A sustained address to the poet’s daughter, The Real Horse takes its cues from the child’s unapologetic disregard for things as they are, calling forth the adult world as accountable for its flaws and as an occasion for imagining otherwise. Farid Matuk‘s interrogations of form cut a path through the tangle of a daughter’s position as a natural-born female citizen of the “First World” and of the poet’s position as a once-undocumented immigrant of mixed ethnicity. These luminously multifaceted poem sequences cast their lot with the lyric voice, trusting it to hold a space where we might follow the child’s ongoing revolution against the patrimony of selfhood and citizenship.
In the following excerpt, author Hilary Plum and poet Zach Savich dive deeply into The Real Horse, and discuss their thoughts and questions which arise from the text. You can find this review and discussion on West Branch, a thrice-yearly magazine of poetry, fiction, essays, and reviews.
“A hero’s pretty feet on her legs white hose skin exposed in sumptuous folds bound as freight on the back of this real horse running into its own outline.”
The questions of authenticity, representation (whose, of whom?), and legibility (to whom? saying what?) are the weighty and beautiful burden of this book, entangled ever with the cruel realities and constructions of race (the phrase “white enough” accumulates in devastating refrain). The couplet quoted above describes the stage actor Adah Menken (1835-1868), whose racial identity was a source of speculation and her own self-invention. Matuk considers her famous role as the “Cossack hero, Ivan Mazeppa”: “Each night on stage she covered her skin, though not her shape, in a pinkish white body stocking to play the culminating scene in which Mazeppa is stripped nude and bound, against a scrolling panorama, to a runaway horse.” There’s a real horse and fake nudity and flamboyantly performed race, of unknown “authenticity”; there’s a fake land in real motion. There are flesh and presence and life in their quickness, elusive amid inescapable representation and discursive force. Performances (Menken’s act; Homelands truest graffiti) may overflow the constraints of their stages, may claim sites of resistance, of “freedom, neither public nor private,” at least for a scrolling moment.
“Where does opposition go after it frames our beautiful camaraderie?” Matuk asks in a letter to his daughter that prefaces the book. “You show me that even if the outlines of our circumstance burn without consequence, we can tend at once to the plain moment and to material things and to the projections they bear.” Both things and the “projections they bear”; both the real horse and its outline. This book forms hope somewhere between reality and representation, in the quick movement of that opposition’s going, the horizon it’s heading toward. Read more.
Poet Farid Matuk
Farid Matuk is the author of the poetry collections This Isa Nice Neighborhood and The Real Horse. Born in Peru to a Syrian mother and Peruvian father, Matuk lived in the U.S. variously as an undocumented person, a “legal” resident, and a “naturalized” citizen. Matuk’s work has been recognized most recently with a New Works grant from the Headlands Center for the Arts and a Holloway Visiting Professorship at University of California, Berkeley.
In Gerard P. Kuiper and the Rise of Modern Planetary Science, Derek W. G. Sears crafts an in-depth history of some of the twentieth century’s most interesting scientists, from Harold Urey to Carl Sagan, who worked with the father of modern planetary science. Now, as NASA and other space agencies explore the solar system, they take with them many of the ideas and concepts first described by Gerard P. Kuiper. In celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, keep reading for a glimpse into Kuiper and the University of Arizona’s involvement in this exciting period of American history.
“It was the most extraordinary time, one that is hard to imagine many decades later. In 1961, when President John Kennedy made the commitment to land a man on the Moon by 1970, rockets were exploding on the launch pad… Eight years later, highly sophisticated, complex, large, manned spacecraft would touch down on the surface of the Moon within feet of their intended landing site. It took a lot of small steps, a lot of dedication, and a lot of stress to make it happen. Astronauts died in the effort. To Gerard Kuiper and his small group of lunar specialists in Tucson, the task was to produce maps and interpretations of the lunar surface and help with decisions concerning landing sites.”
“America’s decision to land a man on the Moon affected Kuiper in two ways. It led to the construction of a new building in Tucson, eventually to become the Kuiper Space Sciences Building… It also led to a series of robotic missions to the Moon. The science team led by Kuiper, who were amid publishing three atlases of the Moon, would be obvious candidates to participate in these programs.
The American robotic precursors for humans to land on the Moon consisted of three programs. The Ranger program was to be a series of spacecraft that would crash into the Moon and take close-up images as they did. The Lunar Orbiter program was to be a series of spacecraft that would, as their name implied, orbit the Moon and take photographs of the surface. Third, and the most sophisticated of the three programs, was to be the Surveyor program that would consist of robots that landed on the Moon.
Kuiper became involved in the Ranger and Surveyor programs in 1961 when he was asked to serve on committees advising the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, who were managing these programs… In 1961, Rangers 1 and 2 failed on launch. Rangers 3 and 5 missed the Moon. Ranger 4 hit the Moon but failed to return any data. In 1963 the project was reorganized, and Kuiper was asked to be the chief experimenter with a science team of Urey, Shoemaker, Whitaker, and Ray Heacock, a JPL engineer.”
“Four redesigned spacecraft were prepared, each with six TV cameras. At Kuiper’s suggestion, the TV system was tested in mock lunar landscapes at Goldstone Station in the Mojave Desert. Camera operations were carried out by Ralph Baker, who later joined the Optical Sciences Center in Tucson. The science team, especially Whitaker, played an important role in determining the impact sites for Ranger and the approach angles. Ranger 6 was another failure, but Ranger 7 was a spectacular success. It crashed just south of the Copernicus crater in a region now known, at Kuiper’s suggestion, as Mare Cognitum.”
“Kuiper arranged for LPL [Lunar and Planetary Laboratory] to make loose-leaf albums from the Ranger 7 prints, which required a local company, Ray Manley Commercial Photography, to make fifty thousand prints. In the rapid-fire days leading up to the Apollo landings, things moved fast. Ranger 8 hit Mare Tranquilitatis in February 1965, and Ranger 9 crashed near the Alphonsus crater a month later. Both were completely successful.”
“Never had the LPL attracted such attention. With this success came attempts by the NASA centers and JPL to recruit LPL scientists. Whitaker was approached JPL, Kuiper was invited to take a position at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., and both Gehrels and Kuiper were invited to move to the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. Kuiper took great pleasure in recounting the details to President Harvill.”
Derek W.G. Sears was a professor at the University of Arkansas for thirty years and is now a senior research scientist at NASA. He has published widely on meteorites, lunar samples, asteroids, and the history of planetary science.
When it was first published in 1982, When It Rains was one of the earliest published literary works in the O’odham language. Speakers from across generations shared poems that showcased the aesthetic of the written word and aimed to spread interest in reading and writing in O’odham. In a new forward to the volume, Sun Tracks editor Ofelia Zepeda reflects on how meaningful this volume was when it was first published and its continued importance. Below, read Ofelia’s thoughtful new forward to When It Rains.
Nat hab e-ju: g t-taccui?
Has our dream come true? It has been some thirty-six years since this little book, When It Rains / Mat Hekid O Ju, was published. Our dream at the time was to envision a flourishing contemporary literary body for the O’odham language. At that time in history, we had speakers from all generations, and it would have been tremendous to create a contemporary literary base for those speakers. Certainly, the goal for me was to be part of a group that created literature for the sole purposes of sharing the aesthetic of the written word and perpetuating interest in reading and writing O’odham. This is what I was working toward at the time–practicing writing, practicing reading, and, when I could or was asked, teaching other O’odham speakers to do the same. Since that time, we’ve come a long way with regard to printed matter for Indigenous languages; some languages certainly have been more successful than others, though few have expanded into the realm of contemporary literature. Just as it was thirty-six years ago, most printed works in Native languages are still for teaching or other academic purposes, relegating printed Native language to these settings.
