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Becoming darkness: Mexico, the United States and the psychic vanishing of radical blackness

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Becoming darkness: Mexico, the United States and the psychic vanishing of radical blackness

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BECOMING DARKNESS: MEXICO, THE UNITED STATES AND THE PSYCHIC
VANISHING OF RADICAL BLACKNESS

Ricardo Alfonso Wilson II

Dissertation submitted to the Department of Comparative Literature at the
University of Southern California
in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Dissertation Committee: Roberto Ignacio Díaz, Chair
Erin Graff Zivin
John Carlos Rowe

August 2015
ii
ABSTRACT

There is a growing tendency, both within the academy and outside of it, to view
the United States as moving toward a more fluid idea of race that characterizes,
at least in the imaginary, many Latin American nations. The nascent stages of
this tendency can be traced to the first challenges to civil-rights-era affirmative
action legislation in the 1970s and, in a different register, to the organized
multiracial movement that began to reshape the United States Census in the
early 1980s. This dissertation examines the vanishing of ideas of radical
blackness within this national process of reimagining race in the United States.
Radical blackness is herein understood as that which continues to call into
question remaining structural imbalances tied to the very ideas of race and
blackness that are being replaced in this new post-racial imaginary.
This dissertation turns to Mexico for language with which to describe and
analyze this active yet largely ignored vanishing process. Among Latin American
nations, Mexico is of particular importance because, as a nation whose founding
thinkers began to imagine it as racially egalitarian in its struggle for
independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century, its process of imagined
post-raciality, especially in relation to a vanished idea of its own blackness, has
been seen to a certain conclusion. This dissertation puts history into conversation
with literary and cinematic works from, among others, Octavio Paz, James
Baldwin, Steven Spielberg, Alfonso Cuarón, and Colson Whitehead in order to
articulate the aspects of a collective psyche that encourage and facilitate these
vanishings. Ultimately, this dissertation aims to uncover and model a critical
practice of reading that does not attempt to recover that which has been
vanished in these instances but rather honors the disruptive capacity offered by a
sustained awareness of the outlines of the process of vanishing itself.

iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Pani Norindr, Peggy Kamuf, Sam Steinberg, Tryon Woods, Nahum Chandler,
Michelle Gordon and Katherine Guevarra: you have all been instrumental in my
progress. Thank you.

John Carlos Rowe, thank you for so willingly stepping in to offer your valued
perspective on my committee. Erin Graff Zivin, thank you for your high standards,
generosity and professional example. Roberto Ignacio Díaz, I am deeply grateful
to you not only for your guidance as my chair during the dissertation but for your
sound advice and kind heart throughout my entire time at USC.

I could not have arrived here without the support of friends and family. I would
like to give a particularly special acknowledgment to the foundations of this
emotional and intellectual support network. Mike, Carlos, Anne, Roberta & John,
Sue & Craig, Toby, Elsie, Tony, Jenny, Kim, Julanne, Mariko, Nada, Deborah,
Whitney, Langston, Hem & Fitz, Gabrey, Naomi, Geoff, Charlotte, Ciara, and
Dad: thank you so very much for all you have given me. Meredith, your presence
has helped to calm my spirit in such an unexpected way and it continues to be a
joy to discover you as a partner. Finally, Mom, none of this is without you.
Though I miss you so, you remain smiling at the center of my heart.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ............................................................................................................ 1
Chapter One – Impossible Yanga ....................................................................... 17
Chapter Two – On Apparent Emanations .......................................................... 65
Chapter Three – Baldwin and the Gravity of Lincoln ......................................... 103
Chapter Four – Alfonso Cuarón and the Question of Futurity ........................... 151
Chapter Five – Toward a Radical Darkness ...................................................... 187
Conclusion – Or Beyond a Counting ................................................................. 215
Works Cited ....................................................................................................... 225

1
INTRODUCTION

The idea that the United States has yet to shed its need to imagine
blackness as unimaginable will not be rehearsed in this dissertation. One needs
only to look to the apparatuses that continue to encourage disparities in criminal
justice, public education or healthcare to see that the endurance of this effort of
un-imagination still structures much of the civic foundation that we in the United
States have inherited. Our collective national imaginary—what I will figure here
as our national psychological apparatus—is what animates this foundation.
I understand this apparatus as embracing, in its most contemporary
iterations, discourses grounded in ideas of multiracialism, multiculturalism and
(an ever-impending) post-racialism. Alongside and within this constellation
remain vestiges of an older psychic order, stronger in certain regions and
registers than in others. Though the makeup constellation can appear
contradictory in many aspects, bringing to mind metaphors of salad bowls and
melting pots, I am not interested in parsing its discursive tangle. Rather, I
assume that the many identity positions found within are granted a social
contract in exchange for the fact that they will not challenge the discursive
legacies of white supremacy. In other words, all of these discourses share a
negation of a presence that would otherwise make imaginable remaining social
2
imbalances that are, in large part, still structured around ideas of race and
particularly blackness.
I do not intend to evoke any recent events that stir our collective outrage.
This does not follow, exactly, Saidiya Hartman’s refusal to reproduce the beating
of Frederick Douglass’ Aunt Hester in her study of the in-between of subjectivity
and subjection in black life. Though we both arrive at the examination of familiar
objects in plain sight, her sound reasoning for avoiding the reiteration of this
genre of spectacle is grounded in the belief that “rather than inciting indignation,
too often they immure us to pain by virtue of their familiarity” (4). My avoidance is
grounded in a belief that, in this contemporary moment, it is precisely this kind of
outrage that can provide a psychically comforting distance that allows for an
evasion of the fact that the same ideas supporting the structures that make
possible such events exist in our very own inherited lives. This holds true no
matter how far we may imagine these lives to be, in terms of geographic distance
or physical violence, from Ferguson, Missouri, or South Los Angeles, or any
other zone toward which we direct our collective shame. This subtle evasion,
when it exists, works to further reify the boundaries of the intrapsychic structures
of our collective apparatus, counter-intuitively further isolating our most
vulnerable parts.
Within this set of discourses, however, there is also ample room for and
the encouragement of ideas of race and blackness that do not call these
structures into question. To observe this one only has to cast an eye toward the
legacy of James Baldwin, an author that will be read in this dissertation. Baldwin
3
fits very comfortably within the pages of Poets & Writers, for example, and is
customarily lauded for his revolutionary yet inclusive messages of the 1960s for
conscious blacks and conscious whites to work together in order to address the
country’s “racial nightmare” (The Fire Next Time 105). But when twenty years
later Baldwin’s now acerbic complaint remains due to his understanding that the
Civil Rights Movement had failed in many respects because of an abandonment
of the project by these same liberally minded whites and upwardly mobile blacks,
this aspect of his literary legacy is for all intents and purposes excised and
unremembered. The same could be said of the evolution of black history
celebrations that make their way into the most public places. Appearing here, for
example, is an almost absolute disappearance of figures such as Malcolm X,
Paul Robeson and Marcus Garvey and a further entrenchment of a Martin Luther
King, Jr. who is remembered more for his pacifism and less for his growing
impatience with the United States government on matters of the war machine
and poverty in the wake of 1964.
The currency of a conservative version of such history has certainly never
been more valuable. Nike understands this, as a 2015 “Power of One” ad
campaign launched their “Black History Month Collection” honoring the idea of
black history. For this historic celebration, they have redesigned the shoes
(priced between $120 and $220) and apparel of the most popular athletes in their
stable in a black and white kente cloth pattern. This effort, of course, prominently
involves the notoriously apolitical Michael Jordan and his Nike sub-brand. His
4
Jumpman logo and the Nike Swoosh frame the new campaign’s own symbol (a
BHM monogram that is attached to all products) at the close of the commercial.
It is a complicated universe to be lived in. It is certainly one in which
nuanced thinking in relation to ideas of blackness is as absent as it is urgently
needed.
My dissertation’s ultimate contribution to this thinking is its theorization of
the horizon between what I have termed the idea of becoming darkness and the
idea of radical blackness. Becoming darkness begins as the simple articulation
of those ideas of blackness that remain acceptable, or becoming, and thus
legible within the boundary of liberal and neoliberal discourses on race and
culture. Radical blackness is on the other side of this boundary—beyond this
matrix of race and culture. It is that which maintains an antagonism in relation to
these celebratory discourses, the mere presence of which points to structural
imbalances that are intimately linked to the very ideas of race and blackness that
are, in this new imaginary, being superseded.

My dissertation reads the historical archive alongside twentieth-and
twenty-first-century literature and film from the United States and Mexico in order
to articulate a psychic vanishing of radical blackness within liberal and neoliberal
discourses on race and culture in both nations. It is my contention that the
example of Mexico, by no means a static one, gives language to this relatively
nascent yet active and encrypted process of psychic vanishing within the United
States. This language will assist in arriving at an awareness of the contours of
5
these ongoing vanishings at the horizon of becoming darkness and radical
blackness. It is an awareness that serves to disrupt the ever-ossifying-despite-
their-fluidity neoliberal discourses on race and culture in the United States.
My project comes at a moment when it is becoming more common, both
within and outside of the academy, to describe the United States as sliding
toward a more fluid idea of race that describes, at least in the imaginary, many
Latin American nations. This sliding has been termed by some scholars as the
“Latin Americanization” of the racial paradigm in the United States (see Eduardo
Bonilla-Silva and David Dietrich). While such comparisons need to be
approached cautiously, it is my belief that there is critical fruit to be gained if such
terrain is crossed with appropriate rigor and attention to difference.
A valuable byproduct to my dissertation’s ultimate concern is a
differentiation in the national psychological apparatuses that enact these
vanishings and what this, in turn, says about the varied nature of the creation of
black subjects across the Americas. This critique, which makes the work of my
dissertation possible, is that of a tendency toward a blinding solidarity in black
subjectivity, at least across the Americas, which is embedded in many of the
reanimated conversations around ideas of blackness in contemporary academic
discourse. Many of the central figures that these present conversations are
founded on—Frantz Fanon, Paul Gilroy and Orlando Patterson to name just a
few—often ignore the social, historical, psychic and political differences, or
gesture to them only lightly. Paradoxically, as my dissertation intends to make
clear, it is precisely this lack of engagement in differentiation that forecloses the
6
possibility of productive critical borrowings that could shed light on transnational
and transregional similarities.
I have chosen to focus on Mexico rather than holding the example of the
United States against a broader survey of ideas of blackness throughout Latin
America, or even focusing on a group of Latin American nations that could be
argued to have a similar relationship to their African heritage (Mexico, Argentina
and Uruguay, for example). Ignoring depth for breadth would compromise the
historical specificity that I argue is absolutely necessary in this comparative study
of vanishing ideas of radical blackness. And among Latin American nations,
Mexico is of particular importance because, as a nation whose founding thinkers
began to imagine it as racially egalitarian in its struggle for independence from
Spain in the early nineteenth century, its process of imagined post-raciality,
especially in relation to a vanished idea of blackness, is seen to a certain
conclusion.
Though Mexico would abandon a racialized sistema de castas, where
Europeans, indigenous and Africans and their various mixtures were so recorded
in legal discourse in an attempt to maintain social order and separation, the
nation would became no longer tenable in the late-nineteenth century because of
rebellion from both factions of the elite and the mixed-race masses. In response
to this rampant instability, the nation was reformed in the Mexican Revolution and
the mestizo (the imagined indigenous-Spanish subject) produced as its
organizing symbol. This transfer is now understood as largely symbolic, as a very
similar power structure maintained its authority over the new mestizo masses.
7
However, even within this new symbolic order that recognizes Mexico’s
pluricultural composition, any idea of blackness goes unregistered.
1

Mexico as a space void of any substantial blackness is the prevailing view
both within and outside of Mexico. For a clue to the extent of this vanishing, one
could read Brian Hamnett’s A Concise History of Mexico (2006), which is four
hundred pages in not-large print, to discover the one sentence dedicated to the
relation between Mexico and its history of African slavery: “Earlier use of negro
slavery did not have a lasting significance in New Spain” (84). This marker of
absence is located in a more-than-one-hundred page portion of the book dealing
with periods where blacks played a very visible role in Mexican society.
Sentiments such as this exist despite the fact that there has been a rise in Afro-
Mexican scholarship, particularly over the last fifteen years, that presents a
dramatically different picture.
We know, for example, that prior to 1640 New Spain was the largest
recipient of African slaves in the New World (Palmer 2). And while Brazil, Cuba,
the United States and other American nations would go on to dwarf these
numbers, it is not to suggest that slavery in early New Spain was insignificant.
Ben Vinson notes that in 1553 the Viceroy Luis de Velasco was lamenting the
fact that there were then “possibly more than 20,000 negroes and mulattos … in
the colony, far outnumbering the white population” (59). And in 1646, the census
registered over 35,000 Africans and more than 116,000 more people of African

1
For a reference to this state-engendered commitment to the recognition of a pluricultural
composition see Article 2 of the Constitución Política de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos (1917).
8
descent in New Spain (Bennett 1; Beltrán 214-19). In 1810, ten percent of the
population of the colony was considered to be Afro-descendant (Bennett 1;
Beltrán 232, 234).
Afro-Mexican studies had what is considered to be its commemorative
moment in 1946 with the publishing of Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán’s La población
negra de México 1519-1810. The field has from this inception been imbricated
with the United States academy, as Aguirre Beltrán was himself trained at
Northwestern University by Melville Herskovits, the United States anthropologist
who played a large role in institutionalizing African and African-American studies
within the United States. The great majority of the scholarship that comes in his
wake can be considered anthropological in nature with a focus on the colonial
period, although there has been a recent increase in ethnographic studies of
contemporary communities in the coastal regions of the states of Oaxaca,
Guerrero and Veracruz. Very little of this emerging archive, however, has been
mobilized to address theoretical concerns as they relate to identity concerns
within Mexico’s national imaginary.
2
While at certain times I read this archive
critically for what it occludes in its own reading of a supposedly stable archive, I
remain grateful for the possibilities of reading it has provided.

Throughout this introduction I have stressed my interest in how ideas of
blackness play at the limit of a nation’s psychological apparatus. I am not

2
This trend could be said to mark the field of Afro-Latin Studies in countries with similar racial
profiles to Mexico. Examples like Alejandro Solamianski’s Identidades secretas: la negritud
argentina, that identify traces in mainstream cultural production and canonical texts, are rare and
valuable models.
9
interested in collecting or cataloguing this excess as essence in order to restore
any sort of imagined community. My focus is rather on how an acute attention to
the psychic vanishing of ideas of radical blackness in particular, and to the
contour of the often-incoherent manifestations that can be seen as resulting from
these ongoing processes, can nurture and sharpen a shared critical practice of
both reading and writing.
It is a project that remains distinct from those that have been drawn to the
intersection of ideas of vanishing and race. Working at the nexus of sociology
and literature in Ghostly Matters (1997), Avery Gordon, for example, sees great
value in the idea of haunting, but this is an idea, as will be made clear as my
dissertation unfolds, that I wish to move away from for its underlying assumptions
of a certain legibility and understanding. David Eng’s interest in what our color-
blind moment occludes in his The Feeling of Kinship (2010) is also helpful for
framing my own interest in traces, but his work is also overwhelmingly concerned
with haunting. Furthermore, the incomplete overlap of ideas of race and
blackness, due to the concerns of his project, is not sufficiently registered here.
Intersecting with black studies, there has been a longstanding
commitment to understanding the non-being or ontological impossibility of the
black from modernity onward. Nahum Chandler, Lewis Gordon, Fred Moten,
Kara Keeling, Lindon Barrett, Hortense Spillers, Frank Wilderson, Saidiya
Hartman, Tryon Woods, Ronald Judy and Jared Sexton are just a few of the
scholars who have been helpful to my own explorations in this regard. This
collection of work has grown, for the most part, out of frameworks that intervene
10
in some way or another with anti-blackness (emerging from Fanon) and/or social
death (Peterson). Here, there is strong tendency toward the ontological
impossibility of embodied blackness. Much of this discourse surrounds the idea
of agency (or visibility) or lack thereof within these unthought positions. However,
the great majority of all of this work’s purview reads all blackness as civically
impossible or at least does not see great theoretical value in exploring in detail
the relation between what has been put forward here as becoming darkness and
radical blackness.
Some of these interlocutors would certainly propose that blackness is not
blackness, embodied or otherwise, unless it is dialectically opposed to whiteness.
I would maintain, however, that we are selling ourselves short theoretically if we
do not explore the psychic horizons proposed here that require a slight move
away from this position. And so my own quarrels and discoveries are indebted to
and in conversation with much of the above-noted scholarship.
However, I maintain a particular investment in the work of Jared Sexton
and Frank Wilderson. Though coming from a position that prioritizes corporeality,
Sexton helps to articulate the processes I intend to explore. His work, while
focused primarily on the multiracial aspect of the post-civil rights era’s
“ascendant ideology of colorblindness,” describes the often-overlooked
fluctuation of pre-civil rights era racial tolerance:
When black resistance is thought to be contained or neutralized,
both practically and symbolically, the color line becomes
considerably more fluid … When faced with the specter of violent
black sexuality or sexualized black violence, white supremacy in
the United States has consistently conflated blacks and mulattos
through retrenched enforcement of the one drop rule. That is to
11
say, when blacks move against the structures of white supremacy,
“mixed race” is revoked as a viable social identity and racial
blackness is again understood as a broad spectrum. (12)

And while the relative viability of mixed race identity positions have
certainly increased as post-civil rights era discourses of multiracialism have
grown in their influence, Sexton argues that an anxiety tied to this position’s
revocability remains. For Sexton, then, “blackness” is still understood “as the
master sign of intertwining forces of instability that together conspire to frustrate
the aspirations of an esteemed neoliberalism” (17). A reading of the returning
symptoms of this anxiety allows for Sexton’s revealing of both “the basic
elements of multiracialism” and a hint of its underlying “(social) fantasy” (18). He
is ultimately arguing for a “conception of nonbiological racial embodiment” in
order to make plain the crisis inherent in multiracial discourse—its continuous
demand for a “displace[ment] or disavow[al of] the protocols of violence,” sexual
and otherwise, that undergird it (4). Though I agree with this position, Sexton’s
concerns remain tied to corporality, as the crisis he is investigating—his gateway
to the contours of multiracial discourse—is understood as being “experienced
profoundly in and on the body” (17).
Wilderson’s work on the trace of the ontologically impossible black subject
in liberally oriented cinema’s representation of “blackness” is also primarily
grounded in an embodied figure. From his perspective, there is no potential
viability: “the Black is always already positioned as Slave” and thus always void
of civic relationality (7, 18). The position of the Slave is expressed alongside that
of the “Savage” (indigenous), which maintains the slight possibility for viability—a
12
“shuttling between death and civil society”—and the White (50). These rigid
positions are consciously designed to emulate how worker and capitalist are
theorized as “positions first and identities second … that is, before they take on
national origin or gendered specificity” (24).
Though my project questions the productivity in Wilderson’s assertion of
such a monolithic idea of blackness in the Western Hemisphere, we stand in firm
agreement with the fact that “the protocols of inquiry” capable of challenging
remaining racially oriented structural imbalances are no longer present (4). Our
projects also look to readings of cultural texts to find traces of this non-presence
and thus revolve around a similar question: “how does a [text] tell the story of
[something] that has no story?” (28); or more precisely, how does a text tell the
story of something that has to have no story?
3

Wilderson’s idea of embodied blackness is discussed as being disavowed
and “doubly foreclosed” in the production of cinema. In traditional cinema, even
that which attempts the articulation of a purportedly radically black position, the
demand for a narrative movement from “equilibrium to disequilibrium to
equilibrium” only strengthens this disavowal (26). Nonetheless, what Wilderson
refers to as the “grammar of antagonism” is understood to interrupt “the
mendacity of conflict” by way of the more peripheral cinematic strategies of
“lighting, camera angles, image composition, and acoustic design” (4-5).
My project can be understood as extending what Sexton calls viability
beyond mixed race identity to an idea of blackness itself (becoming darkness), at

3
“Text” and “something” replace Wilderson’s “film” and “being.”
13
least while it remains within its contractual boundary. It is an idea not tied to a
particular identity position and as such can exist not only within multiracialism but
also throughout the entire matrix of neoliberal discourses on race and culture.
Providing further separation, my project seeks to understand the nature of
becoming darkness’ shift from viability toward invisibility—the possibility of a
becoming radical darkness—in the realm of collective psychological apparatuses.
The disruptive capacity of the awareness of such shifts, in response to
Wilderson, underlines the possibility of reading and writing a story with an idea of
radical blackness as the central (not peripheral) strategy, though this idea itself
cannot be resuscitated or made whole.

This dissertation is divided into five chapters. Chapter One demonstrates
how Mexico has historically related to ideas of blackness in fundamentally
different ways than the United States. This understanding is achieved by an
examination of how negotiations between the Spanish Crown and rebellious
slaves in early colonial Mexico have been remembered in the historical archive.
This process points to a tendency to secret radical blackness within its psychic
apparatus—a tendency that is influenced by Spain’s previous psychic
management of the Jewish and Muslim threats on the Iberian Peninsula. This
brings to the surface an episteme beyond the discourses of the Enlightenment
and alongside the event of the Middle Passage as partly responsible for
conditioning black subjectivity in New Spain. This is, in part, what allows for the
presentation of such a distinctly different process in the United States where no
14
such negotiations with maroon communities exist. This chapter will go on to show
that at the time of Mexico’s independence from Spain, a related process takes
place. It imagines itself as a nation free from the burden of racial distinction
despite the fact that racial difference still structures much of the economic and
political disparity. In this case, it is a secreting at the hand of a utopian impulse.
To understand this process of managing secrets, I turn to the
psychoanalytic paradigm as described by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. It is
their understanding of an intrapsychic crypt that underlies the necessity for me to
include ideas beyond that of dynamic repression (and the symptom of its return)
when discussing blackness in the Mexican case. Building on the intrapsychic
crypt’s ability to hold secrets across generations (what they put forward as the
idea of “the phantom”), I theorize the existence of a transgenerational
intrapsychic gap. I insist on the word “gap” in order to begin a move away from
an idiom tied to the idea of haunting. The remainder of my dissertation focuses
on the boundary of this intrapsychic structure and what emanates from it.
Chapter Two explores these emanations in the context of twentieth
century Mexico. I begin by tracing the twentieth-century transcriptions and
citations of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora’s eyewitness account of the 1692 riot
in Mexico City. Here, I am interested in how Sigüenza y Góngora’s heterogenic
descriptions of the ethnic composition of New Spain are at times unread by,
among others, Octavio Paz and Irving Leonard. This unreading affords a bridge
to both Erin Graff Zivin’s idea of an-archaeological thinking and Stephen
Hawking’s recent theorizations regarding the boundary of black holes. Graff
15
Zivin’s turn away from an “excavational mode of thought” helps to give language
to the unrecoverable and unpredictable nature of what emanates from the
proposed intrapsychic gap. Hawking allows me to describe the boundary of its
structure as a permeable, apparent horizon, and to understand the force that
draws secrets into this gap is akin to gravity. His idea, most simply, is that while
there is no information lost when objects fall into a black hole, the gravitational
forces therein so chaotically distort the information that whatever is emitted from
the apparent horizon is ultimately indecipherable.
Within this same chapter, this indecipherability will be highlighted in an
examination of the debates surrounding the discovery of artifacts related to the
Olmec civilization in the 1940s in the south of Mexico. The Olmec, the first
technologically advanced Mesoamerican civilization, were believed by some at
the time of these discoveries to have potential connections to the African
continent. I analyze how what was described in Mexican archeological circles as
the “Olmec Problem” managed the possibility that a partially Afro-descendant
culture played such an important role in the nation’s indigenous history.
With the nature of the boundary of the proposed intrapsychic gap clearly
articulated, Chapter Three turns to the United States. Building on Sexton’s ideas
of viability expressed above, I describe the post-civil rights era and the secreting
it demands because of the nature of its utopian declarations. I understand this as
the moment when an intrapsychic gap similar to that theorized in the context of
Mexico begins to take shape within the United States. Here, I turn to James
Baldwin’s exploration of the Atlanta Child Murders (1979-81) in The Evidence of
16
Things Not Seen (1985). Here, Baldwin presents a prescient understanding of
the growing need in the United States to secret remaining ideas of radical
blackness in order to protect its imagining of the Civil Rights Movement as a
complete success. Through Baldwin, I read contemporary popular imaginings of
Abraham Lincoln in order to understand how this gap has developed following
the Civil Rights Movement. I am drawn, primarily, to Tony Kushner and Steven
Spielberg’s film Lincoln (2012) that was released in the build up to the 150
th

Anniversary of the “Emancipation Proclamation.”
The final two chapters turn to the science fiction genre in order to address
the dissertation’s central question: how does a text tell the story of something
that has to have no story? In Chapter Four, I use Carlos Fuentes’ meditations on
utopia and tragedy, which seek to destabilize notions of a singular narrative of
the Mexican nation, in order to interrogate Alfonso Cuarón’s critical relation to a
utopian impulse in his films Children of Men (2007) and Gravity (2013). By
ultimately critiquing Cuarón’s inability to distance his cinematic texts from
metaphors of rebirth, I open a space to consider, in Chapter Five, how Colson
Whitehead's zombie apocalypse novel Zone One (2011) unsettles discourses on
race and blackness by appropriating a small corner of the science fiction genre
that naturally allows for a sustained and productive antagonism. This last chapter
will point toward the possibility of a becoming radical darkness, an idea of
blackness that is both viable within and disruptive of contemporary neoliberal
discourses on race and culture.
17
CHAPTER ONE – IMPOSSIBLE YANGA

A 24 del mes de septiembre pasado tuve aviso de como
los negros tenían elegido un Rey, y concertado entre
ellos de matar á todos los españoles, alzarse con la
tierra, y que los indios eran también en ello. (On the 24
th

of this past September I was warned that the Negroes
had chosen a King, and agreed amongst themselves to
kill all the Spaniards and rise up to take the land, and that
the Indians were also with them.)
1

-Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza

The epigraph comes from a missive sent by Antonio de Mendoza, the first
viceroy of New Spain, to Emperor Charles V on December 10, 1537. Scholars
have insinuated that the reality of the rumored uprising in Mexico City, the seat of
power in New Spain, ultimately may not have been substantiated (Davidson 90).
Nonetheless, the supposed conspirators were found, confessions were heard,
and the leaders were drawn and quartered before any manifestation of rebellion
could present itself (Davidson 90). The anxiety in the new colony, however,

1
All translations not placed within quotations in this disserations are understood to be
mine.
18
remained palpable—and for good reason. Spain had already sustained
significant material losses and psychic trauma due to particularly bloody
rebellions on the island of Hispaniola in 1522, and in what is now Colombia in
1529 where the town of Santa Marta was destroyed (Franco 35-37). In New
Spain, by the second half of the sixteenth century minor slave insurrections and
the molestation of Spanish property owners by maroon slaves were becoming
more and more common, leading to a consolidation and re-articulation of fugitive
slave laws and greater restrictions on free and enslaved blacks’ access to
weapons (Davidson 91-92).
It was within this context that in 1579, Yanga, by all existing accounts an
African-born slave, led a group of fellow enslaved persons from the African
continent to escape a sugar plantation near the city of Veracruz.
2
The maroons
formed community in the mountainous region of nearby Orizaba and lived
relatively undisturbed for thirty years. Shifting locations to avoid detection, they
were proficient farmers and would strategically raid local haciendas for tools,
weapons, food and livestock. Several skirmishes are noted in the historical
record during this time, but no large-scale military action was taken by the
Spanish colonial administration. However, by the dawning of the new century,
their continued presence and example were viewed as too big a threat to the
surrounding haciendas and the burgeoning institution of slavery in New Spain. It
appears that in 1608 or 1609 forces under the direction of Viceroy Luis de

2
Yanga is alternatively referred to as Ñanga and Ñaga throughout the historical records of New
Spain.
19
Velasco were sent to suppress the rebellious slaves. After a series of battles, a
treaty was agreed to on March 8, 1609.
3
From this document, sent by the
Commissary of Veracruz to the Inquisition in Mexico City, it is clear that Yanga
dictated many of the terms of the eleven-point truce documented in the historical
record as “Las condiciones que piden los Negros cimarrones de esta comarca”
(The conditions that the black maroons of this region ask for).
Among the terms, were that all slaves that had fled prior to the previous
September were considered free. Furthermore, Yanga and his descendants were
to be the governors in perpetuity with the town selecting its own magistrates and
representatives to interact with the Spanish Crown. As a part of the accord, any
future slave to seek refuge in their town was to be returned in exchange for
compensation. In exchange for their relative autonomy, they agreed to pay tribute
to the King and assist in the defense of New Spain if necessary. However, and
perhaps most importantly, Spaniards, with the exception of a Franciscan priest
and a designated chief justice, were only allowed in the town on market days
(Monday and Thursday).

