeting, a secret society similar to freemasons intending to promote nationalism. By creating a nation-building doctrine free of obvert racist tenets, Duarte was unique among creole elites that championed more racialist projects in nineteenth-century Latin America. The Trinitarios plotted with Haitian activists from La Reforme against Boyer. In 1840, Duarte and his young colleagues formed a new society, La Filantrópica, to market liberal ideals through public theater. Finally, in 1843, Haitian liberal leader, Charles Herard, took power after overthrowing Boyer, but the Trinitarios failed to gain control of Santo Domingo during the commotion. Duarte escaped for Curaçao, Sanchez disappeared, and Mella was arrested. Herard then sought in earnest the support of the Spanish-speaking elites. Yet, in February 27, 1844, the Trinitarios led a successful takeover of Santo Domingo, and Duarte soon came to receive a hero’s welcome in the streets of Santo Domingo.

Although Duarte accepted a position in the new governing board, and was soon declared President by impatient Trinitarios in Santiago, his political fortunes began to decline after the summer of 1844. Santana, a strong-man of doubtful mental health, wrestled power from the Trinitarios with the help of the conservative elite. Duarte left for exile again, and it was not until the war of Restoration in 1864 that he returned to help Dominicans fight a renewed Spanish colonialism. The provisional Dominican government at this time asked him to shore up foreign support for the new republic. Afterward, Duarte stayed in Caracas working on a candle factory, until his death in July 15, 1876. Soon after, President Ulises Heureaux (Lilís) declared him a founding father, and transported his remains to the Homeland Altar in Santo Domingo, alongside to Sánchez and Mella’s.

Bibliography.

Cassá, Roberto. Juan Pablo Duarte: el padre de la patria. Santo Domingo: Tobogan, 2002.

Duarte, Juan Pablo. Juan Pablo Duarte, escritos. Editor, Lebrón Saviñón, Mariano. Santo Domingo, R.D.: Instituto Duartiano, 1997.

Moya Pons, Frank. The Dominican Republic: a national history. Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1998.

Racial Identity and History

2008-07-09T21:38:00.003-04:00

Identity, either personal or collective, is a complicated and knotty issue that despite its elusiveness, it permeates every aspect of human life. Unfortunately, in cultural studies, (i.e., Latin America) "national identity" is almost passé, and in current U.S.A. political arena this concern has been reduced to the simplifications implied in the term “identity politics.”

However, I believe that identity continues, and will continue for a while, to carry a legitimate intellectual value. This is particularly true with the history of countries, nations, groups, and subcultures. Look, for example, at the potential acumen of this question: How have a group of people, which call themselves a nation, developed a particular racial identity and what are the implications of such specific character? A marvelous question! Isn’t’?

Well, if you apply this question to the Dominican History you may get to open a Pandora Box, or may just yet begin tumbling down the Rabbit’s Hole (The Matrix’s). There are many angles you could begin peeking into: intra-national (among Dominicans and within Dominican historiography), Haitian-Dominicans, and also, late modern imperial. And this last one is what Silvio Torres-Saillant began to study on an article that got published twice. Look at his assertion on how a racial identity could be shaped from the outside:

“…Dominican identity consists not only of how Dominicans see themselves, but also of how they are seen by the powerful nations with which the Dominican Republic has been linked in a relationship of political and economic dependence. It is not inconceivable, for instance that the texture of negrophic and anti-Haitian nationalist discourse sponsored by official spokespersons in the Dominican state drew significantly on North American sources dating back to the first years of the republic.” [Silvio Torres-Saillant, “The Tribulations of Blackness: Stages in Dominican Racial Identity,” Source: Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 25, No. 3, Race and National Identity in the Americas, (May, 1998), pp. 126-146]

Silvio’s claim comes in the heels of a growing awareness that 19th Century Dominicans did not seek separation from Haiti or develop hatred against Haitians because of the color of their skin. In fact, the sense among Dominicans that they were different from Haitians came more out of economic interest, politics, and lastly, culture (language, religion and other elements of culture). This, of course, goes against the traditional Dominican historiography, which has demonized Haitians and have set the target of their distinctiveness on being racially different (look for example at Balaguer’s Isla Al Revés). The film, "Nacimiento de una Nacion" is just the continuation of such malignant historical thought.

El Che

2008-06-17T21:45:00.002-04:00

Please, come and watch one of my students' projects. Roma Ramchandani tackled the difficult topic of Che Guevara’s legacy, which is not simply controversial, but plagued with inaccuracies and myth (as shown here). I think we could all learn from her ability to balance sides and multiple opinions, like Walt Whitman wrote “You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.”

US Imperialism Seen from the Spanish Imperial History

2008-06-11T22:00:00.001-04:00

Let me share a few thoughts about U.S. imperialism prompted by the reading of Alberto Moreiras, “Spanish nation formation: An introduction,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, (Vol. 2, No. 1, 2001)

In trying to understand the way that imperial powers have evolved in the past and how they compare with the present globalization it seems as if US hegemony have given way to a new form of imperial rationale, that of the transnational corporations, which appears to bring to an end to the ‘capitalist history as embedded in the rise and expansion of the modern inter-state system’ (Arrighi 1994: 76)” According to Arrighi, ‘it is as if the modern system of rule, having expanded spatially and functionally as far as it could, has nowhere to go but “forward” towards an entirely new system of rule or “backward” towards early modern or even pre-modern forms of state- and war-making’ (1994: 79). Or rather: both. ‘The system seems to be moving “forward” and “backward” at the same time. This double movement has always been a major feature of the modern world system. In our scheme of things, “old regimes” do not just persist [...] rather, they are repeatedly resurrected as soon as the hegemony that has superseded them is in its turn superseded by a new hegemony’ (1994: 79).

"North Country" and Gender Inequalities

2008-04-22T23:53:00.001-04:00

In the Honors’ course, “Race, Class and Gender,” we were reading this week some articles on gender labor inequalities while also watching the film “North Country.” The reading and the film produced some clever commentaries. Allow me to share one of them with you. The student’s name is Jaclyn Bogenseberger, who happens to also be a wonderful lacrosse player:

“I remember that at the end of the movie (or at some other point) we were talking about how this one person could be able to change the mine and all the rest of it. We had sort of a down play to the Josey character. Something was said about how she should have just realized that she was in a world that was not her own and she should have just sucked it up and got used to it because that was the kind of job she was in... a job that was not her own. I had to bite my tongue when we were talking about this because I could have started a huge debate. Do you guys realize that while a movie like this seems almost cliché and somewhat too utopian--- don't you realize that throughout history wild cases like these have been the only way THINGS GET DONE. Think about Little Rock and how segregation in schools was brought down. There was ONE CASE... That took strength from ONE PERSON to make a difference in every school in the country. If we all just 'sucked up our pride and took things for what they were' - NOTHING would ever get done. And that would affect EVERYONE in this classroom. If blacks never stood up against their situation i really don't think ANYTHIGN would have gotten done. If women didn't stand up against NCAA for Title IX I wouldn't be living the life that I am today. I appreciate the courage that people like the Josey character had and have to this day. In ANY situation, I NEVER agree with "just going with it"... I never "swallow my pride"--- that might be the thing that gets me in the most trouble with my family, my boyfriend, my team, and my friends especially, but I don’t believe in laying down against something you don't think is right. If you don't think that something is right, then prove it to those around you that it’s not right and get it changed. I think it’s cowardly to not do so.

Sorry, I had to say my peace lol..

thanks PEACE!”

Crossing Borders: A Comparative Study of the Border Crossing Historiography, U.S. and Mexico, and Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

2008-03-28T19:15:00.008-04:00

The national border between the United States and Mexico shares many characteristics with the Haitian-Dominican border. They both separate countries with startling economic and racial divide, and have a long history of military intervention and violence.

More importantly, they have and continue to have a tradition of transgression and crossing with direct bearing on the national politics and economy. These challenges to the symbolic authority of the border as the defining contours of the nation have so profoundly impacted the development of all these four countries that their histories can be narrated from the perspective of the borders’ memory.

Yet, despite the similarities and their importance far too precious works have drawn any comparisons between these borders, and far fewer works have compared the border-studies (approaches and analyses) used on them. I attempt to bring both historiographical traditions under the microscope and see how both borders have been studied in the past and how are they being studied now.

The intention is to demonstrate how the historiographical traditions that have surrounded both borders have been largely determined by the fluctuations in the national histories of the bordered countries, and how both scholarly traditions may learn from each other. By drawing parallels between both historiographical traditions we can better understand the significance of the cultural construction of the nation and the roles of a lopsided economy.

On the Options about Social inInequalities

2008-02-26T22:59:00.002-05:00

Teaching a course on inequalities as the Honor Senior Seminar titled “Gender, Class and Race, does it matter?,” is showing me, once again, the difficulties of teaching against the grain. Most agree to the cold and depressing reality that the gap between rich and poor is wider now than at any point in the last fifty years, worldwide. Some, however, dismiss inequality as unavoidable and uncontrollable, at least in societies with an open political system. Others – just as defeatist in their own way – accept inequality as a result of people’s unequal aptitudes and talents. Others further appear to condemn inequality, and yet accept it as the required agony that would surely escort the rest of humanity to economic utopia. And even those who believe that lessening the disparity between wealthy and underprivileged might be a good idea, are concerned that it would entail exorbitantly costly government programs. Are we, then, condemned to only these options?

Looking for the roots of 19th Century Racism

2008-02-09T21:49:00.002-05:00

The Adelphi Honor's Course, titled Class, Gender and Race, is seeking this week to understand the roots of 19th Century racism. We are tackling John C. Calhoun first.

It is almost impossible to circumvent the bellicose disposition of John C. Calhoun’s 1837 Abolition Petitions speech in the United States' Senate. He was responding to the abolitionist’s insistence on ending slavery in the District of Columbia and on abolishing the slave trade across state lines. His reaction was intense and fierce. It anticipated and inspired the determination that was to define the South’s increasingly vicious rage against efforts to diminish the influence and expansion of chattel slavery.

The first impression is that he just wanted to safeguard the Southern States’ sovereignty, or what is commonly called, the states’ rights. A more nuanced look reveals, however, that he defended the states’ rights to preserve the so called “Peculiar Institution of the South.” Indeed, the sovereignty of the southern states, as a political tool, was indispensable to defend the integrity of southern slavery from the increasingly savvy and unrelenting attacks of the minority and yet vociferous new Garrisonian abolitionists. The speech bears, more than anything else, the conservation’s instincts of a seigniorial class that had learned to define itself against a caste that was both the major labor class in the South and a clearly separated ethnic group.

In the heat of the debate, at the central point of his message, Calhoun rested his arguments on top of the conviction that African descendants in the U.S., though still inferior in every way, were on their way to prosperity as they brushed shoulders with Whites and enjoyed of their masters’ institutions. He did not simply implicate an insuperable inequality between Blacks and Whites, but set it as the ideal formula for a progressive society.