But there is something uniquely different about it now. In 1982, when this volume was originally published, the first language of the teachers whose writing appears in this collection was O’odham–and it was the same for many of their students. Though these language teachers were bilingual in O’odham and English, most were not certified teachers but aides for their classrooms. During the 1980s federal law required many reservation schools to provide funding to support students’ efforts to transition from their Native languages to English. They used a bilingual approach, using both the target language (English) and the Native language to support the students’ transition to English fluency.
Today the language landscape for O’odham is very different; there is no longer a need for O’odham bilingual classrooms or the bilingual method of English education. Instead, teachers move from grade to grade and room to room, bringing O’odham language and culture to the O’odham students in the schools. Some of these teachers are fluent speakers of O’odham, some are limited in their ability to speak it, and still others are second-language learners of their language. Over the last thirty-six years–the span of a generation–O’odham has suffered extreme language loss. The 1990s experienced the greatest language shift to English for many Indigenous peoples such as the O’odham. This extreme shift to English and the loss of Native language has created an urgency to write the language down, to document it in all forms of media, to use it daily.
Currently, many Native American languages, like Tohono O’odham and Pima, are fading out of use. There are myriad explanations for this extreme language loss, including contact by dominant groups and other similar historical events, institutionalized religions, and educational systems generally but particularly boarding schools; the total causes are too many and complex to address here in detail. It must be noted, though, that due to both language shift and language loss, the teaching of both the oral and written forms of the O’odham language can be found largely outside the classroom.
Today, many tribes must necessarily move the teaching of their languages outside the schools and into the community. These community-based teaching settings invite multiple generations to come together to learn, maintain, and revive their language. In some of these settings, the language immersion method is used; this method relies on the oral form as the primary method for language transmission, though there are a number of opportunities to create written literature in the immersion setting. But even though it is not in the school, this literature’s primary purpose is to support language learning. Perhaps the best example is the case of Hawaiian language revitalization in which both oral and written language use have been promoted. Hawaiian is an exceptional case because, prior to colonization, the Hawaiian language had a rich history of writing and publication. The contemporary language revitalization movements have reached back to these early documents and have continued to add to all genres of printed literary production. Aside from this unique case, other U.S. Indigenous language revitalization movements have not been as successful in actively producing much new literary material in their languages.
Despite the tremendous changes that have occurred within the O’odham languages represented in this collection, it should be noted that one thing has not changed: that is that native speakers of O’odham, those who are learning it as a second language, and all those in between are all still struck with the beauty of the language and all that it is capable of rendering. As a speaker, poet, linguist, and teacher of the Tohono O’odham language, I am still amazed by the new words and usages that I come across. The language is still so new and beautiful with each discovery we make about it, and that discovery is in how people choose to use the language as it moves and changes through time. A mere thirty-six years has allowed us to witness changes in certain elements of the language–some of it good, and some not as positive. A language is allowed this flexibility to change and move according to modernity and the creativity of the people. It has always been that way.
But the changes of the language–whether good or bad–become irrelevant when O’odham gather and share the spoken words. Today, both in the Tohono O’odham Nation and in the Gila River Indian (Pima) Community, the people come together during the winter season to continue telling the story of the creation of the people that is all around them. These gatherings are typically hosted by museums and cultural centers or other formal organizations. As always, these events are communal, and people gravitate toward them. I believe the people understand the importance of these events, even though they have changed in appearance from the events of our parents’ and grandparents’ times. These storytelling gatherings remind people that the real purpose of language is to perpetuate our oral history, to remind us of our origins–of who we are. Stories are capable of this. This is what I understand to be the power of words, of language. This power that I wrote of thirty-six years ago is still there for the people, and I believe those who are now working at reclaiming spoken O’odham know this power is there in the words and that they are gaining more than just words when they learn to speak O ‘odham–whether it be Tohono O’odham or Pima.
Finally, I must comment on the content of the writing in this collection. The themes and experiences expressed in the writing of these people are still relevant today. While both the Tohono O’odham Nation and the Gila River Indian Community have grown and developed over time, they are still very rural communities with small villages dotting parts of the reservation; children still get bussed for miles to go to school, and their parents spend a couple of hours commuting to work each day. The rural desert environment also is still an important part of both children’s and adults’ lives; therefore, the themes written about thirty-six years ago are still applicable. There are words about the cycle of the seasons, about rain in the desert; there are words about the sacred mountains, and, of course, there are words of grief and loss and happiness. There are words about certain animals and about how to behave around them; many children still know of these rules. Things have changed, but many things remain the same. The pieces in this collection will be meaningful to many still.
It is important that I document here that when this collection was first released, we organized a poetry reading by the contributors of the collection. The reading was held in Sells, Arizona, the Tohono O’odham Nation’s seat of government. As we made preparations for this reading, it was hard to predict what would actually happen. This was the first poetry reading ever held on the reservation. We called on many of the contributors to read their piece, and many obliged. We had an emcee for the program, and the venue was the Tohono O’odham Nation’s tribal council building– the largest meeting place in Sells. It was one of the few places that had auditorium-style seating. We mailed invitations to dignitaries of the nation, school officials, and friends. We were not sure who or if anyone would come. I remember working on this with my friend and professor at the time, Larry Evers, who was then the series editor of Sun Tracks. On the day of the event, we made our way to Sells and set up for the reading. Slowly, people trickled in– adults, young people, elders, children. The auditorium was full. We shared our work, reading to a quiet and respectful audience, and afterward, as is typical with such events in the city, we served refreshments. Visiting with members from the audience and friends, I found out to my amazement that many of the tribe’s businesses had closed for the afternoon so that employees could attend the event and that schools had brought busloads of students. We were overwhelmed by their support– or maybe it was their curiosity about the event. Over time, whenever I speak of this experience, I like to think of this event as one that the people knew was going to be about words, making it so important that they all should be there. Though our reading of contemporary poetry was not a telling of the origins, it was perhaps in some way just as powerful.
This collection captured the voices of a small number of language educators, representing both the Tohono O’odham Nation (at the time known as Papago) and the Pima Indians. These educators all were attending a language institute where I was their instructor. I might mention that the language institute, now known as the American Indian Language Development Institute (AILDI), is still very much active at the University of Arizona; it continues to offer courses and training to meet the needs of Native American language teachers, researchers, resource people, and activists. I have been a teacher at AILDI for a long time, and the director for a number of years; during my work at AILDI, I have had the opportunity and honor to work with hundreds of language teachers from across the United States. All of them are special people– but none as special as the group whose writing is in this collection, and by my recollection, this is the first generation of literate O’odham. These educators’ first language was O’odham, and they were trained to read and write in that language. They were our pioneers.
It is poignant to note that some of these educators are no longer with us. I will be saddened to know that the reissuing of this collection will bring the memory of their loved ones to their respective families. I want them to understand that I help bring the memory of their family members with respect and honor. I also want them to understand that their contribution of their ha’icu cegitodag to this collection was truly special. They and their words are remembered here in this work.
Ofelia Zepeda University of Arizona July 24, 2018
Ofelia Zepeda is a poet, regents’ professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona, and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship for her work in American Indian language education. She is the current editor of Sun Tracks, which was launched in 1971 and is one of the first publishing programs to focus exclusively on the creative works of Native Americans.