3
1) que sean libres todos los que se han huido hasta el mes de septiembre próximo pasado y los
de entonces acá se vuelven a sus dueños 2) que han de tener justicia mayor que no sea
mestizo ni criollo ni letrado sino de capa y espada 3) que no ha de haber casa ni morada de
español dentro del pueblo sino fuere a fueren a los tiangues lunes y jueves que le harán en su
pueblo 4) que han de tener los regidores y forma de cabildo 5) que el capitán Ñaga que es el
mayoral de ellos ha de ser gobernador y después del sus hijo y descendientes 6) que los negros
que huyeren de los puertos acá se obliguen a traerlos a sus dueños con tal que por el trabajo les
den doce pesos a los negros que los fueren a buscar y mientras no los volvieron a sus dueños
les darán otros de los suyos que les sirvan y que si no los volvieren que pagaran lo que valen 7)
que dentro de un año y medio se les han de dar estas capitulaciones confirmadas por su
majestad y sino que se volverán a su primer estado 8) que han de fundar su pueblo entre Rio
Blanco y las haciendas de Ribadeneira a donde ellos señalaren 9) que pagaran los tributos a su
majestad como todos los demás negros y mulatos horros de las indias 10) la ultima condición
que piden en que los administre frailes franciscanos y no otros ningunos y que los ornamentos se
han de hacer a costa de su majestad para la iglesia 11) que asistirán a sus armas todos los
negros que su majestad tuviese necesario de estas para defender la tierra (“Las Condiciones”).
20
Despite resistance from local slave owners, the colonial administration
accepted the offer, creating the first free black town in the Americas: San
Lorenzo de los Negros.
4
Faithful to the agreement, in the decades that followed,
the interests of San Lorenzo were represented by their own alcaldes
(magistrates), regidores (councilmen) and alguaciles (constables) (Landers
144n60). Surrounding landowners did attempt to encroach on the town’s borders
but were held at bay by the people of San Lorenzo de los Negros and the
reprimand of the Spanish authorities. Jane Landers cites an Italian traveler’s
account from the close of the seventeenth century that reported a vibrant
community, if somewhat diminished in number. However, by the second half of
the eighteenth century with continued tensions between the liberated town and
neighboring haciendas, and economic opportunities elsewhere drawing more and
more of its inhabitants away, the surrounding haciendas were able to envelop the
lands (Landers 129-132).
This narrative begins to push the limits of thought within the United States-
centered field of black studies by not neatly aligning with scholar and political
philosopher Joy James’ rather representative statement from the world line of the
United States that “maroon resistance failed to convince the tyrannical majority of
the soundness of its reasoning” (125).
5
Colliding with this misalignment is the fact

4
Also named San Lorenzo de Cerralvo after the Franciscan friar who lived in the community. The
present-day municipality has carried the name Yanga since 1932.
5
The term world line is borrowed from the field of physics that allows for the trajectory of an
object to be calculated in the spatial as well as temporal dimension, what is called spacetime:
“According to the theory of special relativity, there is no absolute time which can be measured
independently of the observer, so events that are simultaneous as seen by one observer occur at
different times when seen from a different place (“Spacetime”). This encouragement works

21
that conversations within black studies are mobilizing ideas from Latin America,
especially relating to mestizaje (racial mixing), in critiques of the contemporary
multiracial turn in the United States.
In order to gain the theoretical tools to confront such a continually
morphing process, Jared Sexton, for one, rightly demands that we “think about
what makes New World slavery what it is in order to pursue that future anteriority
which, being both within and irreducible to it, will have unmade it, and that
anterior futurity which always already unmakes it” (17). In other words, without an
understanding of how the unthought nature of blackness simultaneously
produced and undermined the institution of slavery, it is impossible to trace how
its legacies are brought to bear on the present moment. This chapter, however,
does not view the unthoughtness of New World Slavery as without fundamental
variation and thus takes up (and expands upon) Sexton’s charge by tracing the
impossibility that San Lorenzo de los Negros presents within Mexico’s national
psychological apparatus. This will provide the foundation for a theoretical
borrowing that will allow for a more nuanced understanding of the role of radical
blackness and its vanishing within the shifting national psychological apparatus
of the United States.

Beyond the surviving treaty and the sporadic appearance of meetings or
complaints contained in the Archivo General de la Nación, there are two known

against what Eng has called “The disciplining intent of historicism, its abstracting and atomizing of
heterogeneity into empty, homogenous time and space...” (1486).
22
subjective narratives of the founding of San Lorenzo de los Negros, both written
in the generations after the formation of the town: the Jesuit missionary priest
Andrés Pérez de Ribas’ account within his larger Crónica y historia religiosa de la
Provincia de la Compañía de Jesús de México en Nueva España (1654); and
Vicente Riva Palacios’ story “Los Treinta y tres negros” in El libro rojo, 1520-
1867 (1870). Pérez de Ribas is a significant figure in the record of New Spain,
especially from the Jesuit perspective, perhaps most famous for his history of the
Jesuit missions published nine years earlier, Triunfos de la Fe.
6
Riva Palacios,
one of the four politically involved members of the elite who were contributing
authors to El libro rojo, was a liberal politician and the grandson of Mexican
President Vicente Guerrero.
7
The oversized volume is complete with dramatic
etchings that attempt to present a teleological vision of Mexican history from
Moctezuma II to the execution by firing squad of Emperor Maximilian I in 1867.
Because of both temporal distance from the events and ideological positioning of
their projects, both of these documents should be considered, in large part, as
forms of historical fiction. Reading them as such opens up some very rich
discoveries that help interpret and move beyond that which is presented in the
historical record.
The account of Pérez de Ribas was written at the distance of nearly a half-
century, commissioned as a general history of the region by the Jesuit order.

6
The above is the abbreviated title of: Historia de los triunfos de nuestra santa fe entre las gentes
más bárbaras y fieras del nuevo orbe: conseguidos por los soldados de la milicia de la Compañía
de Jesús en las misiones de la Nueva España
7
Juan Antonio Mateos, Manuel Payno and Rafael Martínez de la Torre are the other contributors.
23
Given these origins, and the fact that the document had to pass through the
requisite censorship of the religious superiors, it is of no surprise that Yanga’s
narrative has been delivered in a way to clearly support the Jesuits’ ongoing
mission in New Spain in the middle of the seventeenth century.
8
A large portion
of Pérez de Ribas’ account includes direct quotes from a letter written by the
Jesuit priest Pedro Laurencio, who had accompanied the Spanish soldiers on the
mission to suppress Yanga’s maroon community. The letter, written to a fellow
Jesuit priest, served as justification of “[una] causa tan justa, contra esclavos
fugitivos, salteadores que infestaban la tierra y los caminos reales de ella con
tantos insultos” (such a just cause against fugitive slaves, highway robbers that
infested the land and its roads with so many insults) (290). However, this original
letter has not been recovered and thus the details that are being imparted remain
unverifiable. Unfortunately, much of the scholarship that surrounds the founding
of San Lorenzo de los Negros uncritically relies on the detail that Pérez de Ribas
is a surrogate to.
Laurencio describes the maroons as barbarians and in need of God’s
punishment. Early in the narrative, Pérez de Ribas’ already secondhand narrative
gives a description of a scene in which Laurencio was himself also not present.
In this scene, the insolent rebels kill a nearby Spanish resident with a blow to the
head for not cooperating in their ongoing guerilla warfare: “después le acabaron
de matar con tanta inhumanidad, que el que le hirió con el terciado lamía la
sangre de él, y los demás bebieron también la sangre del desdichado,

8
This process of censorship has been noted in the introduction to the 1896 edition of this text (iii).
24
cogiéndola juntas las manos” (after they killed him with so much inhumanity, he
licked the blood from the sword he had killed him with. And the rest joined in
drinking the blood of this unlucky man, catching it in their hands) (284). To add
insult to injury, the rebels go on to make a flag from the dead Spaniard’s hair and
escape with a Spanish prisoner and six captive Indian women that were in the
vicinity (284-85).
Laurencio’s notably omniscient narration then extends to the voice of
Yanga himself. Speaking to the Spanish prisoner, the rebel leader declares: “No
temas, español, que has visto mi cara y así no puedes morir; con toda esta
autoridad hablaba el denegrido Yanga” (‘Don’t be afraid, Spaniard. Because you
have seen my face, you cannot die’; the utterly blackened Yanga spoke with all
of that authority) (285). Here, with the use of “denegrido,” I argue that the
arrogant barbarity of the rebel leader is tied to the extreme end of a spectrum of
blackness, as the root verb (denegrir, to blacken) alludes to a process of
darkening (“Denegrir”).
9
The deployment of the past participle (denegrido) in this
instance, suggests that Yanga be understood as having been made completely
black by someone or something. Owing to the evolving and complex structures of
racial stratification already underway in New Spain at the beginning of the
seventeenth century, Yanga’s utter blackness is presented as differentiated from
the blacks that were part of the Spanish expedition against him—an expedition
that, according to Laurencio, also included Indians, mestizos and mulatos (285).

9
Though coming from the same Latin root, this is not to be confused with Spanish verb for
denigrate (denigrar), as in to defame or offend (“Denigrar”). Denegrir does not carry with it a
moral judgment. This distinction is not maintained in English as to denigrate, at one point,
accommodated both definitions (“Denigrate”).
25
Against this utterly dark and barbaric force, Laurencio was not worried. This is
because God was on the side of the Spaniards. Laurencio had assured this in
the days leading up to the assaults by personally taking confession for the
ethnically heterogenic fighting force that would accompany the Spanish
leadership into combat: “muchas de las confesiones que entonces se hicieron,
fueron de personas que en muchos años no habían tratado de reconciliarse con
Dios, sino dar larga rienda á sus pasiones. Y así pienso, que si en aquel estado
fueran á la pelea, no teníamos que esperar, sino temer el justo castigo de Dios,
por mano de aquellos crueles barbaros” (many of the confessions that were
made then were from people that had not tried to reconcile themselves with God
in many years, only straying further from Him. And so I think, that if they had
gone into the battle in that state, we wouldn’t of had to wait, only fear the just
punishment of God at the hands of those cruel barbarians) (289).
Riva Palacios’ Treinta y Tres Negros is written over two hundred years
after Pérez de Ribas’ account and seemingly relies on it for much of its detail. Its
treatment of the maroon rebels, however, can largely be read as a critical
intervention with the previous account. Yanga, for example, is described as “el
espíritu de aquella revolución” (the spirit of that revolution) and his soldiers as
confident in “la justicia de su causa” (the justice of their cause) (67). Like Pérez
de Ribas did via Laurencio, he also ventriloquizes Yanga, but in a much more
respectful manner. While deliberating with his chief military advisor Francisco de
la Matosa, it is the bloodthirsty Spanish troops that are painted as unreasonable.
Relating information received from a friend and fellow Angolan slave, de la
26
Matosa says, “Los blancos quieren nuestra muerte … viene una expedición
contra nosotros” (The whites want our death…there is an expedition coming to
fight us) (66). After a discussion of potential military strategies, Yanga offers that
they write a letter stating “que queremos nuestra libertad, que si nos la
conceden, si no nos vuelven a nuestros amos crueles, si nos dan un pueblo para
nosotros, depondremos las armas” (that we want our liberty, that if they give this
to us and not return us to our cruel masters, and if they give us a town of our
own, we will put down our weapons) (66). In contrast, Pérez de Ribas describes
this same letter as being “llena de notables arrogancias” (full of notable
arrogances) and bragging about past victories in order to taunt the Spanish.
Albeit with a much different tone, Riva Palacio then goes on to describe the same
back and forth battle contained in the Laurencio segment of Pérez de Ribas’
account. However, there is a significant divergence when the terms of treaty are
disclosed.
In Pérez de Ribas’ account, Laurencio was called back to Mexico City and
his letter ends before the conflict is resolved. Juan Pérez, another Jesuit priest, is
sent to complete the mission. In the conclusion, there is a need to encircle the
narrative within the terms of a process known as reducción, a concept described
by the anthropologist William Hanks as one, associated with unassimilated
indigenous communities within the context of New Spain, that “implies
pacification and subordination to the new rule of law and to the hierarchical
relations of colonial society” (2). Wanting to distance this term from the erroneous
assumption that it necessarily speaks to a reduction of the number, Hanks traces
27
its roots to the idea of becoming convinced or persuaded.
10
In relation to the
indigenous population of New Spain, the strategy of reducción was two-fold. The
initial task was the “relocat[ion of] the indios into centralized towns called pueblos
reducidos (ordered towns),” followed by the shaping of the “dispositions and
conduct” of the indigenous to align with a Christian doctrine (Hanks 2-3).
Pérez de Ribas’ intent to marry this concept of reducción to the narrative
of Yanga is evident in the title he gives the chapter: “Relación de la misión á que
fue enviado el P. Juan Laurencio, acompañando una escuadra de soldados que
salía á la reducción de negros forajidos y salteadores” (Report of the mission in
which Father Juan Laurencio, accomponied by a squadron of soldiers, was sent
to reduce black outlaws and highway robbers) (285). But it is the conclusion of
the narrative, specifically how the terms of the peace are represented, that bears
this out even more:
Finalmente, el Virrey les concedió un partido, porque suplicaron
estos morenos, y el partido fue: que las cabezas y caudillos de los
forajidos entregarían á los que se hubiesen huido de sus dueños y
amos, y que para que aquella serranía no sirviese más de ser
madriguera de forajidos, se les concediese á los que fuesen libres
de ellos, para sus mujeres é hijos, otro puesto acomodado y no
muy distante de donde antes habían formado su pueblo; quedando
de allí adelante obligados, á que si algún negro esclavo y huido
aportarse por aquella serranía tan áspera, ellos lo recogerían y
buscarían por los montes y lo entregarían á su dueño, dándoles
una, aunque corta ayuda de costa por su trabajo. Y finalmente,
ellos protestaron que eran cristianos y vasallos del Rey, y como á
tales el Virrey les señalase el que hubiese de hacer oficio de
justicia en su pueblo, y Cura para lo espiritual de sus almas, con
que ellos quedarían contentos y aquella tierra gozaría de paz, y

10
Hanks turns to Sebastián de Covarrubias’ definition in the Tesoro de la lengua castellana o
española (1995) [1611] where both reducción and reducido are defined with the verb
convencer(se). Its proper etymological roots can be traced to the idea of restoration or “leading
back” from the Latin reducere (Del Rosal 534).
28
estaría libre de salteadores y ruido de guerra. Por las grandes
conveniencias que en esto concurrían, hubo de conceder el Virrey
lo que estos morenos pedían, y quedaron en su pueblo y puesto en
que están como trescientos vecinos, que edificaron su Iglesia, y es
feligresía que pertenece al beneficiado más cercano. Y con esto se
dio fin á esta empresa, muy propia de los ministerios de la
Compañía, y estos morenos están hoy pacíficos y en posesión de
sus tierras, y muy sujetos en todo lo que por sus superiores se les
manda y ordena.

(Finally the viceroy granted them a truce because these morenos
had begged for it. And the truce was: that the leaders of the outlaws
would turn over those that had fled from their owners and masters
and that mountainous area would no longer serves as refuge for
the outlaws. He would grant to those of them that were free, for
their women and children, another suitable location not very far
from where they had formed their town before. And that they would
remain from then on obligated, if any black slave that shows up in
that thick mountainous area, to track, capture and return them to
their owner, and they would be given a small amount of
compensation for their work. And finally, they protested that they
were Christians and vassals of the King, and as such the viceroy
would appoint who would officiate justice in their town and the
priest for the spiritual betterment of their souls, with which they
would remain content and that land would enjoy peace and be free
of highway robber and the noise of war. The greatest of all the
things that came to pass, was that the viceroy granted that which
the morenos asked for, and that they remained in their town and
location in which they are now like three hundred neighbours, and
that they built their church, and it is a parish that belongs to the
closest benefice. And with this the undertaking was over, very
typical of the ministers of the Society. And today those morenos are
peaceful and in possession of their lands and good subjects in all
that their superiors ask and order of them.) (292-293)

In this conclusion that is derived from no noted archival source, the
maroons are described as outlaws and highway robbers that, thanks to the work
of the Jesuits, have been now pacified and turned into proper, obedient subjects
of the King. Alerting suspicion to the historical accuracy of the representation is
the fact that the terms suggested above are incongruent with much of the treaty
29
that has survived in the archive. Furthermore, this incongruence is contoured in a
way that supports the reading of these events as conforming to a typical
reducción. The surviving treaty makes no mention of the need to return all slaves
that had fled prior to the agreement, only those who had fled in the six months
prior. Given the fact that Yanga and his community had lived in the region for the
last thirty years, it would be safe to assume that this number would have been a
very small percentage of the population. To represent the conditions of the peace
without this caveat is to avoid appearing as if the maroons had any hand, or
perhaps an upper hand, in what the viceroy ultimately granted.
Along this line, since Pérez de Ribas’ account maintains only the it is the
viceroy that will appoint the chief justice, there is no space to articulate that the
maroons, while they agreed to pay tribute and come to the defense of the
broader colony, had managed to negotiate terms that allowed them to chose their
own land, as well as their own governors and representative magistrates. Even
more remarkable an omission that, if included, would make it impossible to
characterize these events as a reducción, is the fact that no Spaniards, with the
exception of Franciscan friars and the designated chief justice, are allowed in the
town except on market days.
Another suspicious rhetorical decision that draws attention to potential
historical inaccuracies within the account is the temporal frame Pérez de Ribas
choses for his narrative. The text asserts that the battles between the Spanish
colonial authority and Yanga’s community began on the 22
nd
of February. And by
Laurencio’s accounting, we know that the on-again-off-again battles lasted
30
several days, and most likely more than a few weeks as there had to be time
enough for him to be recalled to the distant Mexico City and for another priest to
travel to replace him. In Pérez de Ribas summary, however, he maintains that
there was a prolonged period between when the new priest had joined the troops
and when the agreement was reached: “duró algún tiempo el acabar de limpiar
esta tierra de negros bandoleros para dejarla quieta, y los caminos seguros para
trajinar por ellos, en que se trabajó mucho” (it took some time and hard work to
finish ridding this land of black bandits and leave it quiet, and the roads secure
enough for transportation) (292). While this prolonged struggle helps to underline
the arduous but valuable work of the Jesuit mission that Pérez de Ribas’ larger
project seeks to bring attention to, it does not conform well to the fact that, as
noted above, the surviving treaty is dated March 8, just two weeks after the
combat is said to have begun.
11

Riva Palacios, on the other hand, does not reference Laurencio or any
other religious intermediary, and thus its narrative is not framed around the idea
of reducción. However, his conclusion to Yanga’s portion of the narrative, though
more accurate in relation to the treaty, still similarly supports the idea that the
maroons were the party to whom the terms were clearly dictated. In Riva
Palacios’ view of the events, Yanga “proponía una especie de convenio, en el
que había mucho de debilidad” (proposed a kind of agreement in which there
was much weakness) (67): “[Los Esclavos] protestaban no haber tenido

11
There is also the curiously specific request in the San Lorenzo treaty for a priest from the
Franciscan order (read: not Jesuit). See note 2 in this chapter.
31
intención de faltar a Dios ni al rey, de quien eran leales vasallos; se
comprometían a entregar en lo sucesivo todos los esclavos fugitivos a sus
dueños, mediante una remuneración, y pedían un pueblo en que vivir con sus
hijos y mujeres, y en el cual recibirían al cura y al justicia que se les nombrase”
(The slaves protested that they had not had the intention to fail God nor the King,
to which they were loyal vassals; they committed themselves to return to their
owners any new runaway slaves, in exchange for a reward, and they asked for a
town in which to live with their with their children and women, and in which they
would receive the priest and the officer of justice that you appoint them) (67).
Interestingly, Riva Palacios uses the Yanga narrative to highlight the
culture of fear in Mexico City in relation to rebel slaves in the early seventeenth
century. As he tells it, in the three years that followed
el nombre de Yanga y de Francisco de la Matosa pasaban de una
a otra boca pronunciados con espanto…[la gente] decía que
durante las frías noches de febrero, misteriosas tropas rondaban
alrededor de las ciudades como ejércitos de fantasmas evocados
por un conjuro, algunos afirmaban que cuando todos los habitantes
de México dormían, ellos desde los terrados de sus casas habían
visto en las montañas de los alrededores, hogueras que no podían
menos de ser contraseñas, y habían escuchado los salvajes
aullidos de los negros liberados.

(the name of Yanga and Francisco de la Matosa passed from one
mouth to other, pronounced with fright … the people said that
during cold nights of February, mysterious troops prowled around
the cities like armies of ghosts evoked by a conjurer. Some affirmed
that when the people of Mexico slept, they had seen, from their own
rooftops, fires in the surrounding mountains that couldn’t be less
than codes, and that they had heard the savage howls of the freed
blacks.) (68)

Here, Riva Palacios is deliberately connecting Yanga to the historically
32
documented rumors of a slave uprising that circulated in Mexico City in 1612.
12

Similar to the instance in 1537 noted in this chapter’s epigraph, the supposed
conspirators were captured before any plot could be enacted. According to Rivas
Palacios, “veintinueve negros y cuatro negras fueron ejecutados en el mismo día
y hora en la plaza mayor de la ciudad” (twenty-nine black men and four black
women were executed on the same day and at the same time in the city’s main
square) (68). Executed by way of the gallows, here are the treinta y tres negros
of his title, sarcastically referred to within the story as an “ornato digno de la
grandeza de la Audiencia gobernadora” (a worthy ornament representing the
greatness of the high court) (68). As the people mulled around the square “los
verdugos comenzaron a bajar los cadáveres, y con un hacha a cortarles las
cabezas, que se fijaban en escarpias … se estaban castigando cadáveres y
derramando la descompuesta sangre de los muertos. Aquella escena era
asquerosa” (the executioners began to take down the bodies and cut off the
heads with an axe, which they fixed on hooks … they kept punishing the dead
bodies and spilling the decomposed blood of the dead) (68). With this gruesome
detail, Riva Palacios has inverted Pérez de Ribas’ conceit regarding the
barbarous maroons and the righteous Spanish authority and further dissociated
nineteenth century liberal Mexican thought from the colonial period.
Yanga’s success, and the Spanish colonial administration’s chosen route
of managing the crisis of potential mass revolt, proved to be a model for time.

