Browsing by Author "French, John D"

On 23 January 1958, Marcos Pérez Jiménez was ousted in a "democratic revolution" whose emblematic images featured a vast public housing project built by the dictator in the heart of in downtown Caracas, next to the Presidential Palace, Ministry of Defense, and Congress. Officially named "2 December" to memorialize the coup that consolidated his rule, the neighborhood and its residents suffered harshly was renamed the "23 January" (23 de enero) in honor of the 1958 revolution. This study investigates the relationship between this parish and the Venezuelan democratic system that would, over the following decades, be praised for its stability and was believed to have made the urban popular sectors dependent on party and state. This study disrupts such an interpretation by exploring how oppositional politics, forms of street protest, and voting combined to produce evolving understandings of political participation and legitimate contestation.

Three key moments anchor the story told in this dissertation: the transition to electoral democracy during the 1958 revolution and its aftermath; the late 1970s and early 1980s period of structural crisis that lead to dramatic seizures of public vehicles; and the 1989 Caracazo massacre in which Venezuela's newly elected President shocked the nation by ending the country's largest urban protest with a massacre that killed hundreds. The dissertation ends with reflections on the continuity of in political and protest behavior in el 23 under former military rebel Hugo Chávez who was elected to the presidency in 1998. While the urban popular sectors' are depicted by some as having been awoken to national politics under Chavez, this study establishes powerful continuities going back to 1958 in this stronghold of Chavez's "Bolivarian Revolution."

A comprehensive and systematic canvas of thirty years' of newspaper and periodical sources on el 23 provides a firm foundation for the narrative. It also draws on primary sources from the Banco Obrero, the US National Archives, and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, while making extensive use of polling data and electoral statistics from 1958 to 1989. This archival work allowed for the success of extensive oral histories and ethnographic observation carried out in the 23 de enero over ten months between 2004 and 2005.

This dissertation examines the trajectory of military conscription in Bolivia from Liberals’ imposition of this obligation after coming to power in 1899 to the eve of revolution in 1952. Conscription is an ideal fulcrum for understanding the changing balance between state and society because it was central to their relationship during this period. The lens of military service thus alters our understandings of methods of rule, practices of authority, and ideas about citizenship in and belonging to the Bolivian nation. In eliminating the possibility of purchasing replacements and exemptions for tribute-paying Indians, Liberals brought into the barracks both literate men who were formal citizens and the non-citizens who made up the vast majority of the population. This study thus grapples with the complexities generated by an institution that bridged the overarching and linked divides of profession, language, literacy, indigeneity, and urbanity.

Venturing inside the barracks, this dissertation shows how experiences of labor, military routines, punishment, teasing, and drinking led to a situation in which many conscripts became increasingly invested in military service, negotiated its terms, and built ties that transcended local power structures. In addition to examining desertion, insubordination, and mutinies, it provides an explanation of the new legal categories created by military service, such as reservist, omiso, remiso, and deserter. It then points to the 1932-1935 Chaco War and its aftermath as the period when conscription became a major force in tying an unequal nation together. The mass mobilization necessitated by the war redefined the meaning and terms of conscription, even as the state resorted to forcible mass impressment throughout the national territory while simultaneously negotiating with various interest groups. A postwar process of reckoning initiated by the state, combined with mobilization from below by those who served, added a new hierarchy of military service that overlaid and sometimes even trumped long-standing hierarchies based on education, language, profession, and heritage.

This study thus explores conscription as a terrain on which Bolivians from across divides converged and negotiated their relationships with each other and with the state. The unique strength of this work lies in its use of unpublished internal military documents, especially court-martial records. These sources are further enriched by extensive use of congressional debates, official correspondence, reports of foreign military attachés, memoirs, and published oral histories. Through an analysis of these sources, this dissertation reveals not only elites’ visions of using the barracks to assimilate a diverse population but also the ways that soldiers and their families came to appropriate military service and invest it with new meanings on a personal, familial, communal, and national level. In the process, a conscript nation would eventually emerge that, while still hierarchical and divided by profound differences, was not merely a project of an assimilationist state but rather constructed in a dialectical process from both above and below.

This dissertation explores the history of industrial fisheries in the Humboldt Current marine ecosystem where workers, scientists, and entrepreneurs transformed Peru and Chile into two of the top five fishing nations after World War II. As fishmeal industrialists raided the oceans for proteins to nourish chickens, hogs, and farmed fish, the global "race for fish" was marked by the clash of humanitarian goals and business interests over whether the fish should be used to ameliorate malnutrition in the developing world or extracted and their nutrients exported as mass commodities, at greater profit, as a building block for the food chain in the global North. The epicenter of the fishmeal industry in the 1960s was the port city of Chimbote, Peru, where its cultural, social, and ecological impacts were wrenching. After overfishing and a catastrophic El Niño changed the course of Peruvian fisheries in 1972, Chile came to dominate world markets by the early 1980s due to shifting marine ecologies along its coast that shaped the trajectory of the ports of Iquique and Talcahuano. As Peruvian anchoveta stocks recovered in the 1990s, new environmentalist voices--from local residents to international scientists--emerged to contest unsustainable fisheries practices. This study demonstrates how global, transnational, and translocal connections shaped Humboldt Current fisheries as people struggled to understand the complex correlation between fish populations, extractive activity, and oceanic oscillations within a changing geopolitical context.

