Duke University Press Log

Q&A with Denise Brennan

Denise Brennan is is Associate Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Georgetown University. Her new book, Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States, is a riveting account of life in and after trafficking and a forceful call for meaningful immigration and labor reform. 

First of all, can you give a brief description of trafficking into forced labor? Why don’t trafficked persons simply leave—as many migrant laborers do—when working conditions get really bad? Why can’t they just walk away?

 I see trafficking into forced labor as one end of a continuum of everyday forms of migrant labor exploitation. Some trafficking cases are clearly at one end of the continuum. Guards with guns and locks on doors are obvious signs of violent coercion, but most of the workers I met were not physically restrained. I met many workers who did not walk out unlocked doors—for example, domestic workers who did not leave while their abusers were at work. What kept them there? A lot of things: promises of payment, language barriers, lies about corrupt police, and fears about unknown dangers in the United States. And to what would they be running? Abusive employers take their passports, withhold payment, and restrict their contact with the outside world. Without any identification, money, contacts—or even seasonally appropriate clothes—workers in situations of forced labor feel isolated and alone.

 What I learned speaking with men and women who were in forced labor in low-wage labor sectors is that everyone perceives exploitation differently. Simply put, what scares some does not scare others. That’s where individual perception of risk and harm comes in. Every individual experiences coercion subjectively. This subjectivity of coercion explains, in part, why the U.S. government has issued so few trafficking visas (T visas). Attorneys have to prove coercion—they have to explain why their clients did not walk out unlocked doors.

 In the book you mention that trafficked persons sometimes labor side-by-side with other migrant laborers. How do you tell the difference between a migrant worker who has been trafficked into forced labor and a migrant worker in a low-wage, exploitative job? In other words, what are the telltale signs of extreme labor exploitation v. run-of-the-mill exploitation?

Trafficking happens in work sites where exploitation of migrants is commonplace. Extreme abuse can blend into everyday forms of abuse. Wage theft—not paying overtime, or agreed-upon wages—for example is rampant in low-wage labor sectors. Migrant workers, especially those new to the United States with limited English and little knowledge of their rights, expect and accept a certain degree of exploitation. This book looks at the tipping point between everyday forms of exploitation, and abuse that goes too far. What is that tipping point? Neighbors and co-workers should question why, for example, domestic workers never seem to leave their employers’ house, or why farmworkers never go into town. Peer outreach workers describe meeting fellow workers who are fearful of attending any of their organizations’ events or meetings. This is a sure sign that these workers' employers are monitoring them—even in their downtime.

The book’s focus is on rebuilding a life in the United States after forced labor. Yet, as the reader might expect, you also have a lot to say about their experiences during their time in forced labor. How does their time in forced labor affect them?

Remarkably, the women and men I met are emphatic that their time in forced labor has changed them—but does not stop them. Often they are angry about the time and money that their abusers stole from them. Some have nightmares and flashbacks. But they are clear that they look ahead, not behind them.

You emphasize that formerly trafficked persons generally live in poverty. How is this different from other new migrants who live in low-income neighborhoods and work in low-wage jobs?

Life Interrupted’s main focus is on how trafficked persons rebuild their lives. They struggle. They not only have to deal with traumatic events of the past, but they also enter the ranks of the working poor. They do so alone, without family or friends to offer support. This is what differentiates them from other low-wage migrants: trafficked persons resettle on their own, not as part of a larger community. Those who were exploited by somebody from their home country often strategically avoid neighborhoods and jobs with co-ethnics. It can be dangerous to live in a community where your abuser, or his or her associates, may still be at-large. And, most trafficked persons do not even know a single other person who was trafficked, so they do not have the opportunity to learn from others who have been through similar experiences.

In what ways are men and women's experiences in forced labor different?

They aren’t. What has been different is the level of media and policy attention on women's exploitation in the sex sector. In fact in many instances “trafficking” has been used interchangeably with “sex trafficking.” The book introduces women who were brutally exploited in the sex sector. But we also meet many other women and men who also were brutally exploited in farm work, factory work, domestic work and restaurant work. It is just not possible to measure exploitation or to posit that exploitation in one labor sector is worse than in another.

