Blockchain Papers

Michael P. Moynihan

In 1978, after a decade of designing eccentric cybernetic installations— such as labyrinths for living animals and computationally controlled plant environments—Luis Fernando Benedit, a conceptual artist and architect from Buenos Aires, drew a series of eight houses for a World Congress in Mexico City organized by the Union of International Architects (UIA).1 The series title, Las casas que cuestan un millón (Houses that cost a million), was a sardonic critique of the conference's theme of “Architecture and National Development” and openly mocked the rhetoric of low-cost housing presented to development aid organizations throughout the decade such as Christopher Alexander's Low-Cost Housing, Yona Friedman's No-Cost Housing, and the work done by the Minimum Cost Housing Group.2Unlike other architects presenting at the UIA World Congress, Benedit was not looking to access flows of international finance or to share research. His examples of high-cost housing were hand drawn, each appearing visually distinct, beginning in a cartoonish tone with topiary gardens and large curving cantilevers. Throughout the series, the houses gradually evolve into austere, sharp geometric forms reminiscent of brutalism or bomb shelters. Their similarities are more subtle: Each drawing includes a subterranean living space, underground entrances, solar panels, and other small-scale eco-technologies popularized in the 1970s. The format, speed, and level of detail in the drawings are similar to a style of communication media in self-help manuals and appropriate-technology discourse, where a comic format was the visualization technique encouraged by the United Nations for disseminating expertise to a new class of self-builders around the world.3 Yona Friedman, the most well-known architect for utilizing this comic style for his own promotion within development programs, was unable to attend the congress in Mexico City, because he was in Bolivia the same week at a UNESCO seminar presenting a housing project that promised minimum cost for governments and “no cost” to inhabitants.4 Friedman's busy schedule in the fall of 1978 reflects the renewed fervor of development discourse in the late 1970s, as housing became the primary strategy pushed by international agencies and economists looking to promote national development and manage rural-urban migration.5Unlike a step-by-step comic strip illustrating how to build a home, Benedit's houses narrate the rise of bureaucratic authoritarianism in Argentina and were drawn for an international forum as a way to comment subversively on the social, political, and technological changes occurring during the ongoing dictatorship (1976–1983) led by General Jorge Rafael Videla. During this period, clandestine torture centers and death raids were used in the enforced disappearance of more than thirty thousand people accused of political dissent.6 Under the dictatorship's so-called Process of National Reorganization (Proceso de reorganización nacional or El proceso), most democratic institutions were repressed; Congress was suspended, political parties were banned, and civil rights were limited.7Building on a decade of computational and technological artworks, Benedit used the conceptual language of cybernetics and closed systems as a metaphor to call attention to ongoing censorship and repression in Argentina, which were coupled with new policies focused on increasing agricultural exports and a drive to attract foreign investment through rural agribusiness development in the country's interior. Benedit was drawn to cybernetics and early computation in the late 1960s because it offered a new language of control to speak about how bodies are disciplined in social space. A decade later, he used the idea of closed systems as a metaphor for the state's transition of the countryside into a space of technological experimentation. In the final house of the series, Casa H, aboveground, there is an inflatable plastic bubble encasing a technologically regulated and ecologically circular agricultural environment. The crops growing inside are intended as produce for the expanding agro-export economy and part of a closed ecological system of dependency, fed by the carbon dioxide produced by a family living belowground, hidden in an underground shelter.8 Presented at a world congress focused on the role of architects in national development, Las casas served not merely as an illustration of how development policies in Argentina played out in the 1970s but also as a warning for architects in attendance who were looking to participate in shaping development discourse.The weeklong World Congress in Mexico City was organized amid fears within the UIA that professional architects were losing ground to other experts involved in global development. The organization formed in 1948 through the merger of several existing architectural associations in Western Europe. By 1978, the Mexico City congress demonstrated the geographic expansion of the UIA, with more than five thousand architects present, representing nearly eighty countries. In the opening speech of the plenary session, the soon-to-be president of the UIA, Rafael de La-Hoz, stoked fears of a crisis in the profession: “Today,” he said, “National Development is taking place without the help of architects.”9Like many other speakers during the week in Mexico City, La-Hoz cited the Club of Rome's report The Limits to Growth, which had been central to the discussions at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (Stockholm, 1972).10 He also noted that architects had not been invited to participate in a network of world conferences and congresses organized in the 1970s, such as at the UN Habitat Conference in Vancouver.11 Of course, other issues directly affected professional architects during the decade—such as global stagflation following the 1973 OPEC oil embargo and a general decline in global construction— but La-Hoz's speech suggested that architects themselves were to blame. Architects, he said, had fallen behind in what he referred to as “the information age,” and needed to adapt to new computer-aided technologies capable of integrating their practice with global econometric and environmental modeling, what he referred to, more generally, as “a systems approach.”12For the first time in the thirty-year history of the UIA, professionals from outside of architecture participated extensively. Walking through the exhibitions and listening to the debates during the week, this change would be apparent through the onslaught of statistics alone. Graphs and figures replaced orthographic projections of buildings, representing energy costs, military expenditures, chemical fertilizers measured in barrels, and hunger and famine measured in bodies.13 The new emphasis on data reflected a larger project La-Hoz had been working on for the previous three years called ARKISYST, a new global architectural information system developed by the UIA. Like Noah's Ark, which La-Hoz invoked as its allegorical inspiration, ARKISYST was intended to save the profession and supply practicing architects with real-time information needs, modeled off systems in other fields intended to promote international cooperation in the decade.14 Although the project was eventually canceled, his speech was planned to coincide with the opening of an information center hosted in Mexico City. The location was selected to take advantage of Mexico's access to international development loans and state funding for a new computer center for housing research.15Luis Fernando Benedit's inclusion within this world congress was unusual. The UIA imagined the event as a forum to bring architects experienced in computation, systems analysis, and managerial cybernetics into conversation with politicians, economists, and technocratic elites. Although trained as an architect in the early 1960s at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Benedit had become internationally well known for creating computational and cybernetic art environments. In 1968, in an exhibition titled Microzoo, he built labyrinths for living cats, tropical fish, birds, ants, snails, and cockroaches.16 One reviewer of Benedit's labyrinths wrote, “Watching the creatures shivering in the museum's air-conditioning, one felt the experimentation—both scientific and cultural— to be quite sinister.”17 A year later he participated in Arte y Cibernética, the first exhibition in Argentina with computer-generated artwork, and was a founding member of the Grupo de Arte y Cibernética.18In Las casas que cuestan un millón there are several references to Benedit's earlier work. The recurring forms throughout the houses, which alternate between sweeping curved cantilevers and triangular pitched roofs, are pulled almost directly from a painting series called Supercomodo (1969) and a house he designed in 1969 for Antonio Battro, an Argentine neurological scientist. In the front yard of Casa B, there is an apiary and a labyrinth. Positioned near the front door, the apiary refers to his work Biotrón, exhibited at the 1970 Venice Biennale, where he collaborated with Battro to build a habitat in which honeybees pollinated computer-controlled artificial flowers.19 The labyrinth in the drawing refers to a series of works in the early 1970s, such as Laberinto invisible (1971), exhibited in Buenos Aires, and Laberinto para ratones blancos II, exhibited at a solo show at MOMA in 1972.20 The exhibition at MOMA was internationally celebrated for a hydroponic environment named Fitotrón, where Benedit grew cabbage and peppers under high-intensity metal halide lamps inside the gallery.21Throughout Las casas series, each house includes a hydroponic garden connected to solar-powered compressors, filters, and extractors. In the first half of the series, the hydroponic gardens are supplemental, positioned on the exterior of the house. By Casa D, the hydroponic chamber attaches directly to the living quarters with diagrammatic arrows pointing outward. In the final house, the hydroponic garden takes over the entire living space. These references to Benedit's earlier projects were likely intended to position his own life and career within the rising authoritarianism in his home country. Although these houses are not exclusively cybernetic, this self-quotation also allows the series to be read as a continuation of a decade-long experiment with labyrinths and plant environments, which attempted to study through the observation of feedback dynamics how environmental changes modify behavior, in particular how humans, nonhumans, and machines are structurally interconnected with their environments.22Such self-reflection also makes clear that Benedit was an internationally relevant actor in a global artistic movement where artists worldwide appropriated cybernetic and systems theories as conceptual tools for both dematerializing the art object and reconfiguring artistic practice as relational and participatory. Exhibitions such as Cybernetic Serendipity in London in 1968 institutionalized this turn, inviting collaboration between artists and computer