All communities are teeming with energy, spirit, and knowledge. In the new book Spiral to the Stars, geographer Laura Harjo taps into and activates this dynamism to discuss Indigenous community planning from a Mvskoke perspective. The book poses questions about what community is, how to reclaim community, and how to embark on the process of envisioning what and where the community can be. Today we’re excited to share Harjo’s thoughts on conceiving a map to build genuine community relationships, knowledge, and power:
We watched television every day at my grandfather’s house, before cable, when there were only four channels: ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS. We watched The Price is Right and Wheel of Fortune. Hosts Bob Barker and Pat Sajak crooned at us while we sat in Grandpa’s HUD home, situated in a Creek housing subdivision, with a gravel-dirt road leading in and out. Their voices droned from his console TV, which looked like a piece of wooden furniture; I only knew a handful of people who had a “fancy” TV like that. With game shows humming in the background and the smell of sliced USDA luncheon meat, commodity Spam, frying in the skillet in the kitchen, Grandpa would tell me medicine stories. Some seemed unfathomable—but I believed them and believe them still. He would start by telling me I needed to be able to take care of myself, before going on to teach me medicine songs and instructing me on contemporary uses of Mvskoke medicine. As times change, our needs change, and I learned from my grandfather that the songs and medicine shift to meet our current needs. One song he taught me was meant to be sung in a pawn shop when you want the proprietor to negotiate in your favor! The song’s purpose wasn’t to unfairly sway interactions but rather to make you heard and understood. Thus Creek values and ways morph into new manifestations and applications. Our ways are not bound to “traditional” use, and I think our relatives would think it was ridiculous if we refused to benefit from our knowledge and lifeways in the current day. The purpose of this story about my grandpa is to demonstrate a renegotiation of knowledge and its use as a tool. Our medicine does not stand still either, and its use is not frozen in time. In this book, I share other Mvskoke stories with a commitment to prioritizing the theories that come from the lived and felt experiences of Mvskoke communities, and practices born out of necessity and love.
The primary argument is that Mvskoke communities have what they need at their disposal; everyday community practices are deep, rich, and meaningful, and have sustained Mvskoke people through many moments and in many places. Community practices are articulated through Mvskoke relationships, knowledge, power, and spatialities. Despite the eliminatory work of the settler state, these Mvskoke practices, like those of other Indigenous and marginalized groups who are targeted by settler colonialism, have managed to fly under the radar undetected. Mvskoke communities have sustained the spaces to dream, imagine, speculate, and activate the wishes of our ancestors, contemporary kin, and future relatives—all in a present temporality, which is Indigenous futurity. Mvskoke futurity carries out a form of Indigenous futurity while honoring the lived experiences and knowledge of the Mvskoke community. Mvskoke experiences, practices, and theories generate four concepts fundamental to Mvskoke futurity: este-cate sovereignty (Indigenous kinship sovereignty); community (and body) knowledge; collective power; and the imagining, constructing, and accessing of Mvskoke spatialities.
Examining Mvskoke community through the lens of futurity enables us to step out of clashes over grievance claims for a moment and speculate about the future that our ancestors desired and that we desire, and about how to create something that our future relatives will want and need. The notion of futurity challenges a conventional reckoning of time and the future, and pushes us to create right now—in the present moment—that which our ancestors, we, and future relatives desire. As community builders, we often ask tactical sets of questions to develop a concrete plan, and then tell people that they are going to have to sit and wait, knowing that conditions will not improve in their time: their dreams will be for someone else. In other words, we tell them “not yet.” We cannot say “not yet.” I am not eschewing a long view of community; I am merely saying that futurity does not have to be limited to a future temporality, in which we have to wait to create and get to the place where we want to be. Indeed, there are a range of ways in which we are already enacting Mvskoke futurity to shift community conditions.
Shifting conditions and community contexts require us to renegotiate Mvskoke lifeways and practices. Sharing the story of my grandpa’s pawn shop song illustrates the ease with which renegotiation of Mvskoke knowledge and practices can occur. Spiral to the Stars recognizes Mvskoke ways of knowing as a legitimate source of power and recognizes that Mvskoke people embody, enact, and share power and knowledge in multiple spatialities. My operating definition of futurity is the enactment of theories and practices that activate our ancestors’ unrealized possibilities, the act of living out the futures we wish for in a contemporary moment, and the creation of the conditions for these futures. This is futurity: it operates in service to our ancestors, contemporary relatives, and
future relatives. I employ futurity as an analytical tool throughout the book.
Mvskoke poet, musician, and playwright Joy Harjo’s poem “A Map to the Next World” urges us to think about Mvskoke futurities—the other possible worlds to live in that refuse elimination at the hands of settler colonialism. In her poem, Harjo takes the reader through the prevailing world conditions and wonders about a map to the next world, offering suggestions of looking inward—the map is written into us. As a Mvskoke person, I consider Harjo’s poem a call to action, a call to conceive of a map to the next world. This is a significant endeavor that requires renegotiating Mvskoke knowledge—something we have always done. This book is just one idea for constructing a map, using futurity as an analytical tool. As an Indigenous mapper and cartographer, I develop way-finding tools that I will unpack in each chapter. I put into action my community knowledge and academic training to imagine tools that communities can use to operationalize their knowledge without requiring so-called experts to identify their areas of genius.
Laura Harjo is a Mvskoke scholar, geographer, planner, and Indigenous methodologist. She is an assistant professor of community and regional planning at the University of New Mexico.
The Chicana M(other)work Anthology is a call to action for justice within and outside academia. Edited by Cecilia Caballero, Yvette Martínez-Vu, Judith Pérez-Torres, Michelle Téllez, and Christine Vega, with a foreword by Ana Castillo, this volumebrings together emerging scholarship and testimonios by and about self-identified Chicana and Women of Color mother-scholars, activists, and allies who, using an intersectional lens, center mothering as transformative labor. Today, we offer a brief excerpt from this innovative new book.
Chicana M(other)work is a concept and project informed by our shared gendered, classed, and racialized experiences as first-generation Chicana scholars from working-class, (im)migrant Mexican families. Through Chicana M(other)work, we provide a framework for collective resistance that makes our various forms of feminized labor visible and promotes collective action, holistic healing, and social justice for Mother-Scholars and Activists of Color, our children, and our communities. Furthermore, rather than understanding Chicana identity as a singular monolith, we view it as ever evolving. Here we use the term “Chicana” conceptually to integrate our varying identitarian positionalities as cisgender mother-scholars who identify as Chicana, Xicana-Indigena, Chicana/x Latina, and Afro-Xicana.
“Chicana M(other)work is not a project of assimilating or diversifying academia; on the contrary, we aim to transform it.”
We are daughters of working-class Mexican migrant parents, and we are Chicana Mother-Scholars to Children of Color born in the United States. We use a Chicana feminist framework (Anzaldua 1987; Delgado Bernal 1998; Garcia 1997; Sandoval 2010; Tellez 2005; Villenas et al. 2006) as our theoretical grounding to explore and challenge white heteropatriarchy as it continuously marginalizes Women of Color in the academic pipeline (Harris and Gonzalez 2013; Solorzano and Yosso 2006). While we self-identify as Chicana Mother-Scholars, however, we do not view our work as restricted to academic or domestic spaces; rather, the concept Mother-Scholar transgresses these spaces. Our work exists in the classrooms, community, with each other, and with our children. We view our care work and mothering, specifically “motherwork” (Collins 1994), as an interwoven political act that responds to multiple forms of oppression experienced by Mothers of Color in the United States.
We
borrow the term “motherwork” from Patricia Hill Collins and modify it by
embracing the term “other” through the use of parentheses. Chicana M(other)work
calls attention to our layered care work from five words into one—Chicana, Mother,
Other, Work, Motherwork. We see Chicana M(other)work as being inclusive to
Women of Color (trans and cis), nonbinary Parents of Color, other-mothers, and
allies because mothering is not confined to biology or normative family
structures. We strive to build community within and outside academic
institutions, and one way we do this is by mothering others and ourselves
(Gumbs 2010; Gumbs, Martens, and Williams 2016). Building on Chicana feminists’
critiques of institutional heteropatriarchal violence in the academy (Castaneda
et al. 2014), Chicana M(other)work challenges increasingly corporatized
neoliberal institutions by holding spaces accountable through activism when
they are not supporting Mothers of Color and working-class families. In these
ways, we make it clear that Chicana M(other)work is not a project of
assimilating or diversifying academia; on the contrary, we aim to transform it,
for instance, by choosing not to hide our children, instead including them
within our work for social justice. Furthermore, despite the possibility of our
individual upward mobility with our doctoral degrees, we will always remain committed
to our poor and working-class origins. As such, Chicana M(other)work is a call to
action for justice within and outside academia.
