- Now it's my great pleasure to introduce
our guest speaker today, Professor Florencia Mallon.
We would like to thank her in a heartfelt fashion
for her acceptance of our invitation
to present a lecture fitting the theme
of the Peterson Lecture Series
as well as the theme of The Year of Mexico.
Professor Mallon received her doctorate degree
in Nineteenth-century American History from Yale University.
In the past three decades she has been
teaching Modern 19th-century American History,
Modern Mexican History,
Gender and Ethnic History of Modern 19th-century America,
and History of the Revolutions and Uprisings
in Modern 19th-century America,
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In the meantime, through her research, scholarship,
and publications Professor Mallon has established herself
as one of the leading scholars in
the field of Latin American History Studies.
A list of her publications is a long one,
but today I can only name three titles of her many books,
partly because of the time limit for this introduction,
also partly because I don't have enough practice-time
to pronounce the Spanish titles of her books correctly.
Book number one: Courage Tastes of Blood:
The Mapuche Community of Nicolas Ailio
and the Chilean State, 1906 - 2001.
This history monograph was
published by Duke University Press.
Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru.
This history monograph was published
by the University of California Press.
Example number three: The Defense of Community
in Peru's Central Highlands: Peasant Struggle
and Capitalist Transition, 1860 - 1940.
This history monograph was published
by Princeton University Press.
Not many historians write history monographs
as well as novels, but Florencia does both.
Recently she published a novel titled
Beyond the Ties of Blood, a novel that is based on
the turbulent history of Chile in the 1970s and 1980s.
For her tireless pursuit of knowledge
and her achievements in pursuing it,
she has been awarded many academic honors,
book awards, and academic titles,
including the most recent one: Julieta Kirkwood Professor,
a distinguished endowed professorship
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
So for today's program, Florencia will talk about
her most recent research: the changing connotation
and meaning of the concept of America.
Now let's welcome Professor Mallon to share
her scholarship and research with us.
[applause]
- Thank you very much for that
very generous and kind introduction.
I also need to just say that as I learned more
about Dr. Edward Peterson, I felt more
and more honored at having been invited to
give a lecture that is named after him.
And I do have to say that the more
I understood about Dr. Peterson, the more I understood
that I actually do have a lot in common with him in terms
of thinking broadly and globally;
thinking in terms of power relations;
and thinking also in terms of relationships
among countries in the Western Hemisphere.
And in that sense I think that my lecture does,
hopefully in some important ways,
connect with the sensibilities that he
espoused as a teacher and as a researcher.
So, let me just get going.
As you can see here on the PowerPoint,
this is a map of America, the Americas
from the period of the so-called discovery,
which I'm going to talk about why some scholars
got to the point where they said it
was not really a discovery but an invention.
But we can see the ideas that it's
a new hemisphere and a new, large continent
that people didn't realize was there before.
When José Martí, the Cuban writer,
published his polemical essay "Nuestra América" in Mexico
in January 1891, his use of the term "Our America"
was a call to unity among
the republics south of the Rio Grande.
"For in what lands can men take more pride
than in our long-suffering American republics?" he asked.
And he continued: "Never in history have such advanced
and united nations been forged in so short
a time from such disorganized elements."
Publishing the essay in Mexico in 1891,
more than three decades after the US-Mexican War
had dismembered the original
territory of the Mexican nation,
Martí was painfully aware of the need to
sound the alarm about the country to the north.
"The scorn of our formidable neighbor," he wrote,
"who does not know us, is Our America's greatest danger.
And since the day of the visit is near,
it is imperative that our neighbor knows us,
and soon, so that it will not scorn us.
Through ignorance it might even come to lay hands on us."
Of course, as we know, his comment was prescient,
since a mere seven years later the United States
would invade Cuba and Puerto Rico
as part of the Spanish-American War.
My purpose here is to trace a genealogy,
in the Foucaultian sense,
of the multiple meanings of "America,"
and how they evolved from a hemispheric vision
in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries,
to a series of disputed meanings,
one of which was Martí's,
in the nineteenth century and beyond.
Following in the "ensayista" tradition
of Latin American authors,
a tradition to which Martí belonged,
who have used this medium to destabilize
existing ideas or concepts,
I use the term "essay" in the French
sense of "essayer," to try on or try out.
In Spanish as well "ensayo" comes
from "ensayar", to rehearse or try out.
The purpose is, therefore, not to produce
a definitive analysis, but rather to open up
new and unexplored venues for discussion.
I will begin by excavating again in the Foucaultian
sense "subjected knowledges"
is what he called them that is,
knowledge that has been buried
by unequal relations of power.
I will explore the numerous and
changing meanings of "America,"
placing them in the context of evolving power
relations in the Western Hemisphere
and in the Atlantic World of which it formed apart.
Returning then to the multiple meanings of "America"
and how they have been debated, both in
the United States and in the rest of the hemisphere,
I will conclude with what Foucault has called a genealogy,
in his word, an "attempt to
emancipate historical knowledges."
I will then conclude with a reflection on how,
in the northern country of which we form a part,
"America" became a synonym for the United States.
The Mexican intellectual
historian Edmundo O'Gorman struggled,
from the 1940s, with
the notion of the "discovery" of America,
coming to believe that it should more
properly be called "the invention of America."