scientists.23 Scholarship on systems art has often relied on narratives of unidirectional flows of expertise— in particular, through the relationship between cybernetic art and the U.S. military-industrial complex—while also tending to exclude actors in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This omission is surprising, given the large number of bureaucrats, artists, academics, and government officials all over the world who helped shape cybernetic science in their own contexts.24 As Eden Medina shows in her scholarship on Cybersyn—a cybernetic system for managing the Chilean national economy developed in the early 1970s during the presidency of Salvador Allende— local engineers were already knowledgeable about managerial cybernetics out to to help the International was to the history of not in the collaboration between in the United and the in The of art systems science and cybernetics was in the exhibition in Buenos titled Arte de which more than one artists from Argentina, and This of art Benedit within a global discourse how technologies were not by their but by their to change and adapt in a of political and social 1978, Benedit had become a central in a in in Argentina, where artists used systems and cybernetics as both a metaphor and conceptual language for the rise of authoritarianism in the late Argentina had become a global center for technological art with a of to art the by works by the of and in and and by Fernando and institutions such as the de Arte the and an Argentine through that and In these artists in on and In a of new such as cybernetic became a new conceptual language to the art As art in 1968, the role of cybernetics in art was show that art not in but in between people and the of their in to the of art in Argentina, several artists with these artistic and to experiment with to the between art and creating and outside of the that General to these on more political such as and the project is appropriated media and to state and these works a critique of and the conceptual and political from which Benedit's own in cybernetics these more with the idea of the as a metaphor for artists repression and Benedit's to the underground in these houses to on during the of the dictatorship's El the of and and the rise of technocratic in his references to both the underground and to small-scale Benedit called attention to the relationship between ongoing repression and the drive to attract foreign investment through rural development technocratic and the metaphor of the at a world congress focused on the role in national casas que cuestan un millón a architectural of authoritarianism in Argentina, where rural housing programs, designed to access international had been into tools for repression and first Benedit's houses share a in his earlier the in Casa de from the of a connected to an subterranean read as a series, the houses to transition from to In the first houses A and Casa there are and a front As the series into the imagined the and replaced with and each the of the underground space In the first houses, the is By the final house, Casa H, the subterranean and is to that and a for and The is from the of underground and civil in the United which imagined the life of the class out the with and the of In Benedit's by there are of The ground is not but The life inside one of these underground is or read the houses to narrate an environment of increasing censorship and houses were drawn in the of 1978, clandestine torture centers and death raids had become a of life in Buenos of their these torture centers were often within the but out of the de de in the center had been from an into the torture center in the country. 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Buenos Aires, the with a as a show of During this period, used references to the underground to comment on ongoing political and he drew a series of subterranean In titled de subterranean para for a subterranean for geometric how artistic work had been in the early 1970s of this were by at the of the dictatorship led by General Jorge art of the state was almost as in subterranean in houses the underground is as space, on how artists had been into the where would of the work of and political repression through artistic practice place in Buenos Aires, the of cybernetic in this was to a of international and agricultural became a ground for imagined cybernetic in this period, at the of or rural was for this that work in the 1970s of the In 1978, his work to on agricultural such as the works de and de of these projects are cybernetic, but both on the language of control through the of through control in the and through or control in the Argentina systems were central to how the state 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all to this with a at integrating architectural practice within increasing flows of international finance through of and development. This how the of development had the professional and social of the 1970s. As a art in a of the this had a to with a throughout almost all the presented throughout the that national development, and are In this Las casas que cuestan un millón as a warning about the of development as a and of in which architects become

Kim Wyatt

My husband and I had found the desert house accidentally. Each winter, we'd leave our snowy northern home for a few weeks and head to Death Valley to join other pale snowbirds on a heat-seeking mission. We checked out of our overly busy lives to wander mosaic canyons and moonlit dunes. We said hello to lizards and stretched our winter-tight bodies. We took pictures of each other waist high in leggy golden desert daisies; it was a delight to see my burly blond husband frolic in wildflowers. Because of his work, I rarely see him; these photos are proof of life.The year my mother had her “gather the family” stroke, which she partially survived—her mind did not—we ventured farther south, to Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, California's largest at 600,000 acres. A tiny town that would not look out of place in Mexico sits in the middle of it. The houses were cheap and the weather fine. Thinking it would be a place we went for respite during our working years, and, for me, from caregiving, we staked a claim. It was a retreat, we agreed, so far from civilization that we might never be found.For three years, I managed the care of my dying parents. My life was triangle-shaped: from our primary home to their apartment and to the desert, where my husband would sometimes join me. When my parents died, one corner of the triangle fell off; what remained pointed to the desert house. I packed their ashes into a beautifully appointed rice container that my sister in Thailand had given us for our wedding. “It's only temporary,” I told them. Then I put my parents in the van and headed south.The desert house is on a half acre and is surrounded by a stucco half wall, which the neighbors refer to as a “moat.” I like the moat. It keeps out coyotes and the trash that sometimes breaks loose in epic windstorms. The moat feels like a layer of protection I need right now. It feels like a safe place to mourn.The yard has a succulent and cactus garden filled with showcase specimens of Engelmann's prickly pear and paddle cactus. I sit with coffee and watch hummingbirds dip into the chuparosa and drink. White-winged doves coo in stereo. Ravens alight the California fan palms at high noon, tormenting our old border collie, Angus, whose job is to guard everything inside the moat. Jackrabbits have found refuge from coyotes here, and roadrunners cruise the back deck. When the roadrunners arrive, I know the snakes are on their way.The yard has five citrus trees, so I've become an accidental farmer, learning about soil and the trickiness of growing limes, but not lemons, which give and give. With so many lemons, I think there is a still a chance for a lemonade life.Anza-Borrego is wow country. No matter which way you enter, from the Salton Sea through the Borrego Badlands, dropping through the layers of rock on Montezuma Pass, or via the Texas Dip, you say “Wow.” You wonder what the hell happened to make it look like this. You feel like you're driving across another planet.I have fallen hard for this place. The blaze and tangle of rocky canyons, the palm oases, the precise elemental balance. The story of the universe laid out in stone. I want to understand this particular mayhem of granite and iron and star. The strata—the layers of how a place came to be—look like tiramisu.This desert, the Colorado Desert, a claw-shaped piece of the vast Sonoran, seems big enough to hold my grief.My mom had vascular dementia, and was in a nursing home during the pandemic when she died. We'd kept her at home as long as we could, until she started trying to escape, not understanding there was no way out of her own ragged mind. She passed at ninety-one years old without family in a sterile room and with little touch the last few months of her life. This was a woman who worked as a professional clown and wore a “Free Hugs” button on her shirt. My mom loved people and in the end she had none. I hope her inaccurate but happy memories gave her comfort.The last time I saw her, we did a window visit because of COVID. It was a perfect day in Napa. Grape vines and sunshine. The nursing staff, outfitted like astronauts, rolled her up to the window in an empty room. She was on a special mattress, big and black and puffy, so she wouldn't get bedsores. Contractures were settling in at her joints and she was folding in on herself. On that big dark mattress, she looked like a nautilus spinning in space.Over the course of a forty-minute visit, she never opened her eyes. I sat outside the window and whispered that she'd been a good mom and that I loved her and that I'd never forget spaghetti Sundays or watching old movies together. I talked to her until I ran out of things to say. I convinced myself that she looked peaceful, and then I drove away. Eventually, she stopped eating, which is common in dementia, but she kept taking her medication with a protein drink that kept her alive until finally it didn't. She died early one morning after my visit. Her hospice nurse told me the Buddhists believe it's auspicious to take flight in the morning.Six months before, I had moved in with my dad, who had congestive heart failure. He lived a half hour from the nursing home, so that drive became my groove. I had promised him that when he started hospice, I would return to my hometown and stay with him until the end. I kept COVID at bay, masking up to shop at 6 a.m. I couldn't keep him from the news, though. I tried to reassure him that I would survive the virus and the assaults of the current federal administration, and I hope he believed me when he finally let go. I'm making it sound gentle because I was there, his hand in mine as his last heartbeat circled, and he did not struggle for air. Still, I didn't know that a broken heart could break any further until mine broke again. He left in the morning, too.Back at home, I received a package in the mail. Who sent me a gift? I wondered. Inside was my