This conflation of trafficking with sex trafficking helps explain why so few trafficking visas have been issued to date. Since the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) was passed in 2000, fewer than 4000 persons have been awarded trafficking visas. The legislation allows for 5000 visas to be issued every year. This means we could have issued 65,000 visas by now. Why have so few been issued? I argue that the number remains low because law enforcement has focused its efforts on finding exploited workers in only one sector: the sex sector. In the process, many women who are not trafficked are arrested and deported if they are undocumented. These policies have driven sex workers to work underground, rendering already vulnerable workers even more vulnerable. Clearly we could be doing more to find and protect exploited workers across low-wage labor sectors, without harming those who choose to work in the sex sector.

What can be done to reduce the incidence of forced labor in the United States? What is the best strategy?

Trafficking into forced labor is preventable. Holding international temporary labor recruiters and employers accountable is a first step. They must guarantee that their workers’ labor contracts are fair. These contracts should be free of excessive (and bogus) recruiting fees and provide decent wages and overtime pay. Also, a worker’s visa status should not be tied to one employer. If a migrant worker is being exploited (or witnesses coworkers or neighbors being exploited) he or she needs to feel safe to report abuse. I never met a trafficked person who knew about the T visa while they were in forced labor. Rather, they only find out about the TVPA and the protections it offers after they exit forced labor. Most undocumented migrants — and temporary workers (guest workers) — assume that if they come forward to report any kind of abuse they risk arrest and deportation.

At the end of Life Interrupted I outline some basic policy steps to prevent trafficking such as passing immigration reform, monitoring worker recruitment programs, closing the Fair Labor Standard Act (fsla) loophole that excludes some agricultural workers and care workers in private homes, supporting domestic workers’ bill of rights introduced in state legislatures, ending immunity for diplomats who abuse workers in their employ,and rescinding state- and local-level law enforcement policies.

 So immigration reform is intimately tied up with preventing trafficking?

 The U.S. government’s policies on trafficking are nothing short of schizophrenic. Without meaningful immigration reform that protects workers in all labor sectors from abuse, threat, and retaliation, trafficking into forced labor will continue. At the same time that abuse is rampant and unfettered in certain industries (such as in agriculture), migrants also face racial profiling in their communities. Policies and programs that deputize local police to enforce federal immigration law, along with Arizona-style, state-level anti-immigrant legislation, keep migrants from reporting all kinds of crimes and abuse in their neighborhoods and worksites.

 Trafficking into forced labor is an extreme version of what happens in sites where low-wage migrants work every day. The 4000 T visas issued thus far are clearly a drop in the bucket. These are the exceptions to an otherwise punitive immigration regime. It is a fiction to assert that we are truly fighting trafficking when 11 million individuals live and work in the shadows. If we are serious about fighting trafficking, we would end policies that silence migrants. Employers know they can exploit with impunity. I think the shockingly low number of T visas says it all. On one hand law enforcement tries to reach out to the most extremely exploited workers, while, on the other, they simultaneously look for undocumented migrants. One set of polices undoes the other. Finding more workers in situations of forced labor means offering protections—not handcuffs.

Association for Asian Studies, Philadelphia, March 2014

We enjoyed meeting authors and selling books at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in Philadelphia last week.

 

Congratulations are in order for Akhil Gupta, whose book Red Tape won the 2014 Coomaraswamy Prize!

 

Here he is celebrating with his daughter, who holds her mother Purnima Mankekar's recent book.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is Purnima Mankekar, with Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We were happy to meet Robert Stolz, whose new book, Bad Water, came out just in time for the conference!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was great to visit with Michelle Bigenho as well, pictured here with her book, Intimate Distance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thank you to everyone who came by our booth this year. We'll be looking forward to sharing more great books with you next year in Chicago!

Q & A with Kirsten Weld

Kirsten Weld is Assistant Professor of History at Harvard University. In 2005, human rights investigators stumbled on the archives of Guatemala's National Police. In her new book, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala, Weld tells the story of the astonishing discovery and rescue of 75 million pages of evidence of state-sponsored crimes, and analyzes the repercussions for both the people and the state of Guatemala.