Though he believed that, in a Hegelian sort of way, class tensions have always produced wealthy and civilized societies, the South was more advanced yet since it had ameliorated the extremes with an idyllic patriarchal order of compassionate rule over Blacks. The abolitionists, however, were the spoilers of this utopian society, and Calhoun called them “blind fanatics” who were “waging war” against the more “honorable” and benevolent South.

From the perspective of Eugene Genovese and James Oakes’ debate Calhoun’s speech comes out as the perfect example of what Jeffrey Young calls “Corporate individualism.” What this means is that Calhoun was correct in believing that the southern slavemaster saw himself as the custodian of an organic liaison with the slave that stressed the relational articulation of slavery while at once devaluating and reducing the slave’s individuality. So, from this elastic concept of slavery, it is not surprising that Calhoun would sincerely believe that slavery was benign in nature while it denied its brutality. But, what he appears to ignore is that an incipient deeply racist conception of Black slaves as subhuman, of which he was an active promoter, impeded the development of any genuine kind affection towards their workforce.

Joe Wright and the Americanos of Samaná (The 1820s Haitian Emigration)

2007-12-30T20:29:00.000-05:00

Everyone has a story, as the old adage says, but just a few have a story of migration, suspense and hope like Joe Wright. He was just twelve when his father snatched him out of a life of perpetual servitude, elevated him onto his shoulders, and began the treacherous trail out of slavery’s toxic grip. The traveling duo was literally moving away from home; decidedly emigrating out of the plantation. We do not know about his mother. Probably she was sold away, had consciously relinquished him for his own betterment, or had already escaped and they were just following her. What we know for sure is that Mr. Wright risked it all to save his child from the same fate he himself had endured a lifetime. The fugitives must have been traveling light; probably carrying few precious things like food, if any at all, so nothing would stall them. The way they ran was symbolic of their material lives; few effects tied them to the past, and thus, differently from Lot’s wife, they did not look back at their previous existence with nostalgia. Apparently, they had managed to cross from Maryland up north to slavery-free Pennsylvania, and were moving rapidly toward Philadelphia. There they must have expected refuge since this was a city known for protecting and defending the natural rights of the unduly enslaved African Americans. The ex-enslaved Richard Allen founded the first Black independent Protestant church precisely in Philadelphia. In fact, Mother Bethel Church awaited the Wrights. Well equipped to help runaways, it had become a major stop along the Underground Railroad. It just made sense to hide among other people of color.

The Wrights’ ride was a daring adventure by all accounts, no matter how furtive the runaway might have been. Fortunes could change without warning while in rush. And so it was, the father all of a sudden sensed that they were being followed. Escaping the enslaving South into Pennsylvania on the year 1824 was an especially risky gamble. The United States’ Congress 1793’s Fugitive Slave Law encouraged slaveowners to claim their assets across free-states. Free-Blacks, even though they were nominally “free,” were also regular victims to slave-hunting parties that captured and sold them back into southern slavery. News about people being kidnapped routinely infiltrated intelligence circles within the African American community in any given city helping sustain a chronic fear that muddled the lives of freed and escaped alike. Perhaps the callous slave-catchers chasing the Wrights into Pennsylvanian territory may not have entered the state so assertively two years later. In 1826 the unrelenting appeal of the Black Philadelphian abolitionists have urged the state legislature to pass anti-kidnapping laws, which came to rather countered the federal Fugitive Slave Law. These new measures caused the southern slaveowners some difficulties in pursuing their interests in the state. But the Wrights did not want to wait that long for the 1826’s laws to help them escape; indeed, they could not. Two years was a long time to waste hemmed into slavery when their minds were set on freedom and when the future of the enslaved looked grimmer each day despite the efforts of the anti-slavery movement.

The chase must have involved dogs and a few men, and the father was perhaps feeling tired already. Running away without maps into unknown territory is difficult enough. Carrying someone else on the shoulders would definitively have slowed the man down and made the couple fall prey to the trackers. If caught, they could certainly dismiss their dreams of freedom, and look forward to an excruciating bid for survival. So, when the trackers got closer and everything looked as if going the way of the dodo, Mr. Wright paused and decided that his son’s freedom was more precious than his own. The shrewd man then laid Joe down and told him to stay put inside a makeshift hideout while he supposedly went to the toilet. The unsuspecting kid obediently sat and remained for days where his father ordered him to wait, until another group of itinerant Blacks noticed him there. This group, composed of a few families led by a man called Perry Willmore, was also bound to Bethel Mother Church. But that was not going to be their final destination; it was not Philadelphia that excited them. They have learned about someplace better. The Church was simply going to be their springboard to something greater. These free Black families were carrying out the ultimate runaway; they were leaving the country all together and heading toward a true free-land where they anticipated nobody would even think about kidnapping them on account of the color of their skin. Being free-Blacks, the Willmores and friends were not escaping the same type of servitude as that of the Wright’s, but they were seeking the same type of freedom, and were also meaning to breach borders, namely, national borders. They were off to Hayti where Whites did not rule.

With a sense of mission Mr. Willmore picked up the shaky junior Wright and placed him on his shoulders, in the same way that the disappeared father had done a few days earlier. They could become friends; as it happened, they were to be more like family. Both have been assaulted and marginalized with all sort of violence. They were called Africans despite the fact they had been born in the Americas, and were thus labeled outsiders. They were also identified by the color of their skin, and not by their given names, as a way to minimize their humanity and blurred their individualities. That both the Wrights and the Willmores asserted their independence trying to breakout from repression, further entwined their personal bonds. Joe happily joined the group of free Blacks that Mr. Willmore was leading— the peregrines who felt as if they were indeed going to Canaan in Hayti. Among them he found his new mothers and brothers who embraced him as one of their own. Joe made the same stops as the group, and gathered at Mother Bethel Church with other crowds of Blacks for a last farewell to the land that gave him birth, but that also have enslaved him. Knowing just this much about Joe could incite anyone to wonder if senior Wright’s sacrifice was worth it in the long run. Did his son found freedom in Hayti? Was it better than remaining on a slaving nation?

What you have read on Joe Wright here is roughly the story that Leticia Willmore, Perry Willmore’s great-great granddaughter, began telling me in January 2005. I have tried to faithfully reconstruct it here by contextualizing it within its historical milieu. In a deeper sense, this story is not simply Joe’s. It belongs to the scores of people descendant of the enslaved Africans in the Americas who did not wait to be rescued. It is about bravery and hope spread all over the map. This story in particular, which began in the United States, has been preserved through oral tradition on the island of Hispaniola where the 1820s emigrants left a thriving offspring on the peninsula of Samaná. That we should have to go to the Caribbean to recover this story indicates how the Black Diaspora cuts across traditional cultural and national boundaries and connects points that would otherwise have been unthinkable.

Joe Wright’s story concludes on the island of Hispaniola. Leticia informed me that he lived a full live to be well over 70—the immigrants that adjusted to the island’s bionetwork and avoided premature death in the first days after arrival later enjoyed a remarkable longevity. She did not share details about Joe’s careers or achievements, but did mention that he was of a cheerful disposition and that married within the immigrant community. Since this specific group that he traveled and settled with moved along in family-clusters, the immigrants sort themselves out through family names. Joe was the only Wright among them and that could have made him and his descendants to standout. But in such a typical patriarchal society that followed the U. S.’ tradition of ignoring the bride’s last name, everybody thought it was awful that all of Joe’s children were female. “With his death died the last of the Wrights,” said Leticia in a manner that highlighted the quirk of fate in the story. Fortunately, however, he lived most of his live outside of the slavery system.

Innocent Voices and the Problem of Evil

2007-12-24T17:55:00.000-05:00

Last night I watched a terrific film; I watched Innocent Voices. It is about the most intense portion of the Salvadoran Civil War—just before the resistance’s famous offensive that would lead the guerrillas to temporarily control sections of the capital city. I have friends who lived through these events and they have talked about it, and so I have visualized the circumstances in my mind before. But this film showed the war from the perspective of preadolescents, particularly from an eleven-year old boy’s experience whose father had left for the Norte, the U.S. Thus, its main contribution is the children’s experience of the war, which is an angle rarely studied in history, and yet, so rich in significance and so fruitful for potential learning. It somehow links with recent representations of children-soldiers in Africa.

Despite the fact that the main actors are very young, the film is not meant for a young audience. It is an R rated movie, and correctly so. If parents should feel the need to allow kids watch portions of this film they should first know what parts not to show. If watched in its entirety, the film may help some people argue for violence as the ultimate response to uncontrollable evil. There is a part in which the local priest resembles Raul Julia’s Romero calling for a more tangible and righteous response to the escalating government oppression. Like in most depictions and studies of this period the audience here witnesses both the potential of uninhibited government control, and the odds of cunning and obstinate nonconformists. The “innocence” of the kids is not shown simplistically because they are astute and sometimes even unruly. Yet, the film proposes its rendering subtly, without appearing at first to be a violent-action type of movie. Indeed, the film is often slow, purposely focusing on details and sceneries, as prodding the audience into sympathy for the poor hard-working, but unfortunate family. And in spite of treading over grounds other films have been (my library has more material about Salvador than about any other Central American nation) it is original and compelling; it goes beyond what other works on the Salvadoran Civil War have reached.

What strikes the observer harder is the contrast between the evilness of the government’s army and the simplicity of ordinary humble people. Like in any story resembling real-life experiences, the roles of people are not that simple, however. Different shades of kindness and wickedness reveal themselves in every behavior. But this film is to be known for the sharp contrast between the good and the merciless. And the epitome of this contrast, the juxtaposition that encapsulates both extremes, is the one between the ornery army officer and the mentally retarded but cheerful character of the town. In essence, this is a history that wrestles with fundamental moral problems. It is certainly not antiquarianism, and gory entertainment for the sake of spectacle is even less. This is history as a moral enterprise, an undertaking that seeks to understand the circumstances that allow evil to happen; asks how people, as intelligent and moral beings, could participate in the most horrendous evils; and how at certain historical moments, some individuals have been able to rise above their circumstances, address evil in fundamental ways, and expand our moral consciousness.

Steven Mintz has written about evil and history. The latest is on a fabulous book he edited with John Stauffer, The Problem of Evil: Slavery, Freedom and the Ambiguities of American Reform, University of Massachusetts Press, 2007.

Mintz argues that studying the evil through the lens of a moral history we could understand better how each case is unique; we could appreciate how most collective evil have been committed by ordinary people stimulated by different types of intolerances, difficult circumstances, “and utopian and messianic ideas.” (5) And the Salvadoran Civil War is (some may argue that it has not finished) no exception. One cannot but ask, what were these soldiers thinking when they brought that gang of 11 year-old kids to the river? How could they have lost touch with reality in such a crass way? What are the consequences of such a behavior today? What could we learn from this experience so we would not do it again?

For the film's music

Du Bois on Limited Democracy

2007-12-16T00:13:00.001-05:00

When democracy fails for one group in the United States it fails for the nation, and when it fails for the United States it fails for the world. A disenfranchised group compels the disenfranchisement of other groups.