dad, double-bagged. A few weeks passed and I got a second, smaller box. This time I knew what it was. I relocated their ashes to the rice container. I took them to the desert with me because I didn't want them to get cold.We arrive at the dead end at Green Links Drive, Angus and I. It's 8:08 a.m. Our daily walk in Borrego is like going to a bar. We can always count on the regulars. It's early morning and the bunnies and quails are here. The innocents, each with a comical head topping that is convenient for predators to spot. The jackrabbits with those long ears; when the sun shines through you can see the lacy circuitry of blood. And the quails, with a fancy comma on top, bustle as if they are late for the bus.If we come at 8:30, the young, lean coyotes are out on play dates. The humans follow: the overly tan, thin woman who looks like a strip of bacon and always waves; the man with the fancy dog who doesn't smile. The jogger who pitches forward as he runs, so much that I worry for him.There are ducks at the watering hole, an aesthetic at this fallowed golf course that the landowners keep filled for the animals. The Canada geese return and the vultures sun themselves and wait. Same as it ever was.I feel right-sized here. The 8 a.m. woman with dog passing through. No more important than the shapely mesquite trees that house creatures and provide food and shade. Maybe even less so. Maybe the mesquite tree is more important than me, from the species that takes and takes. I wonder if it's possible for me to be as useful and lovely as a mesquite tree. That seems like a worthy goal. I file it to consider, on the other side of grief.My husband works in education, and has arrived for Christmas break. I knew when I married him sixteen years before that I would come second to his vocation, which is fighting for teachers. Union work puts a fire in his belly, and gives him purpose. His phone is an extension of his hand, and he's usually negotiating or bargaining or talking someone down. I understand wanting to be needed. But I need him too; I'm lonely inside the moat. We will have two weeks together, which seems like a feast.Even so, he spends most of his time working. I tell myself it's fine, at least he's nearby. We have coffee together in the morning and dinner at night; every now and then I can talk him into a Jeep ride or a little hike. I don't notice that I'm still mostly alone. His busyness fills the days like clouds.He's at the computer when I tell him I'm going for a hike and I'll be back in an hour. He looks at me over the top of his glasses and waves. Thirty minutes into the trail I round the corner in one of my favorite ocotillo forests. The late afternoon light casts them in a lush blue-green. I see a herd of five large and muscular bighorn rams, grinding their way through grass and cacti. They lift their enormous horns and consider me with widely spaced eyes. They determine I am not a threat and resume grazing. Some eventually move on, leaping to new boulders with delicate grace. There are likely ewes and babies nearby, maybe an errant teenager testing the waters. I know I will not be home in an hour, whatever that is. I'm on bighorn time.A friend recently wrote in a letter, “It must be wonderful waking up in wild open land.”It feels like a return to life.In the picture, I am not yet two years old. It's sepia-toned and I'm in the pine trees. I am striding alone through the forest wearing a smile in half shadow. I'm dressed in a baby jumper and sandals. My legs are strong and I walk with purpose. Do we each have a picture like this, captured of our most essential selves—the marine layer or magma—the person the world will try to destroy? I feel her trying to emerge here from the brutality of grief. Plates are shifting.My husband tries to stay with us in our desert home, but the pandemic has unmoored him. He feels too far away from his colleagues, even though he sees them on Zoom every day. He returns to the north, a snowbird in reverse. You're going in the wrong direction, I think. Just look at the Western bluebirds, they know. I let him go because I want him to be happy.In his absence, I seek comfort in rocks and their stories. I become obsessed with the geologic time scale. Growing up, I had childhood asthma and missed a lot of school—it turns out I had missed the dinosaur lessons. I started asking friends when they first learned about dinosaurs or had dinosaur curriculum.“Second grade?” one said. “I feel like I was always learning about dinosaurs,” said another. I had some catching up to do. I bought a poster, and like a middle-school science teacher I tacked it to the wall in the guest bedroom, determined to learn the eras and periods.I grow my desert library. I pack a milk crate of reference books everywhere I go because there is so much to learn. Every hole in my yard is the entrance to someone's home. There is an entire network of subterranean life under my feet. The subway of the cold blooded, passing each other by. I think of those cross sectional images from biology class and that I've got millions and millions of years to dissect. This keeps me busy.Given that he is working exclusively online, my husband doesn't have many reasons to stay away, yet he does. “I'm waiting for my vaccine,” he says.The girl in the woods in the sepia photo keeps walking in half-shadow, doing what she is built to do: Look, listen.My mom and dad's marriage formed a layer of my personal strata when their families drifted from Europe to Appalachia to the San Francisco Bay Area, where they lived on opposite sides of a steel-span bridge. They met at a Mexican bar and restaurant, where my mom liked to dance.In a flush of hormones I was made. They were, however, ill-suited for each other, incongruent, like sandstone and marble side-by-side in a dry wash. The forces of poverty and stubbornness were the erosions that wore them down, but by some miracle, maybe California sunshine, they stayed together for over fifty years. Mom was a real razzmatazz, an entertainer who loved being in the middle of the action. She was a woman in motion, who would sometimes get out of a car before it stopped moving. Like my husband, she was rarely home, preferring being needed at work to domestic life. Dad was a man of few words who spent his spare time at a fishing hole. They had separate bedrooms, took separate vacations. Family was the glue that kept them together, like desert concrete, made when wind blows on rocks and earth so hard and long they bind together.Dad's hospice nurse showed up every day in good cheer, bringing calm and a full quiver of palliative skills. First she tended to his immediate physiological needs, and next she listened to his fears. Then she'd sit with me in the living room and listen to mine.I talked to her about my dad's imminent death, and how to keep him comfortable. About the rift my mom's dementia created between them, before her safety made us place her in a nursing home.I tell the nurse I'm missing my own husband. I want to take a weekend and go home. She asks me if I'd be okay with my dad dying while I was gone. Although the nurse never talks in absolutes, I understand this shorthand.We were sitting on the couch, our knees so close they almost touched. The nurse asked me about my marriage, how we're holding up. I told her we're fine, that my husband has his own life. “We either relive our parents’ marriage or we reinvent it,” she said, and I grabbed onto her words like a rope. I wondered if we could reinvent ours. We spent so much time apart, it was hard to imagine what a reinvention would look marriage that for a marriage to work there must be for the of over the course of a what when a a or is in a pandemic and and when The of a new person is like a We must be to the in to at this new under our desert made of rock They on a layer of and sometimes they together and one under another and is the on a hike up the it's a but up on top, it looks like a I walk on rock through I but and them up to The three of rock are from and My mind is layer of strata in Anza-Borrego is a marine layer made of which look like layers of and that formed a years is now a in the and here in the this was for so dinosaurs never took eventually up, like the a to the who lived on the the and And they out of the here on that When I see them I will not be I will give them a but I will my gives me comfort to know these creatures passed as I too am a passing the and wind and the new me. The me on the other side of the Anza-Borrego State I see more bighorn than My husband is so my and I that his has my I watch the at the hard to believe what I am to have at the world through a geologic I have come to that there is no here. The desert is not in but there is enough in the trees will The wind will come from the it's and go into or put hand in someone lives And We will one day be or or five my husband days he It's I don't know this at the but I will never me a of He it across the he you got He you mind if I been waiting for him for so I what he is of the house to away and I'm into doesn't tell me this, but he is of grief. The desert, for is the wrong him into the The on the casts an It feels like I'm watching a in a His is out on the and he's his I understand that he has been this for some time and knew what he to believe you didn't see this he I have been to the the home we bought to get away from and work and to citrus and our bodies. I am alone making my way in a pandemic without at years without my of layers of me are A new it and or or will it hold my husband for good in the morning, I open the to let him must be the fallowed golf course at a.m. I see through from a and lift from a tree. a it looks like a baby a did it this little of in the made it and is it there My mind with a and I know I will have a hard time at work with of this going on outside my I will forget for a few that I have been and I will learn everything I can about the of and and my little but maybe a little My for their I have yet to see but I have become a now the A large the through every year on their way from to A flight of Western the of my California palm with for a few then move how in the world did they my The yard is with the of who to work in I I'm on the back in the morning, from the sun by lacy and mesquite in the in the afternoon under the I will as to the of and too many is a Death is a I have is a outside at and There is it is every or not we It's there, with my parents were in their they their I asked them where they their ashes My mom a the where they lived together for years, even though she was of My dad a place in the high desert I'd never as they Mom to be with the family at you put me out at the she Dad to be I was. They are now my inside and outside the rice container. You don't know until after that they don't first day without my husband, the wind blows and A The of wind that rocks and of gone. This is a that keeps going through my like a by or a or a or a desert It's and he I was almost happy again. I as far this because I am with the subterranean and This I be from the I have friends here. star.

Devansh Awasthi, A Nitisha

No abstract is available for this record.