12
Davidson’s archival work substantiates Riva Palacios’ claim that the threat of black violence
and retribution for enslavement, whether real or imagined, continued to be felt and recorded
throughout New Spain (98, 98n14).
33
Though never with a documented treaty as restrictive to the colony as that of San
Lorenzo de los Negros, in an effort to isolate and contain rebels, the colonial
administration of New Spain would go onto allow the foundation of other former-
maroon towns in New Spain: San Miguel de Soyaltepeque (1670); Mandinga
(1762); Nuestra Señora de los Morenos de Amapa (1769); and Cuijla (Landers
132).
13

The relationship between the blacks of the post-San Lorenzo towns and
the surrounding property owners and the colonial administration was certainly
complicated. Patrick Carroll’s archival research is a crucial component in the
development of this picture of a New World in flux as related to negotiations with
threats of radical blackness. The maroons that would eventually found Mandinga,
then later Nuestra Señora de los Morenos de Amapa, had ongoing arrangements
with the surrounding communities. He cites depositions leading up to the town’s
founding that spoke to good mutually beneficial relations between the maroons
and a nearby blacksmith, carpenter and farmer—all mestizos (497). Carroll goes
on to document some instances of productive relations between the maroons
and the district’s white elite: “the district magistrate, Don Andrés Fernández
Otañes … refrained from deploying the district militia against them, was a
constant source of information, and supposedly even provided them with arms.
Fernández Otañes also acted as the runaways’ extra-official intermediary with
the crown, drafting and forwarding their petitions to the royal audiencia in Mexico

13
In the case of Cuijla, located in the present-day Mexican state of Guerrero, no treaty has been
discovered. Both Beltrán’s and Carroll’s archival research notes it as a maroon stronghold since
the sixteenth century. In the 1792 they are recognized as “free black tributaries, indicating that the
maroons had officially received their liberty, and that their town had a royal charter” (Carroll 493).
34
City” (497). He notes the blacks reciprocated by, among other ways, acting “as
[Fernández Otañes’] agents in the local vanilla-gathering trade [,] serv[ing] as
armed guards for the district’s cotton warehouses [and] harass[ing] rival
merchants who tried to break his monopoly of the area’s vanilla trade” (497).
Speaking to the level of comfort the maroons had developed in dealing
with the colonial administration, when New Spain was facing a potential military
threat from the British navy in 1762, the maroons presented themselves to the
viceroy and offered their military assistance in exchange for their freedom.
Though this arrangement was initially granted, it was reneged upon after the
British threat had passed. The maroons, with the continued support of Fernández
Otañes’ would have to wait seven years before the more enduring treaty forming
Nuestra Señora de los Morenos de Amapa could be agreed upon (Carroll 498-
99).
To demonstrate the rhetorical shifts that the need for the legal recognition
of such communities enacted, Jane Landers traces the archive to uncover
correspondence regarding a dispute about the destruction of property belonging
to San Miguel de Soyaltepeque in July of 1695. Of note is not only the San
Miguel official’s description of himself as a representative of a “República de
Negros” in his letter to then Viceroy Gaspar de la Cerda, but the viceroy’s reply
that addresses the leaders of San Miguel as members of said república (Landers
130; 145n68).
Attempting to decipher to what extent the above noted address as a
“republic” should be read as only a pragmatic tactic to neutralize an angry and
35
threatening component of society is, for the arguments of my dissertation,
ultimately inconsequential. Landers helps us arrive at the most important point:
that by whatever means,
for a brief historical moment in the seventeenth century, in the
viceroyalty of New Spain, blacks represented themselves as a
republic analogous to that of Spaniards and Indios, and the viceroy
and Spain recognized them as such … However truncated this
republican moment … blacks had laid successful claim to the civic
values associated with a república y común. (112)

I would qualify Landers’ use of “blacks” by adding that it was “radical blacks” that
were able to represent themselves in this way. Yanga’s narrative nonetheless
remains especially unique within New Spain, not only for its level of recognized
autonomy and sovereignty, but also for its psychic and geographic distance from
the colonial project. This last point is highlighted by the fact that prior to reaching
an accord with the colonial administration for the founding of Nuestra Señora de
los Morenos de Amapa, the maroons had to come down “off the secluded hilltop
where Mandiga had been located to a lower, more exposed site on the bank of
the Amapa River” (Carroll 499).
If one is in search of an appropriate corollary in the context of the broader
hemisphere, one’s mind might move to the example of Haiti, commonly referred
to as the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere. However, the Republic
of Haiti was created as a result of an absolute military defeat in 1804 that France
could not even officially (psychically) recognize until more than two decades later
(1825) in a treaty that, under the threat of France’s regrouped military force, was
economically crippling to the young Haitian nation (McCloy 240). And while the
36
hemisphere maintains a rich history of smaller-scale slave revolts and
resistances, only a small handful of successful maroon communities have been
recorded, and even fewer have been negotiated by treaty.
The most recognized examples of such negotiated communities occurred
in Guadeloupe, Brazil, Cuba, Jamaica, Ecuador, Panama, Venezuela, Surinam,
and Colombia (R. Price). The largest of which was Quilombo dos Palmares in
Brazil.
14
It lasted for almost the entire seventeenth century and at its peak is
estimated to have contained within its various compounds around 10,000
escaped slaves (Kent 170-85; Carroll 491). In 1678 they signed a treaty that
recognized their autonomy only to have their lands encroached upon and the
resumption of intense and bloody battles less than a year later. Factions
developed amongst the maroons and in 1695, Zambi, the leader of the most
radical resistance, was captured and decapitated. The public display of his head
by the Portuguese marked the end of the largest-known community of escaped
African slaves (Kent 184-87).
The other maroon population to achieve both great numbers and legal
recognition which must be considered in order to further differentiate San
Lorenzo de los Negros is the Leeward and Windward Maroons of Jamaica.
Ironically, this island’s principal maroon communities originated when England

14
A Maroon community in Brazil is often referred to as a mocambo or quilombo. According to
Eduardo Silva and Kent, the term was adopted after the colonial period, while mocambo,
originating from the Ambundu (a people located in what is now Angola) word for hideout (mu-
kambo), can be traced back to the early colonial period in Brazil (111). The word quilombo has
since migrated into the Spanish as slang for both “brothel” and “racket” (as in noise) and is
especially common in the South American. Its earliest recorded usage for this purpose was in
Argentina at the end of the 19
th
century (“Quilombo”). Slang expressions for “to frequent brothels”
(quilombear) and “one who frequents brothels” (quilombero) have also developed (“Quilombo”).
37
took the island from Spain in 1655, causing many slaves and their Spanish
masters to flee together to the island’s Blue Mountains. The majority of the
Spanish died off in less than five years and the maroons remained and
flourished, albeit in a state of constant warfare with the English (then British)
colonial authorities (Carroll 491-92). These nearly century-long hostilities are
known as the First Maroon Wars and would end in two successive treaties in
1739 and 1740 (Patterson, “Slave and Slave Revolts” 246). In these negotiations,
the Leeward and Windward Maroons were respectively led by the iconic
rebellious slaves Cudjoe and Quao. However, unlike in the treaty that developed
San Lorenzo de los Negros, the terms were largely dictated by the oppressor
and, beyond a freedom to live in a state of legally recognized freedom, were far
less favorable than those negotiated by Yanga. In the Jamaican treaties, both
maroon groups are addressed as “rebels” and the conditions are framed not as a
truce but as “submission,” “surrender,” and “subjection” (Kopytoff 366; 378; 80).
Additionally, the Jamaican maroons had to accept that “four white men”
appointed and paid by the British governor “shall constantly live and reside” in
each of the maroon towns established by the agreements in order to maintain
“correspondence with the inhabitants of this island” (Kopytoff 379; 382-3; 371;
375). These officials were paid a sum of two hundred pounds annually to perform
this duty (Kopytoff 375). In order to facilitate the ease of their communication it
was specified in Cudjoe’s treaty that “Cudjoe, with his people, shall cut, clear,
and keep open, large and convenient roads from Trelawny Town to
Westmoreland and St. James’, and if possible to St. Elizabeth’s” (Kopytoff 370).
38
And once Cudjoe, Quao, and a small list of other captains of under their
command had died, it was agreed upon that the colonial governor would be
empowered to select the new leader of the maroon region. In other words, in the
timespan of one generation, the colonial administration would gain even more
control over the leadership of the maroons.
Furthermore, the granted land was selected by the governor and was of
relatively poor quality (Kopytoff 151, 275). In contrast, Yanga and his community,
expert farmers by all accounts and extraordinarily familiar with the terrain, had a
much better deal as they were able to settle where they themselves indicated
(“Las condiciones”). To add insult to injury, Cudjoe’s settlement was named by
the British Trelawny Town to honor Edward Trelawny, the then relatively new
British governor of Jamaica (Kopytoff 380).
Another crucial difference is the scope of the Jamaican maroon’s runaway
slave catching enterprise. Not only did the newly legitimized communities have to
return any future runaway slaves who fled to that community, as was the case
with San Lorenzo de los Negros and most such treaties in the New World, this
treaty dictated that they “use their best endeavors to take, kill, suppress, or
destroy, either by themselves, or jointly with any other number of men
commanded on that service by his excellency the governor or commander in
chief for the time being, all [runaway slaves] wheresoever they be throughout this
island” (Kopytoff 369).
15
Paid as much as ten schillings per returned slave

15
Quao’s agreement contains the same intent with adjusted language: “captain Quao, and his
people, shall be ready on all commands the governor, or his commander in chief for the time

39
(Kopytoff 373), through monetary incentivizing the region’s fiercest proponents of
anti-colonial domination were being converted into active agents of the state
policing mechanism.

Most importantly for the direction of my argument, however, is the fact that
Yanga’s narrative has no corollary whatsoever to the maroon experience in the
history of African slavery in the Thirteen Colonies and the United States where
no slave revolt led to a negotiated enclave articulated within the legal register of
the oppressor. This difference brings to the surface a notable incongruence with
perceived notions of the formation of black subjects in the New World. The
stakes for the differentiation I am offering are particularly high because the
position of the slave remains the foundation of a great deal of scholarship within
black studies.
Much of this scholarship, in some way or another, passes through the
positions marked by either Frantz Fanon’s body of work or Orlando Patterson’s
comparative study Slavery and Social Death (1982). The dominant idea to
emerge out of Fanon’s work is that of anti-blackness, or the idea, as expressed in
Black Skin White Masks, that the black is ontologically impossible. This is related
to the work of Patterson that defines the slave as agentless through the process
of absolute domination, natal alienation, and general dishonor. Patterson’s
project aims to uncover the essential nature of slavery across all time and space.

being, shall send him, to suppress and destroy all other party or parties of rebellious negroes, that
now are or shall from time to time run away from their respective owners” (Kryptoff 379).
40
However, those interested in studies of blackness have generally disregarded
Patterson’s claims of universality and applied them specifically to African slavery
in the New World.
Lewis Gordon via Fanon, in part, grounds his conversation regarding the
non-existence of black life around the ideas of Hegel. He argues that per Hegel’s
thought, blacks have been constructed since the beginning of discourses on race
as “either Europe’s contradiction or contrary” with the “divide between the worlds”
being characterized as “not one of Being and less-Being but instead one of
Being and non-Being. Its divide is absolute. It is a divide between Being and
Nothingness” (28). Frank Wilderson, for another example, stands in complete
agreement.
This line of thought and the ways of seeing it informs, grounded in the
experience of the agentless slave, has been challenged by those in search of a
different framework to register the performative resistances in the daily life of the
slave. Hortense Spillers clearly articulates the foundation of this position as
allowing for “sustained human and social activity” within bondage, via a critique
of Fanon:
The Fanonian narrative of the Antillean supposes that this “he”
spends every waking moment in the presence of whites, and while,
to a certain extent, this must be so, insofar as the cultural
apparatus is commandeered beyond his control, if not his sights, he
nevertheless executes an entire human being whose nuanced
particularities escape calculation beforehand (“All the Things” 391).
41
Fred Moten arrives at a similar space by celebrating the idea of the
fugitive, or that which escapes framing. In “The Case of Blackness,” Moten
circles around the philosophical ruminations of jazz pianist Cecil Taylor to
articulate his own decidedly optimistic view of the radical possibility of black
social life, what he calls an “aesthetic sociality.” This, in alignment with Spillers, is
a departure from what he reads as a discourse dominated by the “cultural and
political discourse on black pathology” grounded in Fanon (193, 177). Achille
Mbembe’s theory of Necropolitics also invokes the fugitive, albeit in a very
different register. Working to broaden and critique Foucault’s notions of biopower
in a way that highlights death, he finds a disruptive elusiveness in the practice of
mass suicides in New World slavery (38-39).
However, within all of these formulations the possibility of San Lorenzo de
los Negros, even in the embrace of the fugitive, remains impossible. Some might
argue that such a sustained and legally recognized maroon community is such a
rare exception that it is not worth adjusting the paradigm. This, clearly, was the
view of Orlando Patterson. While he himself had done substantial work on the
maroon communities of his native Jamaica (“Slavery and Slave Revolts”), the
fugitive slave was largely ignored in his aforementioned project Slavery and
Social Death. This gap has essentially been carried forward by all of those reliant
on his work as a foundation. Responding to this, my dissertation discovers its
theoretical possibility within this space between being and non-being that San
Lorenzo de los Negros, and to varying degrees other legally established former
maroon enclaves, helps to articulate. In order to do so, the following question
42
must first be addressed: what in the critical practices generated by black studies
has compromised its vision of this possibility?
The answer to this question is grounded in how the discourses of black
studies have come to know the hemisphere itself. In this context, a picture of the
black diaspora located in the Western Hemisphere comes, of course, most
strongly from Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double
Consciousness (1993). In it, Gilroy seeks to destabilize a tendency toward
essentialized ideas of ethnicity that circle around “authentic” identity as
articulated in mid-90s cultural studies. He theorizes a “black Atlantic” as fractal in
its transcultural formation from the start. Gilroy mobilizes the idea of the ship that
carried slaves in the Middle Passage as representative, in its crew and routes (he
carries this word throughout his work to give a different resonance to the idea of
roots), of this messy, transnational ontological moment. While, generally
speaking, his push for nuance remains a valuable signpost, his work nonetheless
relies on a narrative of slavery that privileges the United States and the
Caribbean, and thus the legacy of modernity that it inherits from a Europe that
does not, in his imagination, include Spain (46).
I will not rehearse here the critiques that have been directed at Gilroy in
the interest of expanding his mapping.
16
I will, however, speak directly to Gilroy’s
silence regarding the role of Spain in the development of slavery in the New

16
For collections of work addressing this see: Always Elsewhere: Travels of the Black Atlantic.
Ed. Alasdair Pettinger (Cassell 1998); Beyond the Black Atlantic: Relocating Modernization and
Technology. Eds. Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio (Routledge 2006); The Black and Green
Atlantic: Cross-currents of the African and Irish Diasporas. Eds. David Lloyd and Peter D. O’Neill
(Palgrave Macmillan 2009).
43
World. Simply put, his conception of European modernity completely ignores
Spain and the fact that slavery in the Western Hemisphere predates the
Enlightenment that is so central to his arguments.
While Spain is not dealt with, Columbus is briefly mentioned twice in ways
that are extraordinarily indicative of the blindness that Gilroy’s work produces.
The mention of a prominent member of Columbus’ expedition, Pedro Niño,
allows Gilroy to create the umbrella for his work: “Pedro Nino [sic] was also an
African. The history of the black Atlantic since then … provides a means to
reexamine the problems of nationality, location, identity and historical memory”
(16). In the second instance, Columbus (and the black Atlantic he opens up)
appears to help argue a blindness in the “ethical and intellectual heritage of the
West” to the teleological connection between the premodern “order of racial
difference” and that which would structure modernity: “the figure of Columbus
does not appear [from the perspective of the West] to compliment the standard
pairing of Luther and Copernicus that is implicitly used to mark the limits of this
particular understanding of modernity” (49). The next sentence moves quickly to
Locke, Descartes and Rousseau. Then Gilroy is on, in the following paragraph, to
Kant and Hegel.
With his move away from the nation, it first becomes impossible for Gilroy
to dwell on Pedro Niño as having been born in Spain of African heritage. This
would force a broader idea of inheritance that, ironically, he is arguing for, though
in a different register, in the second mention of Columbus. Gilroy thus seems
equipped with a time machine that allows him to use Columbus to introduce the
44
always-intertwined relation between blackness and discourses of the
Enlightenment while moving past historicities that complicate his version of a
“fractal structure of the transcultural” (4).
Here, it is important to remember that Mexico’s participation in an African
slave trade peaks during the Iberian Union of 1580-1640 when it was able to take
advantage of Portugal’s familiarity with the African coastline and maritime
expertise. By 1640 there is a rapid decline in the importation of new slaves. To
put Mexico’s relation to slavery in the context of England and what would
become the United States, Jamestown is founded in 1607 and slavery is first
codified in the North American colonies in 1642 (Massachusetts). The institution
begins to develop in the remaining colonies over the second half of the
seventeenth century. England’s investment in New World slavery beyond the
thirteen North American colonies begins in the 1620s with the settling of Saint
Kitts (1623) and Barbados (1627). This enterprise would grow as it expanded its
empire in the hemisphere with the acquisition of, among the larger territories,
Antigua (1632), Bahamas (1647) and Jamaica (1655). To put this in the
perspective with which Gilroy is dealing with, John Locke, one of the earliest
European thinkers whose ideas helped to shape the project of Enlightenment,
does not publish his foundational works until 1689 (Essay Concerning Human
Understanding; Two Treatises of Civil Government; and A Letter Concerning
Toleration).
In other words, the infrastructure created by England and what would
become the United States developed well after New Spain experiments with
45
slavery, solidifies its system, expands it, and virtually completes the importation
of new slaves. To place Yanga’s rebellion within this same context, it begins one
hundred years before the institution of slavery can be said to start its maturation
in the United States, and more than two hundred years before Eli Whitney’s
invention of the cotton gin (1793) and the Haitian Revolution (1804), two events
that would greatly shape the investment in and tenor of slavery in the United
States.
By using slavery as a tool to reformulate ideas of modernity and the
Enlightenment, Gilroy encloses New World slavery within this particular
discourse and ignores the earlier manifestations that complicate this reading.
Thus, Gilroy’s work presents a paradox, for as it seeks to avoid ethnic absolutes
it creates a terminology that does not encourage thinking difference in the case
of black subjects at different moments throughout the Americas. This is
particularly true given that while Gilroy respects cultural and ethnic difference, the
narrative he deploys continues to give weight to the Middle Passage as the
ontological moment of blackness for all of the Americas. While this is an
extraordinarily valid and valuable coordinate within the world lines of England
(later Great Britain) and the United States, and in later iterations of Latin
America, it cannot contain the idea that, at least in the case of New Spain, what
would become “the black” had been prepared for in thought before the ships, or
routes/roots in the parlance of Gilroy, entered the picture. However, for black
studies to give, even slightly, on the primacy of the Middle Passage is to
surrender a unifying ontological moment, a process that might be viewed as
46
extraordinarily decentering as it further muddles ideas of being and blackness.
So it is not surprising that more than twenty years after Gilroy’s work, black
studies specifically, and cultural and American studies more generally, find
themselves in a similar trench.

The project of María Elena Martínez in Genealogical Fictions (2011) is
crucial in undoing this critical misunderstanding. She begins with the same
premise sketched out above: “Spanish colonialism began long before the
emergence of the politics of nationhood, liberalism, and Enlightenment-inspired
universalist concepts of freedom, equality, rights, progress, and citizenship” (15).
She then goes on to relate how the philosophy behind and implementation of
racial stratification in early New Spain was in large part informed by Spain’s
practice of limpieza de sangre, a purity standard that sought to identify a
subject’s Jewish or Muslim heritage and privilege those perceived to be
cristianos viejos (“Old Christians”). Martínez, with the understanding that multiple
historicities have played into the development of colonialism, sets about diligently
untangling the unique historicity of the Spanish colonial project from uncritical
inheritances of colonialism writ large.
Martínez asserts that although one cannot carry ideas of “race” from the
Iberian Peninsula to the Spanish colonies in the New World, one has to
recognize that a discourse that could handle the burgeoning idea of “race” had
already begun centuries earlier—first in an attempt to rid the Peninsula of the
“impure” Jew and later the Muslim. In one of the many examples she offers to
47
support this, Martínez notes that free and rather acculturated blacks and mulatos
in New Spain were often referred to as ladinos, a “term having been used in
Spain to refer to Muslims and Jews who mastered the Castilian language or were
Hispanicized to the point that they could not be distinguished from authentic
Spaniards” (161). Jane Landers offers an example from beyond Martínez’s work
that speaks to the cautiousness with which Spain treated the potential threat of
Muslim subjects in their early experimentations with New World slavery. Landers
points out that in 1521 slaves from the Senegambia region of Africa staged the
first large-scale slave rebellion on the island of Hispaniola leading “Spain
temporarily to forbid the importation of Africans from areas of Muslim influence”
(117).
Martínez thus prepares us to understand not only the existence of an
episteme rooted in the Iberian Peninsula that played a large role in governing the
creation of black subjects in the early New World, but that within this framework
of knowledge there existed a predisposition to keeping identity secrets that would
transfer to the creation of a racial caste system in New Spain and how the threat
of radical blackness was managed.
In order to help theorize a secreted radical blackness and understand its
contours, I turn to the discourse of psychoanalysis—specifically, to the
perspectives of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. In their writing and clinical
practices, they explored Freud’s ideas away from what they felt was an
unproductive reliance on the Oedipal complex. It is their thoughts regarding the
48
process of incorporation that are most useful for the arguments of my
dissertation.
This is not an endorsement f the psychoanalytic register as the only
approach to differentiate ideas of blackness throughout the Americas. However,
as Spillers argues, despite critiques centered on the incapacity to speak to
subjects beyond its Euro-centric roots, psychoanalysis is a helpful paradigm that
simply needs to “evolve a language appropriate to the subjects differently
constructed from the classical moment of psychoanalytic theory” (“All the Things”
404). Spillers acutely sees value in this evolution’s ability to particularize and
untangle the lifeworlds and world lines of otherwise essentialized identities in a
way that fights against the “contrary view which flattens out black into the same
thing despite time, weather, geography, and the entire range of complicating
factors that go into the fashioning of persons” (410). Abraham and Torok
certainly offer tools to complicate and advance the discourse of psychoanalysis
in such a manner. In the work of my dissertation in particular, they help me to
address the following central question: how would we explain, in the register of
theories of the mind, Mexico’s and the United States’ distinctly different
relationships with their rebellious slaves?

Abraham and Torok’s first task within this terrain is to separate the
concept of incorporation from that of introjection. Most simply, they see
incorporation as pointing to “a fantasy” and introjection to “a process” (125). This
difference is most clearly articulated using the experience of death and mourning;
49
but it is not limited to these experiences, as, for them, secrets or untellable things
can evoke a similar process. Introjection, in the case of loss, is the idea of using
language and/or action to substitute for the vacancy left by death. It is the idea of
healthy mourning—events like wakes are designed to fill this emptiness, this
loss, with a communal ritual that involves filling one’s mouth (the vacant place)
with words or food. Community and this idea of sharing one’s thoughts about the
loss are important here.
Incorporation, on the other hand, points to an incapacity to healthily mourn
and to the absence of a community. This comes about when “the loss is of a type
that prohibits being communicated” (129; my emphasis). When there is such a
prohibition on language, “the words that cannot be uttered, the scenes that
cannot be recalled, the tears that cannot be shed—everything [is] swallowed
along with the trauma that led to the loss” (130). All of this remains “swallowed
and preserved” inside what the authors describe as a crypt, as an intrapsychic
secret or fantasy (130). The aim of this fantasy is “to repair—in the realm of the
imaginary, of course—the injury that really occurred” (134).
The crypt, for Abraham and Torok, has a secret topography where “the
unspeakable words never cease their subversive action” (132). It is described as
“an enclave between [the dynamic unconscious and the ego], a kind of artificial
unconscious, lodged in the very midst of the ego [where] nothing at all must filter
to the outside world [and where] the ego is given the task of cemetery guard”
(159). Importantly, the subject who resorts to incorporation is not the hysteric
despite some surface similarities. The person that has turned to incorporation is
50
utilizing a preservative repression that protects a preexisting untellable thing,
where the hysteric utilizes a constitutive or dynamic repression. This constitutive
repression manages a desire that is the result of prohibition and manifests itself
in the symbolic (159). This distinction takes the crypt away from oedipal-centered
conversations that cannot move beyond prohibition and the return of the
repressed and allows for the theorization of “the secret,” a valuable tool with
which to distinguish Mexico’s relation to its rebellious African slaves.
Merrill Cole’s arguments regarding the psychic legacy of Nat Turner,
perhaps the most notorious rebellious slave in the United States, offer a typical
psychoanalytic approach to the threat of radical blackness in the United States.
Furthermore, they will help to launch a discussion of the ways in which
psychoanalytic paradigms might be productively employed vis-à-vis Mexico’s
relation to its blackness. For Cole, Nat Turner’s narrative, The Confessions of
Nat Turner (1831) as told to Thomas Gray, and the insurrection that it chronicles
“takes on the dimension of the Thing [...] the Thing [being] a scrap of mundane
existence embodying the horror of the real, which simultaneously structures and
undermines the entire symbolic field” (270). Because Turner is ultimately
executed, while utter disregard is displayed for his life, the law cannot “efface the
marks of insurrection because they constitute its limits” (270). Thus, according to
the logic of the death drive, this sets in motion an unconscious compulsion to
bring to the surface the repressed thing and the reality of America living in fear of
a “repeat performance” of Turner's bloodshed (272). And it is precisely Turner’s
lack of willingness to compromise with the system—“Turner imagines no new
51
home for former slaves, no reconciliation after fighting, and no pact with the
whites” (272)—that creates a doomsday perspective, an ultimate violence, which
works to destabilize the system: in this case the Enlightenment-informed
master/slave dialectic.
In the context of Turner’s narrative, it is a burning desire to eradicate the
slave rebel (literally execute him) that leads to his reappearance as a
psychological symptom in (279). There is a fundamental insecurity launched by
the prohibition of Turner. The narrative of Yanga, however, involves violence and
insecurity but the process, as has been made clear, is quite different as silence,
not a violent execution, is the governing principal. The colonial administration
struck a deal with this unimaginable threat of blackness. It walled it in and gave it
a relatively high degree of autonomy in exchange for it staying within its bounds
and no longer announcing itself. The lack of Spanish houses within this territory,
no stipulation to maintain the roads (as was the case in Jamaica), and the highly
regulated presence of the Spanish bring to mind the rules that Abraham and
Torok express for the maintenance of the crypt that restrict filtration by way of a
complex, and hidden, psychological security apparatus.
This is, fundamentally, a shift away from a near absolute reliance, in
conversations of blackness that have turned psychoanalysis in the United States,
to a paradigm dominated by Jacques Lacan’s building on Freud’s model that
must maintain dynamic repression. Many of the theorists using psychoanalysis to
study black subjectivity find themselves under this umbrella for good reason,
given the contexts of their projects. Jared Sexton and Frank Wilderson, from
52
whom my project in many ways develops, because of their connection to a
Fanonian anti-blackness are particularly aligned with Lacan. While deployments
of Abraham and Torok have certainly been witnessed, they have tended to be
superficial engagements that do not undo ideas of dynamic repression (see
David Eng and Avery Gordon).
17
In terms of managing racial discourses where
such secreting is a constituent element, a more full embrace of their adjustment
to the psychoanalytic paradigm is necessary.
The transferring of Abraham and Torok’s theories from the individual to
the broader communal or national contexts specifically is also by no means new.
Nicholas Rand, Abraham and Torok’s English language translator and editor,
points to this: “the investigation of introjection and its vicissitudes (which may
include its absence) can shed light on the politics and emotional intricacies of
colonization … the concept is [also] well suited to the study of social interactions
in bilingual or multicultural communities and among religious or ethnic minorities”
(14n9). My mobilization of their theories is similar to that of Esther Rashkin in
Unspeakable Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Culture (2008) where she works
to remedy what she perceives as the field of cultural studies’ allergy to both
psychoanalysis and close reading. She leans on their theories “provide a
conceptual base from which to shift the psychoanalysis of the unspeakable into
the realm of cultural and ideological analysis” (16). We share a particular interest