For
Patricia Hill Collins (1994, 2000), her theorization of motherwork centers
race, class, gender, and other intersectional identities to challenge Western
ideologies of mothers’ roles. Collins’s theoretical framework disrupts gender
roles and defies the social structures and constructions of work and family as
separate spheres for Black women; it acknowledges women’s reproductive labor as
work on behalf of the family as a whole rather than to benefit men. Motherwork
also goes beyond the survival of the family by recognizing the survival of one’s biological kin, as well as attending to the individual
survival, empowerment, and identity of one’s racial and ethnic community to
protect the earth for children who are yet to be born. These concepts were instrumental
for our own theorization of Chicana M(other)work.
As Chicana Mother-Scholars, our concept of Chicana M(other)work
is informed by the labor we perform in the neoliberal university model, which
exploits our work as doctoral students, contingent faculty, and tenure-line faculty.
Although women who are adjunct faculty now compose the new faculty majority in
the United States, the difficulties of advancing in PhD programs and then into
tenure-track and tenured careers are often framed as individual failings rather
than fully recognized as institutional barriers that push Mothers of Color
outside academia. In turn, the university is seldom held accountable for the
institutional violence and exploitation faced by first-generation, low-income, and
working-class Mother-Scholars of Color.
The editors of this volume are part of the grassroots collective, Chicana M(other)work, which offers a blog, podcasts, and original essays in an accessible venue.
About the Editors Cecilia Caballero is a PhD candidate in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.
Yvette Martínez-Vu is the assistant director of the University of California, Santa Barbara, McNair Scholars Program. She is an interdisciplinary scholar with a PhD in theater and performance studies from University of California, Los Angeles.
Judith Pérez-Torres is an adjunct faculty member at California State University, Fullerton, in the College of Education. She is an interdisciplinary scholar with a PhD in educational leadership and policy from University of Utah.
Michelle Téllez is an assistant professor of Mexican American studies at the University of Arizona. She is an interdisciplinary scholar with a PhD in community studies in education from Claremont Graduate University.
Christine Vega is a PhD candidate in the Social Sciences and Comparative Education Division at the University of California, Los Angles.
Global Indigenous Health examines the dramatic impact of colonization on Indigenous peoples’ physical, mental, and emotional health. Building on Indigenous knowledge systems of health and critical decolonial theories, the volume’s contributors explore how Indigenous peoples are responding to both the health crises in their communities and the ways for non-Indigenous people to engage in building positive health outcomes with Indigenous communities. Edited by Robert Henry, Amanda LaVallee, Nancy Van Styvendale, and Robert Alexander Innes, this book raises important considerations for contemporary research in the field of Indigenous health, which is too often done “on” or “for” Indigenous communities rather than within or with these communities. Today we offer an excerpt from the introduction to this important volume:
Prior to colonization, Indigenous peoples had their own political structures, religions, education processes, and concepts of how to live within their territories (King, Smith, and Gracey 2009), which continue today to varying degrees, despite ongoing settler colonial and postcolonial conditions. Indigenous peoples frame their understanding of the world around their relationships with their environments, which, for many, have existed since time immemorial (Kuokkanen 2007; Smith 1999). Globally, Indigenous peoples have a variety of cultural practices, beliefs, customs, languages, and ceremonies that influence their health paradigms. Even during colonial processes designed to eradicate Indigenous cultures, many continued to define health on a continuum of relationships and responsibilities with their environment, families, communities, and ancestors (Burgess et al. 2005; King, Smith, and Gracey 2009; Kuokkanen 2007).
Scholarly discussions of health are often dominated by Western biomedical discourse, which focuses on a cure/disease model. Health, in this model, has been and continues to be typically defined as the “absence of disease or illness” (Rootman and Raeburn 1994). As such, health systems and health research are often viewed through a Western Eurocentric lens, which focuses on healing the body from disease and not on the social and environmental factors that influence an individual’s health (Shah 2003). For example, within the field of epidemiology research, health status is still measured by indicators such as incidence, prevalence, and mortality rates. Through the centering of Western biomedical perspectives and understandings, traditional Indigenous knowledges about health and well-being have been ignored. In other cases, Indigenous knowledges— for example, of medicinal plants or healing practices— have been outright stolen and claimed by Western science (Bala and Gheverghese Joseph 2007).
Western indicators do not directly improve our understanding of how sociopolitical histories shape environmental factors that lead to ill health for Indigenous and other marginalized populations (Singer 2009). In contrast to Western biomedical models focused on the absence of disease as a primary indicator of health, many Indigenous peoples view health, instead, as an interrelated relationship between the mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual aspects of the self, as well as the relationship between individuals and their environments (King, Smith, and Gracey 2009; Kuokkanen 2007; Saul 2014). As a 2009 UN report sets forth, Western health practices often tacitly assume and promote a common heritage, belief system, structure, language, and identity based exclusively on Western medicine, which “does not recognize traditional healing techniques such as song and dance, or traditional training methods for medical practitioners, such as dreams, yet these practices are viewed as integral to the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of illnesses in indigenous health systems” (Cunningham 2009, 175). This ethnocentric bias results in missed opportunities to understand the complexities of health through myriad perspectives and traditional knowledges connected to particular territories and peoples.
Many Indigenous communities have diligently kept their cultures alive by passing on traditional knowledge through arts, ceremonies, and languages. Moreover, they have been protecting and holding onto their lands and territories to sustain themselves as peoples and cultures (Kipuri 2009). Health research frameworks and systems must reflect the interconnectedness and relationships between the individual and family, community, and larger environment, and must recognize how these relationships influence the individual’s mental, physical, and spiritual health. Understanding health in this manner requires acknowledging that illnesses are not just epidemiological concerns identified through Western medicine; rather, health is relational and must be addressed holistically.
The UN states that all peoples have the right to the highest possible standard of physical and mental health. The reality, however, is that for Indigenous peoples globally, this is not the case. Indigenous peoples continue to fight for their right to self-determination and to strengthen themselves politically, economically, socially, and legally, in an effort to promote and protect their human rights (Dorough 2009), as well as their traditions, practices, and knowledges as sovereign Indigenous nations. The chapters within this book are written validations, tributes, protests, acts of resilience, and stories of the success, hope, and survival of Indigenous peoples despite the historical and contemporary harms of colonization.
As Mexico entered the last decade of the sixteenth century, immigration became an important phenomenon in the mining town of San Luis Potosí. Drawn by new jobs, thousands of men, women, and children poured into the valley between 1591 and 1630, coming from more than 130 communities across northern Mesoamerica. The Motions Beneath is a social history of the encounter of these thousands of indigenous peoples representing ten linguistic groups. Using baptism and marriage records, Laurent Corbeil creates a demographic image of the town’s population. He studies two generations of highly mobile individuals, revealing their agency and subjectivity when facing colonial structures of exploitation on a daily basis. Today, we offer an excerpt from this important new work:
The historical literature on the cities of New Spain shows that the disposition of indigenous neighborhoods did not usually follow a blueprint developed and imposed by Spaniards. The ideal of a well planned and grid patterned urban development— as it was appearing in Renaissance Europe— was seldom enforced in urban indigenous neighborhoods. Felipe Castro Gutiérrez describes the general organization of the pueblos y barrios de indios in New Spain in these words: “a labyrinth of small streets, public places hidden on unexpected sites, irregularly designed blocks of houses, and houses disposed according to the resources or to the convenience of each owner, sometimes with ‘false doors’ that permitted people to enter and exit with discretion.”
