2017 Pauley Interview - Andrés Reséndez and Katrina Jagodinsky

Department of History Author

11/05/2018 Added

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Andrés Reséndez and Katrina Jagodinsky's interview regarding the 2017 Pauley Lecture

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[00:00:20.850]Thank you, Dr. Resendez, for coming here
[00:00:22.860]to University of Nebraska, Lincoln,
[00:00:24.450]and visiting the Department of History.
[00:00:26.520]We're really excited to have you here
[00:00:28.550]as our Pauley lecturer this evening,
[00:00:31.270]and glad you could take some time to talk to us
[00:00:33.160]about your Bancroft winning book, The Other Slavery.
[00:00:37.324]I think, just to start out, I would like to hear
[00:00:40.100]about the readers you're seeking in that work
[00:00:42.870]and what it is you want them to take away your study.
[00:00:45.750]Right, and well, thank you.
[00:00:46.810]It's a pleasure to be here, and I,
[00:00:51.490]in order to answer your question,
[00:00:52.700]I will start out by saying, it is a book
[00:00:55.900]that emerged a little bit in an accidental fashion,
[00:01:00.105]meaning, I originally thought that it would be
[00:01:01.410]a more self-contained 16th century kind of a book,
[00:01:05.740]and as I was doing the groundwork for it,
[00:01:09.980]I realized that there was really nothing out there
[00:01:14.690]that would give us the larger contours of this story.
[00:01:18.310]So I eventually persuaded myself
[00:01:21.150]that that would be the best service
[00:01:23.720]I could provide to the profession
[00:01:25.310]and to readers at large was to try to give
[00:01:28.140]this larger framework, and I also became convinced
[00:01:32.490]that in the very same way that you can't really understand
[00:01:36.370]the history of western Africa without reference
[00:01:39.390]to the trans-Atlantic slave trade,
[00:01:41.270]you can't really connect these little stories
[00:01:44.540]without having a sense of the larger structure
[00:01:48.560]looming over the whole of the hemisphere.
[00:01:51.550]And so I didn't really write the history of the hemisphere,
[00:01:55.040]that would be a little too much,
[00:01:56.140]but it is, as you know, a fairly sweeping,
[00:01:59.800]400 year story that begins in the Caribbean,
[00:02:03.470]moves into Mexico and into the American Southwest.
[00:02:08.240]And so that's my hope, is to reach a variety
[00:02:14.620]of scholars, some of whom, obviously interested
[00:02:17.660]in issues of bondage, whether African slavery
[00:02:20.440]or Indian slavery, but a variety of other scholars
[00:02:23.530]who may be interested in gender or in colonialism,
[00:02:26.630]in labor relations, so that is my hope, yeah.
[00:02:32.650]Well, and I think you're pointing to,
[00:02:34.630]what for me was one of the most impressive aspects
[00:02:37.510]of the book is just the range of sources you used
[00:02:41.060]from the Iberian Peninsula to Chile,
[00:02:43.520]Caribbean, the US-Mexico borderland,
[00:02:46.820]and so maybe you could also speak to junior scholars
[00:02:51.120]who are working in these comparative empire studies
[00:02:54.972]about the nature of the work you had to do
[00:02:58.120]in those archives and in the many overlapping disciplines
[00:03:02.590]of the secondary work that you put together for this study.
[00:03:05.960]Sure, I mean I am glad that the book is done,
[00:03:10.660]but it was a very challenging, and for awhile,
[00:03:15.430]I doubted whether I would be able to pull it off
[00:03:20.080]with the immensity of the sources.
[00:03:22.010]I would say that there are a couple of advantages.
[00:03:27.510]One is, for example, and some of your viewers
[00:03:30.730]may find this interesting, is that the
[00:03:34.262]Spanish sources, the Spanish colonial sources,
[00:03:39.343]in many cases, have been digitized.