17
Though brief, Suzanne Yang’s “The Question of Accent” does give nuanced recognition to the
ability of Abraham and Torok’s theories to speak to a “folding inward” of race that is both
“impossible to see” and “impossible to forsake” (140).
53
in cultural instances where their remains an absolute and unconscious denial that
any secreting has occurred.
I am ultimately interested in noting and responding to future
manifestations of permeability emanating from this crypt-like structure. Since I
am positing that the evolving Mexican national imaginary can be approached with
the framework of psychoanalysis inflected by the theories of Abraham and Torok,
I must address a problem that persisted for them when putting their theory in
practice in the clinical setting: how does one access the intrapsychic structures of
previous generations? In other words: what does the transgenerational untellable
thing become? However, before I move to post-Independence generations, and
the theoretical problems and opportunities they present, I will dwell briefly on the
generation that bridges the before and after of the independent Mexican state.
In 1753, Miguel Hidalgo, a leading figure in the struggle for Mexican
independence, was born in the region that would become the state Guanajuato.
In 1771, he had already completed his preparatory education and was in the
second year of his studies for a degree in philosophy in Mexico City (Noll 1, 7). It
was in this same year that the Viceroy Carlos Francisco de Croix continues to
defend the necessity of Nuestra Señora de los Morenos de Amapa, the liberated
maroon enclave discussed earlier that was founded just two years before in 1769
(Landers 145n72). Seven years later, in 1778, the same year Hidalgo would be
ordained a priest, then Viceroy Antonio María de Bucareli y Ursúa concedes to
the advice of his council that “extinguishing [liberated black] towns is a serious
business” and creates the anxiety that uncaptured landless blacks might return to
54
the mountains (Noll 10; Landers132, 145n72). This is evidence that the strategy
of encrypting the most radical ex-slaves, and the silent ex-communication it
requires, persists in New Spain at the dawn of Mexico’s independence, nearly
two centuries after Yanga’s treaty.
The mechanism of slavery specifically (and the accouterments necessary
to manage radical possibilities) and racial stratification more generally, were thus
by no means an afterthought in the revolutionary era. These constants of the
colony were looked upon with shame by a generation of revolutionaries that
would become the forefathers of the new Mexican nation. Thus, a break from this
past, not just the institution of slavery but also the idea of racial distinction, was a
crucial aspect of their rhetorical separation from Spain.
This rhetorical shift can be traced to the very beginning of the revolution
when Miguel Hidalgo most famously gives the urgent call for slave owners to
immediately manumit their slaves. This language is contained in his December 6,
1810 decree, given less than three months after his September 16th
pronouncement, the Grito de Dolores (Cry of Dolores), that is symbolically
heralded as the beginning of the Mexican War of Independence and celebrated
as Mexican Independence Day: “Que todos los dueños de esclavos deberán
darles la libertad, dentro de término de diez días, so pena de muerte, la que se le
aplicará por transgresión de artículo” (All slave owners must free their slaves
within the term of ten days. Failure to do so will merit capital punishment)
(“Bando de Miguel Hidalgo”). As Patrick Carroll reminds us, this call for
emancipation had significant political advantages: “When Hidalgo issued the call
55
for Independence, his movement received little support from the Veracruz slaves.
However, as the news spread of Hidalgo’s emancipation proclamation … slaves
began to enlist in the revolutionary ranks. By the following year they were
deserting their masters in droves” (503). According to Carroll, the slaves from this
region were being organized “into a single fighting force which saw action in most
of the major engagements taking place along the Gulf Coast” (503).
Hidalgo was executed on July 27th 1811. José María Morelos, who would
eventually succeed Hidalgo as the principal leader of the insurgency, includes a
prohibition of slavery and the aforementioned sistema de castas two years later
in his 1813 utopian vision of the Mexican state, Sentimientos de la nación
(Sentiments of the Nation): “Que la esclavitud se proscriba para siempre y lo
mismo la distinción de castas, quedando todos iguales, y sólo distinguirá a un
americano de otro el vicio y la virtud” (Let slavery and the distinction of castas be
banned forever, leaving all equal. Vice and virtue will be all that will distinguish
one American from another). Unlike the Hidalgo decree, which although written in
a future tense demarcates clearly a fixed time period, Morelos’ text is written in
the much more tentative subjunctive and, interestingly, uses the word proscribir
rather than, say, prohibir (prohibit) or abolir (abolish); proscribir contains the idea
of prohibition but also the idea of casting away in a spatial sense, as this verb
comes from the Latin proscribere (pro-“up-front”, scribere-“to write”) and was
used in a legal sense to announce in writing those who had been outlawed
(“Proscribir”). Thus the Morelos decree carries within its command a demand to
both pronounce and disappear. It is rhetorically comparable to the famous words
56
the Cuban intellectual José Martí would pen almost a full century later in Nuestra
América (1891): “no hay odio de razas porque no hay razas” (there is no racism
because there are no races), this utopian vanishing act evacuates all discourse
as it relates to race and blackness (61).
18

In other words, Hidalgo and Morelos announce a shift in the borders that
contain blackness that is read (or unread) as impossible within the national
psychological apparatus. Where in the colonial period uncapitulating rebellious
slaves marked this limit, the new Mexican state desired, albeit in a utopian
register, for all blackness to be so contained. This maneuver is almost complete
when in 1824 the first federal constitution of Mexico is produced and there is no
language referring to the banishment of either slavery or the sistema de castas.
Though not appearing as an amendment to the constitution, slavery would have
to be abolished by presidential decree two more times: first by Guadalupe
Victoria in 1825 and then again in 1829 by Vicente Guerrero, himself of partial
African heritage.
19
Carroll notes that many slaves, due to mistrust, only started to
come out of “self-imposed seclusion” after this last decree by Guerrero (503).
A mention of slavery returns in the rewritten 1857 constitution in two
instances:

18
Before the first federal constitution of Mexico, the conservative Agustín de Iturbide would form
a short-lived alliance with Vicente Guerrero and Gaudalupe Victoria. The Plan of Iguala laid the
foundation for the First Mexican Empire (1821-1823) and would use similarly utopian language in
reference to racial distinction: “Todos los habitantes de la Nueva España, sin distinción alguna de
europeos, africanos ni indios, son ciudadanos de esta monarquía con opción á todo empleo,
según su mérito y virtudes.”
19
Guerrero’s decree also had to do with the precarious position of Texas, then a Mexican state,
as settlers from the United States who were bringing slaves into the territory. Under pressure
from local government administrators who felt such a decree would undermine Mexico’s social
control in the region, Guerrero would go on to exempt Texas from this decree (Anna 227).
57
1) En la República todos nacen libres. Los esclavos que pisen el
territorio nacional, recobran, por ese solo hecho, su libertad, y
tienen derecho á la protección de las leyes. (In the Republic, all
citizens are born free. Slaves that enter from other nations
immediately recover their liberty and have the right to the
protection of the Republic’s laws)

2) Nunca se celebrarán tratados para la extradición de reos
políticos, ni para la de aquellos delincuentes del orden común
que hayan tenido en el país en donde cometieron el delito la
condición de esclavos; ni convenios ó tratados en virtud de los
que se alteren las garantías y derechos que esta Constitución
otorga al hombre y al ciudadano. (Never honor the extradition
treaties of criminal politicians; neither those of delinquents of the
common order that they have had in the country where they
commit the offense of slavery; neither agreements nor treaties
made by those that alter the guaranties and rights that this
Constitution grants to the man and the citizen).
20

As all other nearby nations had abolished slavery at this point, both of these
references are directed principally at the United States and the New World
colonies of the old Spanish Empire (Cuba and Puerto Rico). This editing process
that privileges erasure over a permanent record is in stark contrast to the United
States whose original constitution can only be amended. Mexico takes full
advantage of the psychic gap this allows in relation to slavery to take the moral
high ground, especially in 1857, a time when there was great insecurity about the
future of the Mexican state and the growing potential for hemispheric dominance
by the United States.
21
This potential is thanks in large part to the institution of

20
The 1917 federal constitution carries forward very similar language in relation to slavery.
21
The Mexican-American War, concluded less than a decade prior, led to the United States
eventually assuming (either via purchase or annexation) territories that include all or part of the

58
slavery that the amnesic language of the first revised Mexican federal
constitution conveniently delegitimizes.
Mexico’s nineteenth-century documents, while born out of a utopian
embrace of liberalism, belie the delicate rhetorical struggle the nation’s founders
faced. Claudio Lomnitz-Adler articulates this struggle quite clearly:
During the nineteenth century, Mexican elites—like their
counterparts in many other Latin American countries—were in a
double bind; they could not construct an image of Mexicanness that
was fashioned on their own culture because that culture was
European, and so the whole argument for sovereignty from
European powers was undermined. On the other hand, if they
reached very directly toward popular culture, they ran the risk of
being excluded from the nation that they were so intricately
engaged in forging. (9)

For Lomnitz-Adler, although there was a symbolic discarding of certain aspects
of the colonial racial ideology, others were “simply revamped, especially those
that referred to the brutishness of Indians and, generally, to the inferiority of dark
skin” (276). The move away from the elaborate sistema de castas led to those
formerly known as castas being “blurred into a single mass which came to be
known racially as mestizos,” a continued “discrimination against Indians and a
particularly flagrant valorization of whiteness” (277, 281).
In the nineteenth century, blackness is located beyond the borders of the
contemporary Mexican state. Whether that is a geographic beyond in the case of
the United States, or a temporal beyond as is seen even in Riva Palacio’s liberal

following present-day states: Texas, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Kansas
and Oklahoma. The Wilmot Proviso, legislation attempting to ban slavery in these newly acquired
states, was unable to pass and thus made slaves crossing from the United States to Mexico a
real issue to be dealt with (Ransom 97-100).
59
retelling of Yanga’s narrative in Treinta y tres negros that nonetheless contains
blackness and racial distinction in the colonial past. For the nascent state’s
fragile imagination of itself, the idea of a present day reality being structured by
supposedly outmoded racial distinctions was an embarrassment. The presence
of blackness, the most extreme point of this register, is experienced as
particularly shameful.
It is Rashkin, in her particular deployment of Abraham and Torok, who
reminds us that “it was not the concept per se of an event but the fact that an
individual lived it intrapsychically as shameful, humiliating and thus potentially
annihilating that made the event “traumatic” and that compelled the individual,
consciously or more often unconsciously, to envelop it in silence and render it
‘unspeakable’” (15). Per this line of thought, it is the utopian declarations, first of
Hidalgo then of Morelos, which produce an impossible black subject. Where in
the colonial period the threat of radical blackness helped to structure this gap in
the psyche, the birth of the new nation sees this gap envelop the entire spectrum
of blackness.
To address the idea of what these untellable things become when carried
across generations, Abraham and Torok mobilize the idea of the
transgenerational phantom as “a formation of the unconscious that has never
been conscious [that] passes—in a way yet to be determined—from the parent’s
unconscious into the child’s.” (173). Following their logic of the individual crypt,
“the phantom’s periodic and compulsive return lies beyond the scope of symptom
formation in the sense of a return of the repressed [and] indicates the effects, on
60
the descendants, of something that had inflicted narcissistic injury or even
catastrophe on the parents” (173). Freud had attempted to think through the idea
of an “archaic heritage” in his work and had lightly entertained the idea of
subconscious communication between two people (178). This is, of course,
advanced significantly in Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious that Frantz
Fanon would further expand upon in his arguments for a racialized unconscious
in Black Skin, White Masks. However, Abraham and Torok’s notion of the secret,
which they explored both clinically and theoretically, is unique in its ability to
theorize the particular psychic gap being discussed here.
As Rashkin points out, the key to Abraham and Torok’s investigations is
the fact that the child that inherits such secret psychic matter is “unaware that
she or he carries another’s secret, and that there is even someone else with a
secret” (Rashkin 95). More importantly, “the child is also unaware that she or he
functions as a guardian who stands vigil, intrapsychically, to insure the absolute
inviolability of the secret and hence the integrity of the parent and the family, who
would otherwise be assailed by the secret’s exposure” (Rashkin 95). In Abraham
and Torok’s clinical experience, it is precisely this “horror at violating a parent’s or
family’s secret” that makes for the most difficult approach when a
transgenerational phantom is involved (174). This is especially true when such
an intrapsychic uncovering runs “the risk of undermining the fictitious yet
necessary integrity of the parental figure in question” (174).
In Abraham and Torok’s push toward “curing” an imbalanced psychic state
caused by a transgenerational phantom in their clinical environment, they turn
61
toward an idiom of exorcism. The process of bringing this haunting element out
centers on laying bare, for the patient, the absolute distinction between the
investments of the phantom and the investments of the host. Nicholas Abraham,
in his early work on this subject, theorizes that “the phantom will vanish only
when its radically heterogeneous nature with respect to the subject is recognized,
a subject to whom it at no time has any direct reference” (174-75; my emphasis).
He underlines this by continuing that “in no way can the subject relate to the
phantom as his or her own repressed experience” (175). Only when the patient
feels that this presence does not “endanger their own topography” are they able
to “eject [this] bizarre stranger” (175). Maria Torok echoes this sentiment in her
own work, claiming that “the phantom is alien to the subject who harbors it” (181).
However, in aligning the transgenerational phantom with the Mexican
national psychological apparatus, and other national psychological apparatuses
that depend on similar secrets more generally, a slight revision in this distinction
between the bizarre stranger of a bygone period and the psychic typography of
the contemporary moment must be forced. In the case of Mexico, there is no
simple ejection without great harm to the subject (the imagined nation) because
with each passing generation this phantom becomes at the same time more
unknowable and more imbricated in the topography of the imagined nation’s
psyche. In other words, the contemporary generation who unknowingly keeps
secret this relationship to blackness is in fact invested in the maintenance of this
secrecy in a similar way to previous generations. Undermining this secreting not
only undermines a parent or ancestor, but also undermines the idea of the nation
62
that gives the present-day subject meaning. In other words, the unconscious
investment in the secrecy crucial to this intrapsychic construction is maintained
across generations.
The oblique reference to slavery in the United States in the 1857
Constitution discussed above can be returned to in order to elucidate this. The
evolving liberal Mexican nation that had banished, or rather vanished, both
slavery and racial distinction from its imagination of its historical self could not
reinstate such “truth” without compromising its ability to stand on the highest
possible moral ground in relation to the United States, a position of the utmost
importance to a Mexican nation fighting for hemispheric relevance. So this
generation, decades removed from the 1813 declaration made by Morelos in
Sentimientos de la nación, was at risk of endangering their own topography if
they did not themselves invest in the reiteration of this absence.
My embrace of the idea of a transgenerational crypt-like structure within a
national psychological apparatus has been provisional. This is because the field
of language deployed by Abraham and Torok to describe the term on which it
rests is itself plagued by what I feel is an impeding reliance on the metaphor of
the cemetery and the attending metaphors that such a reliance demands. In this
context, while there remains, underground, the possibility of decay and
decomposition, these processes can themselves be mapped and understood,
and an idea of wholeness reproduced. And even the more ephemeral metaphors
(the phantom, haunting) still gesture toward embodiment. Though not in the
register of Freudian repression, theirs ultimately remains an idiom of
63
discoverability. In other words, a practice grounded in the possibility of the
discovery of, or at least an awareness of, the existence of once whole objects.
Abraham and Torok are themselves helpful in effecting this separation in
the description of their crypt in the terms of a metapsychological concept of
Reality: “that which is, all the more so since it must not be known; in short,
Reality is defined as a secret … and the metapsychological concept of Reality
refers to the place, in the psychic apparatus, where the secret is … ” (157). Thus
before the metaphor of the cemetery is attached, this “place” can be understood
as a gap within the psychic apparatus—and for the purposes of this current
mobilization, as a transgenerational intrapsychic gap.
Because, as discussed above, Abraham and Torok understand their
phantom and the subject it haunts as utterly distinct, and because they are
working within a clinical setting grounded in helping the subject, their approach is
oriented toward a cure: “how can the phantom be weakened so as to make it
restore the unhappy subjects own speech … that had been victimized by the
haunting?” (180). However, because of my acknowledgement of the irrevocably
interwoven nature of hegemonic culture,
22
and my understanding, in the context
of national psychological apparatuses, of the shared investment of the phantom
and the subject articulated in this chapter, the following question must be
addressed: how can what emanates or escapes from this transgenerational
intrapsychic gap be made visible in order to activate anxiety that gives a slight

22
This notion of the irrevocably interwoven comes from Achille Mbembe’s discussion of freedom
and death in “Necropolitics” (38).
64
awareness of contours of the intrapsychic gap itself? To answer this I must first
characterize the nature of what I contend are incoherent emanations. To do so,
the following chapter will examine such emanations in twentieth-century
“Mexican culture.”

65
CHAPTER TWO – ON APPARENT EMANATIONS

What emanates are not the dead, but the indecipherable
matter from gaps left within us by the secrets of others.
-Uncredited

Debo a la conjunción de un espejo y de una
enciclopedia el descubrimiento de Uqbar.
-Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”

In Chapter One, a reading of the formation of San Lorenzo de los Negros
in New Spain led to the proposal of the existence of a transgenerational gap
within Mexico’s national psychological apparatus where, among other once
secrets, the depth and intricate nature of its Afro-descendent heritage has been
vanished. In this chapter, I turn to the twentieth century to examine how portions
of the archive have been read and assembled in relation to this now radical
blackness. My analysis is framed by readings of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora’s
eyewitness account of the 1692 riot in Mexico City and the discovery of the
Olmec civilization in the 1940s. I am interested in how emanations of a secreted
blackness permeate the barrier of this intrapsychic gap—or more precisely, the
manner in which they compromise it.
66

The reorganization of the Mexican state at the turn of the twentieth century
forced a psychic reorganization that endangered the barrier of this gap in relation
to the idea of blackness. Despite the relatively stable national economy that
largely characterized the extended rule of Porfirio Díaz that lasted for all but four
years between 1877 and 1911, reaction to great societal imbalance and
disproportionate economic hardship in certain regions threatened the viability of
the state. In the course of the Mexican Revolution of the early twentieth century,
the creole political elites adopted a pragmatic strategy aimed at more
successfully incorporating the masses in their political agenda in order to create
a more socially stable state.
1
To this end, the Mexican Revolution would settle on
the mestizo as the nation’s symbolic figurehead in a move that, according to
Lomnitz-Adler, “resolved many of the old nationalism’s problems, identified the
political elite with ‘the people,’ and provided an ideological platform for a
protectionist economy and strong state” (Lomnitz-Adler 9).
Like the previous symbolism that announced the disappearance of racial
distinction, this new mestizo face is visualized in the new federal constitution of
1917. Both symbols are understood here as being generated and supported by
the same utopianism described in Chapter One. The language used to evoke
these symbols, however, differs greatly. While in the 1824 and 1857 constitutions
there are no uses of the words raza (race), cultura (culture), or indígena

1
The use of the word “creole” throughout this dissertation is a translation of the Spanish term
criollo/a, understood to be a person of Spanish descent born in the New World. In English, while
this definition does transfer, it can also be used to refer to a person of mixed African and
European heritage.
67
(indigenous), the 1917 document is peppered with all of these terms. Most
importantly, there are special provisions to protect and sustain indigenous
elements of society. In the first article of the first chapter of the constitution, the
new Mexico is announced as a nation that “tiene una composición pluricultural”
(has a pluricultural composition). In the public embrace of the mixed nature of
this new identity, there is an urgent need to contain the potential emergence of
the black portion of Mexico’s heterogenic identity, those formerly banished
remnants from a century before.
José Vasconcelos addresses this directly in his ssay La raza cósmica
(1925). Though Vasconcelos has certainly fallen out of favor within the imagined
pantheon of significant figures of the twentieth century, and is seen almost as an
embarrassment by some, he was extraordinarily influential as Mexico began the
delicate psychic process of reimagining itself after the Mexican Revolution. As
Minister of Public Education in the administration of Álvaro Obregón, for
example, Vasconcelos put a great deal of focus and capital in the rediscovery of
the beauty of Mexico’s indigenous population. He most famously sent Diego
Rivera to the south of Mexico, a trip that fundamentally shaped Rivera as an
artist, and, more importantly, encouraged what would become a large aspect of
the visual record of Mexico’s new self-fashioning (Williams 87). Although his run
for the presidency in 1929 was unsuccessful, he ended up serving in various
prominent roles in Mexico’s state-sponsored cultural and educational sectors.
According to Vasconcelos, strength was to be found in Mexico’s history of
racial mixing and this placed the nation’s citizens as central agents, the avant-
68
garde, in the coming of a quite mystical aesthetic revolution. How the various
racial elements were to be blended into this new race—la raza final—is
expressed in its clearest language here:
Los tipos bajos de la especie serán absorbidos por el tipo superior.
De esta suerte podría redimirse, por ejemplo, el negro, y poco a
poco, por extinción voluntaria, las estirpes más feas irán cediendo
el paso a las más hermosas. Las razas inferiores, al educarse, se
harían menos prolíficas, y las [sic] mejores especímenes irán
ascendiendo en una escala de mejoramiento étnico, cuyo tipo
máximo no es precisamente el blanco, sino esa nueva raza a la
que el mismo blanco tendrá que aspirar con el objeto de conquistar
la síntesis. El indio, por medio del injerto en la raza afín, daría el
salto de los millares de años que median de la Atlántida a nuestra
época, y en unas cuantas décadas de eugenesia estética podría
desaparecer el negro.

(The lower types of the species will be absorbed by the superior
type. In this manner, for example, the Black could be redeemed,
and step by step, by voluntary extinction, the uglier stocks will give
way to the more handsome. Inferior races, upon being educated,
would become less prolific, and the better species would go on
ascending a scale of ethnic improvement, whose maximum type is
not precisely the White, but that new race to which the White
himself will have to aspire with the object of conquering the
synthesis. The Indian, by grafting onto the related race, would take
the jump of millions of years that separate Atlantis from our times,
and in a few decades of aesthetic eugenics, the Black may
disappear.) (72; 32)

In this telling passage, absorption, voluntary extinction, aesthetic eugenics, and a
disappearing blackness all bespeak the relation between Vasconcelos’ symbolic
embrace of a mestizo cosmic race and discourses of whitening. Within this
matrix, blackness is nevertheless something to be managed in 1925. However,
the language of Vasconcelos, which predicts the disappearance of this remaining
trace, this problem, “en unas cuantas décadas,” is more than prophetic as it
69
would be just twenty-five years later that Octavio Paz would confirm the apparent
absence of Afro-descendent elements from conversations of Mexican identity.
Octavio Paz’s 1950 collection of essays El laberinto de la soledad is a
seminal work in the discourse of mexicanidad (Mexicanness) that would help to
solidify the cosmic musings of Vasconcelos into what Carrie Chorba describes as
“a new coherent, and cohesive discourse that would effectively cement its
populace as citizens of a modern nation” (9). In its second essay, “Máscaras
mexicanas,” Paz opens with the following sentence: “Viejo o adolescente, criollo
o mestizo, general, obrero o licenciado, el mexicano se me aparece como un ser
que se encierra y se preserva…” (The Mexican, whether young or old, criollo or
mestizo, general or laborer, seems to me to be a person who shuts himself away
to protect himself.) (26; 29). The vulnerable barrier that Vasconcelos drew
attention to has been reinforced: you are of pure Spanish blood or you are a mix
of indigenous and Spanish blood if you are to be included as Mexican. All others
(indigenous, blacks, Asians) are excluded.
Paz’s intellectual endeavor in regard to the articulation of the elusive
contours of Mexican identity, the labyrinth, was revisited twenty years later in his
1970 Posdata (translated as The Other Mexico in 1972). In large part, this essay
responds to the events of 1968 in Mexico that culminated with the gunning down
by government forces of student and other protestors just before the country was
to host the Olympic Games. In light of the fractures exposed by this violent
suppression of a popular movement, he sees a need to add further nuance to the
idea of mexicanidad:
70
Lo mexicanidad no es sino otro ejemplar, una variación más, de
esa cambiante idéntica criatura plural una que cada uno es todos
somos ninguno. El hombre/los hombres: perpetua oscilación … En
aquella época [de El laberinto] no me interesaba la definición de lo
mexicano sino, como ahora, la crítica: esa actividad que consiste,
tanto o más que en conocernos, en liberarnos. La crítica despliega
un posibilidad de libertad y así es una invitación a la acción.