Edward W. Osowski

A Catholic chapel stands above the town of Amecameca, built into the top of a tree-covered hill called the Sacromonte. A doorway in the back of the chapel leads to a cave of volcanic rock, where an effigy is located that depicts the deceased, reclining Christ. This Christ in the cave is an image of Santo Entierro, the Holy Sepulcher of Christ, and it is believed to be miraculous. Native leaders in Amecameca helped to establish the site in the 1580s and benefited from their founding of the place throughout the colonial period. Spanish friars and Nahuas had different ideas of what was actually miraculous about the location and the image, and each understanding involved different senses of history. For the original residents, the hill, the cave, the territory around the shrine, and the beneficent human beings who directed the construction of the chapel all played roles in an astonishing moment in the history of the town when the polity miraculously did not perish but, instead, found a place in the new Christian order. In this article, I place the European Catholic tradition of miracle narra tives within the ethnohistorical cultural context of indigenous political, literary, and territorial experiences and show how such marvels acquired uniquely Mexican meanings.When the Franciscan Order arrived in New Spain just three years after the fall of Tenochtitlán to Hernán Cortés, its members brought their devotion to the Passion, believing that miracles of the cross represented the triumph of Christ in the New World. Indigenous leaders and communities soon began to accept Christological symbols and reports of the apparitions of saints in Chalco in their own locally triumphal way. I argue that one cannot understand the whole meaning of colonial Mexican miracles unless they are interpreted in terms of their importance to indigenous territorial and leadership concepts and historical thinking. Where the wondrous events happened and who they happened to were of equal, if not greater, importance as the theological message of apparitions or particular Christian symbolism of objects, which the Franciscans emphasized. The gravitational cultural force that held land, power, and holiness in the orbit of the shrine was cyclical history. I show how this Mesoamerican way of making sense of the past is also displayed in colonial indigenous written traditions such as the títulos primordiales, the maps of the Relaciones geográfícas of 1580, oral histories taken in the Relaciones geográficas del Arzobispado de México, 1743; and the Séptima relación, an early seventeenth-century Nahuatl history by Don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin. The títulos primordiales are written and painted documents that established the preconquest foundations of indigenous towns and their legitimacy as loyally Christian in the postconquest era; they usually included maps of which were to Spanish as of the and written the of the hill and its cave in the of Amecameca of the foundations of the indigenous in to from the the were of of the roles of territory and This the that Franciscan and indigenous historical in in the new Mexican were in in the of Christ the and the of I arrived a of Nahuatl Spanish and a in indigenous in colonial this is not devotion or the of this of Christ and indigenous of miracle were to colonial Native and in the of Chalco and believed that which how members of the were of the of the miracles are not the of in which the the of the the of Catholic in indigenous in to of their to the and the meaning of Christ symbols the of the Nahuas of Amecameca, history the and after the hill as the and the around it were in the and of the The town of Amecameca is of in the and that the of the of the town of Amecameca are the and In one particular of the of Amecameca the the Chalco and the called held the Chalco in the of the of was in the of the of the of The was a in which to the and to a of In the of the the represented the The the of was the and were the the where human beings the The Nahuas to be and of were to the and were and human from the the who it were and and also had The the was a hill a the which is in as and in the were the of the and as the in the of of Amecameca, that a of the called to a an where they were the to and to and is written that the was the of the colonial period. from Amecameca documents a not place the the Sacromonte. the of Amecameca to the de that locally as in the of in Amecameca in San had the of the of the and the indigenous of were to was throughout the Chalco as a de of and the indigenous as a of had making around a the from when this was to the in Nahuatl which did not The in in a and the The was a place where indigenous leaders as I it was not a location of to but, instead, an of the of into the colonial indigenous and the who the hill of Amecameca to the hill of and its cave the of Christ. in the the of Amecameca the of the of the throughout the of where the cross miraculously in the the the the hill was an site indigenous as as of In the site was located within the of the town of de Amecameca, which was a town of San The in the the as did its of the towns that were Chalco was a to Amecameca and were located the from to the of by way of by from all The of to the site was the of events their the Christian of the of the in the were in the of the that they were in the This by the In the of that the of the Holy and Holy Sepulcher was one from of Chalco was the of and and each had which the indigenous of from devotion to and as of of into to the leaders of Amecameca, leaders benefited from In 1580, within the of a of into the of a who was in a place called a The and to In the about image of the of called de an indigenous directed who the and when the their they of miraculous of and by devotion and of the of was in Chalco and in and the of were the were miraculous image in the of and the that who brought and from and were of the Passion, or Holy Sepulcher of in in and in the of the The had a of miraculous in San in in in and in the de a of and its were by devotion to the In communities in the of and the displayed a that represented of Passion, and of the colonial miracle of the of Amecameca, was to the of Christ, and the Franciscan Order and its in the New de were in it in the the of Spanish the cave located the was an of the of the indigenous of New was the of a triumphal Spanish Catholic of miracles indigenous that the Franciscan and in the brought to such as the of postconquest New as the arrived in from Spain in they brought to the indigenous their devotion to the of Christ, the of which they had helped to in their de and of the de their to the of Christ This the of Christian in the and to of into the that de of in and of the and of and de that as a in was in and of the Holy the Franciscan of the of the the way the to indigenous The not Nahuatl and the Nahuas Christian and the Franciscan the the friars to the the of the and the which the and to the of was one of the of new concepts to the indigenous of New Spain just after their in In to of the the symbols of the the of the Franciscan indigenous in New San de in from the of de de San de indigenous or the de San in the in and it to as a This of is from of and and three an which Christ stands in are the cross and of the Passion, each in a that is of the of early colonial Mexican the de San is to an the around its its to in who had the of de The of the also of which they to in the of the they one in which Christ a its the of a by the symbols and of the 1580s and the of the had the indigenous of and had to the of Chalco the of the Franciscan and Franciscans of the and the of or in and this In Chalco the of Christ as miraculous the Santo de in and the Santo effigy de in had as a Christian site throughout the of that de from The of miracles the which are in Franciscan historical by de de and de European about the cross in cave above the Franciscan in to Amecameca, where saints and to as a in in the cave the Sacromonte. the of and to the the of Christ as into a the hill and in from the a from after from Chalco to that in the of was Franciscan a of their and and the of their in New the established a in Amecameca the the Franciscans to be a in their the a in Amecameca the location of and the of a from that the and the The were to the in a of and in believed in the of of a of the of The of the Franciscan to to the of the in New and the of in the that had the of 1580, to the of the and reports that when arrived in Amecameca from the in in the to and and that the Nahuas had it as a they believed it to the from an who had it in The also and and the chapel within the cave in the Christ effigy and in an and the Nahuas a in the are to as or of their they are to be of and The Franciscan as as the of were of the indigenous who their to the of not the of the indigenous the construction of the chapel in as the early seventeenth-century from the Nahuas did not in Nahuatl about miraculous events that the of New from the the indigenous of of the Sacromonte. interpreted in the of show that the cave was a of indigenous throughout the colonial period. In Séptima relación, a who was not a of in Nahuatl the miracle of the making of the The moment in of the is the of the chapel in which as a miraculous of Nahuatl how an indigenous historical was in which the of Amecameca the site into just a of European the Franciscan had the of the indigenous in the Séptima Chimalpahin the of the friars in the to that was a New as of Chimalpahin the and importance of the indigenous and Spanish in the in The miracles are found in the human that place the of the Chalco are as in the astonishing in which they into a chapel and of in the leaders the friars as they not to a triumphal Catholic Indigenous from Amecameca their to the friars in to to the in the of the of de in Amecameca, as the Franciscan the the of the cave chapel in the in the the de the cave it is in the context of events that the leaders of are that cave, and in is where the Holy Sepulcher of where they and In to are also in the what was miraculous about the In to the Franciscan Chimalpahin not the of saints and the of in a as they de and In this Chimalpahin the tradition of of one this in to of de in the Amecameca, Chimalpahin that the miracle in the cave was the of Amecameca as the place to an Chimalpahin not the that it was a who brought the image to the shrine above of the human of the the to the a of In the Chimalpahin the events the in of the who and of in the and three the Santo image in the cave, to to the terms and miracles that Chimalpahin did not the events as The miraculous were and For which is usually as the of In the it is in the that it or to Christ. The is to the Nahuatl that de as in the place of de The of to the that it to be in a to to or to This that Chimalpahin was making the the image and the Christ, which the image is a Chimalpahin did not the of the that which they were from of such of an image was not were that of the of a Nahuatl in the is which I as of miraculous The of is and it or which or the The of be found in the of de of The by the of the which of of the the image of the The of is a to the of image were Nahuatl the that to the of an or that an did not the of of the of that one Christian that of its and The meaning of the in the context of the is that human beings had a in the place the of which one Chimalpahin of the European Catholic tradition in of the be found in de of and that the of this The Spanish found in was when the of a miraculous image a of a a meaning to the Spanish is not found in the Franciscan histories of the Sacromonte. the terms are the Nahuatl that Chimalpahin the that human beings played in making the image as they were in miraculous to wondrous one of the indigenous to a new which was a that had a throughout the colonial period. of the of Amecameca who was as in the the of The Don de was the indigenous in which was an of the of In the the one Chimalpahin the indigenous the of the of the and their The which the new the leaders of as in the town leaders they in the which their the legitimacy of a In the of the who the of that a the new Christian and the preconquest This is in of Amecameca, the Don de of as as the de of and Don de of to and to and it cave top of the of which I as the which to the is the the or is this in the A as a by and of In this particular the three indigenous leaders are as of the who all to the as in Amecameca was to the cave where miracles their in an of by the as a a to the that the of the place particular and of the of the to were and The leaders were the of the and of and was an of in the preconquest and Christian The and of such of are when an in which Chimalpahin from Amecameca who of Franciscan in and to the of the of the as an of the in to the the of the