[00:03:43.539]So there's this enormous effort
[00:03:46.256]by the Spanish Ministry of Culture to digitize,
[00:03:48.670]literally, hundreds of thousands of records,
[00:03:50.930]and they have cataloged that, and that is available
[00:03:53.530]on your computer, and so one of the reasons
[00:03:57.740]that tipped the scales in favor of writing
[00:04:00.210]this larger book was that I counted on that.
[00:04:03.280]So that was one piece of evidence.
[00:04:07.230]So I think the greater availability of sources online
[00:04:13.294]is something that will enable to take us,
[00:04:17.210]more ambitious projects that involve
[00:04:19.860]a multitude of archives, scattered in different places.
[00:04:25.139]So that's, so I would tell that to scholars.
[00:04:28.550]Don't be shy into pursuing your subjects,
[00:04:32.270]even when they cross borders or empires
[00:04:36.230]or geographic or present day geographic areas.
[00:04:43.331]Great. Yeah.
[00:04:44.641]Great.
[00:04:45.905]I first read Changing National Identities
[00:04:50.750]at the Frontier when I was a graduate student,
[00:04:54.270]and you've mentioned that you sort of fell into
[00:04:58.180]the larger scope of what you initially thought
[00:05:00.800]would be a 16th century study.
[00:05:02.610]Can you sort of talk about, just, as a scholar,
[00:05:05.500]the evolution of your work from book to book
[00:05:08.230]that got you to this point?
[00:05:10.080]Sure, so interestingly, I started out
[00:05:14.440]by identifying a gap, what I thought was a gap,
[00:05:18.120]and this is, remember, we're going back
[00:05:20.030]to the early 2000s when
[00:05:24.450]I was really trained as a Latin Americanist,
[00:05:28.120]and I saw that the areas that had been absorbed
[00:05:31.720]by the United States were not properly served
[00:05:33.950]by that literature, and so I started out,
[00:05:36.310]very simple mindedly as just, there's a gap here,
[00:05:39.350]and I could do something about it.
[00:05:40.610]I looked up the records and I saw that there was a wealth,
[00:05:43.380]that was not, that had not been mined,
[00:05:45.970]and so I started that way.
[00:05:48.422]Little did I know that in the course
[00:05:51.720]of the subsequent years, borderlands
[00:05:53.760]would emerge as a major field.
[00:05:56.506]And so, it has been a great joy
[00:06:01.560]to see that field come to fruition.
[00:06:04.870]Now, it's very difficult to make the same argument,
[00:06:08.930]that there is a gap, because there is such great scholarship
[00:06:11.580]being done on that, the US-Mexico borderlands,
[00:06:15.180]and other borderlands as well.
[00:06:16.790]I would say, however, that while those records
[00:06:21.310]have been mined, I think what we need to do
[00:06:23.120]is to take the next step, which is,
[00:06:27.400]while we know the dynamics of these borders,
[00:06:30.400]or we understand them a little better,
[00:06:33.180]that information has, in turn, led us
[00:06:39.610]to the realization that we need to understand better
[00:06:42.640]what's happening outside of these borders
[00:06:46.820]in a country that we may not feel comfortable working with.
[00:06:52.460]And so in my latest book, for example,
[00:06:54.270]The Other Slavery, I was very interested in New Mexico,
[00:06:58.210]but really, the way to understand the captive dynamics
[00:07:02.430]of New Mexico was by looking at the mines in Chihuahua,
[00:07:06.370]fully in Chihuahua, not the borderland,
[00:07:08.850]but really further south, and the same thing
[00:07:12.380]occurs in other parts of the United States.
[00:07:14.080]I mean, if you, you can do the Carolinas
[00:07:17.750]and you realize that there is this trade
[00:07:19.460]with the Caribbean islands, and you can stop at that,
[00:07:22.940]but you can really try to understand better
[00:07:25.710]exactly why this happened in specific islands
[00:07:28.880]and how that impacts the Carolinas or New England.