In the areas of the northern frontier of New Spain where silver deposits abounded, this situation was juxtaposed— and collided— with the chaotic development of mining as a private and uncertain enterprise. In Zacatecas, for example, indigenous migrants established their settlements close to mining operations, in accordance with economic incentives and the availability of resources, but not following any sort of urban planning. A similar contrast between the European chessboard ideal of urban development existed in most of Nueva Vizcaya, and only key social and political institutions, such as the church, the cemetery, and the zócalo (central plaza) existed there. Missions, however, followed a strict pattern of well-demarcated territories assigned to indigenous ethnic groups in a written fundo legal, a royal allotment of land for indios. In theory, the pueblos de indios of San Luis Potosí should have received a fundo legal as well, but their location, a very short distance from the Spanish settlement, suggests that the geographic disposition was rather arbitrary.
Traza, Pueblos, and Barrios of San Luis Potosi, Early Seventeenth Century. Map by Juliana de Souza Ritter, Student Consultant, Davis Library Research Hub, University of Northern Carolina at Chapel-Hill. Inspired by Galvan Arellano, Arquitectura y urbanismo, 173.
The major cause behind the apparently disorganized nature of urban development was the fundamental presence of the haciendas de benefico in the regional economy. I will define in greater detail the nature and functions of these sites of production later in this chapter, but suffice it to say for now that Spanish miners established these facilities where the resources allowed for it, rather than where it was best for urban development. Other factors, such as the geography of the land— in San Luis Potosí, the swamp, the lagoon, and the numerous water springs— and the Spaniards’ unfamiliarity with the early modern ideals of urban development were other determining factors. In accordance with this interpretation of urban borderlands, I argue that the development of pueblos y barrios de indios surrounding San Luis Potosí was not planned, but that they were established and evolved according to available resources and to the needs and wills of the population, both Spanish and indigenous. A crucial difference here, however, is that Spanish authorities were quick in recognizing the official nature and government of most indigenous settlements.
The northern frontier was not only characterized by the establishment of human settlements, but also by the arrival and transformation of an economic system. The indigenous population in San Luis Potosí did not only establish itself in the pueblos y barrios de indios. Many of them also lived on work sites run by Spaniards, such as haciendas de beneficios, carboneras (charcoal-making facilities), ranchos, and the like. I recall here that the estimated indigenous population in 1597, according to in-town parish records, was around 2,500 individuals, while the male working population, including the mines, was estimated at 5,000 in 1600 and 6,000 in 1603. That is to say that the laboring population living outside the pueblos y barrios de indios was significant. Indigenous labor was diversified in the nature of the performed tasks, in the degree of knowledge and specialisation, and in the type of relations with the Spanish employers.
Laurent Corbeil received his Ph.D. from McGill University and was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has received grants from the UNAM-IIH and the Québec Research Funds—Society and Culture.
With Election Day approaching, conversations about political representation and social justice have taken on new urgency. But historian Mario T. García reminds us that it was these very topics that propelled Raymond L. Telles to office in 1957, when he was elected the first Mexican American Mayor of El Paso. In The Making of a Mexican American Mayor, García deftly illustrates how Telles’s election marked a turning point in political agency for Latinos. Today, we share an excerpt from the new second edition:
The election of Raymond L. Telles as mayor of El Paso in 1957 was a major breakthrough in the Mexican American quest for political representation and status in the United States. A personal triumph for Telles, his election also symbolized a political victory for the entire Mexican American community of this key southwestern border city. After more than one hundred years of limited and inadequate political participation in local affairs, Mexican Americans concluded in 1957 that the time had come for electing one of their own as mayor of a city numbering almost 250,000 with one half of the population being of Mexican descent. Telles became the first American of Mexican descent to be elected mayor of a major southwestern city in the 20th century. His election and subsequent administration (1957–61) stimulated additional Mexican American electoral initiatives and, more importantly, gave Mexican Americans a growing confidence in themselves as American citizens and as political actors. Hence, the Telles story is part of the larger and ongoing struggle by Mexican Americans to eliminate a legacy of second-class citizenship and to achieve social justice.
The role of Mexican Americans as second-class citizens originated with the conquest of northern Mexico by the United States during the 1840s and in the subsequent labor exploitation of Mexicans in the Southwest. The annexation of this region assumed major economic significance by its integration as a supplier of key industrial raw materials (copper, lead, and silver) as well as agricultural and cattle foodstuffs to feed the industrial armies of the East and Midwest. The railroads penetrated the Southwest and northern Mexico, opening these areas to American capital and technology. In turn, southwestern entrepreneurs induced Mexicans to cross the border and work as cheap unskilled labor beginning in the early twentieth century. Consequently, social relations in the Southwest and in communities such as El Paso took on definite economic characteristics. Mexicans, for the most part, served as manual laborers while Anglos possessed highly skilled jobs as well as managerial, business, and professional occupations. Mexican workers in this exploitative relationship produced much wealth, but received little of it in return.
The labor exploitation of Mexicans supported by racial and cultural discrimination likewise led to their political second- class status. A small number of acculturated and better-off Mexican Americans did participate in early El Paso politics, but as political ward bosses for the Democratic “Ring” that controlled local politics during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most Mexicans possessed no real political representation. Many, of course, prior to the 1930s maintained Mexican citizenship. Still, they contributed to El Paso politics by being paid to vote by unscrupulous Anglo politicians acting through Mexican American intermediaries. Mexicans received slight patronage as city laborers out of this political arrangement, but on the whole their involvement only supported a political system that reinforced their economic oppression. Mexican immigrant workers undergoing a process of proletarianization struggled to protect themselves, but their vulnerable political status as “aliens” and their personal desires to return to Mexico did not lend themselves to long-lasting protest movements.
World War II, however, proved to be a political watershed for Mexican Americans. A new generation— the Mexican American generation—came of age that unalterably refused to accept second-class status and that was prepared to wage protracted struggles for their civil rights. Not immigrants like most of their parents, these mostly first-generation U.S.- born Mexicans achieved slightly improved working- class positions for themselves as a result of greater needs for better-trained workers in a more complex southwestern economy plus increased access to public education. In the process, some began to perceive themselves as an exploited social class. Moreover, a distinct Mexican American lower middle class composed of small businessmen and smaller numbers of professionals also evolved and began to become aware of its own class interest. Changing class characteristics accompanying American economic revival in turn produced growing political and social expectations and aspirations among many younger Mexican Americans. Socialized to American democratic principles through the schools and mass media and patriotically serving in World War II, these Mexican Americans sought to eliminate barriers to full equality with other citizens.
Repulsed by overt forms of social discrimination, Mexican Americans after the war chose to first confront segregation in public facilities such as schools, theaters, swimming pools, restaurants, housing tracts, and access to elective offices. The efforts to force respect for Mexican Americans by pursuing an integrationist strategy involved what Everett Ladd in his study of black politics in the South terms “status goals” as opposed to “welfare goals” intended to obtain material improvements without disturbing race- ethnic divisions. For Mexican Americans, as for many blacks after the war, “status goals” meant abolishing those forms of public discrimination that called attention to their race and ethnic difference.
Consumed by a desire to be treated as full-fledged American citizens, Mexican Americans engaged in the “politics of status.” “The demand for integration . . . ,” Ladd notes, “is essentially the attempt by a group which has been branded inferior in quite literally a thousand ways by white Americans to gain recognition as a truly equal partner in the American democracy.”