Don de leadership as the of Amecameca and of the as a way of of The three communities represented by the three leaders were communities that to Amecameca also had each its own In the each had a that when it its to the as a in this In terms of was in the of that the top of and of Amecameca, Don de to the and was as a of the In the were the who as of the shrine were who were in the Don de the the leaders of the who the of of this site in and their this is by that to the of the de The of and of began in the of the chapel Sacromonte. indigenous leaders a of that the to the of the Catholic the of the colonial period. the Spanish that the to the Catholic and order. This in their in when the of Amecameca, Don de a of to of the from the also this period. Don de to cave into the Holy Sepulcher of the was the that the of of the Spanish colonial the the de to of their from the colonial In Don Don de to a to a a and to in a Spanish from Amecameca a of the years Don de a of located and of the town of was the by and the by the of the which included the This was its the and the the de which after Mexican leaders did not of the their own miracle the that Nahuas were and early in their of the Christian of the Franciscan and who to the New World. This was to in Chimalpahin established the colonial legitimacy of such as the de by their from preconquest the of the cave chapel in if the leadership the of of to a of and not a that indigenous the friars in the image of Christ in the they de cave into and it the Sacromonte. This was a the the Christ in the cave, which was the of their they their of place and which were in preconquest In the leaders of the by and making it the of their in their own this to they also helped to establish the new The the new Christian of their and by the Spanish Catholic order. The cave, which had the of the a of the the and throughout the colonial miracle and established the territorial of the For the of Amecameca, the Santo image of Christ, their of de to the cave and the into a Christian the as the in the of the Mesoamerican the Christ and in in the and 1580s established that as to which the Nahuas historical about the that they had making to the colonial the The Relaciones geográficas maps 1580, the and the of miraculous were all indigenous of which in the and early The in the Relaciones geográficas of towns and territory Catholic in the were to legitimacy to Spanish as as of of and the miraculous to the of towns and legitimacy in the of from the of the written cannot be the they early of such as of the they of a and tradition in which Mesoamerican to in the of are documents written and that indigenous documents and The and the all documents in their and the oral that the written were to be or indigenous included and in European and indigenous territory and events that had the founding of the the the the message that their communities were and the to how had in and the to they to colonial as of and the preconquest of who in the colonial Mesoamerican established that communities had to their the that they had not the of legitimacy the Catholic Catholic the history of the which were in the early they were written the of the friars and who to their towns and and their communities to the the of the a to the new colonial order. The that the of their towns the new is their of of are such as the of Catholic and of to Christian or histories the sense that leaders and the new and the the documents to oral events or or and the of are into a is and to a in the of history. The the the the of miraculous and the in their helped members their in a by their and the the of historical of the of experiences of to a past when the of oral and written miracle and the which they in and in how miraculous arrived in their communities in The in which they were the a Holy and their did not as in the were of the in the of the shrine of de in the a of a chapel which a miraculous image of was In the of San the of that an indigenous of as the to the miracles of their their image in the original where it in their all the members from the of The of San did not the of the they did and that had the miracles of the cross in had an sense of the past that it a the indigenous of the had their and who to In they as a the of Holy of the of Christ the of power, to the that the which in had its in the of the the the a the Christ effigy in the the indigenous in the and the new town the In indigenous the de a around the a Spanish in the the indigenous who had the own to the the town the and in of the was a the of their of founding events the sense of that the of the in the did and The of members to in the In and were from and town the founding which the of a and of miracle indigenous and of the founding of the the the of and a sense of the message that the had an to that involved the and of the of the to indigenous miracle that the as if they had to in a particular The miracles of the were that they not to from their communities of This in a in the Relaciones geográficas of a Santo image from that to In the of this image of the Christ, a of from had it in a to where they to it to in a cave in the way. they in the they found that the had to to the of they the and to the The that the be and they found that the image was had miraculously into the the built a chapel of the and the by it The Spanish who this that was written of the of the image in the and that had the from the indigenous a by the de in and in the image of de in a way. Don de who was as an the of the Holy the image a a hill called the of Don it it in a shrine or and it the image and found it in the place where the to Don de that to a chapel to the image the site of and of Spanish the chapel was built around which Don was In the Nahuatl of the found in de the image to in the was all by to the as is and as is in all of the image its own in one called and which to their documents symbols in to that that they and the by their to after the when was making and For in to a of the of in a a painted to colonial in as of the and territorial In the of town of who is painted as an a of the in as in the the the of their the and their to their territory a This is by a in which the are are to as in Nahuatl or as in the Nahuatl of or of which Chimalpahin in to de the the of the was from its as the from which members had territory and to in and established the of Amecameca the postconquest maps from and the the hill as the that the of the The that the from to by each of the The is from a that Don de in and and the is from the of the top of the Sacromonte. the hill was the place to all of the and of was the that the human the one to all the of the by the to the The this of the and the effigy of Christ in the back of the chapel are the as miraculous Christ effigy and the hill and chapel of Amecameca the the of and the of a of the colonial Nahuas the hill as a that to their such the that that they were The and miraculous image were of indigenous that a particular of as European of the in the indigenous the in the and the of indigenous of in the of triumph of did not the land, indigenous and the colonial period. This was a of the but, in the Franciscan of had the indigenous history. In the early to the Franciscans their the of the and this was into of leaders the that the leaders to the of Franciscan leaders de and de the of the and of to this of their in Amecameca the that as of legitimacy Catholic and of the of their which back to the colonial and of legitimacy by the indigenous were concepts of legitimacy in to their of as the colonial their of the miraculous image the the of their a new miraculous image of the of in the indigenous a of to that of A from the de the and how and the indigenous in to a miracle cross in a of the of such the of the of San a of the of a cross in the The to the as from the of also that were Spanish as in the the of the as and the the cross the of the of the the had arrived from to the of this The of the of Chalco from the de who was also an to the Don a of had the cross into the chapel of its had to the of the and the of who to understand if the miracle was or the indigenous town to to a chapel the were three from the and that they had the the indigenous of the that it to the de In to to a they to the that were after years of Catholic The be the site of their that triumph of their the indigenous the miracle in was by the that one of the communities of had a miraculous cross in the to in had an image of to be to a cross to the located in San In soon after the the members of the the image of Santo de to their in The of the cross did not the that the image had in In the a to the image that they believed and In the de that the of the cross in which the to a chapel their found original held a in the of as in of the of miraculous cave in the histories miracle and the from members of their town leaders and to miracles and as the of legitimacy to by to in the and to indigenous as the image or the original the that their miraculous image in their particular the context of New the of the was the of European triumphal and Mesoamerican of the postconquest The of the of the the site its historical the the of Amecameca to the traditions of and such as that of of The of Catholic symbols and into the of apparitions that and indigenous to the all into of the the Christian the of in Spain that are and to the events in New Spain that are in this to of and towns of New symbols that had represented the of the and of For of Christ and of all this to the a in the of the and the years of in the to the in of the to in Holy and of were their in the to the and when Spain was and the was from Christian the cultural to to by the of of and were the of such devotion in soon as the and such was and towns of the of Amecameca as a of European traditions is to the such a site the and was to the who were different in Spain and the to New indigenous was its by years of and to was and from European Catholic tradition is one of cultural the historical meaning of the Amecameca A the Spanish and the Mexican miracle traditions is the of and of miracles and miraculous in the New In Spain and to miraculous all of the miracles that indigenous to the of and did not the apparitions of The was in New who had miraculous as that miraculous image where were had the as the títulos primordiales, and the Relaciones the and early Nahuas their that their had this and to in and the of the this moment in and they a sense of In Franciscan the apparitions of the saints and miracles of de in Amecameca, that the Nahuas of Amecameca believed in a that miraculously their in a wondrous chapel the of this was not to the history of Mexican by to be the found in indigenous written and I that and historical to be indigenous and Franciscan the triumph of their in the and if one is in of the historical the of that and in New land, and did not that the of was to of European histories and the of indigenous above to the indigenous and of New Spain the of the miraculous cultural and indigenous The of the indigenous in the of the triumph of indigenous

Alejandra Bronfman