[00:07:33.550]And so, I think that's the step where we are right now,
[00:07:35.930]where we are really in need of,
[00:07:39.860]get a better sense of these regions
[00:07:42.790]outside of the United States, and truly understanding,
[00:07:45.840]truly going into the records, the primary records
[00:07:48.700]of those places and seeing how they fit
[00:07:52.030]into the narrative of the United States, in this case.
[00:07:54.500]Mm-hmm, yeah, I think your work
[00:07:56.660]does an amazing job of really identifying
[00:07:59.210]where the border has an influence on the actors
[00:08:02.170]and the processes, but not stopping at the border,
[00:08:06.550]sort of, transaction of the slave trade,
[00:08:09.020]but thinking more deeply into each of those empires,
[00:08:11.910]north and south, or even globally speaking.
[00:08:17.110]How far those traces go, beyond the geopolitical boundary.
[00:08:23.179]In sort of a related way, I think you also,
[00:08:28.060]very creatively read the legal record,
[00:08:31.557]and sort of, not taking it at face value.
[00:08:36.240]To me, that's related to your expansive view of borders
[00:08:40.120]as moving beyond the sort of boundary line itself, as well,
[00:08:44.581]so could you talk a little bit about the importance
[00:08:48.460]of reading the law in a critical way,
[00:08:51.520]as you did in The Other Slavery,
[00:08:53.540]to show how this market expanded
[00:08:58.230]after formal legal abolition?
[00:09:00.190]Mm-hmm, totally.
[00:09:01.850]Yeah, that was really the greatest conceptual headache
[00:09:06.160]I had in writing this book,
[00:09:09.320]which is, even at the very start of the book
[00:09:12.340]I would visit places and give talks
[00:09:15.330]about the project that I was involved in,
[00:09:17.390]and the definitional problem of slavery,
[00:09:21.200]what exactly do you mean by this slavery,
[00:09:24.509]always came up in all of these talks.
[00:09:28.030]At first, I was thinking, well, I could come up
[00:09:32.340]with a definition, but that is,
[00:09:34.633]and I need to come up with a definition,
[00:09:36.770]but I wanted a very broad definition,
[00:09:38.640]because I thought that a very stultifying way
[00:09:41.470]to proceed would be to, well, only the people
[00:09:45.210]who are being bought and sold,
[00:09:46.990]or some characteristic like that,
[00:09:49.980]and then not look at what's out there.
[00:09:52.330]But really, what I was looking at
[00:09:54.090]was a, which is born from the historical experience
[00:09:59.170]of the Spanish Empire, which prohibited Indian slavery,
[00:10:01.550]and therefore, people found creative ways
[00:10:04.040]to get around the law, what I wanted
[00:10:06.440]was to capture that phenomenon,
[00:10:08.320]and so my definition had to be broad enough to capture that.
[00:10:13.270]I didn't wanna take the colonial categorization
[00:10:17.850]at face value. Right.
[00:10:19.791]And so, whenever the Spanish lawyers
[00:10:23.920]of the 16th century said, "Well, this is not slavery,
[00:10:26.067]"this is (speaking in foreign language),
[00:10:27.750]"or this is (speaking in foreign language),
[00:10:28.583]"or this is this, or this is that,"
[00:10:30.260]I didn't wanna take them at their word.
[00:10:33.500]And so, after struggling with this question,
[00:10:39.010]really for much of the research period of the book,
[00:10:43.424]it finally began dawning on me that well,
[00:10:47.499]one of the central characteristics of this phenomenon,
[00:10:51.270]this broad phenomenon that I was looking at,
[00:10:54.438]was that Indians get moved from one place to another.
[00:10:58.080]And there are some good reasons for that, right,
[00:11:00.070]because if you don't move Indians,
[00:11:02.980]the acquirers of those Indians open themselves
[00:11:06.660]to retribution from other members of that group.
[00:11:09.553]The forcible transportation of Indians
[00:11:13.420]from one place to another was a very central aspect
[00:11:16.580]of this, regardless of the details
[00:11:18.400]of exactly how they had wound up in that place.