Reformist by nature, the “politics of status” did not directly combat the root cause of Mexican American underdevelopment in the Southwest: the need by capital to expand from maintaining most Mexicans as pools of cheap and surplus labor. The altering of this relationship would entail more fundamental struggles, encompassing both sides of the border, than most Mexican American leaders in the post-war era were both ideologically and politically prepared to undertake. They believed that the system was capable of reforming inequities. Nevertheless, the “politics of status,” including the struggle for democratic political rights, marked a forward step in the political evolution of Mexican Americans and a further step in achieving social justice. The rising expectations generated by this movement, as well as its accompanying frustrations, would result in even more challenging efforts by a succeeding generation.
In El Paso, Mexican Americans interpreted status goals predominantly in electoral political terms. Unlike other parts of Texas where Mexicans faced de facto racial discrimination in public facilities, Mexican Americans in the border city did not; they had historically possessed access—if they could afford it— to theaters, restaurants, stores, and other forms of public facilities. Even schools and housing tracts were not strictly segregated in El Paso. The Anglo power structure had early learned that it made little economic sense to exclude Mexicans from public facilities due to their importance as a source of labor and as consumers. Moreover, discrimination against Mexicans would jeopardize El Paso’s relation with Mexico, especially the border city’s role as a labor center and as a wholesale and retail outlet for northern Mexican customers. Not confronting a system of overt public discrimination, Mexican Americans, however, still lagged behind Anglos in jobs, wages, education, and political representation.
“El Paso’s discrimination,” one report on El Paso politics concluded, “is based primarily on the belief, or rationale, that Latins are ‘not qualified’ (primarily because of lack of education) for various jobs.”
In 1950, for example, the Spanish-surnamed population in El Paso composed more than half of the city’s total population. Of these, almost three- quarters of Mexican Americans were born in the United States. Despite their numbers, Mexican Americans constituted only 1.8 percent of high white- collar occupations, only 26.4 percent of low white-collar occupations, and only 11.2 percent of skilled blue- collar ones. Only seven Mexican American lawyers practiced in El Paso. Hence, by midcentury Mexican Americans still formed, despite certain gains, a predominantly working-class population excluded from access to political and economic power. Two El Pasos continued to coexist as they had since the nineteenth century: one more affluent and mostly Anglo in the northern section of the city and the other relatively poor and mostly Mexican “south of the tracks.”
Under such circumstances, Mexican Americans in El Paso—experiencing both poverty and degrees of progress—viewed the attainment of effective political representation as the first step in equalizing their status with Anglos. Not having to struggle, as in other parts of Texas, for the right to integrate public facilities— already achieved in El Paso— Americans of Mexican descent in the border city instead saw their lack of access to electoral offices as the most significant affront to their status as American citizens.
No one from this ethnic group had ever been elected mayor nor served on the city council between 1900 and 1950. Moreover, the existence of a poll tax in Texas added to the political disenfranchisement of many Mexican Americans. After the war, leaders from this community vowed to change this. “The Spanish-speaking group is ripe for organized action and has an endless list of social grievances, many of which date back fifty years,” writer-historian Carey McWilliams wrote of El Paso in 1948 in The Nation. “It has only begun to achieve real political maturity, but leaders are emerging and the day of political reckoning cannot be long deferred.”
This was especially true for the aspiring lower middle class that considered politics not only as an avenue of personal mobility, but more importantly of collective respectability. These Mexican Americans believed that the most symbolic way of acquiring status as full-fledged American citizens was through electoral success, including winning the mayor’s office. At the same time, it should be noted, political representation for many Mexican Americans including Telles was only the first step. Telles personally understood poverty and the class/race divide in El Paso and in other parts of the Southwest.
“Poverty pained him,” his daughter Cynthia Telles stresses. He was committed to achieving social justice at all levels, but believed that it would need to start first by achieving political power in order to be able to try to deal with the larger issues of economic inequality. It is in this context that the political ascendance of Raymond Telles can be appreciated.
Mario T. García is Distinguished Professor of Chicano Studies and History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has published more than twenty books on Chicano history and won many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2016 Stetson Kennedy Vox Populi Award from the Oral History Association.
Fifty years ago this week, as Mexico came to represent the first Latin American country to host the Olympics in 1968, a massive student movement revealed the country’s political instability and state of control and repression. On October 2, 1968, government soldiers opened fire on a peaceful demonstration, killing more than a hundred in the plaza of Tlatelolco. Today Jaime M. Pensado and Enrique C. Ochoa talk about the impetus for their book México Beyond 1968: Revolutionaries, Radicals, and Repression During the Global Sixties and Subversive Seventies and their collaborative work to root the telling of México’s history within a broader Mexican public:
México Beyond 1968: Revolutionaries, Radicals, and Repression During the Global Sixties and Subversive Seventies emerges from our long collaboration together. Since the late 1990s when Jaime was an undergraduate and graduate student at California State University, Los Angeles, we developed a close working relationship that was built on a mutual passion for learning, social justice, and the history of greater Mexico. Enrique was born and raised in Los Angeles, the largest metropolitan area of Mexicanas/os outside of Mexico City, and Jaime migrated to the same city in the mid-1980s. We connected in our belief in the importance of studying and teaching Mexican history in a society (the United States) with a significant Mexican and Latinx population that has been publicly denied a full understanding of the deep history of Mexico in the United States. The process of colonialism and coloniality as it plays out in the U.S. academy erases knowledge systems and the deep histories and ways of knowing that communities have. We see it as our goal to unlock the hidden histories of power to understand how power works, the structures of inequality, and the long history of resistance. For us, this must be done through a broad collaboration that challenges the conservative, elitist, and assimilationist structures of the academy. One important step in this process has been to work to foster the expansion of Mexican/Latinx scholars in the writing of history.
The study of Mexican history in the United States, like the field of Latin American studies, has its roots in U.S. hetero-patriarchal colonial and capitalist domination. Therefore, it has been dominated by white scholars with little contact with Mexican or Latinx communities in the United States, and this has been reinforced by the nation-state focus of the study of history. When Enrique was a graduate student in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the United States, there was only one Mexican American historian of modern Mexico, Ramón Eduardo Ruíz (UC San Diego), teaching at a Research 1 university. While affirmative action and diversity programs have made some inroads since then, as this volume attests, such programs are still woefully inadequate. Instead, given the crisis in higher education funding, we argue that, using the logic of meritocracy and reduced funding, programs in the United States have been complicit in further restricting working-class students of color.
It is in this spirit that in October 2016 we brought together at the University of Notre Dame an intimate group of critical scholars who have been researching Mexican authoritarianism and state violence, as well as social and guerrilla movements, and who seek to intervene in political debate by engaging a broader public and by working with communities with long histories of resistance. Nearly all of the contributors have deep roots in broader Mexico, including communities in the United States. By centering the scholarship of Mexican, Chicanx, and Latinx scholars, we underscore that how we do history is just as important as what we do. We know that those who write history shape the narrative and that narrative has power. We have gathered together a passionate group of scholars for whom the production of knowledge is representative of power, and herein lies the second reason why we have employed the term “México” in the title. The authors bring to the center the work of Mexican scholars who have published in Spanish. All too often, the history of Mexico published in the United States and Europe marginalizes Mexican scholars or buries their arguments in the footnotes. Mexico, student movements, revolutionary organizing, and state repression are not just academic areas of interest for several of the authors here. For them, these topics and events are personal, and they have shaped their lives.
Jaime M. Pensado is an associate professor of history and director of the Mexico Working Group (MWG) at the University of Notre Dame.
Enrique C. Ochoa is a professor of Latin American studies and history at California State University, Los Angeles.