—W. E. B. Du Bois, "Negro Citizen"

To put oneself into empathetic identification with the oppressed Other is at the same time to create and adopt a threatening, even revolutionary alternative self—in effect a new persona, always more or less dramatic, for the new world to come. When this happens it is indeed a radical and profoundly imaginative personal transformation, particularly when the person in question is an Other who has become politically conscious and empowered.

El Nacionalismo poético dominicano: Los sufrimientos liberales y romanticos por la nación

2007-11-27T16:44:00.000-05:00

Las voces poéticas en los poemas “Ruinas”, de Salomé Ureña de Enríquez, y “Ecos del destierro”, de José Joaquín Pérez, expresan las contrariedades liberales y convicciones románticas de los nacionalistas latinoamericanos del siglo diecinueve. Sin embargo, aún cuando es obvio que comparten ideales con otros patriotas del hemisferio, sus preocupaciones son más específicas a la tierna nación de la República Dominicana. En “Ruinas”, por ejemplo, la voz poética ve el pasado lejano colonial español como la gloria y la aspiración utópica de la patria del futuro. La voz poética aquí se inquieta, como madre acongojada, por la situación presente, y anhela que con su empuje materno la República pueda reclamar su glorioso pasado. En “Ecos del destierro” la voz poética observa a su país desde el exilio y con pretensiones paternales, añora la posibilidad de defender a su nación del rufián autoritario que gobierna en el presente. Aún cuando ambas voces se refieren a la misma situación política, la voz en “Ecos del destierro” está más abatida. En “Ruinas”, la voz ilusoriamente presupone que si el pasado fue ilustre el futuro también lo puede ser.

Es tanta la importancia del pasado para la voz poética en “Ruinas”, que ella comienza su primer verso nostálgica con la palabra “Memorias.” Éstas, no son las memorias arbitrarias de un pasado visto desde la perspectiva de un joven sentimental, sino que son recuerdos tan sagrados que toman en el poema la forma de unos ídolos augustos. Es como una nueva religión romántica, enamorada de la idea de la nación moderna, y que se alimenta con ansias de una historia suculenta pero ilusoria. Son éstas, pues, las memorias materializadas en “monumentos” y “reliquias” que fueron en su tiempo expresiones fantásticas de “arte” y “pensamiento” sublimes (vs. 2-4). Al contemplar las ruinas y la representación tangible de un pasado glorioso, la mente liberal de la voz poética se agita con unos deseos incontrolables de soñar entusiasmada con la “bella historia de otra edad luciente”, y desea volver a ella (vs. 10).

La interpretación histórica que la voz poética hace del pasado colonial español es Romántica porque concibe los monumentos como si hubieran sido en realidad los recipientes de las ciencias, y las artes europeas, cuando nunca lo fueron. Para que la voz vea estos monumentos coloniales como unos símbolos de grandeza tiene que ignorar el dolor y la opresión que los esclavizados sufrieron para construir dichos monumentos, y también tiene que desestimar el significado despótico que estos tenían para los que vivían bajo ese régimen. El modelo de la nación se convierte en un pasado imaginado por una obsesión con la cultura occidental. Con una mirada romántica, la voz poética ve a la República del pasado como si fuera la misma Atenas que, al transplantarse al Nuevo Mundo, se mejoró y modernizó. Al decir que “vinieron años de amarguras” y “servidumbre”, la voz poética implica que, después del periodo de abandono colonial, y de la revolución y la ocupación haitiana, la situación en la isla es desolada y triste (vs. 26-27). El presente de la voz poética, entonces, es infeliz e indolente porque el legado colonial español ya no reina en la isla. Para el sujeto poético, ya el país no causa admiración, como sí lo hacía en el pasado.

El futuro que la voz poética en “Ruinas” se imagina contrasta con el presente “anatema”, porque lo que viene es el reavivamiento de un pasado utópico (vs. 41). Como una madre esperanzada, la voz poética alienta a la nación dominicana a que recupere la pasión perdida. Le asegura que ella “hacia el futuro” avanza y la exhorta a que luche y revindique sus títulos históricos (vs. 47). Lo que le espera entonces es ser reconocida por los países extranjeros. El poema termina como comienza, con la voz poética contemplando las majestuosas ruinas, pero esta vez con una esperanza renovada, porque la nación camina “al porvenir” (vs. 57).

En “Ecos del destierro”, la voz poética se preocupa por la misma situación: la condición postcolonial de la República Dominicana. También concibe su relación con la nación dentro de un marco familiar. Si para la voz en “Ruinas” el país es su hijo, para la voz en “Ecos…” la nación dominicana es su hija. La diferencia estriba en que la voz en “Ecos…” es más pesimista. Sutil pero tercamente, la voz poética se refiere a un futuro de “agonía”, a un destino de “sentencia”, y a un “mañana reclinado” (vs. 3, 8, 16).

El sujeto poético se llama a sí mismo el “bardo peregrino”, “el cantor” y “el trovador” que tiene que recordar la patria desde la distancia porque está desterrado (vs. 37, 41, 45). Él se desahoga en su trova al expresar lo que siente, y la manda a llevar y a traer mensajes a la isla con la facilidad que él no puede tener. A diferencia de él, la trova no será apresada ni maltratada porque es inmaterial. Tres cosas son claras en estas estrofas. En primer lugar, los contornos de la isla pues la trova tiene que cruzar “extensos mares” y un río, el “Ozama undoso” (vs. 2, 29). En segundo lugar, la República ha sido secuestrada por un “sátrapa”, un déspota ilegítimo y antiliberal (vs. 27). Y en tercer lugar, la voz tiene pavor a lo que el déspota le puede hacer.

A diferencia de la voz poética en “Ruinas”, en “Ecos…” el sujeto poético se preocupa más por su propio sufrimiento que por su patria. Las esperanzas que una vez él tuvo para el futuro de su tierra lo han desilusionado. Los campos de flores en la quinta estrofa representan los momentos de esperanza que ya no volverán, aquellos tiempos en que la nación parecía ir por buena ruta. Sin embargo, se refiere a su “triste afán perenne” como el esfuerzo de un patriota leal a la nación (vs. 5). En el destierro él mismo se inmortaliza como el “cantor” que protegía a la joven nación (“alondra”) en su pecho (vs. 42). Al recordar su labor patriótica, el sujeto poético no parece ya tener la esperanza de que exista algún cambio positivo después de su ida, pero se complace en recordar lo que sus esfuerzos le permitieron hacer mientras pudo.

En fin, la voz poética de “Ecos del destierro” se siente incapaz de cambiar su situación deplorable. La hija, la cual representa al país dominicano, es inocente y es a la vez la víctima de las circunstancias “funestas” que permitieron la ruda tiranía del “sátrapa” impostor. (vs. 16-27).

The Economists Intellectual Empire and the Environment

2007-11-23T19:55:00.000-05:00

In 1990 economist and journalist Peter Passell positioned environmentalists at a disadvantage. He wrote, "It is not yet clear whether the ecologists will establish a beachhead in the economists' carefully constructed intellectual empire." I wonder if there has been any change in the economists' intellectual empire lately.

Memorial for Mauricio Saavedra

2007-11-16T00:28:00.000-05:00

Click here to download the official memorial program

Click here for Stan's awesome memorial video of Mauricio

As humans we are acutely familiar with the experience of loss. We have been losing things since we can remember. We lose our keys, our laughter, and sometimes even our direction. We do not see them around, or do not feel them anymore. They are not there and for a moment we may feel at loss. All of these small loses may upset our daily rhythms, and sometimes may even absorb us entirely, sending our emotions into what appear to be never ending cheerless swirls. But they do not last.

As humans we are also sorely familiar with our physical weaknesses. We are reminded about it each time our fingers get jammed in a door, a kitchen knife proves more resilient than our skin, and whenever we lose someone we love. Indeed, it is at this moment, when the body, the voice and the touch of that special someone, is not there that we usually experience a rare moment of painful loss that, contrary to the previous examples, do last.

It was on fall 2005 that Stan brought Mauricio home. Stan had visited me a couple of nights before in an effort to help my wireless connection at home, and my wife had given him fried plantains. While eating such an exotic dish he began revealing the joys of living amongst a small but tight community of international students. At this moment he could not but talk about his dazzling friend from Bolivia. His friend spoke Spanish, as I do, and was interested in many topics, as I am. So, Mauricio and I should be a natural match, Stan thought. And he was right

A few nights after, I heard a knock in my door around 10 PM. It is not common to have anybody, even less World History students at this time at the door. But I recognized Stan, who came with Chinyere and a young man, who indeed was Mauricio. So, I opened the door and all three came-in in that same order. When we at home got a glimpse at Mauricio’s face we noticed that he projected his own glow transpiring from a genuine and rare broad smile. I will later learn that this signature smile came from a indisputably noble heart that sought always to be better, while keeping it real amongst his friends and professors.

Next I saw Mauricio the following year seated in one of my classes. It was Modern Latin America, and, of course, he knew about the subject like no other in the class. Everyday he came to class full of questions and deeply concerned about the problems he learned about from the reading. It was an inspiration to have him in class. Even though he had to withdraw from the class because of scheduling problems, we continued to be a friend, talking about history, economics and Latin America every time we met on campus. I still remember clearly his reaction after watching the documentary “Corporation” and how he wanted to learn more about the problems poor countries were going through.

So, it was not a surprise to me when he decided to apply for graduate school and seek a Ph.D. in economics. On Wednesday October 31 I saw him at the library and we talked briefly about how to get ready for the GRE and the graduate application process. An hour later I saw an email from him in my inbox titled “Reunion para recibir sus sugerencias.” The title encapsulates the politeness and eagerness he usually exuded. He wanted to schedule a longer meeting to put heads together and make definitive plans for graduate school. I immediately responded, and we agreed on Monday November 5.

I was excited about the possibility of having a responsible, hard-working and intelligent student working on a subject that I thought was of great importance. It is not often that we find the youth genuinely concerned about the problems of the world, and when we do discover them we want to support them and keep close contact with them. And this is what Mauricio represented to me. He was an optimist. He believed that there were solutions to problems and that we had the capacity to find them.

As I gathered information about graduate programs in economics, sent emails to friends in other institutions I imagined Mauricio writing and defending his dissertation about matters that concerned people’s daily lives around the world.

But Monday November 5 did not come for Mauricio. The shock of the news that arrived from Dean Kessler that day just a few minutes before our scheduled meeting was so overwhelming because his life was so promising. It crushed me, and it had taken me some time to move out of denial. I waited for him to show up, or to receive another email from him. Probably selfishly, I wanted to partake from his enthusiasm about life and learning, about spending my self for the benefits of others.

Losing him is not like losing my keys or a book. I can replace both, but I cannot replace his space with somebody else’s. His life was unique. This is what Antonio Machado meant when he wrote “there is no way. The way is made by walking.” The path he opened was his alone.