Shortly after publishing the first Spanish edition
of his book with this name,
he was invited to give a series of lectures
at Indiana University, where he was able to deepen
his understanding of this process of invention,
placing its beginnings in the need to account
for the new knowledge being produced
by explorers as they uncovered
the existence of lands to the west, between Europe and Asia.
This involved a conflictual dialogue between
this new knowledge and the view of the world
confirmed through Christian theology,
which denied the possibility that
antipodal lands could be inhabited.
O'Gorman concluded that the crucial
expeditions that had provided the necessary
additional information for the formulation
of the concept of a "new world" had
been Amerigo Vespucci's in 1501 and 1502,
and Christopher Columbus's
last voyage between 1502 and 1504.
Indeed, O'Gorman saw Columbus and Vespucci as collaborators
rather than as rivals because, because although each
explorer was moved by personal interests and ambitions
that were in competition with each other,
they both were attempting to find a passage that,
by sailing west, would give them access
to the Indian Ocean and thus to Asia.
The failures of both explorers were
essential, O'Gorman explains, because and I quote,
"They opened the way for an
"unexpected and decisive revelation."
Although each explained his failure differently,
Vespucci's almost interminable voyage toward
the south forced him to accept the existence of a new world.
And here as you can see hopefully
you can read it this is an image.
It's a representation that was made
by Bartolome Colon, Christopher Columbus's brother.
And the idea was that there was this idea
that supposedly Asia was supposed to be here.
And this was Espanola, right?, Hispaniola.
But then as Amerigo Vespucci began going
down the edge of what we know now to be South America,
trying to find a passage to the Indian Ocean,
he was totally unsuccessful. So the lower down he got,
and the colder it got, the clearer it became
to him that there was no passage
and that in fact this was a new world, Mondo Novo.
The final result of this complicated process
was the publication in 1507 of Cosmographiae
Introductio by the Academy of St. Dié.
In addition to baptizing the new lands as America,
the most important and transformational
part of this document was the recognition
of America as a fourth continent
along with Europe, Africa, and Asia.
This, O'Gorman argues, changed everything, because of
and here I quote him "Modern man's contempt
"for and his rebellion against the fetters
"which he himself had forged under
"pressure of archaic religious fears."
"It was not by chance coincidence," he continues,
"that America appeared on the historical scene
"of Western culture as the land of opportunities,
"of the future, and of freedom."
We can put O'Gorman's reflections together
with historian Jack P. Greene's suggestion that
not only Vasco de Quiroga in Mexico,
but also the Jesuits in Paraguay and the Puritans
in New England desired to find in America
and I quote, "a site for the realization of dreams
"and hopes that could not be
"achieved in the Old World."
As Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra makes clear,
there was also an underside to this shared utopian yearning.
Both Spanish and British, Catholic and Puritan, he writes,
shared the "tradition of Christian holy wars" from
which they took common images and understandings
of their role in the New World,
resulting in a broadly shared
notion that European colonization of the New World
was in fact a mission to liberate the American
population from oppression by the Devil.
Indeed, he argues, this was at the center
of shared Catholic and Protestant what
he calls "demonological discourses" that informed
the colonization of the Americas more broadly,
reverberating with biblical narratives of
the conquest of a new Canaan
in order to found a new Jerusalem.
It is also important to remember that,
by the time the Puritans set their sights on North America,
the Spanish and Portuguese colonizations had been
ongoing for nearly a century.
The wealth reaching Spain and Portugal
from the Americas, Greene explains,
was a strong motivation for other European countries
to consider doing something similar.
At the same time, the Dutch struggle for independence
from the Hapsburg Empire generated a deep enmity
between Spain and the Netherlands that,
as Benjamin Schmidt argues, reverberated in complex
ways with narratives of the Spanish conquest in America.
Although scholars disagree quite deeply about
the origins and diffusion of the Black Legend,
one thing that seems fairly clear is that most
versions began from Father Bartolomé de las Casas's
Very Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies.
As Lewis Hanke has written,
most of Las Casas's earlier writings,
perhaps especially his Very Brief Account,
and I quote, "May be considered as passionate
"lawyer's briefs put together for a particular
"occasion to achieve a definite end"
and "have the tone of piping-hot pamphlets
"designed to be hawked in the streets to influence
"men's minds toward some specific
"and immediate action on behalf of the Indians."
And Schmidt further points out that
and I quote, "Calculations of casualties,
"or what might anachronistically be called 'body counts,'
"occur obsessively throughout" Las Casas's narrative,
adding that "the Dominican never quite clarified
"how he arrived at these sturdy figures,
"and, added all together, the sum total of casualties
"from the individual islands and provinces
"he assessed actually tops twenty million."
Although we cannot reconstruct the process
through which Las Casas calculated the numbers,
we can definitely reconstruct the origins
and context of his passionate denunciation.
As a member of the first colonizing generation
in Hispaniola, he received an "encomienda",
a Crown grant of Indian tribute and labor
in exchange for Christianizing
and quote/unquote "civilizing" the natives.
Ironically, this was given to him as a reward
for participating in the conquest of Cuba
when already an ordained priest,
and this conquest, along with his travels in Mexico
and Central America, would form the main
basis for his denunciations of abuse in his later writings.
Las Casas was also part of a colonizing lineage,
since his father and uncle had earlier participated
in Christopher Columbus's final
expedition to Hispaniola in 1510.