Following the devastating fire that tore through Rio de Janeiro’s 200-year-old National Museum this weekend, we remember how a group of biology scholars joined the drive to renew the Brazilian nation, claiming as their weapon the voice of their fledgling field. Without discarding scientific rigor, they embraced biology as a creed and activism as a conviction—and achieved success in their bid to influence public policy in environmental protection and the rational use of natural resources. The following is excerpted from Regina Horta Duarte’s Activist Biology: The National Museum, Politics, and Nation Building in Brazil.
The National Museum In the 1920s and 1930s, the scientists who worked at this institute in Rio de Janeiro hoped to transform it into a hub that would radiate knowledge to the farthest reaches of Brazil. During those years, the museum staff devoted itself tirelessly to re-creating the National Museum and staking claim to a new role for it. They couldn’t begin to imagine television or satellite dishes, but they trusted in print, movies and radio, exhibits, and educational methodology as efficacious methods for disseminating the new knowledge and new practices that they were convinced would transform Brazil.
The National Museum already had a long history behind it by then. King Dom João VI of the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil, and the Algarves had founded it in 1818. His court had fled Lisbon shortly before the city was invaded by Napoleon’s troops in 1808, and once settled safe and sound in Brazil, Dom João VI did his best to prepare Rio de Janeiro for its new status as the political and administrative center of the kingdom, a process that transported the seat of the European empire to the heart of the old Portuguese colony. The Royal Museum—as it was then known—emulated Old World museums by gathering collections representative of the entire globe. But the spotlight was on the Portuguese Empire, spread across the European, African, Asian, and South American continents. From its founding on, the museum played a decisive role in the development of natural history in Brazil.
The establishment of the museum figured into a broader nineteenth century trend around the world to set up natural history museums as “cathedrals to science.” By 1910, there were some two thousand museums of its kind. In Latin America, natural history museums enabled exchanges between naturalists while connecting different points of the globe. In cities like Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Santiago do Chile, Montevideo, Bogotá, and Caracas, new institutions continued to open their doors throughout the nineteenth century, most always concomitant with processes of achieving independence and nation building. They were home to enlightened elites who combined their experience as locals with intellectual training in Europe, but they were also frequented by foreign naturalists eager to research the flora and fauna of South America. National governments wanted to undertake inventories of “their” nature and would often hire teams of foreigners to lend impetus to natural history.
The daily routine at nineteenth-century museums in Latin America reflected the challenges specific to the continent’s historical context. Foreign scientific expeditions often took everything they gathered back to Europe, leaving nothing to the institutes that had welcomed and aided them, much to the discontent of local science communities. The piecemeal nature of local collections left Latin American naturalists at a tremendous disadvantage vis-à-vis their foreign peers, whose institutes boasted enviable collections. Latin American museums also had to cope with periodic political turmoil, which occasioned wild fluctuations in government funding and other support. As Nancy Stepan has said, a great deal of progress came thanks to the individual efforts of naturalists in the absence of any collective, institutionalized, stable climate. Teaching institutions emphasized a liberal arts education in a framework where there was no real way to train researchers in scientific work. There was a paucity of equipment and bibliographic material, scientists enjoyed little prestige, and agricultural and industrial modernization was not yet hardy enough to provide new sources of support for science.
Teachers leading students on a class trip to the National Museum, 1930s. Revista de Educação Pública 8:33–40 (1951–52): 51. Courtesy of Fundação Biblioteca Nacional.
Many aspects of the history of these museums give nuance to the traditional view that naturalists working in Latin America were members of cloistered scientific communities. Over the course of the nineteenth century, while Brazil’s National Museum was becoming a place for public exhibits, it was also making room for new fields of knowledge in its various departments—like paleontology, anthropology, comparative anatomy and zoology, botany, mineralogy, geology, and archaeology—reflecting the institution’s attention to research and its tendency to develop specialized fields. From 1876 to 1893, during what was known as “the golden age of the National Museum,” the institution saw substantial changes under the direction of the naturalist Ladislau Netto. Its collections grew through exchange programs with European and Latin American counterparts and thanks to national expeditions financed by the imperial government. The old monarchical tradition of handpicking personnel by appointment was replaced by the requirement that new hires take qualifying exams on scientific topics. Foreigners like Charles Hartt, Fritz Müller, Hermann Von Ihering, Emílio Goeldi, Carl Schwacke, and Orville Derby were recruited and had plenty of opportunity for the rewarding exchange of experience and knowledge with Brazilian scholars. The establishment of a laboratory for experimental physiology and the launching of a science journal in 1876 (Arquivos do Museu Nacional ) energized the museum and cleared the path for its naturalist members to advance in their professionalization. The institute’s collaboration with the Brazilian presence at universal exhibitions was also important. The country wanted to make a place for itself on the world market and to be counted as a civilization in the tropics. It was not just its commercial interests that were at stake; so too were the exchange of scientific and technological know-how and interaction between the National Museum and foreign science institutes. No less important was the organization of Brazil’s National Anthropological Exposition in 1892, where the exhibiting of hundreds of ethnographic objects fed the lively contemporary debate on race, people, and the Brazilian nation.
Like other museums in Latin America—for example, the Argentina Museum of Natural Sciences (now the Bernardino Rivadávia Museum of Natural History), in Buenos Aires, headed by Hermann Burmeister—Brazil’s National Museum experienced such profound changes during these years that it was almost like starting over. As naturalists reclassified nature, as knowledge grew more specialized, and as scientists and observers began relating to collections in new ways, these collections underwent extensive reorganization. In pursuing this new vision, the museum entered into the wider debate about “national being” and introduced a state “optic”—to use Andermann’s term—of the items on display, thereby transforming a tour of the museum into a civics lesson.
In 1889, the army, with the backing of the agro-exporting elites, toppled the monarchy, and Brazil became a republic. As much as civilian republican groups had hopes for a new democratic order, the institutions of the fledgling republic were predominantly individualist and liberal in nature, and most citizens were denied their political rights, since illiterates were prohibited from voting. Although slavery had been abolished under the monarchy, in 1888, the early decades of the republic witnessed no advances in civil and political rights; instead, it was an era of “exclusionary liberalism,” or “oligarchical liberalism,” marked by political accords between powerful elites, underwritten by fraudulent elections. The Constitution of 1891 delegated broad fiscal and administrative autonomy to the states and territories, benefiting the chief commodity-producing states, like coffee-rich São Paulo and the rubber centers of Pará and Amazonas. Under the influence of some republican sectors, the nation’s charter also bore the imprint of positivism, translated into a complete separation of church and state and the absence of any official religion. The republic would recognize marriages, births, and burials as civil processes, and religious teaching would no longer be mandatory in schools.
Boy Scouts on a visit to the National Museum, December 1927. Série Documental Museu Nacional. Courtesy of Arquivo Múcio Leão, Academia Brasileira de Letras.
In the early years of the republic, the museum faced several hurdles. The new government abolished the post of traveling naturalist and demanded the daily physical presence of all researchers. In practical terms, this meant naturalists could not make research trips and instead had to stay in their offices. Some of the top staff left, Fritz Müller among them. A number of wealthier states, like São Paulo and Pará, opened their own natural history museums and managed to attract naturalists like Goeldi and Von Ihering. The federal government itself established applied research institutes, which became the country’s first centers for biological research, such as the Oswaldo Cruz Institute in Rio de Janeiro and the Butantan Institute in São Paulo. Shortly after the Proclamation of the Republic, the National Museum saw its prestige enter a period of steady decline, while other centers began their ascent, offering bigger budgets and additional amenities that could attract the most eminent researchers—a status quo that was not to change until the late 1920s.