But, we are enlightened by the fragility of life—when faced by the loss of a friend like Mauricio we cannot but live gratefully. In fact, I would like to challenge you and myself to take up his baton and run for life with the same enthusiasm and dedication he ran. It is only when we live everyday inspired by those who have been and could have been in our position that we live with true self-respect.

Inscripción en cualquier sepulcro

No arriesgue el mármol temerario
gárrulas transgresiones al todopoder del olvido,
enumerando con prolijidad
el nombre, la opinión, los acontecimientos, la patria.
Tanto abalorio bien adjudicado está a la tiniebla
y el mármol no hable lo que callan los hombres.
Lo esencial de la vida fenecida
—la trémula esperanza,
el milagro implacable del dolor y el asombro del goce—
siempre perdurará.
Ciegamente reclama duración el alma arbitraria
cuando la tiene asegurada en vidas ajenas,
cuando tú mismo eres el espejo y la réplica
de quienes no alcanzaron tu tiempo
y otros serán (y son) tu inmortalidad en la tierra.

Jorge Luís Borges

The Environment, racism, and Global Social Inequality

2007-09-11T11:30:00.001-04:00

We get tire of listening to bad news, watching distressing images, and receiving unenthusiastic facts. Little by little we grow a swelling insensitivity and begin ignoring whatever makes us feel apologetic. After all, there is so much horror we can handle, and it is just natural we try to stay at ease, not just hostages of panic. Is there a better alternative to this likely coldness?

As White as the People from Spain

2007-03-16T19:45:00.000-04:00

Re-reading Columbus's diary I found something that I am not sure how I had missed it before. In reference to the beauty of the Natives in Hispaniola/Ayti he said on December 16, 1492:

"They are the most handsome men and women they had seen up to that time, so fair that if they wore clothes and kept out of the sun and the wind they would almost be as white as those in Spain."

The idea of white being the standard of beauty comes loud and clear from this spontaneous reaction from Columbus. But there is more. His utterance also demonstrates the belief in the "improvement" of the race, which has been a bedrock principle racial relations in Ibero-America. If the Natives would avoid the sun they would become as white and beautiful as the Spanish.

So, keep away from the sun, not because health reasons, but because you do not want its tanning effects.

"To be at the head of humanity's march was both to be white and to be beyond race--to be fully human." And beautiful, I would add. The others, of course, are not! What an arrogance.

(quote comes from Scott L. Malcomson, One Drop of Blood, 289)

Wikipedia as a Research Source

2007-02-22T20:31:00.000-05:00

This article highlights the latest positive development in Wikipedia. University Professors have been assigning projects for students to complete in Wikipedia. Not that they want them to use Wikipedia as a reference—after all academicians have never suggested the use of any encyclopedia for reference in term papers or any kind of projects.

The assignment of projects in Wikipedia is that Professors are finding it useful to bridge the gap between the commonly isolated world of academia and the “real” outside world through Wikipedia. Asking the students to post their works in Wikipedia—which is what this article explains that Professors are doing—helps increase the quality, enlarge the article databases of Wikipedia, and to reach beyond the classroom. In other words, besides helping improve Wikipedia overall, linking this encyclopedic project to classroom projects allows Professors divulge knowledge that would otherwise stayed inside the obscure classroom with little or no application.

Last semester was when I offerrf writing articles in Wikipedia as an option for the first time. Two students took up the proposal and helped enhanced two articles. They were:

1- Anna Komnene or Comnena

2- The Mesoamerican ballgame

Both students demonstrated high satisfaction while doing a first-class work. I have also noticed that their contribution has attracted other collaborators, which has also help boost the quality of the articles—it is a constantly evolving scheme, the way it is suppose to be (or not?).

This semester it is a required feature in all my courses. I am looking forward for the first batch of entries coming within two weeks. Hopefully they will help increase knowledge worldwide--not simply in the classroom.

The Dialectic of Enlightenment: The Paradox of Liberalism

2007-02-11T22:46:00.000-05:00

Most people in the Western World, particularly those who have witnessed the destructive force of totalitarian regimes that thrived throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, would think about (historic) liberalism (not the current political sort) as the opposing side of totalitarianism. But despite of their eyewitness status, the early Frankfurt School did not share this opinion thinking that liberalism may even facilitate the totalitarian phenomena in an inversion they called "dialectic of Enlightenment."

Recently, renowned Italian scholar Giorgio Agamben has offered an invigorating recasting of this view. He argues that the unqualified reverence for human dignity embedded in liberalism makes it an organism of entitlements (rights) that may well be connected with its nemesis of totalitarianism from within. Agmben situates the treacherous link between liberalism and totalitarianism in the strong emphasis liberal states put on the very notion of the rule of law.

Liberalism currently insists that its citizens, the same ones the state attempts to uphold with respect and dignity, shape their behavior in the model of the law. The purpose, as it is widely known, is to promote coexistence; the rights of one end when the rights of the other begin.

But it is underneath of this insistence where Agamben finds the “biopolitical” resemblance that endeavors to capture humans, with dignity or without it, and submit them under the unlimited mastery of the law. In other words, people become the incarnation of law and vice versa, thus limiting our individual conduct and thus essence to legislation and judicial power. The justification, of course, is to exercise the balance needed in a society where every single individual has the same rights as the others; where people’s differences have to be mediated by the rule of law.

The rule of law, which emanates from the state, has the right then to declare when to pass an “exception” violating the rights of a given number of individuals. And it is at this specific moment that politicians call “practical exception,” when the link and resemblance between totalitarianism and liberalism gets clearer as to develop into the same nature: liberalism becomes totalitarianism.

At this point, Agamben’s logic, based on Hegel’s idea of dialectic, is appealing and convincing to me. We should, however, look at the historical record back to the birth of liberalism and modern nationhoods to examine the moments in which liberalism became totalitarianism. Did Latin American liberals, like Porfirio Díaz and Ulises Heureaux, experienced a similar transformation? Their passage from liberalism to totalitarian regimes were indeed smooth and yet surprising. So, Agamben’s arguments may help explain the paradox of liberal politics in Latin America (and probably Africa too).

Reference:

State of exception by Giorgio Agamben ; translated by Kevin Attell. (2004)

Security and Terror: the difference between state and terrorism threatens to disappear

2007-02-11T12:59:00.000-05:00

There is a difference in politics between societal discipline and security since the creation of modern states. Giorgio Agamben’s article is not simply interesting, but revealing. He basically traced down how the task of “security” which liberal states took as one of its many missions have become the sole reason for their existences.

“While disciplinary power isolates and closes off territories, measures of security lead to an opening and globalisation; while the law wants to prevent and prescribe, security wants to intervene in ongoing processes to direct them. In a word, discipline wants to produce order, while security wants to guide disorder…security imposes itself as the basic principle of state activity. What used to be one among several decisive measures of public administration until the first half of the twentieth century, now becomes the sole criterion of political legitimation. Security reasoning entails an essential risk. A state which has security as its only task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to turn itself terroristic…the difference between state and terrorism threatens to disappear…In the end it may lead to security and terrorism forming a single deadly system in which they mutually justify and legitimate each others' actions…The risk is not merely the development of a clandestine complicity of opponents but that the hunt for security leads to a worldwide civil war which destroys all civil coexistence.”

Giorgio Agamben, “Security and Terror,” Theory & Event (Volume 5, Issue 4, 2001)

La Nona Argentina

2007-02-01T11:32:00.000-05:00

La Nona La Nona hambrienta

Como obra literaria de significado social, La Nona tiene aplicaciones múltiples porque ella personifica desnudamente los excesos humanos. Con su grotesco humor negro, ella caracteriza el derroche que al nivel individual como colectivo estamos todos siempre en riesgo de efectuar. En su contexto histórico inmediato, es común y legitimo relacionarla con los excesos de un gobierno dictatorial y militar argentino de los años 1970s. Sin embargo, como muchas obras clásicas que logran describir los conflictos más agudos de la humanidad, su valor literario sobrepasa su origen en la historia.

La Nona será eterna mientras los gobiernos continúen excediéndose en su poder; mientras los grupos militares sigan buscando más guerras; y mientras las empresas y el comercio sigan procurando expandirse fuera de los límites de control individual. Ella revelará de forma estrambótica los resultados destructivos de sus insaciabilidades por poder. La Nona continuará su camino a la eternidad siempre que las clases altas y burguesas vivan glotonamente en la opulencia, a costa de los pobres. Ella los representará con su descomunal cuerpo e inagotable apetito por consumir cualquier producto en el mercado. Su trabajo de conciencia no termina ahí, sin embargo, pues continuará siempre que individuos particulares se desborden por la abundancia o caigan en el exceso de los vicios. La Nona, entonces, tiene un mensaje de crítica que resuena con potencia en los tiempos modernos---nos recuerda que los mejores limites son los que nosotros mismos nos imponemos.

The Colonization of the Writing System

2007-02-01T10:49:00.001-05:00

This might just be a topic for casual discussion in the classroom, but it may just also promote interest outside of academia. While studying the development of writing I reflected about the other side we hardly talk about, namely, the displacement of other forms of knowledge by the alphabetic writing system.

People have always found ways to generate and maintain knowledge. If we start with this premise we would see writing and the writing of history as we know it, as just one form of producing and maintaining historical knowledge. So, as this writing system developed among some civilizations (i.e., Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greece, Rome, India, and China) it must have displaced, supplant and suppressed oral traditions and nonalphabetic writing systems. I suppose that it must have done this because after a while they would not co-exist any longer.

The rapacious nature of our modern writing system is more clearly seen when the Renaissance expanded into the world, particularly into the Western Hemisphere. Look, for example, at what Angel Rama has to say in “La Ciudad Letrada” (1982)

Golfo de las Flechas

2007-01-17T17:31:00.000-05:00

El Golfo de las Flechas fue el lugar donde ocurrió la primera riña contra la invasión Europea en las Américas. Esto sucedió el domingo 12 de enero del 1492. Pero, ¿donde exactamente fue que los Indios Ciguayos de Samaná atacaron a los (no muy honestos, vale aclarar) hombres del almirante? ¿Habrá sido en la Bahía de Rincón o en la Bahía de Samaná? No estamos totalmente seguros.

Fuson y Morison difieren en sus opiniones: Fuson va por Rincón y Morison (y la mayoría de la gente) va por Samaná. El texto del diario de Colón, aparejado por Bartolomé de las Casas, parece dar a entender que él entró en la Bahía de Rincón, que está entre el Cabo Cabrón y el Cabo de Samaná y que fue allí donde sucedió el encuentro violento. Dicha bahía el la midió como si fuera de 3 ligas acuáticas (sus ligas parecían ser cortas). Esto parece convencer de que la primera escaramuza contra los invasores europeos fue en la Bahía de Rincón.