Oh, sorry Christopher Columbus's final expedition
to the Caribbean and, writes David Brading,
brought him back an enslaved Indian boy for his service.
Summarizing Las Casas's own account, David Brading
explains that the priest's change of heart began
with the arrival of Dominican friars to Hispaniola in 1510,
where they quote, "Soon won fame for
"their austere life and missionary zeal."
Still Las Casas maintained his encomienda
and his way of life until at Easter his Dominican
confessor refused to grant him absolution
and he was assigned for his Easter sermon
a passage from Ecclesiastes that began
and I quote, "If one sacrifices from what has
"been wrongfully obtained, the offering is blemished;
"the gifts of the lawless are not acceptable".
The result of these accumulated revelations was
and to quote Brading once again,
"That in 1514 Las Casas decided to free his
"Indians and seek reform of the entire system."
This story of personal transformation is central
in explaining the passion and missionary zeal
with which Las Casas wrote about Spanish
cruelty to the Indians, he had been a part of it.
Whether or not his numbers can be confirmed
and there has been much debate about
this among historians of colonial Spanish America
his repeated attempts to reform Spanish practices,
as well as his entrance into the Dominican Order,
are most likely connected to his need
to seek atonement for his earlier behavior.
It is in this context as well that we must understand
the passion of his Very Brief Account,
which in its later travels through Europe
became the basis for the Black Legend.
Interestingly, this central, personal,
and moral element of the story got lost in the many
and passionate historiographical scuffles
over the Black Legend that took place
among historians of colonial Spanish America
in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In addition to the various and complex ways
in which Las Casas's text was transformed
through travel and colonial competition,
we must also point out that,
even though conquest was violent
and destructive everywhere,
there were differences from region to region.
In the Aztec and Inca empires,
for example, the conquerors were able to benefit
from divisions among native peoples
to garner at least some limited support for their enterprise.
And we can see here that here is where
the Aztec empire was located.
The Inca empire was located here.
And both of these empires were complex
and multi-leveled political systems.
And because of this there were divisions
among native peoples due to some of the political
and violent forms of conquests that both the Aztecs
and Incas had used. And these divisions the Spaniards
were able to take advantage of and garner
at least some limited support from
native peoples for their enterprise.
Although Hernán Cortés initially used extensive violence
to quote unquote "convince" the Tlaxcalans
to become his allies against the Aztecs,
so much so that Charles Gibson calls Cortés's
confrontation with them "The conquest of Tlaxcala,"
once the alliance was forged it proved to
be quite effective militarily against the Aztecs,
despite the horrific costs of taking
the capital city of Tenochtitlan, today Mexico City.
Although the Pizarro brothers were two-faced
and violent in their dealing with
the Inca emperor Atahualpa,
who was ultimately executed,
their conquest of the Andean region benefited
from the assistance of the Wanka people
of the Central Highlands of Peru,
recently conquered by the Incas.
And the Wankas were more or less
in this region here, and this was the
area where the Incas first started and had moved up.
The story was different in regions like Chile
and the Argentine pampas.
If we look at the area today of Chile and of Argentina,
this area suffered from a scarcity of precious metals.
This limited the resources that conquerors were
willing to invest and the peoples who inhabited
the area were politically decentralized,
which also made it much more difficult
to actually conquer them effectively.
In fact, these regions would not
come under the formal authority of
any centralized state until
after the colonial period was over.
These differences better explain the processes
and outcomes of different conquest
and colonization processes in the Americas than
do the differences between Spanish
and Northern European cultures.
So do the economic opportunities in each region.
Mining wealth was concentrated, as I mentioned,
in Mexico and Peru, precisely where existing
complex empires already had labor systems
the Spanish could appropriate and extend.
In the Caribbean and Circum-Caribbean there were
less easily captured sources of wealth,
although as we know, in the long run,
sugar production became central.
In New England, local wealth was embedded
more in lumber, agriculture, and fur trapping.
Although market forces were part of the equation
from the very beginning, the process of colonization,
as Neal Salisbury has argued,
began with a successful trading economy
in which French and Dutch merchants exchanged
European consumer items, such as tools,
cloth, copper pots, and glass beads for pelts.
In contrast to the French and Dutch,
Salisbury writes and I quote, "English expeditions
"from 1602 through the late 1610s sought
"to coerce and dominate one or another of
"the French allies in order to obtain food, labor,
"territory and to assert political
"authority and cultural superiority."
For these reasons especially, Salisbury explains,
the English were initially unsuccessful,
and their fortunes changed only after
the first major epidemic reduced the native population
and I quote, "By about ninety percent."
Indeed, he concludes that in a similar way
to other parts of the Americas, it was quote, "epidemic
"diseases for which the natives lacked immunities"
that became the most effective weapon of colonization.
Thus, although the timing and character of the colonizations
were clearly quite different,
there was a dramatic similarity
in the process of "conquest through epidemic disease"
quote unquote that lends an especially
ironic twist to the notion of a Black Legend
of cruelty that only applied to Spanish colonists.
We should also remember that the Black Legend itself,
and the use of Las Casas's Very Brief Account as evidence,
followed a long and winding trajectory repeatedly
informed by struggles for supremacy among aspiring
colonial powers, not only in the period
from the 1500s to the 1800s, but through
the beginning of the twentieth century.