This book centers on the discovery and rescue of a massive police archive produced during Guatemala’s thirty-six years of civil war, from 1960-1996. Tell us how this discovery came about.  How did you come to be involved?

The discovery of the archives was, quite literally, explosive. Nobody knew that these files still existed, because the administration that signed the Peace Accords took deliberate steps to keep them secret. But one night in June 2005, a four-hour-long series of blasts rocked Guatemala City: a cache of munitions left over from the civil war, stored in frightful conditions on an urban army base, accidentally ignited, showering shrapnel and spewing toxic smoke into the surrounding neighborhoods. Urban legend had it that there was a similar weapons storage problem at a nearby police base, so local residents demanded preventative action. But when investigators from the human rights ombudsman’s office showed up at the police base, they found something even more incendiary than bombs and guns: rooms upon rooms heaped with old papers. They realized that they had found the lost archives of the infamous National Police.

Initially, though, the archives posed more questions than they answered. Who would take custody of this enormous, 75-million-page body of records documenting over a century’s worth of tense, bloody history? Who would do the work to rescue the archives from the rot and abandon to which they’d been consigned, and who would pay for it? What would be the repercussions of reopening a conversation about postwar justice and memory in a country where those who dared to speak of the past were still routinely threatened or killed? What secrets would emerge from the archives?

Slowly, and against all the odds, the outlines of an ad-hoc project to clean, organize, and analyze the files came into being. About eight months into what was then still a shaky, fledgling initiative, I contacted its leaders and floated the possibility of writing a book chronicling their efforts. Believing, I think, that it might provide some extra measure of security to have a foreign observer on-site making a case for the importance of the work they were doing, they agreed to let me join the project as a volunteer, making me the only foreigner to work as a rank-and-file member of the archival recovery team.

No doubt reactions to this discovery were varied and complex.  How have the people and government in Guatemala responded? 

The competing reactions reflected the deep polarization of postwar Guatemalan society. Human rights organizations, advocates of postwar justice, and what remained of the old Left were thrilled, hopeful that this enormous cache of files could be used as evidence in war crimes trials and could help clarify the fates of some of the country’s many desaparecidos, or disappeared people. Conservative sectors studiously ignored the discovery—publicly, at least— but the efforts to rescue the archives faced attacks on multiple fronts, ranging from intimidation to arson attempts. Unknown assailants hurled Molotov cocktails into the archives site on numerous occasions. Workers at the archives project were, in some cases, spied on and harassed. Immense amounts of political pressure were deployed in an attempt to block any revelations that might implicate former police or military officials in crimes against humanity. But because the archival rescue project has managed to achieve major visibility both nationally and internationally, it has thus far survived.

What happened to the people documented in the archive?  Did any of them survive? Since its discovery, have any of the victims documented come forward? 

Many did survive. These files are, after all, the administrative archives of the police, so they contain traffic tickets, noise citations, personnel registries, and other bureaucratic ephemera documenting the regular churn of urban life. That said, however, many other individuals whose names appear in the files were indeed killed by state security forces, even though the records themselves tend to be circumspect on this front—a police report will state that someone was killed by “unknown individuals” or in a “traffic accident,” even when the forensic and eyewitness evidence strongly indicates otherwise. So analysts need to triangulate the information contained in the files with data from other sources, including newspaper reports, oral testimonies, and US government documents. One of the most important tasks underway right now, in collaboration with forensic anthropologists, is to try and match the new documentary evidence about people who were buried anonymously in the country’s many common graves with the DNA evidence currently being exhumed from those graves. The idea is to return the physical remains of the dead and disappeared to their surviving family members.

Survivors have flocked to the archives in search of information about their lost loved ones, but others, we have to assume, stay away, because they fear reprisals or for other reasons. Importantly, many of the people staffing the archival rescue project have personal connections to the people in the files, whether because of their own past political involvement or just because of how pervasively the civil war impacted daily life. So it’s common for those staff to stumble across references to friends, acquaintances, and family members during the course of a day’s work at the archives. As you can imagine, and as the book discusses in detail, that’s a very powerful and complex emotional experience.