Los problemas que encuentro ahora con esta interpretación, sin embargo, son dos. Primero, con la anchura de la bahía. Colón dice que era de cómo 3 ligas acuáticas, así que debía de ser de más o menos 9 millas, mientras que en realidad la Bahía de Rincón tiene una anchura de más o menos 3 millas. La solución a este problema podría ser que Las Casas, que muchas veces confundió millas por ligas, en esta ocasión hubiera hecho lo mismo también, y por consiguiente, esta referencia a su medida no es confiable.

El otro problema, el más serio, sería fácil de solucionar si yo pudiera ir otra vez a la bahía y verificarla con mis propios ojos. Colón se refiere a una pequeña isla o islote que está en medio de la bahía donde el desembarcó algunos hombres, pero sus habitantes huyeron de su presencia. Yo no he visto ninguna isla en la Bahía de Rincón que pudiera tener gente allí. De hecho, esta descripción parece ser la del Cayo Levantado que se encuentra en la Bahía de Samaná.

Hay dos cosas más que deberíamos de considerar al investigar donde fue la dichosa escaramuza. Una favorece a Samaná y la otra a Rincón.

Primero es que Colón llama a la dicha bahía “grandísima.” Pero cuando Colón ser refiere a la Bahía Escocesa, que vio en enero 11antes de llegar al Cabo Cabrón, el la llama “grande,” dando a entender que la bahía en consideración es más grande que la Escocesa. En comparación con la Escocesa, la Bahía de Rincón es realmente pequeñísima. La única bahía por esos contornos que se podría llamarse “grandísima” es la de Samaná.

La segunda es que según el diario, cuando Colón habla con algunos indios en la dichosa bahía que estamos considerando, a el le cuentan de otra isla que el cree ser la isla “Caribe” donde los caníbales viven. El entonces les menciona de que el la había divisado antes de entrar a la bahía. En realidad no hay forma de que el haya visto alguna isla (que no fueran un islote) desde las costas de la Península de Samaná, que es donde el estaba. La única cosa que hubiera el podido “divisar” hubiera sido la parte sureste de la isla Española/Aytí. Y eso haría mucho sentido siendo que al entrar a la Bahía de Rincón ya dejaría de ver esa parte sureste, mientras que al entrar a la Bahía de Samaná, el hubiera podido continuar viendo lo que el pensaba que era la isla “Caribe” pues estaría aún más cerca de ella.

De manera que quedamos todavía en el laberinto. No sabemos con certidumbre en que bahía sucedió la venturosa trifulca. Pero aquí les dejo el enlace con el texto de Colón dice para el sábado 12 y domingo 13 de enero, 1492.

Versión en Español:

http://www.ems.kcl.ac.uk/content/etext/e019.html#d0e1093

English Version

http://www.ems.kcl.ac.uk/content/etext/e020.html#d0e1796

¿Rex Inutilis o capacitador?

2007-01-12T17:33:00.000-05:00

Dos escritores académicos han estado intentando rescatar la malograda imagen del inservible Felipe III.

Philip III and the Pax Hispanica, 1598-1621: The Failure of Grand Strategy by Paul C. Allen

Kingship and Favoritism in the Spain of Philip III, 1598-1621 by Antonio Feros

Podríamos decir, sin embargo, que cuando el poder absoluto decrece hay más oportunidades para los que viven en los márgenes. Esto es lo que pasó, por ejemplo en el 1603 cuando bajo Felipe III la colonia en La Española redujo sus poblaciones del norte de la isla y de todas las localidades lejos de Santo Domingo. Movió a todos los considerados españoles y sus dependientes a áreas cerca de la capital colonial. Esto creó un desorden entre los colonos nunca antes visto allí, y mantuvo mucho territorio abandonado por casi un siglo y medio.

Este desgobierno de las tierras lejanas a la urbe principal no fue por una simple retirada imperial/colonial, sino un recogimiento temporero basado en el pensamiento de Zero-Sum Gain. Los holandeses, franceses e ingleses se beneficiaban grandemente del comercio ilegal que ellos promovían en estos lugares ya que la corona española en esos momentos carecía del mecanismo y potencial de exigir la practica del mercantilismo. Y según el pensamiento del tiempo, en el juego del comercio dos rivales no podían aventajarse al mismo tiempo, pues el uno perdería cuando el otro ganaba. Dentro de este marco ideológico la retirada de “Las Devastaciones,” como ha sido llamada en la historiografía dominicana, hace todo el sentido.

El problema para la colonia española, y para todos los que han tenido sus intereses ligados a sus buenas fortunas, es que la corona española no se pudo recobrar rápidamente para repoblar las zonas abandonadas. No fue hasta la llegada de las Reformas Borbonas, como un siglo y medio después, que inmigrantes, mayormente de las islas del Atlántico y del Mediterráneo, llegaron con orden real de recolonizar las áreas desgobernadas.

Ya, sin embargo, los franceses, que habían desafiado los reclamos territoriales de la corona española al establecerse persistentemente en la isla de Tortuga, habían exigido el lado occidental de la isla en el 1697 y creado la colonia de Saint-Domingue, que vino a convertirse en Haití en el 1804, cuando los esclavos desalojaron descomunalmente a sus amos de las plantaciones y de toda la colonia francesa.

Pero más interesante, aunque menos aludido, es que Las Devastaciones crearon también un espacio donde el cimarrón indio, negro y mestizo, que vivía al margen del sistema colonial, tuvo entonces más amplitud territorial gracias a la distancia impuesta por el decreto real entre el y las urbes coloniales. Todo el territorio del norte de la isla, especialmente el noreste, fue zona franca para la preservación de la cultura cimarrona.

Así que la política de reducción de Felipe III al final de cuenta no fue de consecuencias tan malas para todos, si es que queremos considerar a los que vivían en los márgenes de los poderosos como gente con derecho a sus espacios históricos. De hecho, los que verían la política del rey piadoso como si fuera desastrosa, lo harían dentro del marco de interpretación que considera la consolidación de poder como algo deseable.

Fronteras Nacionales

2007-01-12T16:37:00.000-05:00

Eduardo Galeano: las fronteras nacionales "son cicatrices" que las ambiciones de las personas hacen a la tierra, como resultado de las conquistas, colonizaciones, imperialismos, egoísmos, mayor poderío en las armas, tecnología, etc.

Que Creen?

2006-12-21T17:58:00.000-05:00

"Los ignorantes disfrutan la ignorancia."

Modernity and the Modern Society: What does it mean?

2006-11-28T13:19:00.000-05:00

I just read a (relatively old) article that attempted to define modernity or a modern society. And here are some comments.

Mark Elvin, “A Working Definition of “Modernity”?, Past and Present No. 113 (Nov. 1986), pp. 209-213.

Modernity: Is not so much related to time or the idea of progress, but with the capacity and concerns with power at least in three levels: 1) Power over other Humans, 2) Practical power over nature in terms of economic production, 3) Intellectual power over nature in the form of capacity of prediction.

Power is the capacity to change the structure of systems. This formulation has advantage of (1) differentiating “power” in this context from statically maintained domination (2) allowing for both the destructive and constructive aspect of modernity, and (3) including the intellectual world.

But, what would clearly distinguish a modern society from non-moderns?

“Since concerns with the various forms of power sketched above exist to some extent in societies normally thought of as ‘pre-modern,” we may define a society as a whole as ‘modern when the power-complex, as a whole, is clearly dominant over other ends.”

In other words, it is modern when the structures of power in that society can actually exercise control over the different “concerns” with a tangible measure of effectiveness—being able to control people’s lives, extract from nature resources for economic satisfaction, and understand science/nature in such a way that it could calculate it somewhat effectively for even more efficient control.

But, how would the transition from non-modern to modern happen? In this aspect the author may have given “conservatives” (who differently from reactionaries do not want to hold “change” completely, but to manage it in a way that do not bring confusion too rapidly) a reason to exist.

“Pursuing this line of thought, it becomes quite unparadoxical to argue that, in general, the transition to ‘modernity’ is more easily and effectively achieved when there is a degree of mutual support between some continuing ‘traditional’ cultural values and those that we have defined as being specifically ‘modern,’ and conversely, that an uncompromising antagonism to the ‘non-modern’ may be in many respects counter-productive.” (113)

Review of Luis A. Figueroa's Book: Sugar, Slavery and Freedom.

2006-10-30T18:00:00.000-05:00

Note: This review has been submitted for publication to Itinerario

_Sugar, Slavery, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico_ by Luis A. Figueroa. Paperback: 304 pages. Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press (December 9, 2005) English ISBN: 080785610X. Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches. $19.95

In this book Luis A. Figueroa joins ranks with a select group of scholars who have been emphasizing the importance of slavery to the Caribbean, and to Puerto Rico in particular. I can see why such a reiteration is necessary. A couple of years ago I stepped into an unattractive and under-funded municipal historical archive in one of Puerto Rico’s major cities. The then Archivist and director, who held the position because of political circumstances, showed me the many untouched and uncategorized historical materials available. As I delved with joy into the fragile early Nineteenth Century sources he alerted me to a problem in Puerto Rico’s history. He said, “It seems that everybody these days is only interested in slavery. There are other subjects more important, you know, like politics and music.” Because of his tone, I imagine he must have encountered inquisitive and pesky researchers like Figueroa. Historians like Figueroa do not let the issue of slavery and its relevancy to Puerto Rico’s history die quietly. And that seems to bother people who prefer to remember a utopian and “pastoral” past that was hardly affected by the ungentle “accident” of slavery on the island.

Indeed, like Rebecca Scott’s 1985 “Slave Emancipation in Cuba,” in this major work Figueroa purposely steps on the toes of many people, dead and alive. His is a painstaking study of Puerto Rico’s Nineteenth-Century experiences with slavery and emancipation, through the eyes of the key municipal district of Guayama. It is a revised version of his dissertation written under noted historians of Latin American and Caribbean History. Senior undergraduates and graduate students concerned with the African experience in the Americas and all Puerto Rico’s archivists should make it part of their required reading.

Apparently, this study was originally a regional investigation that, according to the area-study attitude of the time, would have shed light on the larger history of the island. After several years of teaching and conscientious reexamination of the sources Figueroa has presented us with more than that. This book under review is the most current, engaging and significant study of the peak and the rather sudden decline of Puerto Rican slavery, and the Nineteenth Century murky transition to “free-labor.” Simply bringing the African story of Guayama, “Ciudad Bruja,” (Shamans’ City) to the forefront of historical studies at a time when some people are voicing discomfort with its African descriptive name, should bring havoc to the traditional sensibilities of Puerto Rico’s polite society. Figueroa’s illustration of how central slavery, with all its social, economic and cultural implications, has been to the formation of Puerto Rico as a nation is surely more shocking.

Figueroa went through an extraordinary array of sources from Guayama’s archives and compared it to those from other districts. He connected his findings to previous historical investigations done in Ponce, and positioned his ideological stance within the progressive revisionist strand, but with a rather fresh twist. His conclusions were that even though Guayama, with its unshakeable Afro-Caribbean heritage, is not necessarily representative of Puerto Rico’s slavery in general, it is yet an indispensable part of the island’s legacy. It would be a mistake to think this book is just an enlarged regional history of the island. Figueroa finds his work relevant also to the history of Latin America and the Atlantic World as he links it up to other notable works of slavery and emancipation in the Western Hemisphere.