The poor and overwhelmingly non-white Baixada Fluminense, on Rio’s urban periphery, saw Black Catholic priests and lay people engage in religiously-informed activism and grassroots educational initiatives in the 1980s and 1990s. Thus began the nationwide campaign that, by 2012, led to the adoption of racial and ethnic quotas in higher education admissions, the civil service, the diplomatic corps, and the military. As part of raising Black consciousness, they drew on a global theology of inculturation and joined others in pioneering a reform of the Catholic liturgy through “Afro Masses” that taught Catholics to respect Africa, its cultures, and its descendants. In doing so, these Catholic activists made common cause with ‘secular’ organizations ranging from trade unions, black movements, NGOs, and political parties that were often formed and led by Catholics. This dissertation suggests that post-Second Vatican Council Catholicism, especially threads that combined Latin American liberation and decolonial African and Asian theologies, is essential if we are to understand how Brazil came to adopt a bold quota system despite the vast under-representation of Blacks and the poor in the political system. Rather spouting class-only Marxism, liberation theology in its Brazilian heartland was a journey in pursuit of personal, spiritual, and collective liberation that contributed decisively to the country’s secular but nonetheless Catholic-informed legal and political culture in the 21st century.

This dissertation examines how the crisis of World War I impacted imperial policy and popular claims-making in the British Caribbean. Between 1915 and 1918, tens of thousands of men from the British Caribbean volunteered to fight in World War I and nearly 16,000 men, hailing from every British colony in the region, served in the newly formed British West Indies Regiment (BWIR). Rousing appeals to imperial patriotism and manly duty during the wartime recruitment campaigns and postwar commemoration movement linked the British Empire, civilization, and Christianity while simultaneously promoting new roles for women vis-à-vis the colonial state. In Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, the two colonies that contributed over seventy-five percent of the British Caribbean troops, discussions about the meaning of the war for black, coloured, white, East Indian, and Chinese residents sparked heated debates about the relationship among race, gender, and imperial loyalty.

To explore these debates, this dissertation foregrounds the social, cultural, and political practices of BWIR soldiers, tracing their engagements with colonial authorities, military officials, and West Indian civilians throughout the war years. It begins by reassessing the origins of the BWIR, and then analyzes the regional campaign to recruit West Indian men for military service. Travelling with newly enlisted volunteers across the Atlantic, this study then chronicles soldiers' multi-sited campaign for equal status, pay, and standing in the British imperial armed forces. It closes by offering new perspectives on the dramatic postwar protests by BWIR soldiers in Italy in 1918 and British Honduras and Trinidad in 1919, and reflects on the trajectory of veterans' activism in the postwar era.

This study argues that the racism and discrimination soldiers experienced overseas fueled heightened claims-making in the postwar era. In the aftermath of the war, veterans mobilized collectively to garner financial support and social recognition from colonial officials. Rather than withdrawing their allegiance from the empire, ex-servicemen and civilians invoked notions of mutual obligation to argue that British officials owed a debt to West Indians for their wartime sacrifices. This study reveals the continued salience of imperial patriotism, even as veterans and their civilian allies invoked nested local, regional, and diasporic loyalties as well. In doing so, it contributes to the literature on the origins of patriotism in the colonial Caribbean, while providing a historical case study for contemporary debates about "hegemonic dissolution" and popular mobilization in the region.

This dissertation draws upon a wide range of written and visual sources, including archival materials, war recruitment posters, newspapers, oral histories, photographs, and memoirs. In addition to Colonial Office records and military files, it incorporates previously untapped letters and petitions from the Jamaica Archives, National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados Department of Archives, and US National Archives.

This dissertation is a cultural history of the port city of Recife, the capital of the Northeast Brazilian state of Pernambuco, from the 1940s to the late seventies. Its focus is on the Mercado Público de São José, a bustling commercial node where affect, sex, and culture were exchanged as often as physical commodities. It examines the denizens and cultural practices of this storied space using an extraordinary 10,000 pages of handwritten diary entries produced by a municipal functionary who sympathetically documented the stories shared with him by poets, sex workers, entertainers, policemen, and vagrants. This material is supplemented by a rich array of sources from multiple subject positions, including music, published erotica, chapbook poetry (literatura de cordel), photographs, films, material objects, and expressive culture. This dissertation foregrounds two neglected forms of Black culture that take the form of black dolls. It first looks at mamulengo, an improvised form of puppet play historically practiced by and for poor and nonwhite men. Two chapters show how this practice, predicated upon interpersonal violence meted out by Black heroes, is simultaneously a form of Black protest and a perpetuation of anti-Black racism. The project then analyzes calungas, regally dressed tar black dolls that are highly visible components of Recife’s maracatus, as royal corteges of queens, ladies-in-waiting, and percussionists are known. It holds that calungas and maracatus are expressions of an alternative blackness to mamulengo, a female-centered practice whose prestige draws from a grammar of Africanicity. By illustrating the tight braiding of the “people’s” and “learned” culture, this dissertation confronts head on the enduring influence of racial hierarchy and domination on descendants of the slave quarters (senzala) and the big house (casa-grande).