 

Celebrate Mardi Gras with our Journals

Maybe Mardi Gras isn't celebrated in your city, but who says you can't get into the spirit? Duke University Press has published many journal articles on Mardi Gras, and we've made these two freely available for the holiday—so don your beads and mask, cut a slice of king cake, and dive into these articles.*

"Spenser and Milton at Mardi Gras: English Literature, American Cultural Capital, and the Reformation of New Orleans Carnival" by Richard Rambuss in boundary 2 (27:2)

Read an excerpt:

Milton may be far from mind when one now thinks of or, better, experiences what is advertised as the world's greatest free party. Yet, as we have begun to consider, a rather detailed, even learned usage of literature—particularly English Renaissance and classical literature—played a structuring role in Comus's endeavor to appropriate and dignify the residual Latin traditions of Carnival. Propounding a caste status for its founders that was then more an aspiration than an actuality, a commemorative booklet issue by the Mistick Krewe in 1947 thus explains that 'as the members of Comus were socially important this meant that their celebration of Mardi Gras was orderly, educational and cultural.' (pages 49-50)

For more of "Spenser and Milton at Mardi Gras," click here.

 

"Mardi Gras Tourism and the Construction of Sydney as an International Gay and Lesbian City" by Kevin Markwell in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (8:1-2)

Read an excerpt:

Mardi Gras attracts many domestic and international tourists to Sydney during February, and their numbers peak just prior to the parade and party at the end of the festival. The festival, parade, and party are major events on Australia’s tourism calendar. There is a strong representation from countries such as the United States, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, and France, as well as increasing numbers of tourists from Southeast Asia, and Mardi Gras packages are advertised in the gay and lesbian press in European and North American countries. While approximately 15 percent of the eighty events at the festival are free, many of the most popular ones require tickets... Full participation in the festival is an expensive undertaking, especially when coupled with the costs of outfits; body treatments such as waxing, tanning, gym training, hairstyling, and party drugs; and, for tourists, accommodation and transportation costs. Many people are willing, however, to spend large sums because Mardi Gras becomes for them the major yearly event that helps define their gay or lesbian identity. (page 84)

For more of "Mardi Gras Tourism," click here.

 

Don't forget to check out Matt Sakakeeny's new book Roll With It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans while you're on your Mardi Gras kick!

 

*If you're in a location that really celebrates Mardi Gras, don't be concerned. You can still read these articles through the end of the month. Recover from your festivities and then get to reading.

The Cultural Impact of the Olympics

Over the years, several Duke University Press journal articles have addressed the cultural impact of the Olympics. Take a break from watching the 2014 Winter Games to sample these articles.

Erica Rand, "Court and Sparkle: Kye Allums, Johnny Weir, and Raced Problems in Gender Authenticity," in "The Athletic Issue," a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, volume 19 and issue 4, 2013.

Read an excerpt from the article:

At a press conference he initiated to address the gender-test incident, Weir called the terms masculine and feminine "very old fashioned," adding, "There's a whole generation of people that aren't defined by their sex or their race or by who they like to sleep with." My own paradise would not involve throwing out masculinity and femininity or sex and race all together. They can serve as sources of pleasure, strength, community, and solidarity, inside and outside the sport, in ways that do not require policing them. If people of all genders could express, present, or perform in sport in whatever gendered ways they wanted to--which might or might not match up with the way they present themselves in other contexts--that would make for a more joyous sport. But Weir's distaste for having people define others by those terms gestures to effects of gender policing beyond fitting people into categories. As he states in Welcome to My World, being called "flamboyant" instead of "athlete" is another.

To read more from "Court and Sparkle," click here. 

 

Sally Anne Duncan, "Souls Grown Deep and the Cultural Politics of the Atlanta Olympics" in "Performance, Politics, and History," a special issue of Radical History Review, number 98, Spring 2007.

Read an excerpt from the article at the African American performance group Souls Grown Deep:

Unprecedented as it was, Souls Grown Deep was forced to the periphery of the Olympic stage. A vital opportunity was missed to give international visibility to the South’s unique community of African American self-taught artists. This essay examines the social and cultural processes that exalted a banal global art show while suppressing a landmark African American visual performance. This is a case study of the cultural politics of Atlanta, the vested interests of the fine art and folk art worlds, and, most of all, of the performative power of art exhibitions themselves. In Atlanta, the experiential knowledge embedded in the African American artists’ modes of creation and communication in Souls Grown Deep provided a potent social counterpoint to a falsely transcendent Olympic vision embodied in Rings.