Indeed, if we consider the evolution of the Black Legend
in a context of international conflict
among aspiring colonial powers,
it is perhaps especially interesting to note that
the conservative Spanish intellectual Julián Juderías,
an avid supporter of dictator Francisco Franco,
published the first edition of his
denunciation of this legend in 1914,
at the beginning of World War I,
and the second edition in 1917
when, in his own words, "A war without precedent
"in history is at its apogee.
"This war, which has destroyed with indescribable
"brutality those nations considered the most civilized,
"has shattered many of our illusions."
Although there is disagreement as to the details,
most scholars agree that the Black Legend emerged in Europe
in the context of the Eighty Years' War,
during which the Dutch
fought for their independence from the Hapsburg Empire.
Though there had been anti-Spanish sentiment before,
most notably in Italy, the virulence and widespread
diffusion of the Dutch attacks was unprecedented.
As K.W. Swart has written, and I quote, "The Dutch
"greatly surpassed the Italians in the vehemence
"with which they denounced Spain's political
"and religious system and in the success
"which they achieved in turning popular
"hatred of Spain to political ends."
Indeed, as Schmidt makes clear,
the Spanish invasion of the Low Countries was represented,
in Dutch narratives, in a parallel
fashion to the conquest of the Indies.
"In the Low Countries as in the West Indies,"
he writes, "the Spanish waged a
'war of fire and blood' In Antwerp
as in the Antilles, they pounced upon natives
like 'wolves' or 'lions,' and they slaughtered
innocent women and children 'like so many sheep.' "
It is also quite telling to note that the same year,
1620, saw the publication in Amsterdam
of two books about Spanish tyranny,
one concerning the Netherlands
and the other concerning the West Indies.
Both also sported illustrations that graphically,
and quite similarly, detailed the horrific
abuses of Spanish soldiers.
As Schmidt points out, the original images
of Spanish cruelty in the Indies reproduced
in these editions had appeared in
Theodore de Bry's 1598 Latin translation of Las Casas.
So this is one of the lithographs of Theodore de Bry,
and as you can see this is meant to be happening in Cuba,
or Hispaniola really, because here is the coast.
There is the edge of the Spanish sailing ship.
And I'm not going to go into a whole lot of detail
about what is being represented here,
but among the things that are going on
are the burning of babies, cannibalism, et cetera.
So this is clearly an especially ugly form
of visual propaganda against the Spaniards.
It is especially fascinating to learn,
in this context, that Las Casas's Brief Account,
with the Dutch illustrator
Theodore de Bry's illustrations included,
was dusted off, repackaged, and circulated
in the United States in 1898 as part of
a propaganda campaign to support
the waging of the Spanish-American War.
Amy Kaplan and David Blight have both argued
that the Spanish-American War constituted
a potential resolution, on foreign soil,
of the deep contradictions in US nation-state
formation that had culminated in the Civil War.
Blight comments on a cartoon that appeared
in the Chicago Inter Ocean in May 1898.
And here I quote, "As the United States went
"to war with Spain in 1898, this cartoon celebrated
"the reconciliation of the Confederate
"and Union veteran, both draped in the national flag."
So here we see the two veterans draped
in the national flag looking out at a burning Cuba.
Kaplan writes that journalists and politicians
and I quote, "represented the war with Spain
"as a nostalgic recuperation of the heroism
"of an earlier generation and as a purgative final battle,
"healing the wounds and divisiveness
"of their internecine war while completing
"its goals of national reunification."
And what could be more convenient, she suggests,
than the fact that it all occurred, "On the remote
"islands of Cuba and the Philippines,
"leaving the American landscape unscathed."
Finally, a crucial element in her analysis is the focus,
by US officers and war correspondents,
exclusively on the presence
of US soldiers on the battlefield.
And she writes, "The conspicuousness of
"American bodies and the corresponding invisibility
"of all other combatants had to be produced
"ideologically as subject positions,
"not just perceived as military positions.
"The positions were plotted in part by
"a narrative that effaced the prior history
"of the Cuban war against Spain
"and located the US entry into the war
"as the point of historical origin."
Effacing the prior history of the Cuban
war against Spain was at
the center of the reissuing,
in 1898 by a New York publishing house,
of an English translation of the 1620 French edition
of Las Casas's Brief Account.
Entitled An Historical and True Account of
the Cruel Massacre and Slaughter of 20,000,000
of People in the West Indies
by the SPANIARDS, in capital letters.
It was said to be "Written by again in
"capital letters BISHOP LAS CASAS, AN EYE-WITNESS."
After reproducing the text of the French edition
in a translation claimed only by "N.M.L.,"
this version goes on to state and I quote,
"The Spaniard of the 19th century differs but
"little from the Spaniard of the 16th.
"True, he does not dare commit such outrageous
"actions as are narrated in the foregoing pages; yet,
"when we remember their treatment of the defenseless
"women and children in the Province of Havana,
"and the dastardly crime of a Spanish officer who,
"in his official report, boasted of killing
"an entire Cuban family, save a girl of fourteen years,
"who he kept as his mistress, one sees
"that he compares very favorably
"with his ancestors."