The 1920s indeed brought change to Brazil. World War I had ended, as had the optimism of the Belle Époque. The coffee glut and the demise of the Amazon rubber boom in the face of stiff competition from Southeast Asia spelled economic hardship. Anarchist and communist union movements were on the rise, alongside conservative Catholic movements. Modern Art Week, an arts festival held in São Paulo in February 1922, signaled artistic restlessness. Young military officers joined the armed movement known as tenentismo, while the Prestes Column engaged in guerrilla warfare and cangaceiro bandits ran rampant in Northeast Brazil. In 1922, this turmoil was reined in by a government imposed state of siege; the press was censored, and the various movements that opposed the oligarchical Republican project were repressed.
From September 1922 through July 1923, the city of Rio de Janeiro was the site of the International Exhibition in Celebration of the Centennial of Independence. Organized by the federal government, which built sumptuous pavilions for the event, the exhibition was intended to convey an image of progress and national union. The government had designed the show in hopes of garnering legitimacy at a difficult time, but by instigating reflections on Brazil’s past, present, and future at a moment of serious political crisis, the commemoration in fact seeded unease. Visitors grew more aware of conflict and social tension because the exhibition triggered concern about national construction and about Brazil’s place in world civilization. What, after all, was being celebrated? What brand of independence? What kind of nation? What kind of Brazilian people? What type of republic? The exhibition may to some extent have been a paean to the ruling order, but it also awoke society’s latent expectations and desire for change. As Hoffenberg has noted, “Exhibitions were meaningful events for participants struggling with the social, political, and economic dilemmas and opportunities of their era.”
From the very dawn of the twentieth century, countless intellectuals had criticized the reigning oligarchical regime, holding it accountable for the highhandedness of local authorities and the fact that people had been left to fend for themselves. More voices entered the debate about the roadblocks to nation building. Attention became focused on the vastness of the Brazilian land, on its people trapped in misery, illiteracy, and disease, and on the wholly irrational destruction of its natural riches. The prevailing political and economic liberalism was called into question, decried as excessive, and critiqued for motivating selfishness, while centralization of power was posited as an alternative raised above individual interests. Solutions were proposed for a political and institutional system that demanded more than the mere consensus of the elites and that would transform Brazil’s near nomadic population—until then rebuked as inferior—into healthy, educated, and hard-working people, indispensable to the building of a nation. These intellectuals urged society to adopt new attitudes toward nature; Brazilians needed to learn about their country’s flora and fauna, its water resources and landscapes—and learn to value them—while the state had to effectively regulate environmental protection areas and national parks and exercise control over the exploration of natural resources throughout the national territory. Based on an authoritarianism characterized by voluntarism and an obsession with education, they believed that if the Brazilian people, in its most genuine expression, could be brought onto the stage through suitable measures, the result would be the emergence of a popular culture duly civilized through learned knowledge and superior reasoning—to wit, “authentic” nationality.
From 1926 to 1935, the National Museum regained momentum under the leadership of Edgard Roquette-Pinto. The institute modeled itself as a prime space for educational intervention and for the coordination of pedagogical projects for the people of Brazil, as well as a place where knowledge was produced. It introduced and enforced a bold and experimental multimedia project. As urban life and consumption became increasingly sophisticated in the city of Rio de Janeiro, where the museum was headquartered, its staff members embraced the era’s new means of communication, optimistic that new technologies would allow them to span the chasms yawning between them and Brazil’s ordinary men and women, lost in the vastness of their country.
The National Museum was home to a collaborative effort that drew researchers from an array of fields; they engaged in surprisingly varied initiatives that were not confined to the premises of the museum but reached into other institutional and social domains. Staff members like Roquette-Pinto, Alberto Sampaio, and Cândido de Mello Leitão organized public exhibits unprecedented in the history of the institution. They threw themselves into the Biblioteca Pedagógica (Educational Library) editorial project, headed by Fernando Azevedo, and particularly into its Brasiliana Collection, whose ultimate purpose was “to reveal Brazil for Brazilians.” They launched the journal Revista Nacional de Educação, a forum for science communication aimed at the broader public, whose circulation reached 15,000. They set up a radio station specializing in educational programming and ventured into cinema and the production of educational films. They organized notable events like the First Brazilian Congress for the Protection of Nature, in 1934. They led prolific scientific lives, participating in cultural exchange and attending international congresses. They helped make public policy, including the draft bill for the Game and Fish Code, which lay behind the law decreed by President Getúlio Vargas on January 2, 1934. They joined science associations and other civil society organizations. In fulfilling their “pedagogical mission,” the museum staff relied on a range of media, including print, photography, exhibits, movies, and radio programs. Its scientists also maintained close relations with the ruling powers and with other spaces that generated knowledge. Throughout their experiences, these men of science worked and thought collectively, constructing knowledge through frank dialogue. Moreover, they worked to accrue the technical expertise essential to the practical realization of these manifold projects.
The organizational heart of the activities and exhibits at the National Museum was certainly “the Brazilian nation,” and the burgeoning of biology as a fully established discipline figured largely in this work. Although the field had existed in Europe since the mid-nineteenth century, it was only in the early twentieth that biology laid down roots in Brazil. The troublesome presence of sick, ignorant, rebellious people was a quantitative and qualitative problem begging for a solution, and biology, as a “master of life,” was capable of addressing these ills. It lent itself to a variety of nationalistic practices fashioned within an authoritarian, salvationist political culture.
In the eyes of the museum staff, the field of natural history could describe and name things but could not address the full complexity of life, so it was unable to confront the challenges of Brazilians in distress. Biology, on the other hand, was a decisive form of knowledge, which supported scientific medicine and was based on scientific laboratory practices in the fields of physical anthropology, entomology (especially as applied to agriculture), eugenics, the theories of evolution and genetics, and even phytogeography, zoogeography, and ecology.
At a time when biology was taking shape as a field of its own, separate from (but not better than) natural history, the National Museum endeavored to renew its practices and present itself as an institution in step with the changing world of science. Some of its members also belonged to the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, founded in 1916, which valued specialized experts more than wise generalists, and they worked hard to earn esteem as scientists from specific fields. Yet in its practices, the museum displayed a dynamic and contradictory tendency: although many of its members wanted very much to become specialized scientists, their work with different media formats and with science communication took place in an atmosphere of blurred boundaries between the disciplines.
While striving to make a name for themselves in scientific circles, these scientists also sought government backing for their projects. Most importantly, they wanted themselves and their institute to play an active part in public policy making, and in this way their scientific activities constituted veritable political strategies.
Regina Horta Duarte is a professor of history at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil. She is the author of several books, including Noites Circenses: Espetáculos de circo e teatro em Minas Gerais no século XIX and História e Natureza. She is a founding member of the Sociedad Latinoamericana y Caribeña de Historia Ambiental, and she was the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Historia Ambiental Latinoamericana y Caribeña.
In Activist Biology, Duarte explores the careers of three of these scientists as they leveraged biology as a strategy for change. Devoted to educational initiatives, they organized exhibits, promoted educational film and radio, wrote books, published science communication magazines, fostered school museums, and authored textbooks for young people. Their approach was transdisciplinary, and their reliance on multimedia formats was pioneering. Capturing a crucial period in Brazil’s history, this portrait of science as a creative and potentially transformative pathway will intrigue anyone fascinated by environmental history, museums, and the history of science. Duarte skillfully shows how Brazilian science furthered global scientific knowledge in ways that are relevant now more than ever.
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Regina Horta Duarte is a professor of history at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil. She is the author of several books, including Noites Circenses: Espetáculos de circo e teatro em Minas Gerais no século XIX and História e Natureza. She is a founding member of the Sociedad Latinoamericana y Caribeña de Historia Ambiental, and she was the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Historia Ambiental Latinoamericana y Caribeña.