I was about seven years old when President Ronald Reagan signed the legislation that came to be known as the Boland Amendment. Of course, I had no idea what it was about...just as I really had no clue what the whole Iran-Contra ordeal meant a few years later. But I do have some vague memories about Central America from that time, even if I am not all that clear on where those memories come from. I remember hearing about war, and feeling like there were some pretty bad people down there, some pretty terrible things going on. But that was about it. The clearest memory I have from those days, however, is the logo for the 1984 Olympic Games, which took place in Los Angeles, not far from where I grew up. I distinctly remember the mascot, Sam the Olympic Eagle. It wasn't until quite a number of years later that those days--the seemingly peaceful 1980s of my childhood--started to take on some new meanings.
I had a fairly depoliticized childhood, for better or worse. So the landscapes and memories of my childhood started to take on some dramatically different meanings once I went back to school at the age of 26 and started studying anthropology. I'd say the process started earlier than that, maybe around 21 or so (still somewhat late if you ask me), but anthropology is what really turned some understandings inside out. First I started learning about the histories of the Native American people who lived in California (and the rest of the US) long before my German relatives landed on the continent in 1717. While I had heard about Native American people to a certain extent as a kid, I wasn't exactly taught much about their histories. Like many other California school kids, I learned about the missions, and wasn't exactly encouraged to ask where the seemingly happy people who built the missions actually came from. Learning about those histories, once I found my way to anthropology, certainly shifted my perspective quite a bit.
I also grew up as a surfer, which more than likely aided my depoliticized attitude throughout my teen years. Hey, who needs to think about politics when there are good waves? So it goes. I also went on a number of trips to Mexico--specifically northern Baja California. Once again, when I started studying anthropology (and actually learning how to speak better Spanish, finally), I realized that I knew next to nothing about the large country that exists just below the US. My knowledge of the histories of Mexico, outside of vague understandings of the Battle of the Alamo, was pretty sparse. My trips to Baja were in search of out of the way places--the whole goal was finding uncrowded waves. Not a bad goal I suppose, but it's also not a bad idea to have a look around and maybe learn a little about the people--and histories--that surround us.
All of this does have a point, and I'm getting to it right now. These days, my "area of interest" is Latin America, specifically Mexico. The more I experience and learn about various parts of Mexico, the more I realize not only how little I knew as a kid, but also how critical it is to gain a deeper understanding of the histories that shape the worlds that we live in. It's actually pretty amazing how a lack of historical knowledge can allow for certain perceptions and behaviors, certain attitudes that might be unthinkable otherwise. Sometimes I wish I could go back and see how my history classes were taught when I was a kid. Was all the information there? Was I just resistant, bored, or not paying attention? Or, worse yet, were the histories I was taught lacking certain...details? From what I do remember, and from checking out some of the histories of the town where I spent most of my teen years, I am leaning toward the latter. A lot was left out, and those omissions definitely shaped the ways that I understood the world around me, that's for sure. So these days I am doing a lot of rethinking and reshaping when it comes to how I understand the histories of southern California (Mike Davis is a nice place to start), Mexico, and the rest of Latin America.
This past week in class we read Greg Grandin's "The Last Colonial Massacre," which was both well-written and completely irritating--mostly because of the terrible histories it examines, and the role that the US played in those events. The book explores the histories of the Cold War in Latin America, using Guatemala as a case study. I have read numerous books and articles about the histories of Central America, some of the most powerful were by Beatriz Manz (Paradise in Ashes, which is also about Guatemala) and Leigh Binford (The El Mozote Massacre, which is about El Salvador). Here's a description of Manz's book from the UC Press site:
Paradise in Ashes is a deeply engaged and moving account of the violence and repression that defined the murderous Guatemalan civil war of the 1980s. In this compelling book, Beatriz Manz—an anthropologist who spent over two decades studying the Mayan highlands and remote rain forests of Guatemala—tells the story of the village of Santa María Tzejá, near the border with Mexico. Manz writes eloquently about Guatemala's tortured history and shows how the story of this village—its birth, destruction, and rebirth—embodies the forces and conflicts that define the country today.
If you haven't seen it, check out this short film called "Voice of a Mountain," which also explores some of the histories of the violence and war that ravaged Guatemala in the early 1980s. It's a film that I use in classes all the time, and one of the most frequent responses from students is that they are shocked that they never heard about those histories. And I completely understand what they mean--some stories and experiences are completely elided from our historical knowledge, and this isn't exactly an accident, since certain histories and memories complicate the stories we tell about ourselves. That's why historical knowledge is so powerful, and why there are so many battles over how we talk about the past. In fact, the most incredibly frustrating and infuriating part of Grandin's book was right in the middle, when it talked about the ways in which the US reframed its actions and support of what was happening in the region. In a 1986 “retrospective survey” of the violence and war that plagued Guatemala for decades, the US State Department declares, “The explanation for Guatemala’s high level of violence probably is rooted in cultural and sociological factors unique to Guatemala … The use of violence to settle disputes of almost any nature is accepted in Guatemala’s indigenous culture” (100). Not only did the US make excuses for the Guatemalan government and provide material support, it also completely explained away all political factors by using a watered-down, twisted concept of culture to argue that all of the violence was ultimately part of the inherent nature of the Guatemalan people themselves. Sure, it wasn't a matter of international politics, economics, or Cold War paranoia--the violence in Guatemala was just a function of some unruly folks down south. Case closed.
As just another kid from the 1980s, that kind of explanation about some country south of the US border (Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, or that place where those Contras were up to something or another) probably would have passed right over my head. It DID pass over my head. Hell, I might have even BELIEVED that sort of nonsense! Those stories weren't in any of my textbooks, therefore they were outside of my reality. And these omissions have their effects, one way or another. But at some point the excuses run out, and we all have to start digging around in the past to see what's what. If we don't, the consequences can be pretty disastrous...complete indifference, as Elie Wiesel once said, being among the worst. That's why history matters, and why it's absolutely fundamental to confront the silences that color our perceptions. So this requires a certain amount of action on our part, of course. Otherwise, we'll all remain blinded by the glossy trinkets of the present (Sam the Olympic Eagle) while pernicious travesties are afoot in distant, unknown places.