In this section of the retranslation,
entitled "The Spaniards Now in Cuba,"
descriptions of abuse by the Spanish army
are accompanied, on the facing pages,
by engravings taken originally from
the Dutch versions of the Las Casas text.
And this you can see it's the same lithograph
that I pointed to before, but it appeared
also in the retranslation of Las Casas's Brief Account
that was circulated in the United States in 1898.
The positioning of the illustrations is clearly
meant to associate what the Spanish were
doing in Cuba in the 16th century with what they
were doing at the end of the 19th century,
providing in this way a humanitarian
justification for US intervention.
Toward the end of this section, just in case the reader
had not yet gotten the message,
the following passage appears
and I quote, "Nearly four hundred years have passed
"since Pizarro and Cortez, and their band
"of reckless and brutal followers, devastated
"the West Indies and South America.
"Today, there appears a new Pizarro,
"in the form of a General Weyler."
In a moment I'll explain who
General Weyler is in more detail.
In the final section of the retranslation titled
"A Few Facts About Cuba," potential investors are provided
with a description of the geography
and resources of the island, with the assurance
that quote, "About two thirds of the coast,
"is free from keys and reefs,
"and of easy access."
By this point the message of
the retranslation could not be clearer.
The United States must intervene in Cuba
to prevent further abuses by
the bloodthirsty Spaniards who, based
on the eyewitness account of Las Casas,
have been responsible for the deaths
of millions of innocents from the time
of Pizarro and Cortés to the present day.
The reward for such humanitarian action will,
of course, be access to the bountiful
resources of the island, which
are of quote unquote "easy access."
But if we think through this retranslation alongside
Kaplan's analysis, we see how the erasure
of the Cuban Independence Wars against Spain,
beginning in the 1860s, transforms the substantial
human rights abuses of the Spanish army under
the leadership of General Valeriano Weyler from a tactic
of counterinsurgency against a powerful enemy in the
form of a multiracial Cuban revolutionary army into
a simple continuation of Spanish abuses
dating back to the end of the 15th century.
And what could be more convenient,
from the standpoint of an emerging
international colonial power, than being able
to construct its actions as the humanitarian
defense of innocent victims with no
apparent agency of their own in the conflict?
It seems precisely at this moment of increasing
international ambition, not only in the Western
Hemisphere but also in the Pacific,
that the effective ownership, from a US perspective,
over the term "America" would
most likely have been confirmed.
It was also at this precise moment that the Berlin
Conference confirmed the ambitions
of European powers over the African continent,
creating an additional and powerful motive
for the United States, in its constant competition
with European powers, to define its own
sphere of influence between the Caribbean and the Pacific.
But we must also consider the previous political
history of the United States, and explore
the uneasy emergence of a postcolonial nation
that attempted to bring together disparate
and conflicting colonies into a single entity.
And I promise this section is the shortest
because it's the part I know least about.
It's US history and it's not my area,
but I've really enjoyed getting to know it a little better.
So in any case, we see here of course,
and I think from the standpoint of an image
this is especially powerful, because we see that
at the moment of independence this was the United States.
That was it.
French territory and Spanish territories surrounded it.
And if we look at it that way, then perhaps
it is understandable why then the Founding
Fathers would have been a little bit worried
about what happened with the European powers.
Indeed, as Leonard Sadosky makes clear in his book
Revolutionary Negotiations, "The process of US Independence,
"as well as the difficult negotiations
"around confederation vs. federation
"that occupied the period between
"the Declaration of Independence
"and the Ratification of the Constitution,
"can best be understood in a broader Atlantic context
"in which US aspirations to form part of the broader
"Westphalian system that had emerged
"after the Thirty Years' War were repeatedly thwarted,
"in the context of a confederation model,
"by the lack of a centralized diplomatic voice or policy."
All of this pushed hard in
the direction of a more unified polity,
something especially difficult given the deeply held
sense of autonomy present among the original colonies
brought together as a confederation,
generating a deep contradiction between
the concepts of "the American people" and "the States."
Indeed, in The Federalist Papers,
as we know written by James Madison, John Jay,
and Alexander Hamilton under the pseudonym Publius,
when discussing the relationship among the different
sectors of the national government,
the authors write the following and I quote,
"The House of Representatives will derive
"its powers from the people of America."
Then, almost immediately afterward, they add: "The Senate,
"on the other hand, will derive its powers from the States,
"as political and coequal societies."
Here we see both the contrast
and the tension between the notion of "America"
as denoting union, and "the States"
as denoting autonomy and separation.
Since the purpose of this document was to provide
an explanation and justification for the transition
from a confederation to a
federation with the 1787 Constitution,
the tension is especially interesting.
We also see that the notions of territory,
prestige and legitimacy are central to the development
of the United States; and, according to Publius,
the lack of a unified government makes
their achievement impossible, resulting in
the nation's reaching and I quote,
"Almost the last stage of national humiliation."
There are, for example and I quote, "valuable
"territories and important posts in
"possession of a foreign power, which,
"by express stipulations, ought long
"since to have been surrendered."
But it has not been possible to
act in order to recuperate them,
since quote, "We have neither troops,
"nor treasury, nor government."
We can also read in this section of The Federalist
a strong current of frustration that the new nation
has not received that to which it is entitled.
And here I quote again, "Are we entitled by nature
"and compact to a free participation in
"the navigation of the Mississippi?