Through Guayama’s historical sources we learn with Figueroa about the liberal debates over the future of Puerto Rico at the turn of the Nineteenth Century, and how the “Black Party’s” desire to increase African slavery, in the wake of the Haitian Revolution, took precedence as it acted in coordination with other types of immigration projects. The swelling ranks of slaves, in turn, helped increase police and the emergence of a militarized society that was a characterizing trait of the late Spanish colonial administration. As Figueroa carefully examined the slave records, he found that they were actually not “socially dead” as it has been proposed so convincingly in the past. Slaves, Figueroa argues, developed a cunning yet remarkable social network that challenged the colonial and the repressive slavery system in which they lived.

Conventional thought dictates that Puerto Rico had a short and mild history of slavery and was a model for a benign abolitionism. Figueroa shatters those myths with an admirable crusading spirit. He not only shows the long history of slavery in connection to Jorge Chinea’s works, but how illusory is the image of a compassionate slave master. He deconstructs the masters’ ideologies, while also revealing how slaves and libertos (freed) were active agents of their history. Contrary to common belief, during the transition period, before the non-gradual emancipation, slaves were only infrequently freed by their masters. On the other hand, we can see how slaves found ways to buy their own freedom and in this way could assert an unusual degree of control over their lives. Probably most importantly, Figueroa confirms revisionists’ accounts that rather than wanting to modernize voluntarily, international and colonial conditions forced planters to abandon slavery against their will. It was then, when they had no option, that “The planters wished to become ‘capitalistas azucareros’ (sugar capitalists) while remaining ‘amos y señores’ (masters and lords of their class and race inferiors),” (199).

To these doubtful steps toward proletarianization, the libertos reacted with an assortment of resistances and strategies that mirrored those they used during slavery, like arson and post-slavery marronage. Chapter seven, which is concerned with the libertos’ adaptation to the post-emancipation society, is the most interesting and the one with the most promising future. Here Figueroa reveals from the sources the persistent colonial government attempts to impose social conformity upon the libertos with vagrancy laws, prohibition of Bombas, and the enforcement of coercive labor contracts. The records, Figueroa shows us, are full of evidence on how the libertos responded with their own subtle yet powerful weapons of resistance. I believe that to a large extent these tensions of assimilation have profoundly shaped Puerto Rico’s self-identity and culture. More than ever, however, we need to find out why the erroneous idea of an unimportant Puerto Rican slavery and a benevolent abolitionism has successfully persisted for so long.

Adelphi Athlete Students

2006-10-29T17:42:00.000-05:00

Even Newsday, with its notorious aloofness towards Adelphi’s sports, could not avoid reporting the barrage of our student athletes’ accomplishments last academic year.

Men’s Basketball was nearly invincible seizing the regional championship. Women’s Lacrosse Hnot only swept away the national title in effect, but also achieved a collectiveH GPA of more than 3.5. That’s what I call student athletes.

These were not the only successes of our student athletes, but they are exemplary. Happily, it seems we are already making a splash on the field again this year.

Yet, college athletics is not simply about competing and winning, but also about education. College sports in the U.S. began with New England colleges flexing their muscles against each other in the late 1800s. Since then, it has judiciously become another means to prepare students for productive lives in society.

Notice I am not mentioning “careers,” because the average individual will be shifting jobs at least three times in herH lifetime. More important than professional training is the preparation for a lifetime of citizenship, at local and global levels.

Citizenship of the world includes career development, political participation, and social involvements that seek to establish a balance with nature and among ourselves. What you do for society in general is as important as what you do for yourself.

Sports playH a vital role in the preparation for this form of citizenship. Most societies, both sedentary and nomadic, have created systems of sports to improve and tackle challenges. In Ancient Hellas (Greece) the legendary Olympics brought together athletes from all over the Greek diaspora, including from warring city-states.

They stressed personal excellence (arête- αρετη) for the benefit of the collective—the same way our coaches push our students to higher levels of performance for individual and team satisfactions. The Greeks also utilized the games to move beyond local petty rivalries, and in this way sportsmanship attained what politicians often failed to achieve: peace.

The Mayans in Meso-America gave us the rubber-ball—something that the Greeks were missing. Recent archeological evidence suggests they also sought peace through a difficult game of passing the ball through a straight ring.

This was a game much like basketball, but used mainly legs instead of arms. Through painstaking training even a commoner apparently could reach the top of the social hierarchy. Here, again, sports leveled the playfieldsH of inequalities.

We all know that North American natives invented the original violent form of Lacrosse. Vanguard Asian cultures developed Martial Arts to achieve personal excellence and defense. Medieval Europeans contributed other sports with the purpose of war training. All of these sports have reflected on the social values of their culture.

In contrast to professional sports, college athletics are closer to reflecting the ethics of a democratic society that emphasizes individual and collective excellence.

Our student athletes learn that personal dedication and hard work improve performance. Their inflexible and arduous schedules show them the concrete meaning of energy and time-management, better than a pricy seminar could.

To keep a high GPA while also improving athletic performance is a feat that few can achieveH. But more important than the fleeting joy of recognition is the state of mind cultivated to achieve such a deed.

Thriving in the midst of the game’s pressure, dealing with the awful taste of loss, coming back after defeat, and keeping one’s head amidst campus’ social life are extremely valuable skills not taught in the classroom.

In our current narcissist culture the values our students learn in team-playing and thriftinessH are indispensable. They serve well not only in their professional lives, but also in their communities as we accommodate ourselves to a new trying century.

We need to stress in our students that their playing is more than simply fun—it is learning too. In team play they learn to tackle many challenges. They devise strategies and produce stamina to overcome them. Here our students learn that a group is better and stronger than a single person.

It should be required from them, indeed, to discover ways to transfer these skills and aptitudes to the learning of academic material. In the increasingly complex world we inhabit, scholarly knowledge is essential for useful citizenship.

They can apply to a difficult course the same skills they develop to deal with a stressful game. Sensibly interpreting a game’s technical side can enhance performance, in the same way as learning to construe hardcore facts and ideas about history can enrich their lives without end.

Obesity, History and Freedom of Choice

2006-08-06T11:17:00.000-04:00

Again, on the freedom of choice, look at what an interesting article about obesity has to say regarding the bent of biology in our weight.

“Along with the continuing research on the genetics of obesity, the study of other biological factors could help mitigate the negative stereotypes of fat people as slothful and gluttonous and somehow less virtuous than thin people. There is, of course, the risk of overemphasizing how potent the biological forces are that make some people prone to gaining weight. Biology sets the context, and that is critical, but obesity still boils down to whether a person eats too much or exercises enough. The danger in bending too far in the direction of a biological explanation — whether that explanation is genetics, infectobesity or some theory yet to be discovered — is that it could be misinterpreted, by fat and thin alike, as saying that behavior is irrelevant.”

I think that this is applicable to other issues affecting behavior like personality, height, physical characteristics and many others. As a historian, this is an important matter because we look mostly at the exploits of people. If we view the (biologic and otherwise) circumstances as determining behavior we might give our historical beings little freedom of decision. Of course, that would translate into our view of present reality as being the same. The other alternative (or approach) would be to explore how the competing forces of circumstances in any historical context, while limiting and formative, still produce possibilities and open (sometimes new) venues of actions and thus (probably reduced) freedom of choice.

Freedom, Choices, Constraints and Different Paths in Life

2006-07-06T00:22:00.000-04:00

A recent NY Times article began with the following question: IF you could choose between the life you imagined for yourself a decade ago and the one you've actually lived since then, which would you prefer?" The article is about housing, but the question is a timeless one because it deals with the fate of humans. David Scott's book is concerned with something similar. Above all, he is a critic as well as a contributor to the postcolonial scholarly tradition. And within this community of scholars and thinkers he is challenging us to write a postcolonial history that identify the hidden circumstances that both limit and permit historical agents (us?) to engage their historical reality. The title of his book, "Conscripts of Modernity" reveals his idea that we are not volunteers in the world we live, but that we are actually more limited than free. Overall, it is not a very sanguine book, but how can we blame him for that. Following a saying popular among those of the U.S. left, if you are not mad or frustrated at the current condition of the postcolonial is because you have not been paying attention. Is not?

A Free Community of Valid Persons

2006-06-06T12:42:00.001-04:00

Can we ever reach what the late Guyanese poet Martin Carter memorably called “a free community of valid persons”?

David Scott, in his recent book _Conscripts of Modernity_ unveils the incredible power of the current status quo, in other words, of the present way of living, of the contemporary ascendant ideologies to “normalize” us, in other words, to tranquilize us, to makes us conform and defuse revolutionary energy into an uneasy yet unavoidable compliance. He explained that the bankruptcy and utter disaster of the postcolonial experiments (i.e., new postcolonial nations, and liberation movements) are an indication of something deeper gone wrong, namely, a pervasive “anxiety of exhaustion.” Hence, “consequently, almost everywhere, the anticolonial utopias have gradually withered into postcolonial nightmares.”

I quote here from him:

“I think we live in tragic times. … our time is suffering from what Raymond Williams (in his discussion of modern tragedy) aptly described as ‘the loss of hope; the slowly settling loss of any acceptable future.’ But if what is at stake in critically thinking through this postcolonial present is not simply the naming of yet another horizon, and the fixing of the teleological plot that takes us there from here, still, what is at stake is something like a refusal to be seduced and immobilized by the facile normalization of the present.”

I still need to get and grasp fully from Scott his solution to this predicament. He tells us that we need to avoid being “seduced” by the “facile normalization of the present,” by reshaping the questions we make (previous anticolonials did not provide wrong answers. The problem is that we need to ask different questions), but it is not clear yet through the reading what are the questions then that we should ask.

The book was reviewed by The American Historical Review

Maña

2006-05-30T21:24:00.000-04:00

"Más vale Maña que Fuerza." ¿Cual es el significado real y practico de la palabra maña?

El Gobierno de Puerto Rico: ¿Cortar on no cortar?

2006-05-30T00:23:00.000-04:00

La relación de los negocios privados con el interés y bienestar publico es un tema que ninguno de nosotros deberíamos de ignorar. La crisis fiscal y política que hubo en Puerto Rico recientemente, cuando casi todas las estructuras del gobierno boricua cerraron sus servicios que no fueran de emergencia, es un buen caso de estudio de cómo un gobierno orientado al servicio colectivo se adapta a las nuevas demandas del mercado internacional. Valga la aclaración que este mercado va al paso de los parámetros impuestos por la política económica de los Estados Unidos, que como sus críticos han podido explicar claramente, va en camino de una división permanente de niveles de vida y por consiguiente a una enorme crisis económica mundial (que quizás se manifieste de las formas más sorprendentes). Es por eso que el camino del gobierno Puertorriqueño, que es una dependencia colonial con ciertas libertades limitadas, es de mucho interés.