To read more from "Souls Grown Deep," click here.

Amy Bass, "Objectivity Be Damned, or Why I Go to the Olympic Games: A Hands-On Lesson in Performative Nationalism," in "The Pleasure Principle: Sport for the Sake of Pleasure," a special issue of SAQ: South Atlantic Quarterly, volume 105 and issue 2, 2006.

Read an excerpt from the article:

My relationship with the Olympics continued after my dissertation was complete and I began my life as a professor at Plattsburgh State University. Within months of arriving in Plattsburgh, I audaciously asked if I could leave the following fall semester to go with NBC in a supervisor role to the Sydney Games. I was indoctrinated: I was part of a small group of highly specialized people who drop everything for several weeks during an Olympic year and gather together, working for whatever network is broadcasting the Games. It is a unique group, knowledgeable in multiple languages, geography, world politics, and specific random sports (from gymnastics to curling to judo, in which it is legal, by the way, to break your opponent's arm as a means to win). Plattsburgh graciously worked out a way for me to go, which included teaching an honors seminar--The Black Athlete--online from Sydney. I returned with more life-altering experiences: watching Marion Jones run, sitting in the bleachers as the United States beat Cuba for the baseball gold medal and listening to rumors that Castro was in the house, and again witnessing a spectacular Closing Ceremony. I reworked the dissertation after returning from Sydney, and by the time Salt Lake City rolled around I was in the final editing phases of my book, Not the Triumph but the Struggle: The 1968 Olympic Games and the Making of the Black Athlete, more confident than ever of the viability of sports, especially the Olympics, as a fruitful site to examine how the world works, whether in terms of my own focus on exploring how ideas of race and nation are culturally manufactured, or the broader goals of determining where in the world politics exists.

To read more from "Objectivity Be Damned," click here.

Violence in Latin America

NPR has been running a series of stories this week and last about violence in Latin America. Their reporters have been to Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil, reporting on extortion, kidnapping, and police violence. If you'd like to learn more about violence in the region, its roots and causes, we recommend the following books.

In her painful but important new book Cruel Modernity, Jean Franco examines the conditions under which extreme cruelty became the instrument of armies, governments, rebels, and rogue groups in Latin America. She seeks to understand how extreme cruelty came to be practiced in many parts of the continent over the last eighty years and how its causes differ from the conditions that brought about the Holocaust, which is generally the atrocity against which the horror of others is measured.

Violent Democracies in Latin America is a collection edited by Enrique Desmond Arias and Daniel M. Goldstein. Contributors explore why violence persists in the region despite the establishment of democratic governments. From vigilantism, to human rights violations, to police corruption, violence persists. It is perpetrated by state-sanctioned armies, guerillas, gangs, drug traffickers, and local community groups seeking self-protection. The everyday presence of violence contrasts starkly with governmental efforts to extend civil, political, and legal rights to all citizens, and it is invoked as evidence of the failure of Latin American countries to achieve true democracy. The contributors to this collection take the more nuanced view that violence is not a social aberration or the result of institutional failure; instead, it is intimately linked to the institutions and policies of economic liberalization and democratization.

Daniel M. Goldstein's Outlawed: Between Security and Rights in a Bolivian City is an ethnography examining how indigenous residents of crime-ridden, marginalized neighborhoods in Cochabamba, Bolivia, struggle to balance human rights with their need for safety and security.

We have several books about violence in Guatemala. In Adiós Niño: The Gangs of Guatemala City and the Politics of Death, Deborah T. Levenson examines how the Guatemalan gangs that emerged from the country's strong populist movement in the 1980s had become perpetrators of nihilist violence by the early 2000s. In Reckoning: The Ends of War in Guatemala, Diane M. Nelson looks at how Guatemalans are reckoning with the aftermath of a civil war that left fundamental assumptions about selves and others in tatters when it officially ended in 1996. And in her forthcoming book Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala, Kristen Weld uses poignant, intimate oral history interviews and on-the-ground participant observation to take readers inside the complex process by which “terror archives” are found, grappled with, and put to use. 