[00:11:24.733]The inability to leave the workplace
[00:11:26.870]was another central element, of course.
[00:11:28.810]So I eventually boiled down to four,
[00:11:30.840]so forcible mobility, inability to leave the workplace,
[00:11:36.300]threat of violence, or violence to get compliance
[00:11:40.310]from the victims of this phenomenon,
[00:11:42.950]and finally, a very symbolic or no payment.
[00:11:48.120]And so again, I found many instances
[00:11:50.170]in which these individuals were paid,
[00:11:53.140]but they were paid such an absurdly low sum
[00:11:56.200]that it made no sense to call that a payment.
[00:12:00.200]So those were the broad parameters
[00:12:03.490]that I ended up with, because I do believe
[00:12:05.870]that it is a legitimate point to raise
[00:12:08.810]that there has to be some way of defining
[00:12:14.440]this other slavery, as I call it.
[00:12:16.420]And you know, other people will, other scholars
[00:12:19.030]will define it in different ways,
[00:12:20.340]but that is the, certainly, the major problem
[00:12:24.560]that I struggled on. Yeah.
[00:12:27.956]And I think that's something that other scholars
[00:12:30.910]in the field, of both borderland studies
[00:12:32.990]and Western history have encountered a lot,
[00:12:35.706]and you can see that, sort of at play within the field,
[00:12:38.980]in terms of distinctions between borderlands
[00:12:42.150]and frontier, terminology and the weight
[00:12:44.560]that each of those concepts carry.
[00:12:47.070]And then, also, trending today,
[00:12:49.720]concerns about characterizing North American colonization
[00:12:53.190]as genocide, and so, given your expertise
[00:12:57.150]in four centuries of this process,
[00:13:01.300]would you wanna weigh in on, sort of,
[00:13:03.530]how you see those concepts evolving
[00:13:05.720]and that debate moving forward?
[00:13:08.770]Yeah, I mean, as I was saying in the previous answer,
[00:13:13.010]I think that we really need to step beyond
[00:13:15.650]the borders themselves and go into these outside regions.
[00:13:19.540]So that is the great lesson that I found
[00:13:22.370]in the latest book that I wrote.
[00:13:29.282]I think that's what I would encourage
[00:13:31.590]scholars to look at as they,
[00:13:34.180]to become bolder, to go into,
[00:13:36.810]because of the accessibility of the records,
[00:13:38.880]because of the way our world operates now,
[00:13:44.570]I think this is a very good development
[00:13:47.960]that I think we need to still work on.
[00:13:51.080]Mm-hmm. Yeah.
[00:13:52.890]I should also say, about the legal aspect of this
[00:13:58.810]that I found fascinating, which is that the legality,
[00:14:06.536]or the legal framing of slavery
[00:14:13.286]is something that you could easily conceive of as,
[00:14:17.390]it's very simple to put rules by the Spanish Crown
[00:14:20.880]or by the Mexican government, or the US government,
[00:14:23.460]and it's far more difficult to enforce them.
[00:14:25.810]So one of the things about slavery is that,
[00:14:28.190]in slavery is that, you discover the real limitations
[00:14:32.340]of enforcement of the Spanish Empire
[00:14:34.430]that you conceive us as this absolute monarchy,
[00:14:37.410]and in reality, on the ground, it was very difficult.
[00:14:41.090]If the Crown said, no, you need to liberate
[00:14:43.320]all of these Indians, well, on the ground it didn't happen.
[00:14:46.359]By the same token, I don't want to say
[00:14:49.126]that the law did not matter, because
[00:14:53.210]the prohibition of slavery did a host of,
[00:14:58.010]created a host of problems on the ground, as well,
[00:15:00.660]as you would imagine, because everybody,
[00:15:03.310]or most everybody who, of means, engaged in this activity
[00:15:09.400]to some extent, it became a liability, politically.
[00:15:13.610]So some political opponents accused others
[00:15:18.510]of illegal Indian slavery, and that was very common.