On 14 November 1904, El Mundo, Havana’s conservative newspaper, reported the “mysterious disappearance of Zoila,” a four-year-old white girl, from her home in El Gabriel, a small town outside of Havana.1 Over the course of a year, the newspaper would devote a great deal of attention to the story. Eduardo Varela Zequiera, the story’s reporter who would eventually build a career based on his reporting on issues of race, publicly surmised, along with his reporting of the facts, that the child had been a victim of brujería. At the same time, El Gabriel’s increasingly alarmed and vocal residents demonstrated before the courthouse and police station, demanding thorough searches of every household in the vicinity until the brujos were found and detained. Suspicion settled on Pablo and Juana Tabares, a black couple living together, and on Domingo Boucourt, a former slave known in the area for his African-derived healing and religious practices. They were detained briefly, but released after questioning for lack of evidence. The same month a parallel case involving the death of Celia, another little girl, and the arrest of a black man named Tin-Tan also occupied the front pages of the newspapers. About two weeks after Zoila’s disappearance, the police found a body. A gruesome description of its condition communicated, in all its details, the allegedly barbaric nature of the crime. A large portion of the torso and extremities were missing skin and flesh. Yet the feet were intact, including shoes and socks that were still on the body. The heart had been extracted, according to forensic doctors, with a sharp instrument. After a lengthy investigation in which the number of accused grew to a dozen, the following story began to emerge. Boucourt was said to be the leader of a group of brujos who gathered regularly to enact rituals and healings. Juana Tabares, whose children suffered from ill health, had sought Boucourt’s help, and since his remedy required the blood of a white child, he was said to have demanded that someone in the group kill one and bring him the corpse. The investigation had failed to pin down the actual murderer, although suspicion rested on Victor Molina and another man of African descent. But it had confirmed (or so it claimed) the instigating role of brujería.By January 1905, Boucourt and Victor Molina had received the death penalty for murder. They were executed amidst a great deal of attention from the press in 1906. After the execution, the brains of Molina and Boucourt were sent to Luis Montané, professor of anthropology at the University of Havana, to be put on display at the Museo Antropológico Montané on campus. There, they took their places alongside ñáñigo suits, ritual objects and archaeological findings, adding to the collection of “criminal brains” examined by students of anthropology for morphological evidence of violent tendencies.Zoila was the first of a series of public, sensational brujería scares that shook early Republican Cuba. As this brief example suggests, the unfolding of events reverberated, beyond the families and towns most immediately affected, into courts of law and elite intellectual spheres. In the courts, both prosecutors and defendants exploited the contradictions arising from a changing legal system. Long investigations and trials tested the elusive boundaries among brujería, ñañiguismo, asociación ilícita, and delinquency against changing notions of legal responsibility and new codifications of rights to freedom of religion and association. For intellectuals monitoring Cuba’s imbibement of modernity, evidence of practices deemed primitive threatened the achievements of political autonomy and universal manhood suffrage and aspirations to social order.In the earliest moment of the republic the contours of criminality and citizenship had been subject to contention. A hybrid and evolving legal system both codified and added ambiguities to the definitions of brujería, ñañiguismo, and asociación ilícita. Although authorities often conflated them of of practices to African-derived brujería and were legal a of often and violent the of asociación the in a that it in practices from to to in of a had the In the early of the authorities had to brujería the of both asociación and health, which had been in the of the The for freedom of religion and of a of after the In accused of brujería and new they freedom of religion in their the both legal and of African-derived religious practices into a of this from and also by elusive boundaries at the took it to and the of they practices of African descent. The with its of and added new to the of and and new into the in the first two of the in this in which legal and social on one and in which the scares a of and its codified but of a with the who to the against of of Cuba’s of and political The of a religious and social of former and their along with political a from in the At was to the of the for and the republic from and black political with the its to the at the first of new political contours have the for of the the first two of the of their As political for the black in both and were for both and and although the to which they black their in a In to political from and their in a number of including the both in the and black newspapers. that and but them a with which to and to the of black intellectuals in the press and in of the of brujería and since brujería had before been with and a of the of practices to the of the of republic they As they and on and of the A on and in Republican with to the of in and on the and of the of to that with of the of the of a arising of the of in a of and to the in which both and black criminality of race, and spheres. of in the social and in the courts into of the republic with to In they that and and practices but were also to one legal and political of the for of the by this to that the of black criminality into Cuba’s a often in and intellectuals on of of and with to the of the a whose according to a on intellectuals and and a for and whose course on one of the most at the University of Havana, and the to the two most and for the of all to they had a for based on and to had and lack of to the In that this and had the a a political The for a to and that were for that universal suffrage had been a that and was a and that the was by of the of social the of whose from that of For black Havana’s in Cuba’s social from he the But the was and social on the increasingly of and and that sought a he the for Cuba’s along with its its and its of Cuba’s that the to the of autonomy and attention to a series of violent race, African into the of the black on this subject reported in the press and to his that had been from the the press that brujería and to a them a the the for that The reporting was and Long on the of the and and new evidence of its with the and of the little new was The also of the of the of the accused and their the its were the of the execution, were with of the As of the and a of brujería and a of the the one black often with African-derived religious white children in to their blood for ritual The accused in a by was of Varela that and barbaric was in and in the of the and Varela that the of the black was most a barbaric a that social would and Yet he Varela them for his that was for it was of the be to the a in of of by at the role of and in evidence a and of in the early of the had been of since the early with the first press in In the had (or with to their and including black and the of had a for and of to with one the early the and of grew a of changing A in of for in that it was to to and by In since were at the same time, of were At two El and reported the have that he had a for along with his reporting of the facts, his of the of the The was of but a of a and from the Cuba’s he on his of religious at that they were and he that the of to in and brujería was and at the heart of the was a great The of was a for but it one of the by the so by to to in the of a of had to of its he this and was by the of its in the and its to with its practices the and was before a religion a against of The and practices of brujos at the a to and a to a and to the of the of Boucourt’s and a man who would in intellectual his to Varela the the of and for a of Boucourt and a of the the system the would be with in of of was a he that the was to be he would have been a had he one of the most known to his African and his role a in the with a and were that would have by of evidence for the of a first of since Boucourt to was a of his his had been a by and he the to Zoila,” he so that his although a was and according to the he had from and had to which the of In to Varela of to the and of Boucourt’s he had the that he by the he had so the of his him on the of the white it was his primitive and the of his and to his in his and a of he the primitive and of his of the it was a of a but of religious the and for that had in the the of a white But his to was the of that was the of the was and so African were in a A was of in who his according to the with their of and a in for his to to the that this the of its social and the course of a of would be to that in the course of from to it was which him and his in the in the first of they to a his of the with to and and including and on to his The of with had his in in the of the of the new of of and two and them to on one that were to a primitive and they had On the he that be to and from both and the of with the of that a with African with was that had been by of that they had been a group to by the of was on a Varela of the of Although brujería still a he it had a of its with Cuba’s of The for was on the of on the of the of the the Cuba’s and the of brujos of They were but of one had so that brujería so of it was with the of that one the the of their required investigation and still in a would it to that this of would to they to the and and following the of another with but with the of the the in which would the had the of ritual and into evidence of he was to his to which had its but of the African At the of his that Boucourt was of his a that the had a for his in In a had a for and who to him in the of a for his to be of he “criminal was in a had at the University of and and to in to in In a the of the a to the of him a in he was in had a brief the of to in a by the intellectual who was to his was of the the case the press and public, he to have attention from after the story in the he had the on which he would brujos the that the on the of the was and of the on the of Boucourt’s execution, its the of the and of the race, and crime. Yet the beyond the in its of and In and and and for brujos was a new of for a sensational series of events into the of a and the social that on the of by At the same it career a of and a with with intellectual including and the on to the on in and evidence both to to the of brujería and to a case for As social were to the was a that of the Cuba’s was to for the of African into the the was based on the of on criminality and delinquency it rested on and notions of was the of the Yet brujos at on of on of their and objects and on the and to their on first which the of Cuba’s with a of and its on the he it to race, in by their to in a was of the of a which and the of to the the the black which to and the white its that into from the of his and were for for at that time, but The of and criminality was from but from he his from of and to reporter of from newspaper that of brujería the and 1906. the the story of child would on after the of practices and to brujería in pages The healing and ritual from which objects were and in one case the of a black from a one story of reported the of a child, from of which in his and it was one of the that the with child in the and that the case of was the for the the A of the of he on and the religious system he to the brujos and the practices of the and a of the of in African and so that the practices and their criminality to be a for the of brujería, with in and were also with a of the African the be a following the of on the the of would a Yet The with a for first in the against brujería be to the them from their with brujería have their and their their all the of that its to the barbaric of be to to their from the of and to of In to of and of African in to the of brujos were in their in of and subject to the of and a number of from the for attention The the that a race, and criminality it to brujos was a The of in this case of and was in the case and he the he on and for with the newspaper gathered and sent to him in the case his he was with brujería. by police of the small town of and police from the town of of of and and of of on the the by the in of and into in the of social of of The police would for social but for legal his with in and a of thorough and first in to it was and by of brujos in political and of most that their from the of the had They of that with in a of Cuba’s in the They also and to to in El on with the his and the of in so a and the attention the and had received from had been for Cuba’s put his on the and found the of and that have but have in brujos and two of two of against this his subject for this by began with but a of to with his in to of he and from he that of his based on with were and a of from the in that he the but was of for the whose intellectual so the that of new for of and intellectual In findings, he on their to and on role in by took on and of religious and that the had been to and brujería, and that brujería had so of the new to the the for and to that the was a and with for that he was the one that and to to social so that they be according to the of The of to social and to the of of the to who had a and the of it The and a at the University of evidence from the in his on in a a by his of brujos of a and in El in it to the and the of to the of at and from of the in to on a and the a of intellectual on a number of issues be gathered the of and with a number of social of from and also of intellectual and his of for the of the republic have to of and for their to in the and and of a number of new the had race, and social this a in the of and to social took University of one home for the of After the of was in the Luis Montané, of the of and professor of anthropology and of the two of a course on the and of the of at the time, his to from a number of he his course first course on for the law to students in the of anthropology to The of and of the and in course description to the of of The that both and be