We have several other titles that, like Paper Cadavers, deal with the aftermath of violence in Latin America: how people remember and memorialize genocide and other state violence. Accounting for Violence:Marketing Memory in Latin America, offers bold new perspectives on the politics of memory in Latin America. Scholars from across the humanities and social sciences provide in-depth analyses of the political economy of memory in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay. It is edited by Ksenija Bilbija and Leigh A. Payne. In Unsettling Accounts: Neither Truth nor Reconciliation in Confessions of State Violence Leigh A. Payne argues that rather than reconcile past violence, truth commissions actually catalyze contentious debate. She argues that this debate—and the public confessions that trigger it—are healthy for democratic processes of political participation, freedom of expression, and the contestation of political ideas. Steve J. Stern looks at memory and reconcilation in Chile in his book Reckoning with Pinochet: The Memory Question in Democratic Chile, 1989–2006. Stern’s analysis integrates policymaking by elites, grassroots efforts by human rights victims and activists, and inside accounts of the truth commissions and courts where top-down and bottom-up initiatives met. 

 

 

 

 

 

Duke Press Authors on the Venezuelan Elections

The Venezuelan elections were held yesterday, April 14, and it now appears that Nicolás Maduro, Hugo Chávez’s handpicked political heir, has won. Duke Univerisity Press authors blanketed the media this weekend talking about the elections and the future of Venezuela.

George Ciccariello-Maher's We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution is just out and he is burning up Twitter and the airwaves. He appeared on Al-Jazeera, Russia Today, and on BBC Radio 5. In an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer, he debunks five common myths about Venezuela. In Counterpunch, he compared reactions to the deaths of Chávez and Margaret Thatcher. He was quoted in the Wall Street Journal, the Miami Herald, and Brazil's InterJournal. 

Sujatha Fernandes, author of Who Can Stop the Drums? Urban Social Movements in Chávez’s Venezuela is quoted in the Christian Science Monitor, discussing the importance of women in Venezuelan politics. “Chávez made popular women central protagonists in his politics,” she says. "It was really important in giving women a sense of what they could achieve in life." She also appeared on NY1.

Miguel Tinker Salas, author of The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela, appeared on a panel with filmmaker Oliver Stone at a special screening of his film on Hugo Chávez. Salas commented on the importance of this election and the future of Venezuela: “What’s at stake is really two different visions of Venezuela, two different visions of Latin America, and two different visions of how the north and the south should relate to each other. Fundamentally what’s at stake here is control over the largest oil reserve in the world,” he said. Tinker Salas also appared on the PBS News Hour, Russia Today, Al-Jazeera, Telemundo, Pacifica, Telesur, and CCTV.

David Smilde, co-editor of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Democracy: Participation, Politics, and Culture under Chávez, liveblogged the elections yesterday, calling the results "a devastating victory" for Maduro. "It leaves him weakened within his own coalition and facing an emboldened opposition," he writes. Smilde appeared on BBC Radio 5, Latin Pulse at Link TV, and on Al-Jazeera discussing the elections.

And don't forget, these books and all in-stock books are on sale for 50% off until May 15, 2013!

 

 

Mexico's Religious Question: Ben Fallaw on Catholicism and the State

As millions of Catholics in Latin American prepare to celebrate Easter under a new Pope, we're pleased to present a guest post by Ben Fallaw, Colby College professor of Latin American Studies and author of the new book Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico and Cárdenas Compromised: The Failure of Reform in Postrevolutionary Yucatán. 

Eleven years ago, I went to Mexico City to research Mexico’s “religious question” of the 1930s:  the political role of the Church after an anticlerical revolution in a Catholic country. Not long after I arrived, the city virtually shut down as millions flocked to greet Pope John Paul II.  He came to canonize Juan Diego, the Nahua
shepherd who witnessed the Virgin of Guadalupe’s apparition in 1531. A few weeks later, my archival work uncovered why the campaign to make Juan Diego a saint was championed by Bishop José de Jesús Manríquez beginning in 1939. Manríquez and his priests had just beaten back attempts by federal teachers to turn his diocese of Huejutla (Hidalgo state) into a revolutionary laboratory for land reform and indigenous empowerment. For them, Juan Diego symbolized the pure “Indian Church” menaced by “the Beast” of the state. This was but one of many historical connections between Mexico’s postrevolutionary religious question and Church-state tensions today. 