"Spain excludes us from it.
"Is commerce of importance to national wealth?
"Ours is at the lowest point of declension.
"Is respectability in the eyes of foreign powers
"a safeguard against foreign encroachments?
"The imbecility of our government even
"forbids them to treat with us.
"Our ambassadors abroad are the
mere pageants of mimic sovereignty."
With its origins in the process of independence,
this frustration, involved not only the English,
French, and Spanish, but indigenous nations as well.
The fear that the English, Spanish, and French
possibly with the aid of discontented indigenous nations
might stand in the way of the full development
of the United States of America
was not entirely an illusion,
giving further credence to the argument,
as Publius put it, that the power to decide matters
relating to national interest and I quote,
"Ought, in the first instance, to be lodged
"in the national depository."
Across the last two decades of the 18th century,
the conflicts among France, Spain,
and Great Britain intensified, prompted by
the Haitian Revolution in the Caribbean.
Laurent Dubois has demonstrated the global
impact of these conflicts,
and also that the Louisiana Purchase of 1803
was part of the process, lending further credence
to the notion that US continental expansion was
intimately tied to the belief, on the part of US leaders,
that only through expansion could
the United States compete
effectively with European countries.
And we see, of course, the size of the expansion
that the Louisiana Purchase
provided the United States of America.
Perhaps the most telling evidence concerning
the interconnection of all of these events
and concerns can be found in a November 1819
excerpt from John Quincy Adams's memoirs where,
reacting to a conversation with several other important
political leaders where concern had been expressed
that both England and France considered the United States
to be quote "an ambitious and encroaching people."
Adams wrote and here I quote,
"I said I doubted whether we ought to
"give ourselves any concern about it.
"Great Britain, after vilifying us twenty years as a mean,
"low-minded, peddling nation, having no generous ambitions
"and no God but gold, has now changed her tone,
"and was endeavoring to alarm the world
"at the gigantic grasp of our ambition.
"Spain was doing the same; and Europe, who,
"even since the commencement of our Government
"under the present Constitution,
"with the Indians and negotiating to bound us by the Ohio,
"has first been startled by our acquisition of Louisiana,
"and now by our pretension to extend
"to the South Sea i.e. the Pacific
"and readily gave credit to the envious and jealous clamor
"of Spain and England against our ambition.
"Nothing that we could say would remove this impression
"until the world shall be familiarized with the idea
"of considering our proper dominion
"to be the continent of North America."
It is also in this context that we
must understand the War of 1812.
As Sadosky makes clear, there was an important
southeastern dimension to the War,
for in the midst of that conflict, a civil war
erupted among factions of the Creek nation,
with a radical anti-European faction known
as the Red Sticks confronting the more moderate
and European sectors of their people.
In addition to a Red Stick attack on the Fort Mims
stockade in Alabama that killed hundreds of settlers,
it became known the Red Sticks were procuring
arms from British suppliers through
the Spanish at Pensacola, Florida.
So you can see how this, then,
becomes a big issue of national security.
Fort Mims and a huge massacre of settlers.
And the Red Sticks are getting their arms
from British suppliers through a port
in what is still Spanish Florida.
In such a context, it is not surprising that between
1812 and 1827 the United States also waged
two wars against the Seminole in an attempt
to limit Spain's influence on the Florida peninsula
and prevent the Seminole from harboring fugitive slaves.
And indeed if you look at as it says here in my explanation
of the PowerPoint, this photo of the Seminole
family makes clear that they are accepting into
their families a series of runaway slaves.
Their phenotypes are really quite
representative of that combination.
Given the aspirations of US leaders in the Atlantic World,
it is perhaps not surprising that the relationship
with Europe should have played such a central
and defining role in the development of US policy
toward its neighbors in the hemisphere.
What is perhaps less well analyzed is the similarity
and interplay of US policy toward Native American
and toward Latin American nations,
and how both were clearly subject to
concerns about US national security.
As Sadosky argues, the purpose of the Jackson Doctrine,
which was quote, "To limit the ability of the European
"powers to interfere in the Indian nations' internal
"affairs and the United States' diplomacy with them
"is almost exactly what the United States wanted
"in terms of European relations with the new
"Latin American states, as outlined by the Monroe Doctrine."
Furthermore, he continues, "It is especially ironic to note
"the role that John Quincy Adams played
"in articulating both the Monroe and Jackson doctrines."
These questions of national security,
in combination with a demand for respect
as an equal partner in the Atlantic World system,
were also intimately interconnected,
within the United States, with ongoing
and intense debates about states' rights.
As we shall see, these conflicts were deeply
interconnected with debates about slavery,
and all of these tensions would emerge again
and again across the rest of the nineteenth century
as the dynamics of US nation formation drove
a westward expansion in search of,
as John Quincy Adams so aptly put it,
the "proper dominion" over "the continent of North America."
An especially dramatic flashpoint in this process
would be the US-Mexican War.
When US commercial penetration,
especially of the Texas region, intensified
after Mexican Independence in the 1820s,
the issue of slavery became a point of great
conflict after Mexican abolition in 1829,
culminating in the Texas Revolution of 1835.
And as you can see here, at that point this
was the part of Texas that was considered
already to be part of the US, and this was
the part that was under contention,
and which of course the settlers in Texas
were interested in including within their purview.