“Surrendering to the Streets” thus offers a fully contextualized urban cultural history of slavery’s afterlives in the capital of the northeastern state that received one-fifth of the enslaved Africans that landed in the Western Hemisphere. In presenting the broad resonances of slavery as “living,” the dissertation does not assume that these sociocultural inheritances are immutable, nor does it contend that poor and overwhelmingly nonwhite Brazilians are perpetually condemned to domination. Rather, it examines Brazil’s “public secret” of racism while exploring how Recife’s nonwhite majority contested these hierarchies through humor, religiosity, and forms of popular entertainment that proved capable of influencing the literate upper-class, with a chapter each focusing on the multitalented artist and documentarian Liêdo Maranhão (1925-2014) and Recife’s famed playwright and novelist Hermilo Borba Filho (1917-1976).

The intellectual historian Gabriel Paquette has identified the propaganda language of the eighteenth-century Spanish Bourbon monarchy with a “pliable rhetoric of public happiness” of which the monarchy claimed to be “linchpin.” In a process beginning in the sixteenth century, by the late eighteenth century, the phrase “public happiness” had substantially replaced the “common good” in Spanish political thought. This project excavates the emergence of Spanish civic eudaemonism from Renaissance debates on reason of state, demonstrating the historical processes by which it repeatedly changed hands in subsequent centuries. Civic eudaemonism allowed Renaissance authors to allude to reason of state without instrumentalizing virtue, thereby putting the needs of the State over the doctrinal demands of the Church. The result was a new emphasis on the absolute sovereignty of the monarch, on whose shoulders rested the secular happiness of Spain. There was no consensual definition of public happiness. At the turn of the seventeenth century the sum of justice, security and civic virtue was meant. Later in the century the definition of mercantile success appeared, and by 1750 justice and virtue were disappearing. After 1780 mercantile definitions gave way to the personal industry of individual subjects, independent of regal influence and taken collectively. Public happiness, although associated with regalism throughout Europe, appeared earliest in Italy and Spain; in Spain it took longest to defeat the individual otherworldly happiness promised in Christianity. In Spain, as elsewhere, the alliance with regalism collapsed as soon as Christianity was purged from political writing.

This dissertation argues that the civilian "political class" played an understudied yet decisive role in toppling Brazil's 1964-1985 military dictatorship. In contrast with existing explanations for the regime's fall, which emphasize either the isolated initiative of the generals or the independent resistance of civil society, this dissertation highlights the inadvertent opposition of civilian politicians, connected by familial and social ties to both the military and social movements. Between 1968 and 1985, the relationship between all three shifted significantly, as politicians first resisted the military's challenge to their presumed right to rule on behalf of the masses and later came to defend a role for those masses in ruling the nation. It offers a deeper understanding of the dispositions, worldview, and behavioral codes that united politicians regardless of ideology or party and turned them against the regime that many of them had helped bring to power.

In contrast to the Southern Cone, where the military sought to abolish political activity, Brazilian officers cast themselves as democracy's saviors. Yet even as they maintained elections, they also imposed authoritarian reforms on politicians. The first four chapters offer the most detailed study to date of this project and politicians' indignant reaction. In 1968, as the regime repressed leftist student activists, politicians, tied to students by blood and social class, took to the streets to defend their children in a nearly forgotten act of defiance. Then, when the military demanded the prosecution of a congressman for insulting them, Congress refused to lift his immunity. In response, the military placed Congress in recess, arrested several politicians, removed many others from office, and decided to turn their reforms into tutelage. Amidst the repression, a few politicians opted for courageous denunciation, but most chose to wait out the storm until the generals believed them sufficiently cowed. Still others adopted the strategy proved most successful - working within the rules to build their careers despite constraints.

The final three chapters show how the military's project collapsed amidst bolder challenges from politicians, especially in the vitally important state of São Paulo. In 1974, after five years of breathtaking economic growth, the powerless opposition party decisively won legislative elections. This study offers fresh insights into the opposition's success by examinging its novel appeal to working class voters. By 1978, restiveness in São Paulo spread to the military's own allied party, as in São Paulo they nominated a dissident gubernatorial candidate against the generals' wishes. As the regime turned toward political opening, in 1979-1980, opposition politicians took to the streets to protect striking workers from repression, demonstrating a greater acceptance of popular mobilization. Politicians changed under military rule, but rather than collaborating with a demobilizing regime, many allied with an emerging civil society to oppose it.

This study draws on transcripts and audio recordings of legislative speeches, electoral court records, public opinion surveys, police records, classified Brazilian intelligence reports, newspapers, and correspondence from the foreign embassies. It cites the personal archives of key politicians, as well as oral histories, biographies, and memoirs. The sources enable a dynamic and culturally informed analysis of the "political class" to explain how, through resistance to tutelage and the acceptance of popular participation, civilian politicians helped topple the military regime and lay the groundwork for an unprecedented expansion of citizenship in the following decades.