Two months after the publication of Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico, Jorge Mario Bergoglio became the first Latin American pope. North Americans (non-Catholics among them) celebrated the choice, lauding the Argentine’s simplicity, devotion to the poor, and New World origins. The latter was hard to miss: the backdrop for an early public appearance as Francis I featured a large image of la Guadalupuana. Reaction to Francis I in Latin America was much more divided. 

While some North Americans see Bergoglio as a fierce critic of what John Paul II famously called savage capitalism, many Latin Americans see in him a bitter foe of the new left. Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is a nemesis of the IMF, but she also championed birth control and marriage equality. Bergoglio denounced the latter as “a destructive attack on God’s plan.” They and their supporters often view each other through the lens of history: Fernández remembered the silence of the Argentine Church’s hierarchy during the Cold War dictatorship, Conservative Catholics charged Fernández was prejudiced by leftist anti-Catholicism dating back to the nineteenth century. The conflict has underscored the Latin American Church’s paradoxical position as an institution both non-partisan and politicized, both very influential yet feeling persecuted by the postcolonial state.   In Mexico, I chronicle how the postrevolutionary state’s consolidation created many lingering historical grievances among Catholics. For instance, Bishop Manríquez’s counterrevolutionary jeremiads were provoked in part by federal teachers’ destruction of hundreds of sacred images in Huejutla on 3 June 1935.

Of course, Mexico in the 1930s and Argentina today are profoundly different. Among other things, Argentine Catholics never rebelled against a revolutionary state as did Mexico’s cristeros in the late 1920s. Nevertheless, the election of Francis I has reopened wounds in Mexico, too. Some are quite recent. As I was writing the conclusion to Religion and State Formation in August 2010, the mayor of Mexico City sued the Archbishop of Guadalajara for libel after the prelate denounced legalization of same-sex marriage in the capital, and the press was reporting on the jailing of six young women charged with seeking abortions in the conservative Catholic state of Guanajuato. Just last year, the PRI, the party that claims to have institutionalized the revolution, returned to the presidency a dozen years after its presumed demise in part by courting important bishops. At the moment, new president Enrique Peña Nieto is negotiating with the Vatican, reportedly offering the return of Church influence over public schools in return for a visit by Francis I.

The PRI’s willingness to abandon its heritage of revolutionary secularization in return for political advantage reflects one of Religion and State Formation’s main concerns: the ability of Catholics and Catholicism to impede the revolutionary transformation of society in the 1930s. The Church refused to allow a political party or insurgency to act in its name. However its organizational matrix, its ideology, and its lay (and in a few cases clerical) leadership galvanized grassroots-level resistance to postrevolutionary state-making. The Vatican endorsed this “radial strategy” which successfully turned much of Mexican civil society against the revolutionary state, but it was in many ways a strategy that emerged from the base. In Campeche, caciques led syncretic gremios (confraternities) to oppose peasant cooperatives and elect sympathetic candidates. In Guerrero, Catholic women mobilized male voters, and catechists and priests convinced peasants to reject federal teachers and land reform. Some even supported the sporadic attacks against schools and ejidos (land grants) termed the Second Cristero War (c.1932-38). In Guanajuato, congressman and army reserve officer Salvador Azaña collaborated with cristero insurgents, catechists and allied politics to block agrarian reform.  Again and again, the Church’s radial strategy stymied revolutionary change.

  Historians long assumed that President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-40) put to rest Mexico’s vexing
religious question though negotiation and compromise with Catholics, ending anticlerical regulations in return for Catholic support. I found that the clergy and much of the laity saw Cárdenas’s détente as the opportunity for a strategic shift rather than acquiescence to the postrevolutionary regime’s hegemony.   After 1940, Catholic leaders formed the right-of-center opposition party known as the PAN that eventually ousted the PRI from the presidency in 2000. The Church also “rechristianized” Mexican society in part by encouraging Catholics to marry sacramentally, zealously defending its social teachings from a state still seen as anti-Catholic. Indeed, Catholics opposed federal schooling because it was coeducational and allegedly mandated sexual education.