[00:15:21.480]That's one very good way in which I found my information
[00:15:25.040]about Indian slaves, so while it was extremely difficult
[00:15:29.400]to enforce, the existence of the law itself
[00:15:34.185]had profound implications about how this society worked.
[00:15:38.250]And let alone, of course, the fact that the,
[00:15:41.350]the remarkable fact that many of these slaves
[00:15:43.970]actually took the law and took their masters to court
[00:15:47.550]and sued for their freedom, which again, shows you
[00:15:50.910]that even though it may have been difficult to enforce,
[00:15:54.079]some people took the law and used it to their advantage.
[00:15:58.340]I think that's a great point you're making,
[00:16:00.740]and it is clear in the book itself
[00:16:02.940]that although the law may not have been
[00:16:06.837]equally apportioned or equally implemented,
[00:16:10.700]it did offer these sort of flashpoints of opportunity
[00:16:14.040]for people to lodge protest or resistance,
[00:16:17.775]that then scholars now can measure in really clear ways,
[00:16:21.590]and I think that's true in the Spanish, Mexican,
[00:16:25.110]and American systems regarding Indian and Black enslavement.
[00:16:30.078]So, that's what I appreciated about the work
[00:16:33.370]is that it's a pretty creative and critical reading
[00:16:35.490]of legal sources, both as a record
[00:16:41.960]of the imposition of force and authority,
[00:16:44.540]but also as a conversation about resisting
[00:16:50.220]that authority as well.
[00:16:51.967]And I just was really impressed with the broad scope
[00:16:56.870]of the work, but at no point did it really feel
[00:16:59.270]like you had lost the humanity of the actors involved.
[00:17:02.760]And so, over the course of four centuries,
[00:17:04.990]that's not an easy task, so I applaud you on that.
[00:17:08.910]Thanks so much.
[00:17:10.230]Maybe just as a way of sharing with audiences
[00:17:14.500]or readers who aren't as historically minded,
[00:17:18.150]could you talk a little bit about the parallels
[00:17:20.710]you make at the end of the book to modern day trafficking?
[00:17:25.330]Sure, so in the book,
[00:17:28.340]I call it the other slavery,
[00:17:30.836]but in some ways, it is the most common type of slavery.
[00:17:39.520]Today, slavery is forbidden all over the world,
[00:17:42.380]in the same way that Indian slavery
[00:17:43.870]had been forbidden as early as the 16th century,
[00:17:46.160]yet it flourishes because it takes advantage
[00:17:49.260]of these subterfuges and euphemisms
[00:17:52.040]that we were talking about.
[00:17:57.840]Unfortunately, the conclusion of my book
[00:18:02.210]is fairly lapidary, which is that this other slavery
[00:18:07.400]was never abolished, in the way that the other slavery was.
[00:18:11.230]In many ways, it has proved to be extraordinarily adept
[00:18:16.570]at adapting to different conditions, at surviving,
[00:18:21.300]and today, according to the Walk Free Foundation,
[00:18:24.090]there are 45, more than 45 million people
[00:18:27.750]subjected to modern day enslavement,
[00:18:30.522]forms of enslavement that in many cases,
[00:18:33.370]Native Americans 200 years ago would find very familiar.
[00:18:37.020]So they are enslaved on the basis of debts,
[00:18:39.400]of the legal, the penal system,
[00:18:43.251]so this is a story that has relevance until today.
[00:18:49.260]If we want to really seek the origins
[00:18:51.980]of that particular modern day form of enslavement.
[00:18:55.130]Mm-hmm, well, thank you for taking the time
[00:18:58.810]to talk to us about your book, and I look forward
[00:19:01.890]to the lecture this evening.
[00:19:03.530]It's been a real treat having you here on campus.
[00:19:05.670]Thank you so much, the pleasure has been mine
[00:19:07.550]for having me, thank you so much.
[00:19:09.183]Thank you.

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2017 Pauley Interview - Andrés Reséndez and Katrina Jagodinsky

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