El clamor del Banco Mundial y de la elite económica internacional (ver el libro, Empire por Michael Hardt y Antonio Negri) es de reducir el tamaño del gobierno. La primera razón para esta reducción es la falta de dinero. Y a primera instancia, es muy fácil entender porque esto es necesario. Si uno gasta más de lo que gana, una persona mesurada primero cortará los gastos para balancear las entradas con las salidas. Sin embargo, lo que sucede en los casos gubernamentales dentro del debate de lo colectivo y lo privado (arriba referido), esta solución tiene infieras ideológicas y por lo tanto, nada inocentes. Básicamente, reducir el tamaño del gobierno con tal de balancear el paso de los ingresos le aprovecha perfectamente a los intereses de las clases pudientes (ponle el nombre que quieras, Burgueses, Clase Media, Alta, etc.) al reducir también su contribución a la colectividad. La justificación que primero les viene a la mente a los defensores del sistema que actualmente tiene más influencia en la economía mundial es que la base de toda relación económica es una de egoísmos competitivos; en otras palabras, de interés propio.

El pensamiento se radica en la idea de que si yo busco mi propio interés este será, al fin de cuentas, de beneficio para toda la sociedad. El gobierno solo juega el papel de árbitro entre intereses en competencia cuando ellos se estrellan unos con el otro y no pueden buscar un camino armonioso. Esto, por supuesto, es algo fuertemente debatible y problemático. Es más, recientemente se publicó un libro que si lo miras bien es una critica al corazón de este sistema de pensamiento porque básicamente prueba que Adam Smith (el que los neo-liberales consideran cómo el profeta de la economía actual) no se refería al amor o interés propio como el centro de gravedad de una economía equilibrada (ver Self-Interest before Adam Smith : A Genealogy of Economic Science por Pierre Force).

Siguiendo la política errónea de poner primero el interés y amor propio, lo que se quiere es que menos interferencias hayan del gobierno (impuestos, reglamentos). Pero esto significa que el común pierde terreno, y el rico se pone más rico y el pobre más pobre. Esto es esencialmente una vuelta a las diferencias sociales (ahora al nivel internacional) que hubieron en el siglo 19 en los países industrializados y en camino a la industrialización. Por esto y por muchas otras cosas más creo que estamos definitivamente en camino equivocado al intentar simplemente de reducir el gobierno público con tal de salir de los números en rojo y alcanzar los negros.

Esto es un tema de aborda el periódico independentista boricua. Para este artículo ellos entrevistaron a Santana Rabel, profesor de administración pública. El siguiente párrafo se merece una cita aquí porque detalla algunos posibles efectos de las políticas neo-liberales en Puerto Rico.

Ya entrada la década de los años de 1990, mientras Puerto Rico seguía manteniendo el mismo modelo de 1949, Santana Rabel explicó que un informe del propio Banco Mundial, en 1997 señaló que el tipo de reforma orientada exclusivamente a reducir tamaño, al ajuste fiscal sin considerar las instituciones y sin considerar el rol importante que tiene el gobierno para promover otros valores como es la equidad, la transparencia en los procedimientos y el cumplimiento de la ley, podía caer en pobreza, desigualdad y corrupción. Es entonces cuando las corrientes mundiales plantearon una nueva forma de gobernabilidad que pone en juego la capacidad que tiene el estado de enfrentarse a los retos de una sociedad basada en economías distintas, en la revolución en la tecnología y las comunicaciones en las que, según Santana Rabel, la estructura organizativa del gobierno no estaba preparada.

Para el articulo entero siga este enlace:

http://claridadpuertorico.com/articulo.php?id=4068

Siendo que nos encontramos en un momento de transición bien importante, deberíamos de observar detenidamente y críticamente lo que sucede cuando gobiernos con una práctica más o menos orientados al servicio social (opuestos al servicio de la clase comercial y adinerada) se adaptan a las demandas de la nueva economía internacional que los oprimen a acomodarse a sus necesidades (neo-colonialismo).

Figurations of History in the Dominican Diaspora.

2006-05-12T01:17:00.000-04:00

1- The cold and Hostos and Pedro Enrique Urena

It must have been a cold day, no doubt about it, but for the ascetic Eugenio María de Hostos, it was bitterly freezing. It was 1869 his first winter in New York, in Brooklyn to be more exact, and a broken heart weighted him down. It was not simply that he had not experienced New York’s icy winter before (colder than Spain to be sure), but that he was entering the cruel trail of “voluntary” exile—far from his country-like Mayagüez’ home and rejected from what was supposed to be his formal fatherland, Spain. The year before, taking advantage of a liberal breach in the stubbornly conservative Spain, he had had the guts to stand in front of a well-read European crowd at the Madrid’s Ateneo and tell everybody there that he was an anomaly by European standards because more importantly than his Spanish nationality and any other defining trait, he was an American (he meant from the American continent), a “product of colonial despotism, and hindered by it in my feelings, thoughts and actions.” It did not take long for accusations to begin dropping on Hostos for not being Spanish patriot enough. But there was no injure more excruciating than the cold indifference of his liberal colleagues who continued perceiving everything colonial as secondary in importance and refused to grant his federation dreams the same kind of urgency he believed it had. It is in this circumstance, then, renting an unheated apartment without enough money for three decent meals a day that this spirit of failure, desolation and dislocation enveloped Hostos. And yet, it was at this critical juncture of pain and identity crisis that a new Hostos was conceived—out of the ashes produced by rejection, and in the midst of exile.

Fast forward nearly a century after, also coming from the Caribbean, Puerto Rico and Dominican Republic, I found myself facing my first Michigan winter in 1989. A growing community of Dominicans in Grand Rapids was living evidence of the unbroken colonial condition of the Antilles. In my condition of a light Dominico- Puertorrican and U.S. citizen, I thought myself to be a bit above the rest who were not as fortunate as I was (thought this would be only clear in hindsight). But juggling three jobs and with a marked accent like many of my equals, I was bound for disillusionment and dislocation. I thought that I was an American like Hostos, but most U.S. citizens, who considered themselves the “real Americans,” did not think of me as one of them. They had to call me foreigner, spic, and ugly so I could understand once for all Ana Lydia Vega’s “Encancaranublado.” When I realized the meaning of second-class citizenship I also became aware of the racial and social hierarchy in which we were all colored and colonials. It was a cold, cold winter. And yet, it was at this decisive instant of destitution and disenfranchisement that a new me was invented—out of the ruins produced by snobbery and in the midst of exile.

2- The unsettling of the Exile

Hostos’ parents had also been exiles. They had fled the Dominican side of Hayti in the 1830s and had precariously established themselves in the west side of the forgotten Spanish colony of Puerto Rico. All in all, they belonged to a multitude of exiled caribeños and antillanos who, forced to question the boundaries of what meant to be home-grown, had redefined themselves outside of their native lands. We know some of them well. I think of José Martí, who while in exile here in New York he wrote his most powerful pieces about colonialism and nationalism. Pedro Henríquez Ureña, who after living in New York went to Minnesota from where he wrote back home about the glacial weather, and produced his best book on Latin American Culture. Also his sister, Camila Henríquez Ureña and many others like Juan Bosch to whom the diasporic experience was an antidote against the poison of colonial life and a refuge from annihilation.

The local stage upon which the dramatic diaspora of all these intellectuals took place was framed by the world-historical relation between the imperial core and colonial marginality (their constitutive connection as well as their constitutive antagonism) and the irreparable breach opened by the self-realization as marginals at the core, which altered forever the epistemic and political condition in which thought and action were possible in the exilic experience. Because of their relative fragility, their movement away and from the established limited notion of reality of colonial settings towards the centers of competing power, Madrid, Paris or New York, came together with an epiphany that did not let them rest. In other words, their unsettled circumstances offered them the opportunity to critically interrogate the world and historical vision of the colonizer and prod the system with grueling queries that would hardly have been possible should they had stayed in their original colonial setting.

No doubt about it. The exiled intellectual is often able to unveil the colonial mask of conformity and reveal the life of lies people live in the colonial utopia—a place of totalizing structure of brutality, violence, objectification, racism and exclusion. They are what Edward W. Said' called the "Liminal Intellectual." In his lecture entitled "Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals," Said described the secular critic's global predicament of continual transition and an ongoing negotiation of competing allegiances:

The exile therefore exists in a median state, neither completely at one with the new setting not fully disencumbered of the old, beset with half-involvements and half-detachments, nostalgic and sentimental on one level, an adept mimic or a secret outcast on another. (49)

Himself a liminal figure -- "nostalgic and sentimental" about his youth in Egypt and Lebanon but not altogether comfortable in his "new setting" amidst the university -- Said characterizes this "median state" as a liminal space between the prerogatives of national interest, academic specialization, and filial piety. But it is not any type of “median” state that produces the type of intellectual that could look back home like Hostos, Martí and Ureña did. It needs to be one that goes through the pain of dislocation as a learning experience, and embrace suffering, not as a masochist, but as one that recognize suffering and dislocation as familiar traits of the universal human.

3- My Diasporic View of Dominican History

In my experience as an exiled nationalist I have seen that it is when this learning experience of dislocation, suffering and ultimately of compassion trickles down to the conscious and began shaping our thinking patterns that we can observe the two faces of our cherished nationalism. On the one hand I noticed how nationalism is an effective weapon of the weak in fomenting a unified front against the more powerful colonial aggressor. Its most effective techniques are the creation of the Other (against the backdrop of Us, those who belong), and the marketing of regenerative postcolonial dreams that would arrive after the revolution. On the other hand, nationalism pits colonials against colonials, weaks against weaks, and eventually debilitates and stalls any revolutionary action, and perpetuates our condition of underdogs—which is what has happened on my beloved island of Hispaniola.

From these diasporic eyes I recognize a Dominican history that would not be readily available at home in DR. I see, for example, that today’s deep inequalities between Dominicans and Haitians correspond to a unique postcolonial condition with its roots in the construction of nations and invention of collective commonsense on the island of Hispaniola. Any attempt to recognize and oppose the pyramids of discrimination behind such striking disparity should focuses on the Dominican origins and evolution of the nineteenth-century intellectual paradigms that shaped the current social situation of double inequality based on race and socio-economic standing. It is only by recognizing the specific historical myths that have provided the sweet rationale for the current production of difference that we can interpret the social spaces in which these durable inequalities were produced. What is at stake here is what was going on during the Haitian occupation and the subsequent U.S. involvements.