(“Mexican-ness is no more than another example, another variety,
of that changing, identical, single, plural creature that each is, all
are, none is. Man/men: perpetual oscillation […] But while we live
we can escape neither masks nor nouns and pronouns: we are
inseparable from our fictions, our features. We are condemned to
invent a mask and to discover afterward that the mask is our true
visage … In those days [of El laberinto] I was not interested in a
definition of Mexican-ness but rather, as now, in criticism: the
activity which consists not only in knowing ourselves but, just as
much or more, in freeing ourselves. Criticism unfolds the possibility
of freedom and is thus an invitation to action.”) (Posdata 11-12;
“The Other Mexico” 216)

The idea of an “other Mexico” encourages Paz, and his readers, to be aware of
this heterogenic excess, this other that is both within and without, in order to be
prepared for a generative (and necessary) criticism and self-reflection. When
pressed to define such an imprecise idea, he does so by describing it as a
“realidad gaseosa que forman las creencias, fragmentos de creencias, imágenes
y conceptos que la historia deposita en el subsuelo de la psiquis social, esa
cueva o sótano en continua somnolencia y, asimismo, en perpetua fermentación”
(“gaseous reality formed by the beliefs, fragments of beliefs, images, and
concepts which history deposits in the subsoil of the social psyche, that cave or
cellar in continuous somnolence and likewise in perpetual fermentation”) (109;
287).
71
Here, Paz is admittedly relying on Freud’s ideas of the subconscious in
order to explain this “pasado [que] reaparece porque es un presente oculto”
(“past [that] reappears because it is a hidden present”) (111; 289). While his
description of hidden elements does leave room for the gaseous appearance of
fragments that might align with Chapter One’s articulation of Mexico’s
transgenerational intrapsychic gap, his turn to the subsoil is primarily framed as
an archeological expedition: “El mexicano no es una esencia sino una historia”
(“The Mexican is not an essence but a history”) (10; 215). Furthermore, a great
irony lies in the fact that in this tract that seeks to uncover Mexico’s repressed
“invisible history,” there is no conscious recognition of Paz’s replicating this
disappearing maneuver in relation to Afro-descendent elements deposited in that
“subsoil” of the Mexican psyche (321). Instead, in the final paragraphs of the
Posdata we see again the now cemented discourse of cohesion: “Los
verdaderos herederos de los asesinos del mundo prehispánico no son los
peninsulares sino nosotros, los mexicanos que hablamos castellano, seamos
criollos, mestizos o indios” (“The true heirs of the pre-Columbian world are not
the peninsular Spaniards but ourselves, we Mexicans who speak Spanish,
whether we are Creoles, mestizos, or Indians”) (153; 323-24).
Remaking Paz’s own concept of the labyrinth, Lomnitz-Adler clearly
articulates how by remaining within a discourse of the national, Paz, and others,
have managed to trap themselves:
In short, most of the writers who have meditated on and criticized
Mexican national culture have done so without resolving the
theoretical obstacles that block our comprehension of the very
nature of “national culture.” The political importance of national
72
culture and the difficulty in describing national culture in any terms
other than the terms of nationalism has generated a circular dialect,
a vicious circle that is built on the tensions that occur between the
maze of social relations that exist within the national space and the
ideologies regarding a common identity, a shared sense of the
past, and a unified gaze toward the future. I call this complex of
issues the labyrinth. (3)

Roger Bartra, in The Cage of Melancholy: Identity and Metamorphosis in
the Mexican Culture, similarly identifies the hegemonic culture as an
accumulation of “mythological expressions” that produce a metadiscourse that
has become “the common drinking trough in which the thirst for identity is
quenched; it is the source of the myths that not only give unity to the nation, but
also render it different from any other” (2-3). Bartra thus claims that “studies on
Mexicanness constitute an expression of the dominant culture [and, as such,] this
hegemonic political culture is bound by the set of imaginary power-networks that
define socially accepted forms of subjectivity and that are customarily considered
as the fullest expression of national culture” (2; my emphasis). In other words,
both Lomnitz-Adler and Bartra identify the hegemonic project as particularly
brilliant in its ability to enlist not only its primary stakeholders (the creole elite) to
carry the project forward, but more importantly those with nothing to gain and
often much to lose who nonetheless desire to imagine themselves as articulated
within the matrix of a Mexican identity.
Thus, we can see how Paz’s meditations, regardless of their progressive
intent, were doomed to be bracketed by and thus in service of the very
hegemonic political culture that they seek to undermine. Whether using the
metaphor of the labyrinth or the cage, these meditations trace the barrier or limit
73
of the hegemonic political culture, the reverse side of which limits the
transgenerational intrapsychic gap articulated in Chapter One. Thus, “the
definition of the ‘Mexican’” is an articulation of this barrier, “a description of how
he or she is dominated and, above all, how exploitation is legitimized” (Bartra 6).
But this domination is not total, there are gaps through which evidence of
the underlying heterogeneity, however incomplete and fleeting, emerge. We get
an example of such an emergence in Paz’s own work. In 1971, Elena
Poniatowska publishes La noche de Tlateloco, which grapples with the
aforementioned events of 1968 that Posdata attempted to speak to.
Poniatowska’s effort is essentially a collection of interviews, slogans and photos
organized and edited to leave a record of the events that, like those in France
and other locales around the world in that same year, lasted months and were
extraordinarily complex in their manifestations and reasons for being. In 1975,
Poniatowska's work was published in English as Massacre in Mexico and
Octavio Paz was charged with introducing an English-reading public to the
nuances of this crisis.
Paz contends in this introduction that he “has always considered it
necessary to look back to our colonial history in order to have even a partial
understanding of the Mexico of today” (xi). He continues: “By so doing, we will
not, of course, find the answer to all of our questions. But since the world of New
Spain is the immediate antecedent of the world we live in today, our colonial past
enables us to establish certain parallels with our present” (xi). Immediately
following this particular quote, he specifically notes the similarities between the
74
events of 1968 and those of June 8, 1692 when a riot shook the ruling elite in
Mexico City. In this comparison, Paz relies heavily on the eyewitness account of
Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, a scientist, historian and member of the creole
elite. From Paz’s perspective, this work of Sigüenza y Góngora, which comes in
the form of an extensive letter written to the Spanish Admiral Don Andrés de Pez,
is as “impressive as Elena Poniatowska’s” (xii).
While the 1692 riot is most often attributed to a corn shortage, the
constellation of causes has been long discussed within the colonial record and
the academic scholarship interested in interpreting that record. Tracing both the
wheat and maize harvests, Douglas Cope does an excellent job of asserting that
despite whatever else was likely to have been going on socially, food shortage
was palpable and certainly among the pressures. Nonetheless, how much of this
can be laid at the feet of poor yield resulting from the previous year’s floods and
market manipulation remains undetermined. First-hand accounts paint
contradicting perspectives regarding culpability for the riots, as do the court
proceedings immediately held by the viceroy in the months that followed. The
testimony of the elite tend toward a conspiracy led by the city’s indigenous
population, but this has been challenged by those who claim this perspective was
only developed as pretense to change the physical structure of the city to further
contain this same population. Some blame the network of bars serving pulque,
the intoxicating drink made from fermented agave. Still others blame the blacks
and mulatos that live among the indigenous for compromising their natural
morals (O’Gorman). Nonetheless, it is a significant event that energizes the
75
populace and forces self-reflection among the elite, making it an appropriate
corollary to the events of 1968.
As is to be expected, the great majority of the surviving archive related to
the events of June 8, 1692 is dominated by the creole elite. In all of this
discourse, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora certainly looms larger than the rest.
Anna More’s Baroque Sovereignty: Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and the
Creole Archive of Colonial Mexico (2012) puts his letter and the rest of his known
life’s work in proper perspective. Her project adeptly uses Sigüenza y Góngora’s
output to connect to and trace the development of a cohesive creole political
discourse that relied on a selective incorporation and refashioning of the existing
pre-Columbian archive that allowed creoles to “to invent a deep history extending
beyond the Spanish conquest” (8). This “turn to history [was] as an archive rather
than a chronological narrative” and had nothing to do with establishing “esoteric
dissent” but rather “a local authority and tradition following the fragmentation of
indigenous communities and the demise of evangelical utopianism” (15). For
More, Sigüenza y Góngora’s letter aligns with this evolving creole project that
seeks to dominate the present while recalling an essentially fictionalized and self-
serving past.
More emphasizes that this discourse should not be viewed merely as part
of the smooth teleology that leads from seventeenth-century creole life to the
battles for Mexican independence that would take place over a century later.
Alternatively, More describes the archive produced in the second half of the
seventeenth century not as concerned with hatching the visions that would
76
undermine Spanish authority but as quite narrowly focused on responding to the
local insecurity felt because of the developing crisis of Spanish imperial rule in
Europe. This decline in influence and power begins with the restoration of self-
rule by Portugal in 1640 and is of course punctuated with the death of heirless
Charles II in 1700 that brings the end to the Hapsburg dynasty in Spain and the
clear annunciation of a new geopolitical reality. Sigüenza y Góngora’s life span
(1645-1700) almost exactly traces this decline. This fact, combined with his
intimate relationship with the Crown in both official and unofficial capacities,
make him the perfect centerpiece to More’s project, and yet an awkward ally to
Paz’s project that seeks to extend his ideas regarding an “other Mexico.”
In other words, even though it does not signal a rebellion from Spain just
yet, this is the foundation of a creole ideology of crisis management in relation to
its racial others that would evolve through the eighteenth century only to be cast
away to serve as part of the invisible structuring force of Mexico’s national
psychological apparatus. I will quote at length the most substantial portion of the
Sigüenza y Góngora letter that Paz invokes, as it is central to this inheritance. It
is a description of the riot and its participants as hostilities are just beginning to
erupt. Prior to this quotation in Sigüenza y Góngora’s account, an indigenous
woman demanding answers from the Spanish authorities regarding the corn
shortage has been killed. She is then carried through the streets by the
protestors. For those who blame a premeditated indigenous conspiracy, this
woman is alive and only playing dead to incite the riot. In either case,
hordes of men came rushing down the street where I was standing
(and down all the others that led into the public squares). The
77
Spaniards had unsheathed their swords, but they stopped in their
tracks for the same reason that kept me standing there as though
rooted to the spot: because the blacks, the mulattos, and all the
raggle-taggle plebes were shouting: ‘Death to the Viceroy and all
his henchman!’ And the Indians: ‘Death to the Spaniards who are
eating up our corn!’ And exhorting each other to bravely enter the
fray, since there was no Cortez on the scene this time to conquer
them, they stormed into the plaza to join the others and throw
rocks. (xii)
2

Though not quoted in Paz, Sigüenza y Góngora would again refer to the
commoners’ diversity in similar language throughout the document. These are by
no means unusual accountings of the gathered crowds. Though the records
tracking punishments doled out by the court and those tracking deaths during the
riot show an indigenous majority, the racial diversity that Sigüenza y Góngora
describes is present in numbers too significant to ignore (Cope 155-58).
However, despite these accounts which encourages a polyethnic view of the
uprising and of New Spain, Paz, in the same paragraph that contains the above
noted quotation, chooses to summarize in his own words the events as follows:
“In 1692 a shortage of corn caused an uprising among the common people—
Indians, mestizos, and even impoverished creoles—and for the first time in its
colonial history Mexico City was the scene of serious disturbances as the poorer
classes rioted in the streets” (xii). The blacks and mulattos of Sigüenza y

2
Paz has offered his own translation of the Spanish rather than rely on Irving Leonard’s 1929
English translation. The following is Romero de Terreros Spanish edition of the same passage:
“Por aquella calle donde yo estaba (y por cuantas otras desembocaban a las plazas sería lo
propio) venían atropellándose bandadas de hombres. Traían desnudas sus espadas los
españoles y, viendo lo mismo que allí me tenía suspenso, se detenían; pero los negros, los
mulatos y todo lo que es plebe gritando: “¡Muera el Virrey y cuantos lo defendieren!”, y los
indios”: ¡Mueran los españoles y gachupines (son los venidos de España) que nos comen
nuestro maíz!”, y exhortándose unos a otros a tener valor, supuesto que ya no había otro Cortés
que los sujetase, se arrojaban a la plaza a acompañar a los otros y a tirar piedras” (152).
78
Góngora’s description that emerge in Paz’s text go unnoticed in relation to his
larger project which uses this colonial history to help articulate Mexico’s “other
half, its hidden face: an Indian, mestizo face, an angry blood-spattered face” (xii).
Sigüenza y Góngora’s work, and this letter in particular, arrive to the
twentieth century, and to Paz, through the same imaginative archival work that
Sigüenza y Góngora himself obsessed over. The American literary historian
Irving Leonard’s participation in this process is crucial. His interest in the
seventeenth-century creole intellectual began with his work as a graduate
student at UC Berkley that culminated with the book, Don Carlos de Sigüenza y
Góngora: A Mexican Savant of the Seventeenth Century (1929), and continued
throughout his career with scholarly texts that highlight the Mexican figure’s
interest in, among other things, fiction, philosophy, astronomy and geography.
The aforementioned letter to the Admiral Andrés de Pez was excavated from the
archive by Leonard’s dissertation advisor and published (in English) as an
appendix to this 1929 book.
Given Leonard’s significant role in raising the profile of Sigüenza y
Góngora both in Mexico and abroad, it is of no surprise that he was given the
task to introduce Seis obras (1984), an offering that includes the author’s
essential writings. Leonard chooses to begin the publication with an epigraph
quoting none other than Octavio Paz: “siempre lo he dado por imprescindible
echar un vistazo a nuestra herencia colonial para conseguir siquiera una
comprensión parcial del México de hoy.” (“I have always considered it necessary
to look back to our colonial history in order to have even a partial understanding
79
of the Mexico of today”) (Sigüenza y Góngora, Seis obras iv; Poniatowska x).
Although Leonard does not clarify which Paz text this quote comes from, it is
itself, in an odd symmetry, a translation of a portion of Paz’s work in the forward
to Elena Poniatowska’s book that was quoted earlier.
Interestingly, the evolution of the baring of polyethnic conversations as
they are related to discussions of Mexican identity in the twentieth century is
echoed in the publication and citation history of the Sigüenza y Góngora letter
that Paz’s work both relies on and negates. As was mentioned above, the letter
was originally included in the appendix to Leonard’s 1929 volume on Sigüenza y
Góngora and titled “Letter of Don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora to Admiral Pez
Recounting the Incidents of the Corn Riot in Mexico City, June 8, 1692.” This
letter would be published separately and in the original Spanish by the Mexican-
based Talleres Gráficos del Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Historia y
Etnografía in 1932 as Alboroto y motín de México, del 8 de junio 1692: Relación
de Don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora en una carta dirigida al Almirante Don
Andrés de Pez. The letter is then published in a modernized Spanish in the 1940
collection Relaciones históricas edited by Manuel Romero de Terreros. Here, it
contains the abbreviated title “Alboroto y motín de México, del 8 de junio 1692.”
Leonard, in a review of another Sigüenza y Góngora collection for the Hispanic
American Historical Review in 1946, references the 1932 publication of this letter
by this same abbreviated title used by Romero de Terreros.
However, in both a note and in the bibliography of Leonard’s 1959
Baroque Times in old Mexico Seventeenth-century Persons, Places, and
80
Practices, his own 1932 book has been retroactively retitled adding the descriptor
“de los indios” (of the Indians): Alboroto y motín de los indios de México de
México del 8 de Junio de 1692 (229n6, 246). And in 1984, when Sigüenza y
Góngora’s work is collected in the volume Seis obras, the letter abbreviates this
title that indicates that the event was an indigenous uprising: “Alboroto y motín de
los indios de México.”
3
In that same year, a Spanish translation of Leonard’s
1929 book is published in Mexico and the letter is again given this new title. In an
interview with Leonard in 1983, as the manuscripts for these two projects are
being completed, he is asked about how he chose Sigüenza y Góngora for his
dissertation work and responds: “[My advisor] put me on to that. He had an
original manuscript that I published later as Alboroto y motín de los indios de
México.”
In much of the contemporary scholarship that manages Sigüenza y
Góngora in very productive ways, this re-membering is carried forward and
solidified, as bibliographic references to the 1932 book often include the incorrect
title.
4
Noteworthy examples include: José Rabasa’s Without History: Subaltern
Studies, the Zapatista Insurgency, and the Specter of History (2010) and “Pre-
Columbian Pasts and Indian Presents in Mexican History” (1994); and Kathleen
Ross’ The Baroque Narrative of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora (1993). And

3
While in the catalogue of Sigüenza y Góngora’s writing in Leonard’s original 1929 work the letter
is referenced using this language, it does not become the title of the letter until Baroque Times. In
Seis obras, the same retroactive titling of his own 1932 book occurs in the notes and bibliography
(136n1, 427).
4
Ross does not make this error when referencing the letter within her earlier essay “Alboroto y
motín de México: Una noche triste criolla” (1988) where she relies on the text as edited by
Romero de Terreros.
81
while the original letter was not titled for publication by Sigüenza y Góngora, it is
nonetheless telling to trace the evolution of its naming as its present form works
to foreclose the much richer ethnic makeup of the events it describes.
An examination of the reproduction of another portion of the original letter
presents the meanderings of a similar foreclosure. In the following segment,
Sigüenza y Góngora is describing for the admiral the nature of the gathering
mob. Leonard’s original 1929 version (an English translation) is vastly different
than the standalone version of the letter in the original Spanish that he publishes
in 1932:
It is composed of Indians, Creoles, bozales from various nations,
chinos, mulattoes, moriscos, mestizos, zambaigos (Indian and
chinos half-breeds), lobos (half-breeds), and Spainiards as well
who, in declaring themselves “saramullos” (which is the same as
knaves, rascals, and cape-snatchers) and in falling away from their
allegience, are the worst of them all in such a vile rabble. (240)

Componerse de Indios, de negros Criollos y Vosales de diferentes
Naciones, de Chinos, de Mulattos [sic], de moriscos, de mestissos
[sic], de Sambaigos, de lobos y tambien de españoles que, en
declarandosse Saramullos (que es lo mismo que pícaros, Chulos y
arreuata Capas) y degenerando de sus obligaciones, Son los
peores entre tan ruin canalla. (51)

Leonard’s 1929 translation comes with no glossary and thus bozales and
moriscos, not clarified parenthetically, go unregistered. Bozales refers to African-
born blacks and moriscos to light-skinned mulattos (Katzew 44). Chinos, named
for the appearance of curly hair, demarcate a mixture of mulatto and indigenous.
In his parenthetical clarification of zambaigos, Leonard seems to define chinos as
half-breeds but it is unclear because an opportunity is missed to provide that
definition earlier in the phrase. Nonetheless, Zambaigos (also known as zambos)
82
were a mixture of indigenous and black, as was lobo (Katzew 44). What is clear
from all of these omissions and misrepresentations is an inability to register
blackness as such in Mexico, even when it is being pointed to by Sigüenza y
Góngora.
What is most interesting, however, is how he works against Sigüenza y
Góngora. While Sigüenza y Góngora does demonstrate to the admiral that some
Spaniards have “degenerando de sus obligaciones” (fall[en] away from their
allegience), the creole elite maintain their fealty to the Crown. However, Leonard
cannot read Sigüenza y Góngora’s description of blacks (“de negros Criollos y
Vosales de diferentes Naciones”) for what it suggests, as has Anna More:
“Creole and bozal blacks of different nations” (192). Leonard’s 1932 more faithful
reproduction of the Spanish original shows a striking fluidity in the idea of a
creole, as here it is an adjective that was not always as firmly attached to
Spanish blood. But in failing to read this in his first English version, he has
perhaps given what the original author of the letter might have felt as a greater
insult by inserting creoles into the rabble.
This passage regarding the native and foreign-born blacks has been
remarkably unstable throughout its rewritings. Romero de Terreros’ 1974 edition
in Relaciones históricas and both 1984 editions credited to Leonard’s editorial
hand (Un sabio mexicano and Seis obras) use the following phrasing:
“componerse de indios, de negros, criollos y bozales de differentes naciones…”
(Relaciones 133; Seis obras 113; Un sabio mexicano 243). Sigüenza y Góngora
83
original intent seems to be maintained, but to achieve this there is a need to
separate “negro” from “criollos” by a comma.
Though this remains the most common contemporary reproduction of this
portion of the quote, José Rabasa contributed a “new” edition in his
aforementioned subaltern project Without History. In a portion of his work where
he is critiquing the Spanish “impulse to classify races,” he quotes Leonard’s 1932
Spanish version and then immediately translates it via Leonard’s 1929 English
version. While representing the English, he erroneously substitutes “Chinese” for
“chinos.” However, as humorous as this is, what is more revealing is that with
both quotes placed side by side, as they were above, there is no notation of the
vast difference between them. This re-presents Leonard’s original act of un-
reading in an even more dramatic manner. There is, seemingly, some sort of
gravitational force at work here.

These twentieth-century disappearances made manifest in the work of
Paz and the deployment, transcription and citation of Sigüenza y Góngora run
counter to the prominent Afro-Mexican scholar Ben Vinson’s understanding that
“the period stretching from 1821-1940 can be described as one of a conscious
‘historical forgetting’ of the black population” (67). Vinson is singling out the
1940s as the beginning of an academic renaissance in the study of Mexico’s
Afro-descendent heritage. This is a clear and appropriate acknowledgement of
Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, the famous Mexican anthropologist trained at
84
Northwestern University by Melville Herskovits.
5
Aguirre Beltrán’s 1946 La
población negra de México deals with the presence of an Afro-descendent
population in New Spain, and largely sparked the development of Afro-Mexican
studies. Nonetheless, whatever progress has been made within certain corners
of the academic community, the middle decades of the twentieth century saw the
broader zeitgeist embrace a disappeared blackness.
Beltrán’s own work, to a certain and perhaps unexpected extent, mirrors
this disappearance. It is not a new criticism that in La población absolutely no
time is spent on the present-day Afro-descendent populations. However, in 1971
he would go as far to release a “corrected and augmented” edition that added a
short final chapter, “Integración del negro,” and a prologue. He included this final
chapter because, in his own words from the prologue (his rereading of his
original project), “era necesaria para cerrar el panorama total del transcurrir del
negro desde sus lejanos orígenes en el África hasta su completa integración en
el Estado mexicano” (It was necessary to close completely the panorama of the
black in Mexico from his distant origins in Africa to his complete integration into
the Mexican state) (12). Beltrán’s deployment of the verb cerrar (to close) is
valuable as it makes visible within the discourse of Afro-Mexican studies itself
this barrier that disappears the Afro-descendent elements that lie beyond it and
helps give shape to “Mexican culture.”

5
Herskovitz is the American anthropologist that played a role in introducing the academic
disciplines of African and African American studies in the United States.
85
Erin Graff Zivin has identified a similar dangerous tendency, what she has
accurately termed a reliance on an “excavational mode of thought,” within not
only the context of decolonial and subaltern studies but, of greater concern to
her, contemporary Latin Americanist political thought. Building on Alberto
Moreiras’ deployment of marranismo, or that which escapes the “conversion to
hegemonic submission” (Moreiras “Common Political Democracy” 175), Graff
Zivin argues for an an-archaeological critical practice that exposes the instability
of a logic dependent on “an unburied truth, a once forgotten truth brought to light
… that betrays a compatibility, or complicity, with the logic of archaeology”
(200).
6
More precisely, this excavational mode of thought reads “that which
hides beneath it [as] an identifiable and revealable truth” (200). My italics mimic
those by Graff Zivin that underline what she sees as the incapacity of this
particular mode of thought to know “the limits of its own thinking or theorizing, the
inability to call reading reading” (201). This limit is analogous to the barrier that I
have articulated here.
Such an an-archeological imagination, one that embraces reading as
such, offers a distinct challenge to those working within the studies of blackness
within Mexico. The truth must be, and can be, dug out. This mantra has
essentially framed the academic study of Afro-descendent populations in Mexico.

6
Moreiras’ marranismo has its origin in the figure of the marrano in Spanish and Portuguese
history. The marrano was a Jew that converted to Christianity to avoid persecution but
nonetheless continued their prior religious practices in secret. As the crypto-Jew is the origin of
the theorizations collected under the umbrella of a “marrano register,” my own borrowing via Graff
Zivin will steer away from the idea of haunting, and thus its resonances to the crypt and the
cemetery. Graff Zivin’s turn to archaeology is helpful in this separation. For a more detailed
explanation of this reasoning see Chapter One’s discussion of a similar move with regard to
Abraham and Torok’s notion of the crypt.
86
This is why the bulk of the scholarly output can be characterized as either
ethnographic or anthropologic in nature, with very little concerned primarily with a
more philosophical register. In the push to decipher and uncover whole
narratives, for one example, Pérez de Ribas’ account of the founding of San
Lorenzo de los Negros discussed in the previous chapter has been relied upon,
not as much for its transparent ideological position, but, of greater danger, for the
set of coordinates that has allowed it to be mapped in time and space without a
recognition of the fictive nature of this mapping.
This is not to say that the exposed artifacts are not without great value.
This dissertation, for one, would have been impossible to articulate initially
without them. However, these artifacts simultaneously create a discourse tripped
up, or trapped, by their discovery. In other words, this mode of thought has
helped to create a discourse founded, primarily, on ideas of phenotype and the
accompanying notions of authenticity and its trace. These require not only the
pointing to fragments of found objects and cultural expression but to their
mapping and reconstruction, while, by and large, avoiding the more central and
pressing meditation on the ways in which this negation of blackness, an aspect of
the transgenerational intrapsychic gap, helps to structure contemporary “Mexican
culture” and the nature of what radiates through it.
But how can the permeability of this barrier be approached—falling out of
or being drawn into its state of disappearance? On many registers, especially
from many of the world lines emanating from Mexico, material that makes it into
or comes out of this part of the apparatus is effectively no longer read, even while
87
we read. The void of scholarship addressing such an emergence in the work of a
Mexican thinker as prominent as Paz testifies to this, as do the ever disappearing
citations in the case of Sigüenza y Góngora. At the very least, we know these
instances of permeability are not read as violent repressions or their return,
which an oedipal-centered orientation would force. At most, they might be felt as
incomplete, almost benign, interruptions within an otherwise stable world line.
The idea of black holes and the recent debates surrounding their
boundaries offer a tentative interstellar analogy to help give language to this gap
within the Mexican national psychic apparatus and the nature of the permeability
of its border. This analogy is particularly appropriate here given Mexico’s cosmic
relation to discourses of racial mixture as well as my further explorations in
Chapter Four and Chapter Five of the theoretical possibility offered at the borders
of the science fiction genre, which theories connected to general relativity have
done so much to inform. Despite the complicated nature of the scientific
discourses that have attempted to more fully understand black holes, they have
retained a position within a global imagination as the region of the unthought par
excellence.
A black hole is defined as “an object with such a strong gravitational field
that its escape velocity exceeds the velocity of light.” In its classical theorization,
the radius of such an object is described as an event or absolute horizon that
obliterates the possibility of any remnant escaping and the complete loss of
information beyond its border (“Black hole”). However, Stephen Hawking has
recently proposed a new theory regarding the permeability of its horizon. Though
88
Hawking himself had helped to articulate our traditional understanding of black
holes that included the event horizon, the discovery of their potential emission of
particles forced him to reevaluate over the course of decades the assumption
that black holes were true black bodies – “regimes from which light can’t escape
to infinity” (3). Consideration of this emission of particles—what is sometimes
termed Hawking Radiation—ultimately led to his new postulation that replaces
the event horizon with what he calls an apparent horizon. With the apparent
horizon, some information will pass through but it will be chaotically mutated in
such a way that it “will effectively be lost” (1). While direct observation of a black
hole eludes astrophysicists, its contours are perceptible in this emitted matter, as
well as in the effects given off from nearby objects falling towards it (“Accretion
disk”). I intend to use this idea of an apparent horizon as a border to the
transgenerational intrapsychic gap within which the remnants of the unthought
are contained.
7

Without an embrace of the fact that these remnants are ultimately
indecipherable (an-archaeologic) radiation that emerges from this apparent
horizon, the discoveries owed to an excavational mode of thought will remain in
service of contemporary iterations of the hegemonic culture that demand their
marginalization, if not disappearance. This is either by remaining fictionally
stagnated in the past—evidenced in Beltrán’s closure of the panorama—or on

7
This borrowing remains fully aware that Hawking’s thesis has yet to gain generally acceptance
by those most invested in this area of the cosmos. However, it remains productive both despite
and because of this anxiety, as both articulations share a tentative embrace of their especially
nascent theorizations of the unthought. Additionally, this grand oscillation between astrophysics
and national psychological apparatuses that will be carried through this dissertation serves as a
reminder that all is reading.
89
the very margins of thought—evidenced in the surge of ethnographic studies of
present-day Afro-descendent populations in the remote coastal regions of
Oaxaca and Guerrero, which nonetheless remain isolated from central
conversations about the nature of Mexican identity.