Seen in this light, contemporary Church-state tensions in Argentina and in Mexico result not just from national traumas like the Dirty War and the Mexican Revolution but also from deeper conflicts over the definition of marriage and human  sexuality. The direction and outcome of these conflicts has profoundly shaped and will continue to profoundly shape everyday life and politics in the region. In many ways the Church in Latin America prevailed for close to two centuries.  Under Francis I it confronts an uncertain future, one clouded by the same problems that beset the Church in Europe and North America as well as the region’s unresolved religious questions.

 

Duke Authors on the Death of Hugo Chávez

Several Duke authors have been active in the media since the death of Hugo Chávez on March 5. 

George Ciccariello-Maher, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Drexel University, is the author of We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution, which will be out next month. He appeared on Al Jazzeera yesterday, and on RT's Crosstalk today. He is quoted in the French paper Libération. In a new review in The New Republic, Dorothy Kronick calls Ciccariello-Maher's book "essential to understanding the Chávez era." Read his piece "Preparing for a post-Chávez Venezuela" on Counterpunch. Follow him on Twitter @ciccmaher.

Miguel Tinker Salas is the author of The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela. Born in a Venezuelan oil camp, Tinker Salas is now Professor of History at Pomona College. This week he has appeared on PRI's The World and Democracy Now!. He is quoted in the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and Business Insider.  

 

Sujatha Fernandes, Associate Professor of Sociology at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center, is the author of Who Can Stop the Drums?: Urban Social Movements in Chávez’s Venezuela. She is also quoted in the Los Angeles Times and was interviewed on KPFK's "Hiphop and Politics." Catch her this weekend on MSNBC's Up with Chris Hayes. 

 

 

Greg Grandin, Professor of History at NYU, is author of The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation and co-editor of The Guatemala Reader and A Century of Revolution. His article in The Nation "On the Legacy of Hugo Chávez," has been much-circulated and discussed. And, he very kindly calls out the work of the above authors!

Books on Chávez and Venezuela

What lies ahead for Venezuela after the death of president Hugo Chávez? To understand Venezuela's history, culture, and politics at this crucial crossroads, check out these books.

We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution by George Ciccariello-Maher will be out this May. It provides a broad, nuanced account of Chávez’s rise to power and the years of activism that preceded it. Based on interviews with grassroots organizers, former guerrillas, members of neighborhood militias, and government officials, Ciccariello-Maherpresents a new history of Venezuelan political activism, one told from below.

In Who Can Stop the Drums?: Urban Social Movements in Chávez’s Venezuela, Sujatha Fernandes also looks at Chávez’s poor supporters in the barrios of Caracas. Her widely-praised book portrays everyday life and politics in the shantytowns of Caracas through accounts of community-based radio, barrio
assemblies, and popular fiestas, and the many interviews she conducted with activists and government officials. Listen here to a recent interview with Fernandes and Miguel Tinker Salas on KALW's "Your Call."

In The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela, historian Miguel Tinker Salas examines the role of oil in Venezuela's economy. He traces the historyof the oil industry’s rise in Venezuela from the beginning of the twentieth century, paying particular attention to the experiences and perceptions of industry employees, both foreign and Venezuelan. His interest in how oil suffused the consciousness of Venezuela is personal: Tinker Salas was born and raised in one of its oil camps.

Venezuela’s Bolivarian Democracy, edited by David Smilde, Daniel Hellinger, brings together a variety of perspectives on participation and democracy in Venezuela. An interdisciplinary group of contributors focuses on the everyday lives of Venezuelans, examining the forms of participation that have emerged in communal councils, cultural activities, blogs, community media, and several other forums.

Looking much further back at Venezuela's history is a special issue of the journal Ethnohistory, Colonial Transformations in Venezuela: Anthropology, Archaeology, and History, edited by Berta E. Pérez. Contributors employ the tools of history, anthropology and ethnology to address the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized in Venezuela. It examines various aspects of the Venezuelan oral-based cultures—including religion, gender, and trade—and argue that the
indigenous and black populations were never "cultural islands"—neither before nor after European penetration.