subject to his his students the of of The of from the of the a and he them the of of also a on of the for and by the were in in with his and although by the they had to The for students in the of the and of into its Montané of the of the in and in and the and of with of a the anthropology for law students and for and a of and one of The to a with new on and and on the of in legal with new on of the a of and legal of the On of the of the and to students also in to Havana’s and that they the and of the of from the in students to in the adding the of and to the he the responsibility the among by who of a with his on the of received a deal of attention in and would to a role in the system At was the to which be for their by of to by In the this was a often of accused brujos and of this course the same until at For the of until he in the were in the of from with to on the of took the after he most of the of the it adding a on the that had been in the press and since 1906. In to the in in the University of Havana’s he his on the of he most of that his in that his The most of a child reported the year, demonstrated the of the to with the death of Although with Varela his were have of the who with been one of the most and social in the to which his of the in and the in including and and to new in the and and a in which the social were to and social The with which they of their in the of that the would on political and in all the a of that they and Yet of their of a of health, the role of the in and the of with to the and the of by and and on the of they also a for of intellectual of in the of law and in the their to social deemed The of in this also a and in law and and from a of were were on and on by in and doctors, of them political of the intellectual elite group to the of Cuba’s social and In the and were to a of and that in a in the in and of this intellectual to of at the in both the and be As the of been and the of social and social a of The early intellectuals on by and in both in the and in In the that be a of and In demonstrated that a and that his were the of in to a to and intellectuals with began with the notions of social and of of social and social with the of in their in a of responsibility in a healing of the In the of and and of Havana’s in that of the that be from and to so to the and to be most and his for the and and and with and to be a of of The of in which he eventually one of the in which they of the most on race, one of the most to a with and anthropology after from in the with which the African-derived religious and practices social to the and crime. The a from his of at the University of his was new to their was in legal and in intellectual was and on his before the of of and early in two had a on the of Havana’s for his to be a for the of the same he was by the of to in the for in the of took the race, and that had and the of was to that brujos they so of a of their from their from to and social two of he black he the of from the of he he it in the to in his The from which was that a by his a ñáñigo that Although brujos were by and they had the who were by their for the of their the the would have been for the of had been social to this by his pages with at the of to criminality their In a he that of their the and elusive of the The the it to of of and of and Yet his on a that the to was to that although he was that would of the and of he the was so in by the ambiguities of intellectual to in But a changing and to his objects of his objects A by the of the in a on of the evidence. and the which he the and of the black on the of his for his career in would be and In he of the of In he the to of of which he was also a which El El all of which received from the which received the from the in in and in the and gathered for the of anthropology to law and a and in one of into the of the of the black was to a number of social and social to with a of to that would and in their social Yet the and put of black criminality in and their in the of The of this of the in which the and criminality in the of In the courts, black criminality the for the of in the hybrid legal system. In the of the had been most the black intellectuals a against which to their and notions of the its in the press and its in the social brujería in the was law against at were by rights the of a of autonomy of the legal and social spheres. and according to were of accused of white children of reported in the In of in in and in the black accused were released of to the including were released for lack of evidence. The accused in the in were by the amidst a was the case in which the accused were found and of rights by the in a case in against and for asociación ilícita. In this case the of and Luis Montané were for the to the the objects in rituals of The the of religion and the that of the objects was a crime. The case before the so the but the the boundaries of and practices in which the and a of the social and the legal system. A case against and black according to the for asociación in the of the legal of and the and crime. also the and role of gathered by law of by that have been the police had objects their of the The which named and two of for with the of said a of a large named another named another of the another the of and two whose against the of the accused that they were by of evidence for the to that they to be detained and the to the of the objects and their with to the and of the the police to investigation to the accused were to they and its practices and rituals by and to have the for they the of for that although it was a known that were at ñáñigo in Havana, their of it to that one of the he was and that the had gathered on added that following the death of one of their in to which of and in Havana, and it was to the of their of that the police were this he a that the accused of the of and the police a but it to that all of the were was that they in healing practices and with that they at the In his of the case the to by of have for it the of a of a group of to that events the of to accused for the of the had the for both and the sought to from the legal system with of his on the that of the law against asociación of the to in the were political which had to be to by on the to on of the ñáñigo of to he they had he the to a and of the the of a who sought to the same his subject in the most until it was into the to of said to political The and of his he to of its from with to said a of the and including the of which the by a of his of the of this by a great deal of and with a of the that had to after the of that had failed to ñañiguismo, it he to a and political of the he the that at the case also a by of the Luis which with the and crime. the by the of the investigation and them in his their by the that were But for it their that the most of of have been and so that they by of in by all that from the to the case to the for a with a of for one year, and at which had Boucourt and was Cuba’s first black and and in a The

Monica Dall’Asta, Alessandra Chiarini

Women's interest in found footage and compilation has been extraordinarily intense from the very beginning.1 Even the origins of this peculiar mode of film production are tied to a woman's name, that of Esfir Shub, the great director of Soviet cinema who was the first to create an essayistic feature by putting together pieces of archival footage.2 Her seminal film of 1927, Padenie Dinastii Romanovykh (The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty), depicts the collapse of the Tsarist empire from the February Revolution to the October Revolution of 1917 purely by means of a montage of preexisting footage. Followed by a handful of other films she made with the same method in subsequent years, this first experimentation in compilation film was an opportunity for Shub to demonstrate the creative power of montage, showing how even the most resistant, unyielding materials can generate an entirely new meaning from the way they are combined—as for example in the case of the numerous shots taken by the camerapeople of the Tsarist film industry, which were transformed through her editing into incontrovertible proof of the necessity of the Revolution. In a way, then, Shub's work can be considered the most advanced result of all the philosophy of the Soviet avant-garde, for her films test Lev Kuleshov's intuition about the signifying power of montage by reworking preconstituted materials that had been originally produced to respond to a completely different, and sometimes even opposite, ideological project.3Many more women after Shub have adopted compilation as their privileged approach to film production and experimentation. Once a marginal form even in the documentary field, found footage cinema is now enjoying an extremely vital phase, fostered by both the exponential growth of the audiovisual archive and the improvement of digital editing technologies that have made film images all the more usable. Up to the 1950s and through the appearance of new avant-garde movements at the end of that decade, the history of found footage cinema consists of very few names and a similarly small number of film titles. And yet, even in the first half of the twentieth century women are a notable presence in the field, not only for their sheer numbers, but also by virtue of the quality and originality of their work. In this context we need to cite at least the name of Germaine Dulac, whose archival film of 1935 anticipates many typical concerns of the contemporary debate about the historicity of the film image. Le cinéma au service de l'histoire (Cinema at the Service of History) was assembled by Dulac during a period of intensive archival research at Gaumont, where she had been employed until the previous year as coeditor of the company's newsreel, France Actualités. Her monumental film is constructed from fragments taken from Gaumont newsreels from 1905 to 1935, and presents itself as a recollection, as well as a critical assessment, of the historical experiences made by a generation, her own, that was equal in age with the cinema: the generation born during the Belle Epoque, educated in the myth of progress, and doomed to witness its ruinous dissolution in the disaster of World War I, only to find itself confronted with the advent of dictatorships and totalitarianism. Made in the political-cultural context of the Popular Front (the film was made to be screened on the occasion of the opening of an independent “all-newsreel” film venue), Cinema at the Service of History reveals a thorough confidence in the testimonial power of cinema.4 It is at once a requiem about the atrocities of war and its moral, social, political, and economic consequences, and a warning to the present about repeating the mistakes of the past.Alongside Shub and Dulac, the third female master of found footage cinema before the 1960s is no doubt Nicole Vedrès. Her innovative work on Paris 1900 (1947) combined a “classical” approach to compilation film, based on exclusive use of documentary sources, and a more definitely modern approach, which regards the products of narrative cinema as no less legitimate sources of historical knowledge than documentary materials. Vedrès's work anticipates by several decades the awareness, typical of the debate on film and history of the early 1980s, that every film, whether narrative or documentary, bears a number of specifically historical traits—or, rather, what Vedrès characterizes as a specific form of historical truth that expresses itself in a visual quality on the order of photogénie.5This early phase of the history of found footage cinema, where three women play a primary role, draws to a close at the end of the 1950s. A more critical, irreverent, and playful attitude toward archival images, and a tendency to employ the past to produce an allegory of the present, and often quite a complex one, appears in the work of diverse experimental filmmakers, including Isidore Isou, Stan VanDerBeek, Bruce Conner, and Guy Debord. Again, several women participate as well in this new moment that marks the evolution of found footage film as a major form of experimental cinema, often referred to as collage film. Though the women's names are more obscure today than the filmmakers we have just cited, their position in this shift is far from secondary in terms of their critical awareness and their innovations.Already in 1959, Jane Conger Belson Shimané's Odds and Ends offered a precocious example of a collage film that mixes outtakes of travelogues with abstract animation, both painted on the filmstrip and created with paper cutouts. Since then, the ranks of women involved in the deconstruction of the codes of contemporary culture—and often particularly of its sexist stereotypes—through the reworking of preexisting