What better tool to begin to expose and undo this excavational mode of
thought that structures this so very real hegemonic imaginary as it relates to
Mexico’s blackness than archeology itself. In 1939, Mathew Stirling, an
archeologist from the United States working in the south of Mexico, began to
unearth a site in the Mexican state of Tabasco that would become know as La
Venta. He was building on the information gained in a previous archeological
effort organized by Tulane University in 1925 (Grove 5-16). This original
expedition was led to La Venta following the citation of the Spanish chronicler
Bernal Díaz del Castillo that he had discovered a ruined town along the Gulf
coast (Grove 13). It was Stirling’s work, however, that led to the discovery of the
Olmec culture, which predated both the Mayan and the Aztec culture in Mexico,
and launched a strong debate about the nature of Mexico’s indigenous identity.
By 1940 photographs of Stirling’s findings were splashed on the pages of
National Geographic. The most striking of his initial discoveries were the colossal
heads taller than a human being carved out of basalt that were, in Stirling’s mind,
Negroid in appearance. And while many smaller artifacts were unearthed that
had no visible Negroid features, the possible implications of Stirling’s discovery
were enormous: A new culture was now to replace the Mayan and Aztec as the
90
fountainhead of Mesoamerican culture, with the possibility of an African ancestral
presence. This possibility, no matter how small, disrupted two things. First, the
racial composition of the Mexican identity grounded in its negation of blackness
was no longer acceptable. Second, if outsiders (Africans, in this case) played a
role in the construction of the first American, an argument described as
diffusionist, compromised was the idea of an entirely “new” culture that when
combined with the blood of the European offered the theoretical separation so
necessary in defining their difference relative to Europe.
Stirling was not the first to unearth a colossal head. That distinction
belongs to the Mexican anthropologist José Melgar y Serrano. In an article
published in 1869 Melgar makes the following observation of his discoveries in a
remote agricultural area in southern Mexico:
Lo que más me impresionó fue el tipo etiópico que representa:
reflexioné que indudablemente había habido negros en este país, y
esto había sido en los primeros tiempos del mundo, aquella cabeza
no solo era importante para la arqueología mexicana, sino también
podía serlo para la del mundo en general.

(That which first stood out to me was the fact that it represents an
African: I thought that there had undoubtedly been blacks in this
country, and that this had been in the early ages of the world, that
head wasn’t only important for Mexican archeology, but it could
also be important for the archeology of the world in general.) (6)
8

And unlike Stirling, Melgar does not merely stop at this observation.
Archeological evidence of an African presence in Mesoamerica is a crucial
aspect of his essay. In particular, he focuses on a quotation attributed to

8
At this time, the adjective etiópico/a described something African in nature.
91
Francisco Núñez de la Vega, bishop of Chiapas in the late 1600s, in which the
bishop reports:
Tienen los indios gran miedo al negro, porque dura la memoria de
uno de sus primitivos ascendientes de color etiópico, que fue gran
guerreador y cruelísimo, que los de Ochuc y de otros pueblos de
los llanos veneraban mucho, al que llaman Yalahau, que quiere
decir negro principal, ó Señor de negros.

(The indigenous are very afraid of the blacks because they still
have the memory of one of their primitive ancestors that had the
same coloring. He was such a great warrior, and cruel, that those
from Ochuc and other towns of the plains venerated him a lot. They
called him Yalahau, which means the first black or Lord of the
blacks.) (8)

Melgar points out that two other historians referenced this quotation but
have not taken it at face value, instead arguing that it was a custom for
indigenous priests to paint their faces this color (Melgar 12). For Melgar it is
important to consider that neither of these scholars were themselves confronted
by the overwhelming evidence of a colossal statue of a warrior with a helmet and
Negroid features. Melgar is not trying to claim Africa as the origin of Latin
American culture but rather explore what in his mind is an undeniable
connection. This point of a relationship with Africa dovetails with his other
explorations—principally connections with the Ancient Phoenician and Icelandic
cultures—that suggest that a distinct separation between the so-called New
World and regions on the other side of the Atlantic is a fallacy.
I am not concerned with whether or not this assertion that both Melgar and
Stirling make is correct. What interests me is how it was handled and rejected in
the years immediately following Stirling’s popularizing of the discovery and before
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the archeological evidence had accumulated to the point that its dismissal was
deemed warranted by the archeological community. The fact is that two
archeologists very familiar with the region and with seemingly no political
motivations had described the colossal heads independently. However, within six
years, and without rigorous cross-examination, these assertions completely
evaporated.
An unexpected yet very influential character in this disappearance is
Miguel Covarrubias. Covarrubias was a self-trained caricature artist who, as his
career developed, became increasingly interested in anthropology and used his
artistic skill to produce, among other things, a visual and textual record of
faraway places. He traveled to the United States as a young artist and was
quickly embraced by the New York publishing industry. His exaggerated portraits
of prominent public figures were featured in both Vanity Fair and The New
Yorker. While in the United States, Covarrubias had been accepted within the
community of Harlem. He had close relationships with many of the black artists
and white benefactors and his artwork was on the covers of, among others,
works by Langston Hughes and Zora Neal Hurston. He would also design the set
for Josephine Baker’s famous La Revue nègre (1925) in France (Jules-Rosette
61, 130).
9
Covarrubias enjoyed an audience both in Mexico and the United
States, much like his friend and contemporary Diego Rivera. Among his most
famous early books were Negro Drawings (1927) and Island of Bali (1937).

9
Covarrubias would do both the cover and drawings for Hurston’s ethnographic account of
African-American folklore Mules and Men (1935) and the cover for Hughes’ first collection of
poetry The Weary Blues (1925) (Powell and Bailey 170, 176).
93
Negro Drawings collected many of the submissions he had made to Vanity Fair
and other drawings inspired by the nightlife of Harlem. In many ways, the exotic
nature of his drawings of black life would help to frame the visual record of the
Harlem Renaissance. Island of Bali was the result of several trips to the island
and combined drawings with a similar exotic flair and texts that described
customs, dress, and rituals with a great eye for detail.
In 1946, Covarrubias turned his by then developed anthropological eye to
Mexico and the exotic within. He had been fascinated by the culture that was in
the heart of its rediscovery in the south of Mexico at the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.
In her biography of Covarrubias, Adriana Williams describes the artist as greatly
influenced by Vasconcelos’ call to rediscover and bolster the indigenous
component of Mexican culture (12, 255). Long before he would write of the
region, he was hired by Vasconcelos, then Minister of Education, to teach the in
open-air art schools of Mexico City the value of certain elements (color, line, etc.)
of indigenous Mexican art to contemporary artists. The famous Mexican painter
Rufino Tamayo was also among this group of artistic missionaries (12). However,
Covarrubias’ participation in the Mexican dialogue regarding identity would move
way beyond the open-air schools with the publication of Mexico South: The
Isthmus of Tehuantepec (1946).
10
With this book, he played a fundamental part
in the formation of Mexican anthropological thinking surrounding the Olmec
culture.

10
This book was published by A.A. Knopf in English and not translated into Spanish until 1980.
94
As a member of the Sociedad Mexicana de Antropología, Covarrubias
was a participant at the 1942 conference on the Olmec in Tuxtla Gutiérrez,
Chiapas, and his 1946 book was central in disconnecting blackness from what
was the Olmec culture’s largest sign, the colossal head. At the conference,
Stirling and Melgar’s observation of the Negroid quality of the colossal heads is
mentioned, but the implications of such an observation went unexplored (Mayas
y Olmecas). By the time Covarrubias publishes Mexico South, the specific racial
referent that had been used to discuss the colossal heads has vanished. He
mentions racial types (Mongoloid and Semitic) when discussing smaller figurines
common to Olmec archeological sites, but leaves out a racial description of the
colossal heads, instead listing characteristics as follows: “The first monument we
saw was the seven-foot-high colossal head, the masterpiece of La Venta. It
represents a chubby youth with a flat nose, heavy lids, and a full, sensual mouth”
(96, 89). Then, in the collection of photos that follow the section where the
colossal heads are discussed, there are two pictures that complete the
maneuver:
95

The young boy in the top image interprets the countenance of the statue
and the woman in the bottom photograph has a similarly shaped mouth. Both of
these images serve to put a different face on features that had theretofore been
described as Negroid. Pseudo-scientific as these gestures may be, they have
had remarkable staying power within the anthropological community. Richard
Diehl, who has authored perhaps the most comprehensive book on the Olmecs
in 2004, echoes Covarrubias’ observation and sums up the debate as follows:
When José Melgar y Serrano published his pioneering description
of Tres Zapotes Colossal Head 1 in 1869 he proposed that it
depicted an “Ethiopian.” This fiction recently resurfaced in the
96
writings of Ivan van Sertima and others as part of an Afrocentric
rewriting of world history. Melgar may be excused for his mistake,
but today there can be no doubt that the heads depict the American
Indian physical type still commonly seen on the streets of Sotepan,
Acayucan, and other towns in the region. (112)

And while Diehl and Covarrubias are correct to point out similarities
between the statues and the current native population of the region, to
wholeheartedly reject any possible connection to Africa appears not to be driven
by archeological inquiry alone. And as was discussed in Chapter One, because
of its port, the state of Veracruz (where the majority of the heads were found)
maintained the largest population of African slaves that would eventually mix with
the local indigenous population. Covarrubias’ and Diehl’s negations are thus
double. First, there remains the possibility that the local indigenous population is
in part descended from an Olmec population that was mixed with African blood.
Second, and more closely connected to the arguments of my dissertation, the
very populations that are being compared to the colossal heads are in fact the
most likely to have mixed with the colonial slave populations. This is just another
insight into the nature of the barrier that works to restrict Mexico’s Afro-
descendent elements. In a related irony, another site containing significant
Olmec ruins was discovered in 1945 and given the name San Lorenzo
Tenochtitlán (Grove 52). This site, believed to be Mesoamerica’s earliest city, is
located less than 150 miles from what was San Lorenzo de los Negros (Diehl
29).
In Indian Art of Mexico and Central America (1957), Covarrubias would
deepen his connection to the narrative of the Olmec culture by publishing a chart
97
that “that graphically illustrated the derivation of all later Mesoamerican rain
deities from an Olmec progenitor” (Diehl 98; Covarrubias, Indian Art 62). This
was the first attempt to connect the Olmec to what had been previously put
forward as the “Continuity Hypothesis.” Before the discovery and placement of
the Olmec, it had been suggested that the Mayan creation myth (Popol Vuh)
connected to the Aztec, Mixtec and Zapotec cultures that followed (Diehl 98).
Covarrubias’ suggestion, which has since been endorsed by much of the
archeological community, solves the “Olmec Problem” by creating a psychically
comforting continuity between the first Americans and the contemporary Mexican
state that had then just recently been reorganized around an Aztec/Mayan
indigenous paradigm. Though in a much lighter tone, his undated caricature of
himself as an Olmec statue chases the same continuity:

98
For a clue into how this restriction has been carried through to
contemporary Mexican public discourse, one need only look to the nation’s
imagination of itself as it prepared to celebrate its bicentennial in 2010. To
commemorate the milestone, the Mexican government, in conjunction with the
Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) and the Consejo Nacional
para la Cultura y las Artes (Conaculta), commissioned the book project Viaje por
la historia de México. Intended to document Mexico’s diverse and impressive
history, the book uses text from the Mexican historian Luis González y
González’s Álbum de la historia de México and features reproductions of
photographs and paintings and descriptions of important Mexican figures and
moments. Although intended for a mass audience, including children, it aims to
present a quite complete historical overview from Mexico’s pre-Columbian era to
the present. Twenty-five million copies of the full-color, glossy booklet were
printed and freely distributed to commemorate the nation’s diverse history.
11

In President Felipe Calderón’s introductory statement to the volume, we
see the same coordinates we have come to expect to bind Mexican identity: “A
través de los siglos, México ha sido hogar de grandes historiadores. Los ha
habido indígenas, españoles, criollos y mestizos” (Across the centuries, Mexico
has been home to great historians. They have been indigenous, Spaniards,
creoles and mestizos) (3). In the final words of his introduction, Calderón
prepares the reader for a vision of Mexican history that is “generosa, plural,
abierta, y constructiva” (generous, plural, open, and constructive) (3). As one

11
This process was overseen by the Comisión Nacional de Libros de Texto Gratuitos.
99
might expect, the narrative that follows, and the gaps it presents, contains an
extraordinarily bracketed plurality, especially in regard to Mexico’s Afro-
descendent elements. There are two brief mentions of slavery being abolished,
first in 1810 by Hidalgo and later in the biography of Guadalupe Victoria. No
reference is made to the subsequent 1829 abolition by Vicente Guerrero.
Furthermore, the idea of African slavery is never specifically presented, and
neither the benefits to the state nor the large population it produced are
discussed.
In the book, there are two explicit references to the presence of Afro-
descendent people in what would become modern-day Mexico: Juan de Oñate,
an explorer in early New Spain, is described as bringing an expedition that
included “130 soldados, algunos frailes franciscanos, negros e indios” (130
soldiers, some Franciscan friars, blacks and Indians) in order to claim New
Mexico for New Spain at the end of the sixteenth century (22); and the former
president Vicente Guerrero is described as being an “agricultor y arriero mulato”
(a mulatto farmer and mule driver) prior to his ascension through the military to
the presidency in 1829 (33). When describing the concept of mestizaje, González
y González’s text does contend that it was both biological and cultural and that
within this mix were “ideas prehispánicas, europeas y africanas” (Pre-Hispanic,
European and African ideas) (25). But this reads as out of place, as outside of
the one adjective used to describe Guerrero and the mention of the blacks that
traveled with Oñate, there is no other reference to a Mexican Afro-descent. If one
is reading this document to educate oneself about the history of Mexico, which is
100
how it is intended, one might be quite confused as to the origin of these
otherwise invisible “ideas africanas.”
This is no more evident than in the section of the book dedicated to the
height of the baroque period in Mexican history, the seventeenth century. The
highlight of this section is a discussion of the Virgen de Guadalupe whose
symbolic importance was cemented during this time. The text of this section is
placed below the following image (24):

It is a detail from Traslado de la imagen y estreno del santuario de
Guadalupe, painted in 1709 by a member of the Arellano family and
commissioned by the Viceroy Francisco Fernández de la Cueva to
commemorate the completion of the new basilica in honor of la Virgen in Mexico
101
City. The Arellano family contributed greatly to the genre of casta paintings, the
predominantly eighteenth-century style of painting in colonial Mexico that sought
to categorize and classify the racial and social makeup of New Spain. So
although this particular painting was intended to recognize the completion of the
new basilica, the painter’s interest in classification and representation of the
various strata of Mexican culture is evident. The editors of Viaje por la historia de
México have chosen a close-up that highlights the image of la Virgen that
miraculously appeared on the garment of Juan Diego in 1531 as proof of her
existence. Just above this image, the artist has placed a black man and a black
woman who are dressed in somewhat regal garments standing on a balcony.
There is nothing in the text that prepares a reader for the emergence of these
figures; from the world lines of contemporary Mexico, I would argue, they remain
illegible.
The visibly invisible black bodies bring us back to Hawking, and the
radiation that first brought him to examine the border of a black hole more
closely. To explain what happens to the information lost in a black hole, Hawking
relies on the metaphor of the Encyclopedia: “If you jump into a black hole, your
mass energy will be returned to our universe but in a mangled form which
contains the information about what you were like but in a state where it can not
be easily recognized. It is like burning an encyclopedia. Information is not lost, if
one keeps the smoke and the ashes, but it is difficult to read” (4). As has been
argued, my project remains steadfastly uninterested in excavating a quantity of
these fragments to approximate a “truth.” In the context of the psychological
102
apparatus of an hegemonic culture that depends on the fostering of a non-
knowledge of the gaps which generation after generation give it structure, these
unreadable remnants of the unthought are disruptive in that they point to a
structuring metapsychological Reality that can neither be fully avoided, as
evidenced by the remnants themselves, nor fully understood, also evidenced by
these same remnants.
If, as a rereading of Nicholas Abraham suggests, that “what [emanates]
are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others,” I am then
calling for an embrace of a critical practice, buoyed by Graff Zivin’s notions of the
an-archaeological, that honors a sustained awareness of these gaps and the
valuable uncertainty they contain (171).
12
To articulate this practice in the register
of vanished radical blackness, I will eventually turn to literature and film in the
United States and Mexico in order to address the following question: how can
what crosses the apparent horizon be magnified to activate this unsettling
awareness of the contours of a barrier from which this indecipherable matter
comes? But first, the following chapter will articulate the relevance of this
comparison by demonstrating how the United States’ racial paradigm can and
should be read, by and large, as beginning a vanishing of radical blackness
similar to what has been demonstrated as having occurred in Mexico.

12
The word “haunts” is used in place of “emanates” in the original text.
103

CHAPTER THREE – BALDWIN AND THE GRAVITY OF LINCOLN

…the legend controls what is left of the American
imagination...
-James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen

The two previous chapters describe the existence of an intrapsychic gap
within Mexico’s national psychological apparatus that carries within it
intergenerational secrets too harmful to the limits the apparatus has set for itself.
I have theorized that this gap is bordered by a horizon that is not absolute but
permeable—an apparent horizon. However, as the gap has matured across
these generations, grown in its destructive gravitational force, the matter that now
manages to escape this horizon is ultimately indecipherable.
This chapter will use this foundation to better explore how a large part of
what has been inefficiently described as a “Latin Americanization” of the racial
paradigm in the United States can and should be read as effecting a vanishing of
radical blackness similar to what has been described in Mexico. This chapter
does not suggest that the phenomenon of the violent return of a repressed
radical blackness does not still plague the United States—a large portion of its
104
psychic apparatus is too steeped in this approach to the threat of what is
imagined to be a blackness beyond the bounds of imagination. This chapter does
suggest, however, that taking place alongside this, and assuming an evermore-
dominant position within the collective psyche, is a secreting much more akin to
what has been described in Mexico. Central to this idea is the link between
utopian discourses of racial egalitarianism and the shameful secret of remaining
social imbalances tied to these same vanishing ideas of race.
In this chapter, I will use James Baldwin’s final book-length work of
nonfiction, The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), as a lens through which to
examine how the contemporary popular archive reads Abraham Lincoln and the
boundary these readings set in relation to ideas of radical blackness. This
examination aligns with the Lindon Barrett’s reading of Saidiya Hartman’s
understanding of a collective desire within the United States to read
emancipation—of which Lincoln has become our symbol—as a “discrete
historical event” rather than the “structural exposure” of the state’s ongoing
reorganization of its “regulatory mechanism” (Barrett 72).

In April of 1981, James Baldwin was living in France when he was asked
by Playboy editor Walter Lowe to make a trip to Atlanta in order to investigate
and report on a developing case of missing and murdered children in that
southern city. Baldwin obliged, returning on multiple occasions to interview and
interact with local residents, city officials and the families of the missing and the
dead. The official death toll was eventually recorded as twenty-nine—twenty-
105
seven children and adolescents and two adults, the great majority coming from
Atlanta’s black underclass. This catastrophic collection of events is often referred
to as the Atlanta Child Murders (1979-1981).
Baldwin was intrigued by how Atlanta, with its largely black municipal
administration, was managing this crisis. Who was stalking the city’s poor black
youth, luring them into cars for them only to turn up weeks or months later, shot,
strangled, stabbed or beaten to death? His initial investigation into this terror
produced an article, “Atlanta: The Evidence of Things Not Seen,” that was
published in the December 1981 issue of Playboy and won the magazine’s
award for best nonfiction piece that year. However, it was during the process of
writing the article that Wayne Williams, a twenty-one year old black male Atlanta
resident, was arrested in connection with the murders. In February of 1982,
despite relatively weak evidence, Williams was found guilty of two of the
murders, the only two adults that were killed. Immediately after his conviction, the
Atlanta police department declared twenty-three of the twenty-nine murder cases
solved, feeling that the “pattern,” which included so many different causes of
death, had stopped. Its residents, especially those geographically and
biologically related to the victims, were not convinced. And neither was Baldwin.
1

Because of the timing of the trial, Wayne Williams was not dealt with at all
in Baldwin’s article for Playboy. And despite the discomfort Baldwin felt returning
to the scene, he was compelled to explore what he described as an all-too-

1
In recent years, DNA evidence has tied Williams to some of the murders and he remains in jail
(Polk and Zdanowicz.).
106
common cowardly “attempt to make the public and social disaster the result, or
the issue, of a single demented creature” (72). Baldwin sought to articulate this
social disaster in the same manner as he had done, and as he had been so often
relied upon to do, in his essays of the 1950s and 60s. Baldwin returned to Atlanta
several times, including for the trial of Williams, and The Evidence of Things Not
Seen, this time a book-length essay, was eventually published in the United
States by Henry Holt and Company in 1985.
2

Written in tandem with the then burgeoning Reagan Era, its meditations
center on a remaining relative non-presence of certain black bodies in what
Baldwin understood as the American imagination. Still early in the essay, Baldwin
presents the first thirteen of these particular twenty-nine bodies in a sparse roll
call: Name, age. Date last seen. Date body was found. Cause of death, if known.
Baldwin stops at thirteen because though the authorities would ultimately claim a
pattern led to the conviction of Williams, it was only after the thirteenth murder
that there was a legible, “(official) hue and cry” (40). Baldwin was confused—or
rather infuriated that he was not confused—by the fact that it took so long for the
terror of Atlanta’s underclass to register in first the city’s imagination.

2
Baldwin was neither the first nor the last author or artist to deal significantly with the Atlanta
Child Murders. The cultural critic Stanley Crouch did so in an essay that predates Baldwin’s and
contains similar ruminations on Atlanta’s racial history. The novelists Toni Cade Bambara (Those
Bones Are Not My Child, 1999) and Tayari Jones (Leaving Atlanta, 2002) constructed books
around the subject, and as recently as 2007, Kim Reid, daughter of one of the police
investigators, published a memoir (No Safe Place). Abby Mann’s The Atlanta Child Murders
(1985), a four-hour docudrama starring Morgan Freeman, James Earl Jones, Ruby Dee and
Martin Sheen, deals most thoroughly and directly with the events surrounding the murders and
the trial of Williams. Baldwin was more than aware that he was working within the footprint of
Mann’s project, even referencing it briefly with guarded praise in the preface of Evidence.
107
John Flemming, in his 1985 review of the book for the New York Times,
was among the critics that pushed Baldwin’s work aside for lacking a fact-based
reporting style. However, Baldwin’s agenda seems only to be to point out the
case’s dubious nature in order to use it as a vivid metaphor for how the myth of
social progress functions to placate the larger society and, ultimately, to
underline who gets left behind in this myth-making process. And most
importantly, questions, not facts, are the center of Baldwin’s essay. What finally
made present this obscene collection of bodies, at that point all children between
seven and fourteen years old? And the reverse: What had allowed the vanishing
of the first twelve for such a protracted time? The Evidence of Things Not Seen is
a meditation on the nature of the barrier that floats between these two questions.
Racial integration in the United States quickly becomes the focus of his
analysis. Baldwin reminds the reader that the initial demand of blacks in the
1950s and early 1960s was not for integration:
Integration, as we could all testify, simply by looking at the colors of
our skins, had, long ago, been accomplished…The Black demand
was for desegregation, which is a legal, public, social matter: a
demand that one be treated as a human being and not like a mule
or a dog…It had absolutely nothing to do with the hope of becoming
White. (22)

In Baldwin’s argument, the greater American public consciousness
decided that desegregation equaled integration and this had a profound and
disastrous effect on the social fabric of the black community. Before integration,
in urban areas with large black populations, the black middle class existed within
the same physical space as the working class in a symbiotic manner where “the
108
porter and the banker and the dentist all knew they needed each other” for their
economic and social survival (56). Baldwin astutely recognizes that “the social
details, the habits, of integration, created not a divorce, but a distance” (56).
According to Baldwin, it was this distance that led to a waning political strength
within Atlanta’s black underclass and helped the slaughter of its children to be so
poorly dealt with.
The belated insight of his tormented protagonist in Giovanni’s Room –
“people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts” – brings to mind that, for
Baldwin, psychic terror is always intimately linked to an ever impermanent and
elusive, yet necessary, idea of connection. Thus, when trying to work around the
events in Atlanta, it is of no surprise that Baldwin is drawn to a comparison that
he desires “neither to force nor avoid” (40): Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old boy
from Chicago that was kidnapped and brutally murdered while visiting relatives in
Mississippi in 1955. Beyond the details of the act and the condition of the body,
Baldwin reveals a tentative symmetry in the eventual high profile nature of Till’s
murder that marked the segregation crisis of the 1950s and further ignited a push
toward more full civil rights. An important aspect of this symmetry is to be found
in the Eisenhower Administration’s relative silence on, and absolute refusal to
further investigate, those involved in the murder.
In the case of Till, the only reason he rose to our collective conscience “is
that he happened to come whistling down the road—an obscure country road—at
the very moment the road felt itself most threatened” (40). The very moment
Baldwin is speaking to was cultured by Eisenhower’s silence on matters of
109
desegregation that could only be read as a lack of approval “of a mongrelization
of the races” (41). For Baldwin, the silence from the nation’s legal and political
apparatuses that continued to persist after the murder of Till forced the reading of
the act, from the perspective of the black community, as one being committed as
a “spiritual and patriotic duty” (41). Whether said silence was driven by cowardice
or ideology is, in the end, a meaningless distinction in Baldwin’s accounting. For
Baldwin, the murder of Emmett Till is, in large part, representative of a broader
failure of authority to declare the absolute humanity of America’s black citizens:
“It is impossible to know what might have happened had authority felt, or dared
suggest, that the darker brother has every right to be here, and nothing whatever
to prove. No American president has ever unequivocally stated this” (41).
The first president to be called out by name is Abraham Lincoln, who, for
Baldwin, “was simply determined to preserve the Union, with slavery or without it”
(41). Historians that have managed the topic of emancipation can be arranged on
a spectrum that stretches from those that see Lincoln as “the Great Emancipator”
to those that record a process of self-emancipation through efforts of the slaves
themselves and free blacks. But in terms of public rhetoric, what Baldwin is
excoriating here, there is certainly no question that the archive of public
speeches and documents related to his candidacy and later presidency supports
his view.
3

3
Baldwin had, of course, addressed Lincoln obliquely in the past, as the prologue to his book The
Fire Next Time (1963) is introduced by a letter written to his fifteen-year-old nephew on the 100
th

Anniversary of emancipation.
110
Baldwin could be read as wanting to imagine the impact of a clear utopian
declaration similar to those put forward by Hidalgo and Morelos that surrounded
slavery, racial castes, and the formation of the Mexican state. We of course know
not to search for a parallel in the two principal documents produced in the
American Revolutionary War (The Articles of the Confederacy and The
Constitution of the United States) while slavery in the United States was at its
apex. However, given the stature that Abraham Lincoln now seems to maintain in
the historical imaginary of the United Sates, perhaps it may be surprising to some
that equivalence cannot be sought here either.
Putting aside the extent to which Hidalgo’s rhetoric was or was not
employed to gain a military advantage, or any evaluation of its sincerity, it
delivers a clear directive (that all slave owners release their slaves), time frame
(ten days), and punishment (death). Morelos’ Sentimientos de la nación replaces
authoritative specificity with a grand utopian embrace that is worth quoting again
here: “Let slavery and the distinction of castas be banished forever, leaving all
equal. Vice and virtue will be all that will distinguish one American from another.”
Neither the certitude of Hidalgo nor the utopian grandeur of Morelos is to be
found in the public rhetoric of Lincoln surrounding the issue of slavery and black
equality.
As is commonly known, Lincoln’s “Preliminary Emancipation
Proclamation” comes on September 22,

1862 and, on its face, serves as a
warning to Confederate slave states that if they remained “in rebellion” at the
start of the following year, their slaves would be freed. It is a calculated political
111
strategy with great eventual moral consequences. However, no clear immediate
judgment is included on the institution of slavery or the current social hierarchy in
the document itself. In fact, the threat of mass rebellion can be read as being
held up against the carrot of Southern states potentially keeping their status as
slave states if they were to join the Union. Alongside the proposed emancipation,
the document formally announces the idea of compensating slaveholders and
slave states for emancipating their slaves, as well as a continued commitment to
the “effort to colonize persons of African descent, with their consent, upon this
continent, or elsewhere, with the previously obtained consent of the
Governments existing there.” Though the final “Emancipation Proclamation”
signed on January 1, 1863, does not contain mention of consensual colonization
or compensated emancipation, it does refer to and uphold the original
document.
4

The idea of consensual colonization, ongoing with free blacks in the North
since the beginning of the nineteenth century and long-supported by Lincoln, was
a great psychic comfort to a nation that though divided on the issue of slavery
was far more united on the idea of social segregation. However, it is a major
sticking point in the narratives of Lincoln that wish to insulate his image from
critiques such as Baldwin’s.