As John Tutino writes and I quote, "Anglo Texans
"who had claimed independence in 1835
"sought annexation to the United States a decade later;
"they were ready to relinquish sovereignty
"to preserve the cotton and slave economy and
"to take control of the Rio Grande."
And you see here the Rio Grande, of course, is right here.
But also it's important to remember that
this whole region in blue was a part
of Mexico before the US-Mexican War.
In A Wicked War Amy Greenberg explores
how the war with Mexico between 1846 and 1848
was in part a consolidation and reproduction
of earlier ideologies and practices of expansion
and conquest against the native peoples of North America.
She describes how the invading armies,
the US armies, most notably the Arkansas volunteer
detachments that had prior experience in the Indian Wars,
used tactics that included scalping
against some of the Mexican civilians.
She also shows how the War became a proving
ground for military leaders who would quickly emerge
as the main officers of the Civil War, especially
Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, Stonewall Jackson,
George Meade, and Jefferson Davis.
In addition to tracing the connections between
the US-Mexican War and the Civil War, Greenberg's
analysis also suggests a relationship between
North-South sectional conflict in the United States,
and ideologies and practices of expansionism.
US territorial expansionism, as we have seen so deeply
motivated by the need to be an equal player,
so to speak, in the Atlantic World system
and the hemispheric conflicts
among European colonial powers,
also helped fuel and was fueled by confrontations
between North and South.
Greenberg writes that the War, "fractured the delicate
sectional balance within the United States."
And indeed, she concludes, victory in Mexico
spurred expansionists in both sections of the country
to push for more land, in Hawaii, Central America,
the Yucatán, and particularly Cuba,
further exacerbating sectional tensions.
The stage was set for secession.
It was an argument that could not be settled with words.
At the same time, as John Tutino argues,
the US-Mexican war resulted in an expansion
of the United States into Texas as well as what
had been the Mexican Northwest, what I pointed
to and obviously is now the US West
and Southwest resulting not only in a deeper
conflict over slavery, but also in
a dramatic expansion of the US economy.
"Vast lands rich in resources enhanced
"the prospects for US economic power," Tutino writes.
This claim merits further consideration,
especially in the context of the existing
narratives of US economic history.
In its more recognizable textbook versions,
US industrial development is, to some extent,
already predetermined by the unique
history of the Thirteen Colonies.
In other versions, a narrative of technological development,
the construction of railroads, the outstanding
forms of innovation and invention,
and the arrival of industrially skilled immigrants
helps explain the unique development
of industry in the United States.
While all of this is clearly important,
one is also left to wonder whether the easier
capital accumulation that became possible
as a result of the mining
and agricultural wealth incorporated
with the US-Mexican War might
have also played an important role.
Combining Tutino's conclusion that the US-Mexican War,
and the wealth of the new territories acquired through it,
underwrote US economic power, and Walter LaFeber's
argument concerning the economically
powered take-off of US expansionism,
this hypothesis gains greater traction.
As LaFeber writes, "The economy reached its
"take-off stage between 1843 and 1857."
And he continues: "These two facts that by 1860
"the industrial economy was already moving
"ahead rapidly and that the Civil War marked
"the transference of power from planters
"to industrialists and financiers do much to explain
"the dynamics of the new empire."
If we place Tutino's and LaFeber's arguments together,
we can suggest a mutually constitutive relationship between
economic growth and territorial expansion that began
to emerge most dramatically with the US-Mexican War.
In this context, the Civil War was the last step
in the reorganization of the economic balance of power
that would move the United States toward
expansion as a new empire that set its sights
beyond the territory of North America.
At the same time, however, as we saw earlier
in the work by David Blight and Amy Kaplan,
the Civil War was not an entirely effective solution
to the deep conflict between North and South
of the previous period, and the Spanish-American War
turned into an additional attempt
to move beyond sectional confrontation.
Indeed, the difficulty of resolving the internal wounds
and divisions left by the Civil War and the attempt
to heal these on foreign soil also facilitated
the emergence of a new vision of the United States
as the savior of those still suffering under
the weight of Spanish colonialism.
You'll be happy to know that you my
exploration of how a term that initially denoted
the full Western Hemisphere was transformed
into a shorthand word meaning the United States of America
has now reached its final stage.
A Foucaultian archaeology of the term
"America" has suggested that, from the moment it was
invented in dialogue with initial European explorations,
the term denoted new possibilities and a sort of
utopian imaginary.
At the same time, the idea that European colonizers
were in the New World in order to liberate
the American population from oppression by the Devil
provided justification, from a European perspective,
for much of the violence and the death
by epidemic suffered by the native population.
In this way, throughout the hemisphere,
the process of conquest and colonization complicated
the utopianism of the American imaginary
with an underside of violence and exploitation.
This expropriation and exploitation of native
and Afrodescendant peoples was covered over
in a variety of ways across the hemisphere,
and nowhere with more success than
in the British colonies that would
become the United States of America.
The case of Spanish America was somewhat different,
given the passionate interventions
of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas.
As becomes clear from an examination of the debates
among Latin Americanist historians about the Black Legend,
the cruel treatment of indigenous peoples remained
a thorn in the side of Spanish colonialism.