footage has not stopped growing. Filmmakers such as Anita Thacher, Chick Strand, Dara Birnbaum, Peggy Ahwesh, Michelle Citron, Abigail Child, Hito Steyerl, Angela Ricci Lucchi, Leslie Thornton, Su Friedrich, Eve Heller, Vivian Ostrovsky, Nina Fonoroff, Sabine Hiebler, and Frédérique Devaux, or, among the younger ones, Lana Lin, Naomi Uman, Deborah Stratman, Caroline Avery, Cheryl Dunye, Cathy Joritz, Barbara Meter, Louise Bourque, Magda Matwiejew, Akosua Adoma Owusu, Rebecca Baron, Meike Fehre, Meryll Hardt, and Lisa Reboulleau—and those whose work is analyzed in this issue of Feminist Media Histories: Myriam Borsoutsky, Cecilia Mangini, Cécile Fontaine, Barbara Hammer, Valentina Monti, and Alina Marazzi—make us tempted to describe found footage cinema as a field where gender parity is close to being finally attained.Yet we want to resist explaining away such a proliferation of female auteurs who choose a most difficult manner of expressing their own imagination and thought—through images created by others in different places and times—with some sort of specific or “essential” female inclination toward montage, maybe even by invoking its similarity to the tailoring operations of cutting and sewing. Such essentialist comparisons can certainly be suggestive, but they hardly help us understand the reality of women's experience in the sphere of filmmaking. Even less could we endorse a thesis that would interpret women's bent for compilation films as an ability to excel exclusively in contexts characterized by a minimum creative coefficient. On the contrary, the innovative content of cases such as those we briefly recall above should demonstrate the opposite—that is, women's extraordinary creative capacity, evidenced by their ability to extract the maximum coefficient of originality from seemingly inert materials.But this would be a simplification, too, a sterile generalization based on a purely reactive attitude. A more interesting approach begins when one considers the apparent affinity between women and the practice of found footage, on the one hand, and on the other the material conditions of film production—more precisely, the difference that exists between the labor involved in editing and researching and that involved in shooting, especially in commercial cinema. All available data show that commercial cinema, which, as everyone knows, is basically a narrative and fictional type of cinema, is a field where only a few women succeed in reaching and holding directorial roles. We are then prompted to ask whether the specific difference that is responsible for found footage cinema being such a favorable field for women's initiative should not be sought at the level of what we mean by “film directing” in the first place.Cameraless cinema does not imply “directing” in the common sense of the word. Women working in found footage do not direct actors and technicians on a film set; they do not preside over complex organizational machines from the apex of the film set's hierarchical system. If they work in a group, they do so by choosing a few close collaborators, often other women. Their work more closely resembles conducting a research project, including immersive sessions in archives and philological interrogations about the materials, than directing a film set. This amounts to saying that women, in the absence of directorial opportunities within the frame of institutional cinema, may have elected the practice of found footage as a way to build an autonomous space of creativity that allows them to transform limitations into a stylistic peculiarity.6The subtitle of this issue, “Women Without a Movie Camera,” alludes in a clearly provocative way to the objective condition of limitation that women experience in their attempts to access professional opportunities for directing in the mainstream film industry, a situation that, in our interpretive hypothesis, can explain better than any tailoring metaphor the remarkable intensity of female creativity in found footage cinema.7 More than a yen for reusing archives, the breadth of female presence in the history of films derived from found footage proves women's tenacious will to make cinema at all costs, even if it means inventing their own modes of independent production under conditions of limitation and lack of means. Clear evidence of this is that even when they leave the particular sphere of found footage and take up the camera, these filmmakers usually keep working beyond the borders of mainstream narrative cinema, that is, in the fields of documentary, experimental, or animated cinema.Put another way, if an affinity between women and found footage cinema exists, most likely it is not because the process resembles “cutting and sewing,” but because cameraless cinema appears as a utopian mode of production that can be practiced in perfect autonomy, or together with a small group of trusted collaborators, in which a lack of means can be countervailed with patience and flair. It is a cinema that, as in the case of Cécile Fontaine, can even be executed at home at the kitchen sink.The remarkable number of women filmmakers who are or were active in found footage cinema could then be taken as confirmation of the famous hypothesis advanced by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own (1929), that we would now have many more female names in the history books if women had had their own rooms where they could work in peace, away from the stereotypes and performative codes of patriarchal culture. The separateness and seclusion of the editing room are more than just metaphors for Woolf's idea of the room of one's own as a space of autonomy and expressive freedom.The field at stake is obviously much larger than is possible to analyze within the limits of the present publication. Unable to cover the entire, rich spectrum of women's contributions to the history of found footage cinema, we chose a series of studies on a few individual figures who represent various different approaches.8The issue opens with a selection of articles by Esfir Shub, as yet unpublished in English, introduced and edited by Liubov Dyshlyuk. The publication of these materials drawn from Shub's autobiographical book Zhizn' moya – kinematograf (Cinema Is My Life, 1972) is a deserved homage to a figure who is regularly presented as the most influential pioneer of compilation film, but whose poetic reflections are almost completely unknown in the Western world. Dating back to the time of the making of The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927), Shub's writings in this issue document her extraordinary awareness in tackling the task of assembling in a coherent montage a host of such heterogeneous materials as old newsreels, home movies, and institutional documentaries. In their rigorous as well as impassioned tone, which continuously emphasizes the political valences of filmmaking, these articles confirm the fundamental position that Shub occupies not only in the practice of, but also in reflections about, the practice of compilation cinema.Monica Dall'Asta's essay on Myriam Borsoutsky and Nicole Vedrès focuses on two French figures who are almost completely forgotten today. In the virtually perfect obscurity of Borsoutsky (better known as Myriam)—who was Sacha Guitry's editor during the 1930s, before collaborating with Vedrès on Paris 1900 and codirecting La Course de taureaux (Bullfight, 1951) alongside Pierre Braunberger—Dall'Asta finds a clue to retracing a possible female genealogy of French found footage cinema. The rediscovery, or rather the discovery, of Myriam, whose skills in editing were so outstanding as to be called “diabolical” by André Bazin, discloses a whole cultural scene that includes as many different figures as Braunberger, Henri Langlois, Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Jacques Brunius, Denise Tual, Victoria Mercanton, and Yannick Bellon. Paradoxically, Myriam's obscurity becomes the crucial element that illuminates a gray area in film history, beginning with Vedrès's groundbreaking work.Better known for the documentaries she shot—which register, with the precision of an anthropologist's eye, the transformations of Italian society between the 1960s and the 1970s—Cecilia Mangini also belongs to the crowd of forgotten women filmmakers. Her films based on the technique of assemblage are examined in deep detail in Dalila Missero's essay. Mangini's work in the archives began with the making of All'armi siam fascisti! (To Arms! We're Fascists!, 1961–62), the film she made with her husband, Lino Del Fra, and the socialist film critic Lino Micciché, and continued with Stalin (1962–63), codirected with Lino Del Fra and the great Marxist poet Franco Fortini. As with Dulac's and Vedrès's earlier works, To Arms! We're Fascists! offers a critical reading of the historical experience of the authors' generation, born under the Fascist regime and subjected to the destructive fascinations of its ideology. To find the documentary materials for both this film and Stalin (issued in 1963 in a version reedited by the producer and disavowed by the authors), Mangini conducted research in several archives around the world, facing huge difficulties. Her interest in the meaning effects attainable through the recombination of stock footage is further documented by an intense sequence in her film of women's emancipation, Essere donne (Being Women, 1963–65), of which Missero proposes an extremely accurate analysis.Barbara Hammer's first feature, Nitrate Kisses (1992), is examined by Alessandra Chiarini as an example of a film based on the construction of a complex relationship between stock footage and original shots. In conceiving of her cinema as a means for the expression of “feeling-images,” that is, “inseparable unity of emotion and thought/idea/image and internal bodily states of excitement,” Hammer is in search of an alternative style to the linear narration of mainstream cinema.9 In the movement of thoughts and emotions that spring from the flow of images in the film, Chiarini sees a method of assemblage that is reminiscent of Maya Deren's theorizations about “vertical cinema.” In Nitrate Kisses this method is adopted to a history of the twentieth century by and footage and original shots are combined in to a critical about history that into the and of between past and present, individual and very different case is presented in essay on Cécile A French who is very of what Nicole has called a approach to found footage, the of preexisting images by way of on the film a of that in and of or of the film her on the relationship between the stylistic and and that the mode of La to the construction of The are where a with the of the film is with an to the content of the the most original of the the of footage to the that her to her from when she was a In these materials a complex whose and quite result is the of the of of film archives to create new films is the of essay. More particularly the with the complex creative and process the making of a film constructed from fragments from the of the an Italian Made by Valentina with at the editing is just the in a that has produced an a and a film, Dating from the the images as of a the of and and document the of the between and is to describe the work of and as a time with the the images, which to the women of the and at the same time the rigorous approach, no less than with which women images of women to a montage of in the with and Alina that the issue, these two of contemporary found footage cinema their experiences and their creative and professional by by film Barbara and filmmakers demonstrate a awareness in their approach to the practice of cameraless cinema. who is the of films in the political of Italian has been regularly working with the early with first feature, More with their has of interest and is the case of More with which the of who only a few after by materials from her home by her and after a time from an old her and and from the of the on a visual history of women's in that, among a host of different materials, includes fragments from films by the during the to on complex such as the of preexisting images, the of archival footage as a of and the relationship between found footage and women's cinema, and a series of very original which the of montage in the expressive of women's by the creative that exists between and the of this of also alludes to the editing room as room of one's a space where women, over the of almost a have the of Woolf's The editing room as a of separateness and autonomy is a space where women have to make of their a a of movement in the of the film If this is then we that found footage cinema should an in film We more new research will to the work of not just the filmmakers, but also so many obscure the of these