4
Michael Burlingame picks up on the “curious” omission of the word “forever” when the following
statement is reiterated in the final “Emancipation Proclamation”: “shall be then, thenceforward,
and forever free” turns to “are, and henceforward shall be free” (2: 463). Both phrases are present
in the document as two paragraphs from the Preliminary “Emancipation Proclamation” were
included verbatim in the final version. Burlingame supposes that perhaps Lincoln “may have
feared that the courts would take a dim view of such an extravagant claim” (2: 463). In either
case, it points to the delicate nature of language as this idea was finding its form.
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This was by no means new territory for Lincoln, as he rose to the
presidency as the nation was coming to grips with the question of what to do with
the soon-to-be-freed blacks. In Lincoln’s first set of debates with Stephen
Douglas for the United States Senate in 1854, for example, he spoke of his
strong preference to return slaves to Liberia (Tsesis 35). Lincoln would again
address the issue prominently as president in his first two State of the Union
addresses. In 1861, he outlined the fact that such a colonization, which could
include portions of the already free black population, would need the financial
support of the federal government and the acquisition of new territories. One year
later, and just weeks before he would announce and sign the final “Emancipation
Proclamation”, Lincoln again addressed Congress on the issue and clearly
spelled out the advantages to white citizens:
I can not make it better known than it already is that I strongly favor
colonization … With deportation, even to a limited extent, enhanced
wages to white labor is mathematically certain. Labor is like any
other commodity in the market—increase the demand for it and you
increase the price of it. Reduce the supply of black labor by
colonizing the black laborer out of the country, and by precisely so
much you increase the demand for and wages of white labor. (39)

In December of 1862, this plan had already advanced far enough to where
Lincoln could announce in the speech that “the Spanish American Republics
have protested against the sending of such colonies to their respective territories”
(22).
5
In this same address, he would go on to propose three detailed
Constitutional amendments that would: (1) ensure the compensation of states for

5
This is a somewhat veiled reference to the ultimately failed colonization project in the Chiriquí
region of Panama that I discuss below.
113
lost slaves if they were to agree to abolish slavery by the first day of the coming
year; (2) ensure similar compensation for individual slaveholders that were able
to prove their loyalty; and (3) earmark federal funds for the colonization and
deportation of significant portions of the black population in the United States.
Most historians concerned with this aspect of Lincoln’s political legacy
acknowledge that the United States government-led project of colonization was
ongoing while Lincoln was imagining, drafting and declaring the emancipation of
the slaves in rebellious territories. By July of 1862, while Lincoln was
contemplating the idea of a proclamation, Congress had appropriated $600,000
under the direction of Lincoln to support the deportation and colonization of
blacks (Magness and Page 1; Burlingame 2: 385; Tuckerman 332). The two
most famous and documented colonization projects were located off the coast of
Haiti on the Île à Vache and in the Chiriquí region of Panama. While the effort in
Panama would fail without bearing fruit in October of 1862, the push for the
settlement of Île à Vache would continue well after January 1, 1863, what has
become somewhat of a psychic boundary marking the end of colonizing efforts in
the Lincoln Administration (Burlingame 2: 394). In fact, Lincoln signed an
agreement relating to the Île à Vache settlement on December 31, 1862, the eve
of his signing the “Emancipation Proclamation.” He is said to have developed
concerns regarding the trustworthiness of the contractor for the project, Bernard
Kock, and canceled the agreement by way of a presidential proclamation on the
technicality that the signature had not yet been paired with the seal of the United
States (Vorenberg, “Black Emancipation” 22; Burlingame 2: 395-96;
114
“Proclamation 99”). But this did not derail the project. Under a new agreement,
Kock remained involved on the ground in Haiti, but the transportation of 453
blacks was arranged by Charles Tuckerman and Paul Forbes. Months later, the
colony, under the misdirection of Kock, was found to be an abject failure. And in
February of 1864 Lincoln would send a United States Navy ship to recover the
368 colonists that had managed to survive a smallpox outbreak and disastrous
living conditions (Tuckerman 330-31; Burlingame 2: 396).
6

The common narrative for most scholars who deal with Lincoln’s interest
in deportation and colonization is that the failures of Île à Vache punctuate the
colonization experiment. However, recent work on the subject, particularly that of
Phillip Magness and Sebastian Page, uncovers a great deal of archival material
that details Lincoln’s significant commitments to the colonization after this date.
Though Lincoln’s comments regarding colonization evaporate, their study traces
the development of colonization schemes in British Honduras, British Guiana and
Surinam under the direction of Lincoln’s director of the United States Emigration
Office James Mitchell. These three projects represent a shift in the United States’
strategy in their “attempt[t] to negotiate an agreement with established European
powers to designate specified northern port cities as points of emigration and,
from each, induce a voluntary mass migration of the freedman” (Magness and

6
For insight into the man that Lincoln felt decidedly more comfortable working with than Kock,
here is a portion of Tuckerman’s recollections of the disaster made for the Magazine of American
History in 1886: “No sooner were the survivors landed and the necessity for manual labor on their
part apparent, than the lowest characteristics of the negro—indolence, discontent,
insubordination, and finally open revolt prevailed. Mistaking liberty for license, they refused to
work, and raised preposterous demands for luxuries to which they were wholly unaccustomed
during servitude. History repeats itself” (330-31).
115
Page 55). Henry Highland Garnet, the noted black abolitionists and key supporter
of colonization within the black community, was to be a crucial piece in this
design (Magness and Page 60, 86-89). His influential African Civilization Society
was to help encourage blacks to emigrate to the new colonies. Ultimately, the
likelihood of convincing large amounts of black settlers to emigrate forced the
project’s waning in the early months of 1864 and the ultimate discontinuation of
the Emigration Office in July of 1864. For Magness and Page, the two most
common narratives of Lincoln’s interest in colonization—either as a mere “ruse to
‘defuse’ white backlash” or something that he let go of when his personal beliefs
on race shifted—are complicated by the fact these colonization projects would be
vigorously pursued throughout 1863 (8-9).
Even historians that allow for Lincoln’s expressed pre-presidential
misgivings on racial equality,
7
often do so by tying them into a narrative of
gradual but ultimate arrival to a firm moral ground on the issues of slavery and
equality. The above noted developing archive suggests that if we are going to
include an eventual moral enlightenment as a cause for Lincoln’s gradual

7
Perhaps the most famous of such statements comes from his fourth debate with Stephen
Douglas during his 1858 United States senatorial campaign. Though Lincoln did not approve of
the expansion of slavery, he did not envision social and political equality for blacks and whites: “I
will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and
political equality of the white and black races—that I am not nor ever have been in favor of
making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with
white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white
and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social
and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there
must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of
having the superior position assigned to the white race … Judge Douglas has said to you that he
has not been able to get from me an answer to the question whether I am in favor of negro-
citizenship. So far as I know, the Judge never asked me the question before. He shall have no
occasion to ever ask it again, for I tell him very frankly that I am not in favor of negro citizenship”
(Davis 131-65).
116
disconnection from his oft-proposed and partially implemented colonization
project, it must be alongside the lack of feasibility of the projects themselves and
the perceived growing political risk.
However, my concerns in this chapter are ultimately elsewhere. Lincoln’s
ambition to deport significant numbers of black American citizens—even if it is
just as he is proclaiming emancipation, or if it is argued as a “necessary” aspect
of an involved political strategy—merely underlines that we are quite far from
anything resembling a utopian declaration regarding the value of black life—the
absence of which is the focus of Baldwin’s lament. For Lincoln, that “obscure
country road,” to extend Baldwin’s metaphor of the American psyche, still felt
threatened. Compensated emancipation and the various colonization projects
were an attempt to mitigate that self-inflicted and accumulated threat, and the
value of black life took a secondary position to this psychic comfort
The enduring image of Lincoln in the American imagination as the
founding father of our contemporary utopian desire, and the relatively racially
egalitarian moment that it has produced, seems to have not suffered for any of
this.
President Barack Obama, for an example of perhaps the most visible
investor in this symbolism, has firmly tied his presidential brand to this idea of
Lincoln ever since he announced his candidacy on the steps of the Old State
Capitol, in Springfield Illinois, where the sixteenth president gave his famous
“House Divided” speech in 1858. In the months prior to his inauguration, Obama
would note the impact of Doris Kearn Goodwin’s bestselling book Team of
117
Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln on his own potential strategy in
regard to his impending cabinet selections (Rucker). Obama would go on to be
sworn in for his first term with his hand on the same bible that Lincoln had used
for his 1861 inauguration—of note, the same inauguration that saw Lincoln state
that he had “no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of
slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I
have no inclination to do so.” Adding to this symbolism and creating a direct link
from Lincoln to the Civil Rights Movement’s most visible icon, Obama would be
sworn in for his second term with his hand on the same Lincoln bible stacked
above one used by Martin Luther King, Jr. (Boorstein).
It was in this spirit, three weeks before this second inauguration, that the
“Emancipation Proclamation” itself received a makeover by the president on its
150
th
Anniversary. In a proclamation of his own (“Presidential Proclamation –
150
th
Anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation”), Obama summarized the
original document, papering over the language that had once been described by
Richard Hofstadter as having “all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading” with a
decidedly grandiose, if not utopian, prose (Guezlo 2):
On December 31, 1862, our Nation marked the end of another year
of civil war … Blood and bitterness had deepened the divide that
separated North from South … Slavery still suspended the
possibility of an America where life and liberty were the birthright of
all, not the province of some.
Yet, even in those dark days, light persisted. Hope endured. As
the weariness of an old year gave way to the promise of a new one,
President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation
– courageously declaring that on January 1, 1863, “all persons held
as slaves” in rebellious areas “shall be then, thenceforward, and
forever free.” He opened the Union Army and Navy to African
Americans, giving new strength to liberty's cause. And with that
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document, President Lincoln lent new moral force to the war by
making it a fight not just to preserve, but also to empower. He
sought to reunite our people not only in government, but also in
freedom that knew no bounds of color or creed.

Obama’s proclamation is, all told, a five hundred-word document that
retains only twelve words from the original: all persons held as slaves … shall be
then, thenceforward, and forever free.
8
Gone entirely is the reference to the
preliminary act, enacting a further distancing of compensated emancipation and
colonization. With no mention of the states that were in rebellion, gone as well is
the uncomfortably long list of parishes and counties in Louisiana and Virginia
that, due to their loyalty to the Union, were entitled to keep their slaves “as if this
proclamation were not issued.”
It has become, in this re-envisioning, a utopian declaration.
Immense investment along this line stretches well beyond the political
arena and can be recently observed in Steven Spielberg’s Golden Globe and
Oscar-nominated biopic Lincoln, which came to the theaters amidst the buildup
to the proclamation’s 150
th
Anniversary in 2012. The screenplay, also nominated
for the two major United States-based cinematic award competitions, is written
by Tony Kushner and based, in part, on a portion of Goodwin’s bestselling book.
In Goodwin’s forward to Kushner’s published screenplay, she notes how
Kushner had openly struggled to frame for the screen a project that was
potentially so large. Ultimately, the final story’s arc begins with a brief prologue

8
Refer to note 4 in this chapter to see how Obama has chosen to restore the language of the
preliminary version: “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free” instead of “are, and
henceforward shall be free.”
119
that takes place around the brutal Battle of Jenkins’ Ferry (Arkansas) in 1864,
showing white and black soldiers fighting side by side. The narrative ends with a
series of scenes that depict the Thirteenth Amendment’s passage in the House
of Representatives on January 31, 1865, General Robert E. Lee’s subsequent
surrender on April 9
th
, and Lincoln’s assassination six days later. The remaining
body of the two and a half hour film circles around Lincoln’s role in the process of
passing the amendment.
This narrow temporal frame aids the moral vigor of its dramatic arc. By
remaining in 1865, Spielberg and Kushner are able to avoid the awkward
subjects of colonization and deportation all together and construct a narrative
that more forcefully demonstrates Lincoln as the principal architect of black
freedom to the diminishment of those around him (or off screen). Thaddeus
Stevens, played by Tommy Lee Jones, and James Mitchell Ashley are the two
radical Republican members of the House given the most screen time. However,
as the film centers on the passage of the bill in the House, there is no great focus
on the radical Republican senators that had worked tirelessly alongside Stevens
and Ashley to develop the language for the amendment and pass it in the Senate
eleven months prior.
Chief among these absences are the Massachusetts Senators Charles
Sumner and Henry Wilson. Wilson is not in the film, while Sumner makes two
very brief appearances.
9
Sumner, in particular, would work to craft an unused but

9
Sumner’s first appearance is in the reception line for a party where he is waiting to greet Mary
Todd Lincoln. His one line in the film is of no significance as he is interrupted so that she may

120
nonetheless recorded version of the amendment that is an absolute contrast to
the final version. Drawing from France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man,
Sumner proposed the following language: “All persons are equal before the law,
so that no person can hold another as a slave; and the Congress shall have
power to make all laws necessary and proper to carry this declaration into effect
everywhere in the United States” (Stanley 740-42). This constituted not only a
universal declaration of human rights that extended, in his mind, “the idea of
human rights which is enunciated in our Declaration of Independence,” it
presented the radical legal foundation for equal protection that would have to wait
until the Fourteenth Amendments ratification in 1868 (Stanley 742). Sumner’s
proposal was rejected for a variety of reasons. Many Democrats and
conservative Republicans rejected it outright on ideological grounds, while others
simply decried the audacity of evoking the French document (Stanley 742).
Some Radical Republicans like Jacob Howard of Michigan, however, while in
support of its principal ambition, felt that its language, “in a legal and technical
sense [was] utterly insignificant and meaningless” (Vorenberg, Final Freedom
107; Stanley 742). Though Sumner would eventually relent, his remarks in the
senate, seemingly in accord with Baldwin, would attempt to underscore the
“transcendent importance” of language in that particular moment: “In placing a
new and important text into our Constitution, it seems to me we cannot be too
careful in the language we adopt … Universal emancipation, which is at hand,

direct her attention to the other guests. He is later visible in the balcony when the vote on the
Thirteenth Amendment is read.
121
can only be won by complete emancipation of the Constitution itself, which has
been degraded to wear chains so long” (Stanely 742).
The fact that the gravitational pull of this coalition of radical Republican
congressmen worked both independently of and in alignment with Lincoln is
evidenced by the presidential elections that took place in the months prior to the
passing of the Thirteenth Amendment in the House. Thaddeus Stevens and
Senator Ben Wade, among others, initially supported Benjamin Butler in Lincoln’s
own National Union Party (Waugh 162). And in a more dramatic pressuring of
Lincoln, a group of disheartened Republicans would form the Radical Democracy
Party and nominate in a separate convention the more radical John Frémont in
1864, the Major General and former senator that had famously been forced by
Lincoln to rescind his emancipation decree in the border state of Missouri in
August of 1961.
10
Though Frémont would step out of the race in September of
1864, the party’s convention had received public support of Frederick Douglass
and the abolitionist community.
Returning to the film and setting aside the unknowable variable of
intention, it is enough to state that much of the work of those devoted to prepare
the possibility of a Thirteenth Amendment remains beyond the frame of the film.
How these characters, devoid of this past to ground them in, are translated to the
screen is summed up well by Joshua Zeitz in his review of the film for the
Atlantic:

10
Their convention was held a week prior to the National Union Party’s and included in their
platform the call for a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. This would eventually make it
into the Republican Party platform a week later
122
With the exception of Secretary of State William Seward (played
convincingly by David Strathairn), Lincoln presents almost every
public figure as either comical, quirky, weak-kneed or pathetically
self-interested. Only the president is able to rise above the moment
and see the end game. This treatment does injustice to men like
Rep. James Ashley, Sen. Charles Sumner, and Sen. Ben Wade …
These men were serious, committed legislators who fought a lonely
fight for black freedom before the war, and a difficult struggle for
black equality after it.

However, if Kushner and Spielberg were to spend valuable screen time fleshing
out the characters of this coalition, it would have certainly diminished from
Lincoln’s stature as an unadulterated “Master Among Men”—this moniker being
one of the alternative titles considered by Goodwin for her project on Lincoln
before she suddenly realized the unfortunate resonance with slavery (Rucker).
And though Stevens is drawn as the most well-rounded of the radical
Republicans presented, even he is cast as the foil that Lincoln must rein in in
order that Stevens may learn to more effectively channel his own assertive
political will. It is a perspective that belittles the political savvy and
accomplishments of a man who began his political career in local Pennsylvania
politics in 1833 and at the national level in the House of Representatives in 1849
at the age of 58. In his legal practice he was known to defend fugitive slaves pro-
bono and had offered up his offices as a stop along what we have come to know
as the Underground Railroad (Holzer “Reel vs. Real”). In the film, Stevens exits
the screen on the evening of January 31. He has taken the official bill home for
the evening to share with Lydia Smith, his supposed “colored” mistress that
maintains the public role of his housekeeper. It is in this private moment that
Stevens delivers one of the film’s most important lines: “The greatest measure of
123
the nineteenth century. Passed by corruption, aided and abetted by the purest
man in America.”
This is one of several lines in the film that comes “straight from the
archive,” boosting the film’s reputation as a historical resource. However, this line
is deployed in a bit of a disingenuous fashion. While the line is attributed to
Stevens, Michael Vorenberg shows that it was supposedly said to Senator
James Scovel (Final Freedom 200). Scovel mentions the remark thirty-five years
after the fact in a reminiscence for Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine where he
claims that a deal had been struck between Charles Sumner and Senate
Commerce Committee to oppose a railway in New Jersey that Sumner was
originally a strong proponent of (Final Freedom 200). In exchange for not pushing
the railway project, Lincoln and Sumner were able to gain the support of certain
influential lobbyists to procure votes for the Thirteenth Amendment. Vorenberg
even doubts the veracity of this delayed secondhand reminiscence because it
seems to contradict an immediate firsthand report by another senator (Final
Freedom 200-01).
In either case, the line was not recorded as having been said to Lydia
Smith. But for Kushner and Spielberg, this moment is a particularly poetic
cosigning of Lincoln’s moral purity by a grateful but silent colored woman and a
once rival that had in the months prior initially opposed his nomination for his
second term in favor of Benjamin Butler. And though the romantic nature of
Smith’s relationship with Stevens remains unconfirmed, Smith herself is not an
unknown character in both Washington DC and Pennsylvania (Vorenberg,
124
“Spielberg’s Lincoln” 567). As was pointed out Michael Shank’s review of the film,
Smith was a successful businesswoman with several properties in both states
(Shank). However, beyond the exploitation of the rumor of their romantic
relationship, none of her character’s complexity comes to the screen. In a certain
light, the last-minute portrayal of their relationship serves to provide a motivation
for Stevens’ uncommon passion on behalf of blacks that is displayed throughout
the film. But as Shank notes, this reading dismisses that fact that his “relationship
with Smith was an outgrowth of his conviction, not the cause of it.” Speaking to
Stevens’ long-held beliefs, historian Edward J. Blum is similarly disappointed that
film does not portray “the deep biblical commitment of radicals like Thaddeus
Stevens who saw his plans for massive redistribution of wealth and property as
fitting within the Exodus narrative” (Bush 18). Blum sees this evasion as
diminishing how, in that time and in relation to the issue of slavery, “religion—on
its own—generated authority or power” (Bush 18). If such a perspective were
present it would compete with and perhaps put into a less heroic perspective
Lincoln’s measured political approach.
However, because of this large collection of omissions, there is little to
steer the absolute grandeur of the film’s climax in any direction away from
Lincoln. Instead the man, like his proclamation at the hands of Obama, is
refashioned as the point of origin for our utopian discourse on race and equality.
One of the film’s official trailers prepares viewers for such a reading of the
film by reaching well beyond the temporal scope of Lincoln’s life to emotionally
connect the film’s rather focused time frame to an imagined teleology of
125
twentieth-century battles (and wars) for civil and human rights. The first forty
seconds of the trailer, with their complex interaction of sound and image, are
crucial to this encouraged reading.
We first see an aerial color view of the present-day United States Capitol
looking onto the Washington Monument. It is the only color image in the trailer
that does not come from the film. This image quickly becomes black and white,
and aged. Then the screen fades to black: “FOR EVERY DREAM” appears
against the now black screen. This phrase crossfades into an image of Martin
Luther King, Jr. walking arm in arm with other civil rights leaders in the march
from Selma to Montgomery as the word “DREAM” lingers over the photo (see
below).
11
This image transitions to an aerial photo of the March on Washington,
then a shot of soldiers in the United States’ war in Afghanistan (a.k.a. Operation
Enduring Freedom). Fade to black: “FOR EVERY BELIEF.” As all but “BELIEF”
fades away, the viewer is presented with the image of Nelson Mandela, then a
march for women’s suffrage, then Mahatma Gandhi (see below). Fade to black:
“FOR EVERY FREEDOM.” The iconic photo of soldiers raising the flag on Iwo
Jima comes to the screen, bleeds into soldiers exiting a naval landing craft on D-
Day. Finally, the viewer is offered a night cityscape of Manhattan with the 9/11
Memorial’s two beams of light and the Statue of Liberty (see below). Fade to
black: “THERE ARE THOSE WHO UNITE US ALL.” This segment ends with a
profile view of Lincoln as played by Daniel Day Lewis.