So much so, that even at
the beginning of our current century,
with the massive genocide carried out against
Guatemala's indigenous peoples by the military
dictatorships during the country's extensive civil war,
the effective comparison of the two genocides
was a powerful weapon, a powerful weapon
among analysts and activists in favor of indigenous rights.
And me just say a couple of words about,
this is the cover of a book by a British law professor
and human rights activist Bartolome Clavero.
A book about the genocides in Guatemala.
And as you can see, he uses the term,
the destruction of the Indies yesterday and today.
And he uses here a drawing that was made by Victor Ivan,
who is the son of one of the more
important Maya activists, Victor Montejo, in Guatemala.
At the same time, the use of Las Casas's Brief Account
by competing colonial powers tended to become
a self-serving way to shift attention
to the abuses of Spain,
so amply documented by the Dominican friar.
His passionate denunciations of the cruelties
inflicted upon native peoples in the Americas
proved to be excellent ammunition in the hands of the Dutch,
French, and English during their conflicts with Spain.
And the Brief Account would once again
be dusted off in 1898 by a new
emerging colonial power, the United States.
Although these geopolitical conflicts shed
a different kind of light on the historical evolution
of America as a hemisphere, we should not
lose track of the fact that America, as a new,
utopian, and exceptional place, was a concept
shared by all in the hemisphere for centuries.
Seen in this way, the use of America
as a term denoting the unity of the different states
within the United States suggests a utopian
imagining that would be congruent with,
maybe even recognizable to,
other political thinkers in the hemisphere.
José Martí, for example, had more than a small amount
of utopian imagining in his concept of "Nuestra América"
when he wrote, as quoted at the beginning: "Never in history
"have such advanced and united nations been
"forged in so short a time from such disorganized elements."
Nevertheless, given the historical events explored here,
the utopian imagining of America ended up articulating
itself to imperial economic and military
power in only one case, the United States.
We have seen how the deep divisions between North and South,
inscribed at the very heart of the federal system
in the ideally productive tension between America
and the States, was an important factor that helped
generate continental expansionism,
even as that expansionism itself generated deeper
divisions, especially concerning slavery,
that ultimately led to the Civil War.
As Reconstruction failed and the South re-segregated
under the veil of state's rights essentially appropriating
the notion of the States what better use for America
could be found than in the baptism of the United States
as the protector and defender of freedom
and democracy across around the world?
José Martí, given his presence
at the beginning of this essay,
seems the most relevant example to provide as we conclude.
At the end of 1889, before his essay Nuestra América,
while Cuba was already engaged in its War of Independence
against Spain and before the US invasion of the island,
Martí published an essay in
the Argentine newspaper La Nación
in which he commented on the Pan-American Congress
being held in the United States in
October and November of that year.
"Never in America," he wrote,
"from its independence to the present,
"has there been a matter requiring more
"good judgment or more vigilance,
"or demanding a clearer and more thorough examination,
"than the invitation which the powerful United States
"glutted with unsaleable merchandise
"and determined to extend its dominions in America
"is sending to the less powerful American nations
"bound by free and useful commerce to the European nations
"for the purpose of arranging an alliance against Europe
"and cutting off transactions with the rest of the world.
"Spanish America learned how to save itself
"from the tyranny of Spain; and now, after viewing
"with judicial eyes the antecedents, motives,
"and ingredients of the invitation, it is essential to say,
"for it is true, that the time has come for
"Spanish America to declare its second independence."
Martí's comment on the Pan-American Congress serves
as an important entry point for the consideration,
in dialogue with our reflections and by way of conclusion,
of a recent essay by Michel Gobat which appeared
in the American Historical Review
on The Invention of Latin America.
In this essay, Gobat moves beyond John Leddy Phelan's
original suggestion that the term "Latin America"
was coined by the French in preparation for
the invasion of Mexico in the 1860s to argue
that the concept emerged as a result of the fear
of US expansionism that took hold with
the success of William Walker's filibuster
expedition in Nicaragua in the 1850s.
"The term 'Latin race' fits with the efforts of modernizing
"liberals to disassociate their societies from Spain,"
Gobat writes, "which they deemed hopelessly backward."
Yet as we think back on the various conceptualizations
by Latin American intellectuals that we have analyzed
in this essay, the issue of America vs. Latin America
vs. Spanish America seems a bit
more complex and multi-faceted.
To begin, it is particularly interesting to note that,
even at the end of the 1880s when Cuba was battling
Spain in an independence war, Martí did not
use the term Latin America, but instead America
and Spanish America in distinct contexts.
As can be seen in the excerpt quoted above, he used "America"
to refer to the full hemisphere when he was emphasizing
the expansionist ambitions of the United States,
and Spanish America when calling for the nations
south of the Rio Grande to declare a second independence.
Finally, as we saw in the work of
Edmundo O'Gorman in particular,
the notion of America was seen, even in the 20th century,
as an expansive and utopian one that helped
release Europeans from their theological fetters.
In this way, the utopian meanings
and yearnings attached to America transcended
specific locations in the hemisphere.
Ultimately, then, the notion of America,
as it emerged across the period of exploration
and into the postcolonial era, continued to hold a utopian
quality for intellectuals
and political thinkers across the hemisphere.
At the same time, as the United States
began its process of imperial expansion into the Pacific
and the Caribbean, the term took on for those
north of the Rio Grande a greater
connection specifically to the United States.
Thank you.
[applause]