4- A Revised History of Dominican Republic

Post-revolutionary Haitians had the challenge to convince the international community of the advantages of their revolutionary ideals. Their greatest achievement had not been on the military field, but on the world of ideas. Haitian revolutionaries had moved up a notch the liberal claims of the revolutionary Atlantic by adding the clauses of race and fair labor practices to the struggles for freedom. Yet, the timing of their victories, and thus of their proclamations, was not auspicious. On both sides of the Atlantic the Napoleonic wars were upsetting the most radical liberal causes and hardening conservatives against far-reaching alterations as those proposed by the Haitians. In addition to these external motives, there were the obstructions that could have been considered to be of their own making. Hampering a favorable reception, for example, were the resulting extreme violence of the revolutionary struggles, the fracturing internal quarrels, and the constant shifting of loyalties. The road ahead for international recognition was steep and yet, the leaders knew that without it their revolution would pass into history as a hiatus. Between 1804 and 1822 Haiti went through a phase of internal reorganization as it prepared to consolidate the gains attained through the revolution. This was a period to experiment with different levels of liberalism and authoritarianism, which in turn involved different approaches to national economies and labor practices. Jean Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe tried desperate measures to stimulate compliance and compel workers to generate similar production levels as those the colony delivered before the revolution. On the south, Alexandre Pétion and Jean Pierre Boyer tested more generous approaches to politics with workers and population in general. As an indication of the international role Haiti would want to play in the future, Pétion welcomed a weary Simón Bolivar and supported his anti-colonial cause with money and soldiers.

About two decades into post-revolutionary Haiti, the efforts resulted in a unified country under a relatively liberal and strong government, and with the unique characteristic of being the only country in the hemisphere with no slaves. In both constitutions drafted during this period the nation was defined as the collective entity that safeguarded individual freedom and equal citizenship regardless of race. Still, on a country with virtually no whites, residual colonial tensions between blacks and mulattoes predisposed politics. What made Haiti unique also put it in conflict with the rest of the international community. Persistent rumors of invasions, economic pressures to reinstate the old regime, and the casting of Haitians as unfit for self-government gave this country a strong ingredient of suspicion to everything foreign and a fixation with their distinctiveness. Nevertheless, at the root of their rhetoric and practice of national identity during this period we find a subtle yet strong desire to imitate the same imperial powers they fought against.

With these unusual characteristics the Haitian government of Boyer believed it was ready to make its influence felt outside of the national borders. The first step it took was to integrate the Spanish side to the Haitian republic months after an urban white elite led by José Nuñez de Cáceres strove to establish a rival state in Santo Domingo. Multiple sectors of the Dominican society requested absorption to the Haitian state because it was perceived as favorable and as more progressive than what they have experienced till then. The first years of the union brought unprecedented economic prosperity to both sides despite the contention with the groups that had benefited from the old colonial system. Subsequently Boyer attempted to secure recognition and normalization of relationships with the United States through the acceptance of thousands of freed blacks. During the preparation stages, he sent to the U.S. the first foreign plenipotentiary in order to redefine perceptions of Haiti abroad and establish lasting contacts with powerful sectors there. Unfortunately, the project of redefining Haiti’s image abroad did not have the necessary support in the U.S., and yet, the immigrants still arrive at the Haitians shores leaving a mark on the history of the island. Boyer also tried to regularize relationships with France by acquiescing to the former colonial master’s demands and paying an indemnity for the French loss during the revolution. These attempts at foreign love destabilized the country at a time that he wanted to assimilate the Spanish side and implement a difficult agricultural program of labor and distribution of land.

The resulting economic and political chaos galvanized the more liberal groups on both sides of the island. Yet, the failure of Boyer’s national programs impacted the eastern side even more by expanding the reach and helping define the ideological base of the Dominican separatist groups. Separation was indeed the outcome sought at all cost, and for this a rhetoric of difference was invented to highlight the raison d'être for self-rule and laid down the terms of fraternal bonds of equality. Several ideas of what made the inhabitants of the eastern side Dominicans and not Haitians competed for preeminence. On one side Juan Pablo Duarte, somewhat following Bolivar’s mestizo rhetoric, attempted to create a genderized concept of an inclusive nation that embraced all American races into a unified collective identity. His concerns and ideals evolved out of the bourgeoisie that had grown thanks to the policies and conditions set down by Boyer’s regime. As it has been demonstrated recently, most bourgeoisie sentiments of racial inclusion in Latin America at this time did not mean equality, but an aggravated wish of subordination. Still, Duarte’s rhetoric moved away from Nuñez de Caceres’ elitist and racist discourses. Particularly near the end of the Haitian regimes, he made a conscious appeal to colored Dominicans, and it is very probable that under favorable circumstances he would have worked for parity of rights. On the other side of the spectrum, however, were countless of pamphlet and paper writers that appealed to xenophobic and racialist sentiments with a rhetoric charged with difference in order to generate support for separation among the rural citizenship.

5- Conclusion

From the diasporic condition of a nationalist in exile, I am convinced, without a doubt, that the foundations for the current systems of durable dispositions of inequality afflicting Dominicans and Haitians today took shape, then, during the much misunderstood period of the Haitian supremacy. Considering that Duarte’s nationalist vision of a racially diverse country lasted only days, since Dominicans became something other than blacks, I ponder over the causes of such a quick defeat. What were the bounds of the social spaces in which these discourses were produced? How much effect could they have had in creating fear for Hatianism and uncertainty because of their geographic position when the population was mostly illiterate? What forms in language and behavior were different between the position of rural and urban populations, which in turn created fixed context of principles and traditions? What role did the church had in filtering and passing on these mores? More importantly, why these discourses kept producing race as a political currency even long after independence was achieved? Take into account also the pressures coming from abroad. Considering Haitian efforts to secure international recognition, what effect did the quick acknowledgment of the Dominican Republic had over the Dominican bourgeoisie in hardening racialized ideas of separation? This is particularly important when we consider the explicit rationale of foreign governments. For example, the U.S. Secretary of State John C. Calhoun addressed the need for the United States, France and Spain to support the fledging Dominican state to prevent “the further spread of negro influence in the West Indies.” The impact must have worked both ways. It could further be argued that the extreme high level of racialized national discourses that emerged after the declaration of independence paved the way for the bizarre second annexation to Spain.

Thus, like Hostos, I have come to realize in exile the dangers of nationalism running amuck, and that a shared and interdependent nationalism would be the best way to go, one that our status as Latinos in this borrowed nation has presaged. I mean with a shared and interdependent nationalism, one akin to the ideals of Hostos’ federation, which emphasized cooperation. And in reference to our status of Latinos in the U.S. I mean that after living in a diaspora where our identity as Dominican is less important than our Latino self, we can better steer clear of the excesses of nationalism which thrives in creating differences.

Respect for the Immigrants

2006-04-10T17:57:00.000-04:00

Published by the Delphian on Thu, 17 Aug 2006

I suggest that we consider the ongoing immigration concern in the United States from a global perspective and from within an analysis grounded in the historical process. As people we often think about our current problems as entirely unique failing to see the similarities they may have to other difficulties in the recent past. Old problems, those seen as happening long time ago, surely migrate from our collective memory into the oblivion where they offer us no warning for today and from which we learn no moral lesson. It is a habit of the heart pervasive in our society today, but we should find ways to repair this fault. And what a better time than this one, when we have forgotten that we have been at this conjuncture on the immigration debate before.

The human record is one of constant movement of people from one place of residence to another. It is a fact of life that people has always migrated, and will continue to do so. Even after people formed settled societies and became more permanent thousands of years ago, they still continued emigrating for reasons of climatic changes, political conflicts, and availability of resources. Migrations have always reached a critical point at times of natural disasters, and peaks of inequalities and oppressions. It is interesting to note that migrations are often a natural way to rectify unbalances. Moreover, immigrants often not only obtained a livelihood in their new places of residence, but they also reinvigorated the established societies they came to help populate by increasing diversity of thought and skills. Indeed, societies that for some reason stopped receiving or had a serious decline in the number of immigrants normally fell into serious economic and cultural depressions.

Immigration in the United States is not so different from what has been the general pattern through the years. Despite the occasional fierce nativism (a hostile and defensive reaction to the flux of immigration) and resistance to new arrivals, it is these immigrants who have usually been the most important driving force regenerating the U.S.

The Americas, (not only the United States), absorbed a large part of the 19th Century world growing population at a time when people who believed in "progress" pushed and removed American Natives from their land. This systematic confiscation helped create the impression that there was land available for the taking. Not surprising, the U.S., like Argentina, Brazil, and other American countries began receiving immigrants from all over the world to fill in the vacuum created. Despite the fact that all the people who considered themselves Americans were already immigrants or immigrant descendents, they generally received the new arrivals with hostility. Not even the German immigrants, who became the largest group in the U.S. over time, escaped this treatment. But it were the Irish and other Catholics who received the harshest treatment of all (in the other Americas the indigenous people and slave descendents were treated this way instead). In fact, nativist sentiment spread almost everywhere in the U.S. against those who arrived and who posed the most serious, imaginary or real, threats to the way people constructed their lives. This means in areas of religion, language, customs and cosmologies.

This tension between the ones who were here and those newly arrived have permeated U.S. history since, making our current debate on immigration simply part of a long track record we should not ignore. A close look at our past performance shows that we have been going through the same rhetoric and reiterating the same issues. Indeed, the workers’ program suggested in Congress mirrors that of the Braceros Program that lasted from 1942-1964. So, how can we move along the discussion without considering what has happened before? More importantly, how can we understand the uniqueness of our current situation without looking critically at our global role in helping induce the inequalities and oppressions that have prompted these immigrations in the first place?

Immigrants have been responsible for new solutions to old problems and for catapulting this nation to the current position of world power. So, we should first begin with an attitude about immigrants that reflects the respect they deserve considering what they have and will continue to do to help us avoid complacency and irrelevancy. Yet, this does not mean that we should introduce an indiscriminate immigration policy, but one that originates from the realization that immigrants by and large are a positive addition to us here and now.

Honoring My Students

2006-04-10T13:21:00.000-04:00

Conferring Honor to some of my students, Spring 2006 (as of Monday, April 10, 2006)

*Crissy Martinez-

Admitted to the MSc in Globalisation and Latin American Development
The Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London

Clio Award Nominees:

*Matt Bursig, “German Immigrant Soldiers in the Mexican-American War:
Their reasons for enlistment & fighting”

*Thomas Graziano, “The “Dirty Dealings” Behind the Acquisition of the Panama Canal: A Detailed View of French Deceit, Wall Street Profiteering, and the Panamanian “Revolution”

*Stephanie Matyszczyk, “The Alamo as a Pyrrhic Victory: The Mexican Experience in the Battle of the Alamo.”

*Wesley Miller, “Hernando Cortes and Niccolo Machiavelli: Allies in thought and action.”

The 20th National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR 20):

*Stephanie Matyszczyk

*Wesley Miller

Adelphi Undergraduate Research Conference:

*Jesse Pholman

Intellectual and Moral muscles

2006-04-10T12:43:00.000-04:00

Hostos in all his glory: showing off his intellectual and moral muscles.

Hostos the Hercules

2006-04-10T11:57:00.000-04:00

In San Juan, Puerto Rico, besides Hosto's Herculean statue. Yasiel, Dennis, and Jared.