11
The civil rights activists shown in the photo are (from left to right) Ralph Abernathy, James
Foreman, Reverend Jesse Douglass, and John Lewis.
126

127

The position of the women suffragists in the photomontage is perhaps the
most deceptively anachronistic. The picture comes from a march in Brooklyn in
1920 just before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified by three-fourths of the
states (“Suffragette Parade in Brooklyn.”). And while Lincoln was a noted early
supporter of women’s suffrage, it was the Women’s National Loyal League, then
headed by Susan B. Anthony, that worked with abolitionists to present a petition
with over 400,000 asking for a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery
(Burlingame 1: 104; E. Foner, Fiery Trial 291; Venet 120). The initial 100,000
signatures were presented to the League’s ally in congress, Charles Sumner, on
February 24
,
1864, giving the Radical Republicans the mandate to begin work
pressuring a Lincoln Administration that up to that point held the position that
state-enacted emancipation was the way forward (E. Foner, Fiery Trial 291;
Venet 120).
12

The trailer also appears to extend emancipation’s morally justified use of
force to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The above-described images
from the European and Asian fronts of World War II (the “Good War”), the United

12
As mentioned above, this pressure would also be added to in the months after by the threat of
the more radical Butler or Frémont usurping Lincoln’s bid for a second term.
128
States’ war in Afghanistan, and the 9/11 Memorial are immediately followed by a
clip from the film’s depiction of the Battle of Jenkins’ Ferry. The gesture here is
double. The images encourage a prioritization of the just and moral cause of
slavery over the pragmatic objective of preserving the Union. If this is understood
and accepted, then the war to free the slaves can be deployed to extend our
already collectively understood battle against Hitler’s pure evil in World War II to
the justification of the United States’ contemporary global reach with the ongoing
war in Afghanistan and the “War on Terror” in general.
All of the anachronistic images of this first segment and the passionate
moments of the film that are presented in the remainder of the trailer are further
sutured by two consistent sonic elements. The first is Veigar Margeirsson’s Dawn
of the Titans, an orchestral composition originally created to score several
prominent dramatic elements of the first-person shooter video game franchise
Halo. The highly emotive piece underscores the entire trailer and, though darker,
evokes the European tradition of musical nationalism. The second binding sonic
element is Lincoln’s dialogue from the film. In the first segment discussed above
it plays ominously off screen, first heard as we see the image of King: “You think
we chose to be born? … Are we fitted to the times we’re born into?” … We begin
with equality. That’s the origin, isn’t it … That’s justice…Say we’ve shown that
people can endure awful sacrifice and yet cohere?” Through this suturing, the
trailer sets the stage for a film that will depict a clear, Lincoln-directed moral
triumph, punctuated by an assassination that further solidifies his image as one
of the United States’, and the world’s, moral martyrs—the origin of democratic
129
liberation that the United States has bravely carried through the twentieth century
and beyond.
In Evidence, Baldwin writes that it was “impossible to pretend that you are
not heir to, and therefore, however inadequately or unwillingly, responsible to,
and for, the time and place that give you life—without becoming, at very best, a
dangerously disoriented human being” (31). His project is one that proposes that
we were then coming into an age described by a highly evolved form of this
disorientation. I read the above trailer of Lincoln as a frightening example of the
ease with which we are now “dangerously disoriented.”
But what has led to the need for such an exaggeratedly unadulterated
vision of Lincoln? Baldwin, in his rebuke of presidential authority provides a
bridge to the argument of the previous chapters. After Lincoln, Baldwin calls out
Kennedy as another of the usual suspects who are far too fondly imagined as
unequivocal supporters of black life. For Baldwin, Kennedy belongs in this
grouping for his “address [to] Mississippi on the night James Meredith was
carried into Ole Miss [detail here] as though there [were] no Black people in
Mississippi” (41). Though not mentioned by Baldwin, Kennedy would also refuse
to speak publically at an event organized for the 100
th
Anniversary of the
Preliminary “Emancipation Proclamation” for fear of turning away southern
Democrats in advance of the next election cycle (Branch and Edwards). During
this time he would also ignore Martin Luther King, Jr.’s many requests for
Kennedy to announce, alongside the proclamation’s anniversary, a “Second
Emancipation Proclamation” more directly connected to the ongoing battle for
130
black equality (Edwards and Sweetland). This stonewalling by the powers that be
in Washington is discussed as a motivating factor in King’s post-1962 more
radical turn that saw him got to Birmingham and personally approve the
enlistment of women and children marchers. The pictures of their mistreatment
went a long way in returning the issue of civil rights to the front of nation’s
consciousness and back to Kennedy’s desk (Edwards and Sweetland).
Baldwin does offer a short list of presidents that cannot be so easily
accused of never declaratively connecting blacks with “any human reality” (41).
Thomas Jefferson, with a veiled reference to Sally Hemings, is listed as a
“possible (but meaningless) exception” (41). Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Johnson,
however, are, for Baldwin, “exquisitely, the exceptions that prove the rule” (41).
Johnson would of course step into Kennedy’s void and not only sign the Civil
Rights Act into law but stand in front of the American people and broadcast, with
an implicit apology for the delay, the first unequivocal presidential declaration on
the value of black life that approaches the utopian grandeur of Morelos’
Sentimientos de la nación.
13

And though Baldwin’s remark in reference to the exception of Johnson is

13
Here is a portion of Johnson’s address to the nation: “We believe that all men are created
equal. Yet many are denied equal treatment…We believe that all men have certain unalienable
rights. Yet many Americans do not enjoy those rights … We believe that all men are entitled to
the blessings of liberty. Yet millions are being deprived of those blessings—not because of their
own failures, but because of the color of their skin … The reasons are deeply imbedded in history
and tradition and the nature of man. We can understand—without rancor or hatred—how this all
happened … But it cannot continue. Our Constitution, the foundation of our Republic, forbids it.
The principles of our freedom forbid it. Morality forbids it. And the law I will sign tonight forbids it
… The only limit to a man's hope for happiness, and for the future of his children, shall be his own
ability … Let us close the springs of racial poison ... Let us hasten that day when our unmeasured
strength and our unbounded spirit will be free to do the great works ordained for this Nation by
the just and wise God who is the Father of us all.”

131
sincere, throughout the essay he uses what this moment has come to represent
in the American imaginary, the most visible success of the Civil Rights
Movement, to counter-intuitively propose that this is the turn that makes the
murdered children in Atlanta, somehow, more invisible than Till.
It is this backward glance, first to Eisenhower via Emmett Till then to
Lincoln, that, for Baldwin, makes present the movement for full civil rights as a far
from a complete project—despite the fact that by the early 1980s it was a
movement that the United States psychological apparatus desperately needed to
understand as complete and wholly successful. In other words, in light of
evidence to the contrary, Atlanta, famously dubbed “the city too busy to hate” and
an unquestioned emblem of the Movement’s success, had to move on.
But it is not the same as Till, and Baldwin’s comparison is ultimately not
read as an analogy. The nation’s psychic terrain had certainly shifted since then.
For Baldwin, this meant that a much larger and more diverse portion of the
American community had been initiated into a process of psychic evasion,
leaving the most vulnerable still vulnerable but even more isolated. For Baldwin,
these shifts reduced the collective field of critical vision and made the evaluation
of such complex social disasters particularly difficult, as the psychic apparatus
had convinced itself of the near impossibility of their existence. Though not cast
in terms of the formation of an intrapsychic crypt-like structure, Baldwin’s work
nonetheless points to that process beginning to occur in the United States.
Baldwin’s “things not seen” are placed in a developing intrapsychic gap and “the
evidence” he points to is a prequel what are to be its indecipherable emanations.
132
If the events in Atlanta are understood as part of an uneven and ongoing
process within the broader national psychological apparatus, then by the time of
Spielberg’s Lincoln the ever-diminishing legibility of radical blackness has begun
its process of transgenerational indecipherability.
Beyond the film’s content, Lincoln very much understands itself within a
larger utopian discourse. It is produced by Participant Media, the self-described
“global entertainment company” that declares it their mission to produce “feature
film, television, publishing and digital content that inspires social change” (“About
Us”). Through its various platforms, “Participant seeks to entertain, encourage
and empower every individual to take action” (“About Us”). Founded in 2004, the
first major release that propelled the company was Al Gore’s An Inconvenient
Truth and they have gone on to produce over sixty films that include, to name
just a few, Citizenfour, Darfur Now, The Help, The Kite Runner, The Soloist, The
Square, and Food Inc.
In a review of Participant Media’s ambitions for the Washington Post, Ann
Hornaday focuses on their 2012 documentary film Last Call at the Oasis that
treats the subject of water shortage and contamination. Near the film’s end, the
environmental scientist and social activist Peter Gleick speaks the following
words: “The more we know, the more likely we are to do the right things.” For
Hornaday, these remarks accurately speak not only to the film, but to the “driving
artistic ethos” of the company that produced it. It is an ethos that desires to “first
plunges viewers into panic, then brings them to the surface, convincing them that
they can stem the tide of disaster if they act decisively and quickly.” Hornaday
133
identifies the danger in “soothing [the] audience with false optimism” and
producing an exaggerated sense of their own participation by alluding to a scene
in which moviegoers are asked to participate by texting “water” to register a
complaint. For Hornaday, this moment of “bourgeois art-house liberalism” is
made both more appealing and more appalling by the fact that the emotional
singing of R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe undergirds it.
This commercially packaged utopian ethos is seen in the trailer for Lincoln
that was examined earlier. Participant Media is a content producer that has
positioned itself as capable of providing the truth that once known can lead to
“right” action. Such an exchange might be expected in the realm of documentary
filmmaking. However, stretching this exchange to narrative filmmaking is
particularly dangerous for what it works to disappear under the umbrella of an
ethos of an emotionally engaging “truth.”
The trailer’s reliance on the presence of King and Mandela, for example, is
troubling when one considers the absolute omission of radical black thought in
Kushner and Spielberg’s cinematic archival project. For even more pronounced
than the diminished role of other white political figures discussed above, is the
fact that not one black abolitionist is presented or directly referred to on screen.
Because Frederick Douglass has become, in the American imaginary, the go-to
black abolitionist to eclipse so many others doing similar work, it is a particular
surprise that he is among the absent. But there is no room.
Several movie reviewers have pointed to the irony of a film that opens with
the scene of blacks in battle alongside whites making vanish the man who most
134
vocally challenged Lincoln to grant blacks the right to fight and die for the Union,
and later worked with him to recruit black soldiers and defend their rights when
Lincoln belatedly and desperately understood their necessity (Shank, Vorenberg
“Spielberg’s Lincoln”, Masur). This is an omission that is even more startling for
the fact that Douglass’ public urgings of the Lincoln Administration and ongoing
frustration pepper the entire recorded landscape from Lincoln’s first inauguration
to well beyond the “Emancipation Proclamation”. When Charles Sumner pressed
the president to reconsecrate Independence Day by issuing an emancipation
decree on July 4, 1862, the president responded that it was “too big a lick” and
would force “half the army would lay down its arms” (Burlingame 2: 398).
Frederick Douglass would compound this pressure with a speech on the same
day directing pointed criticism at Lincoln and announced the need for a
proclamation:
I do not hesitate to say, that whatever may have been his
intentions, the action of President Lincoln has been calculated in a
marked and decided way to shield and protect slavery … he has
steadily refused to proclaim, as he had the constitutional and moral
right to proclaim, complete emancipation to all the slaves of rebels
who make should make their way into the lines of our army … he
has assigned to the most important positions, generals who are
notoriously pro-slavery, and hostile to the party and principles
which raised him to power…To my mind [the policy of the
Administration] is simply and solely to reconstruct the union on the
cold and corrupting basis of compromise. (“Selected Speeches”
506)

Eleven days later Lincoln tells his Secretary of State Seward and Secretary of the
Navy Gideon Welles in a private carriage ride that he is going to issue a decree
against slavery in the rebel states (Striner 168). On July 22
nd
, he produces a draft
135
of the proclamation for his cabinet to review (Striner 170). It is impossible to know
the exact role this rising pressure form Douglass and other particularly vocal
abolitionists played, but their absolute non-presence is indicative of a tendency in
the collective imagination of the United States.
While Douglass is a missing character in Lincoln, he is present throughout
Goodwin’s Team of Rivals. But, as Michael Vorenberg points out in the most
complete scholarly article on the film, Goodwin’s book “has little sympathy for
radicalism and minimal coverage of race and Reconstruction” (“Spielberg’s
Lincoln” 567). And this certainly extends to Douglass. She paints the Douglass-
Lincoln relationship as it evolved in the broadest strokes. She notes, among
others, Douglass’ criticisms of Lincoln’s first inauguration speech and the pace
that Lincoln took toward emancipation and the eventual enlistment of black
soldiers. She also includes his harsh description of Lincoln’s decision to rescind
Frémont’s emancipation decree as the largest “blunder” of Lincoln up to that
point (394). All of this to say, Douglass can in no way be characterized as absent
in Goodwin’s account.
However, he is certainly used in a manner to support the mastery of
Lincoln. Though she in one instance puts forward the caveat that “there is no way
to penetrate Lincoln’s personal feelings about race” she is able to see into his
brain enough to judge that in his “initial approach” to colonization “Lincoln’s
remarkable empathy had singularly failed him” (470). For Goodwin, “though he
had tried to put himself in the place of blacks and suggest what he thought was
best for them, his lack of contact with the black community left him unaware of
136
their deep attachment to their country and sense of outrage at the thought of
removal” (470).
For Goodwin, Lincoln would shift his consciousness entirely and Douglass’
previously expressed disappointments would soften as their relationship
developed. She then turns, as many historians have, to Douglass’ 1886
reminiscence of Lincoln where he described the president as the “first great man
that I talked with in the United States freely, who in no single instance reminded
me of the difference between himself and myself, of the difference of color” (207).
And with this ties a bow on the relationship as a smooth trajectory from
misplaced good intentions to enlightenment on the question of equality.
But it is Douglass’ treatment in Goodwin’s introduction that most strikingly
belies her overly simple characterization of this relationship and portends
Douglass’ vanishing in Kushner and Spielberg’s project. The book’s first words
are nearly his as he helps to frame her project:
In 1876, the celebrated orator Frederick Douglass dedicated a
monument in Washington, D.C., erected by black Americans to
honor Abraham Lincoln. The former slave told his audience that
“there is little necessity on this occasion to speak at length and
critically of this great and good man, and of his high mission in the
world. That ground has been fully occupied … The whole field of
fact and fancy has been gleaned and garnered. Any man can say
things that are true of Abraham Lincoln, but no man can say
anything that is new of Abraham Lincoln.” (xv)

The ellipsis in the above quote are Goodwin’s and lead to a rereading of
Douglass that contains a mild judgment on his capacity to say, in that moment,
anything of great “new” consequence. Goodwin goes on to note that Douglass, at
the distance of only eleven years, was too close to uncover such insights. The
137
implication is that Goodwin, armed with an archive that has matured since
Douglass’ speech, considers her project, which draws on the stories of his four
rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, as poised to bring such
“illumination” (xv).
But what has been omitted by Goodwin’s ellipsis? The italicized section of
the following quote highlights what has vanished: “That ground has been fully
occupied and completely covered both here and elsewhere. The whole field…”
(22). In other words, Douglass feels compelled to say no more in that moment
because he, in his near-five-thousand-word portrait of the sixteenth president,
had himself done his part to occupy “that ground.” Fully cognizant that the
occasion of free black citizens dedicating a monument to Lincoln would be “an
act which is to go into history,” Douglass is especially sure throughout his speech
to contribute a complicated and nuanced, as well as emotionally stirring portrait
of the man.
Douglass delivered the speech with President Ulysses S. Grant and
members of his cabinet, as well as Supreme Court Justices and members of
Congress seated behind him (Douglass, Selected Speeches 615). It was not lost
on him that such a mass gathering would not have not have been possible just
years prior. Though he would later express displeasure with the fact that the
monument “showed the Negro on his knees” that day he chose to laud the
“monument of enduring granite and bronze, in every line, feature, and figure of
which the men of this generation may read, and those of aftercoming generations
may read, something of the exalted character and great works of Abraham
138
Lincoln, the first martyr President of the United States” (Selected Speeches 615,
618). But for Douglass, this was not the only part of the legacy that demanded
remembrance: “It must be admitted, truth compels me to admit, even here in the
presence of the monument we have erected to his memory, Abraham Lincoln
was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his
interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he
was a white man” (618). He continued with his delicate portrait: “He was
preeminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white
men. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his
administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the
colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of this country” (618).
In Douglass’ view, America’s white citizens were “the children of Abraham
Lincoln” while the blacks were “at best only his step-children; children by
adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity” (618). All of this,
and much more, precedes the statement that Goodwin quotes and it is principal
reason why it is no longer necessary for Douglass to speak critically of Lincoln.
Douglass turns his oration toward guarded yet compassionate praise:
Despite the mist and haze that surrounded him; despite the tumult,
the hurry, and confusion of the hour, we were able to take a
comprehensive view of Abraham Lincoln, and to make reasonable
allowance for the circumstances of his position … Though he loved
Caesar less than Rome, though the Union was more to him than our
freedom or our future, under his wise and beneficent rule we saw
ourselves gradually lifted from the depths of slavery to the heights of
liberty and manhood. (619)

139
In presenting this speech in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and
Writings, Phillip Foner expresses disappointment with the fact that Douglass did
not go further and make it known that “everything Lincoln had achieved for the
Negro was being wiped out in state after state in the South” (616). Eleven years
later, after a trip to South Carolina and Georgia, he would do so in a speech
entitled “I Denounce the So-Called Emancipation as a Stupendous Fraud” given
on the on the 26
th
anniversary of slavery’s abolition in Washington D.C. (April 16,
1888):
I here and now denounce his so-called emancipation as a
stupendous fraud — a fraud upon him, a fraud upon the world. It
was not so meant by Abraham Lincoln; it was not so meant by the
Republican party; but whether so meant or not, it is practically a lie,
keeping the word of promise to the ear and breaking it to the heart.
(Selected Speeches 715)

Goodwin acknowledges neither of these more radical moments from Douglass.
Their absence preserves the narrative that caution and deliberate pace was part
and parcel of Lincoln’s political genius to create a foundation for an enduring
emancipation. If Douglass’ judgment that very little had changed more than
twenty years later were to be made present, though not in any way Lincoln’s
“fault,” this narrative would still lose a portion of its imagined continuity.
Goodwin is certainly not alone in this project that responds to a need to lay
claim to the topography of Lincoln’s mind. Richard Striner’s Father Abraham:
Lincoln’s Relentless Struggle to End Slavery (2006), for example, attempts to
restore Lincoln as the “Great Emancipator” in the face of what he feels are
140
attempts to diminish this reputation. Like Goodwin, an uncomplicated and
manipulated Douglass is instrumental:
Another clue to Lincoln’s feelings on race can be found in the
memoirs of blacks who encountered him in person. They, above all,
were in an excellent position to sense and to feel his racial
attitudes. Frederick Douglass, the black abolitionist, was in such a
position. Though Douglass concluded in a speech before a largely
black audience in 1876 (presumably on the basis of Lincoln’s public
statements in the 1850s) that Lincoln “was a white man and shared
toward the colored race the prejudices common to his countrymen,”
he reached a very different conclusion in the summer of 1865—
when the memory of Lincoln was vivid. Douglass stated that Lincoln
was “emphatically the black mans [sic] President: the first to show
any respect for their rights as men.”
…Historian David Grimsted has argued that Lincoln was
struggling with a “self-admitted racism.” In the course of this
struggle, he would not allow his prejudice to “cloud his sense of
blacks’ full humanity.” If such a theory is correct, then Lincoln’s
struggle, as Grimsted suggests, “has something of the transcending
dignity of Huck Finn’s.” But there remains the possibility that no real
prejudice existed in the mind of Lincoln. It is possible that Lincoln,
under pressure and confronting a militantly white supremacist
electorate, pretended to feelings he did not really have on the
subject of race. Whatever his innermost feelings on race, Lincoln’s
overall intention in the 1850s was apparent to all: to make whites
disgusted with slavery, as much for its oppression of blacks as for
its ancillary menace to themselves. (63-64; my emphasis)

Goodwin’s and Striner’s efforts are reminiscent of what Anna More as Sigüenza y
Góngora’s and the other creole elite’s need to “invent a deep history extending
beyond the Spanish conquest”—it is, as I discuss in Chapter Two, a turn to the
archive to organize new histories of greater psychic comfort (8). But note how
now the terms of such discussions, even my own, are drawn into revolving
around Douglass without even registering the recognized black abolitionists
beyond him, none of which are mentioned in the projects by Goodwin or Kushner
141
and Spielberg. This, in itself, is indicative of the gravitational pull of the
developing intrapsychic gap that my dissertation proposes.
But it is the figure of the slave—after all, the most committed abolitionist
and the reason for Lincoln’s narrative—who is the most conspicuously absent in
the film. Tad, Lincoln’s youngest son, at two points in the film is examining glass-
framed photographic negatives of images of slavery while his father is in the
room. These photos were then widely circulated and published. On this first
occasion, a couple of the negatives depict young boys near to Tad’s age and list
their monetary value on the slave market. From the conversation that follows the
viewer is to understand that the photos also remind Tad of the loss of his brother
Willie, who had died at the age of eleven three years prior. Lincoln carefully takes
the negatives away from his son and proceeds to lie next to him and offer
comfort. This and another brief appearance of Tad studying other negatives are
the only moments in which any slave is represented on screen.
The tender moment with Tad in particular highlights both Lincoln’s
empathy toward the figure of the slave and his support of his son’s colorblind
association with the negatives. However, it also serves to distance the Lincolns
from the institution of slavery, as these physical reminders are necessary to
connect them to that institution and feed their empathy. This aligns with
Goodwin’s characterization of Lincoln’s desire to colonize blacks as due
principally to his “lack of contact with the black community” (470). Here Lincoln,
having learned his lesson, diligently refining this empathy in his son. But this
distancing is misleading. Slavery was not yet abolished in the District of
142
Columbia until more than a year after Lincoln took office, making the argument of
proximity less formidable. More than this, however, the appearance of only these
distant images works to vanish the active role that slaves played in securing their
own freedom. As Lincoln scholar Eric Foner points out in his op-ed in the New
York Times, during the January 1865 deliberations on the Thirteenth Amendment
that Kushner and Spielberg’s project is dedicated to, “Sherman’s army was
marching into South Carolina, and slaves were sacking plantation homes and
seizing land. Slavery died on the ground, not just in the White House and the
House of Representatives.”
The fact that such rebellious slaves remain unthought in a film project that
sets firmly within its embrace “radical” ideas of equality tells of the expansion of
the intrapsychic gap, and its attendant gravitational force, that marks what is an
acceptable, or becoming, radical position in relation to blackness and what is
simply becoming unthought.

In a time when we are struggling to find a manner of articulating our
anxieties in relation to this developing horizon, works that help to theorize it with
any degree of nuance are crucial. By showing a keen awareness of the
gravitational forces at play within the intrapsychic structures of the United States’
psychological apparatus, Baldwin’s articulation in Evidence, certainly one of
these texts, was both overdue and before its time. And for this, the articulation
itself has suffered greatly, as it has been consistently derided, when it has been
registered, as a minor work by an aging and at that time insignificant author. As
143
can be understood from the above conversation, Baldwin’s quarrel in Evidence is
in many ways with how the archive has organized its connection to history, and
how that was brought to bear on Atlanta’s underclass between 1979-81. In this
sense, Baldwin’s project theorized its own vanishing.
Despite Baldwin’s prescient engagement with issues of race in America in
the 1980s, Evidence was almost not published in the United States. The Dial
Press, with whom Baldwin had a longstanding literary relationship, turned it down
calling it “unintelligible.” The manuscript was also rejected by Putnam and
Doubleday and only sold to Henry Holt and Company after it was published in
France and Britain. Even Jay Acton, Baldwin’s agent at the time, was not
interested in the piece unless Baldwin was willing to do more research on the
Atlanta murders themselves, causing an end to their business relationship.
However, prior to their break Acton did arrange for McGraw-Hill to buy a future
project that would be a joint biography of Malcolm X, Medgar Evers and Martin
Luther King, Jr. from Baldwin’s perspective. The rights were bought for $400,000,
although it is not understood how much of this advance was received by Baldwin,
as the work was unfinished at the time of his death in 1986 (Weatherby 360).
The fact that Baldwin, who was still somewhat of a literary institution (he
had been short-listed for the National Book Award five years earlier in 1980 for
his last novel Just Above My Head), found such a hard time selling Evidence yet
was scheduled to receive nearly a half-million dollars for a historical project that
he had yet to write is very curious and hints at the inclinations of the literary
144
apparatus in the mid-1980s and its coalescing boundary in relation to radical
blackness.
Graham Huggan’s thesis in regard to postcolonial literature when applied
to Evidence sheds an interesting light on this. Huggan posits that the literature
we have come to know as postcolonial, which is understood to write against
traditional colonial structures and epistemologies, is in fact heavily influenced by
what he calls postcoloniality, which “is more closely tied to the global market, and
capitalizes both on the widespread circulation of ideas about cultural otherness
and on the worldwide trafficking of culturally ‘othered’ artifacts and goods” (28).
For Huggan, this intersection is represented in his term the “postcolonial exotic”
and suggests a “fetishisation of cultural otherness [that] allows metropolitan
readers to exercise fantasies of unrestricted movement and free will” (10).
Baldwin himself makes this connection between black Americans and the
citizens of formerly colonized nations in Evidence: “No colonizing power
voluntarily surrendered this arrangement, and ‘independence’ (like ‘integration’)
merely set in motion a complex legal and political machinery designed to
camouflage and maintain the status quo” (27). Huggan argues that although
many of these writers (Salman Rushdie is a primary example) strategically
subvert the phenomenon of postcoloniality and attempt to disrupt this status quo,
the market ultimately dictates the place and language of these conversations,
subversive or not. The literary prize plays a crucial role in this process of
commodification by both “expanding public awareness” of the new dimensions of
literature and “paradoxically narrow[ing] this awareness” to a small collection of
145
literary talent charged with conditioning unfamiliar readers on what to expect from
these literatures, and this has a strong effect on market forces.
14
In the case of
Baldwin, I wish to suggest that Evidence represented an absolute disregard for
the market forces that since the late 1970s had begun to demand a decidedly
historical approach to black life.
The focus on historical fiction has long been noted as a crucial aspect of
the African American literary canon since the early 1970s. Ashraf Rushdy and
Timothy Spaulding trace the origins of Neo-slave narratives of the 1970s and 80s
to the rise of the Black Power Movement and the emergence of the New Left,
which sought to explore history outside of that made by the traditional imperial
powers. Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada, Sherley Ann Williams’ Dessa Rose,
and Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale and Middle Passage are among the
novels discussed in these two projects. But it is Keith Byerman’s research on the
historical tendency in African American literature that, in addition to the
postmodern slave narrative, points to the television mini-series Roots (1976),
based on Alex Haley’s novel which heroically tells the story of a black family from
slavery to reconstruction, as a watershed moment in that it “brought African
American experience within the framework of mass culture” (16). After this
moment, Byerman suggests in language that aligns with Huggan that “[r]ather
than simply an academic field, black history became an institution and a
commodity” (1). This institution or discourse would come to dominate the

14
This is of course related to the critique of Latin Americanist subalternist thinking that, like
Huggan’s analysis, makes itself most visible at the turn of the millennium.
146
landscape of African American publishing in the United States in the 1980s, and
what started as a well-intended historical reclamation process also paradoxically
helped to limit the boundaries of radical conversation. This is borne out by the
fact that the great majority of works by black authors to win any of the major
literary awards for fiction in the United States have been decidedly historical in
nature. In fact, after 1980, the early stages of the national psychic shift that
Baldwin has helped to identify, only one, Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones
(2011), contradicts this.
15

This was the landscape that Baldwin and his final work, though in this
case nonfiction, were presented with. It was a landscape that Baldwin, as he
announced in the preface to Evidence, would refuse to navigate: “History, I
contend, is the present—we, with every breath we take, every move we make,
are History” (xiv). But the effects of this refusal may have impacted the legibility
of the project beyond the literary marketplace. Despite eventually securing
publication, Evidence has been largely ignored by scholars. Harold Bloom has
edited two separate editions of Modern Critical Views: James Baldwin. The first
was published in 1986 and the second in 2007. In the twenty-seven essays
collected in these two volumes, Evidence is mentioned only once, in a three-
page literary review by James Snead originally published in the Los Angeles

15
Four African American authors have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction: James Alan McPherson
for Elbow Room (1978); Alice Walker for The Color Purple (1983); Toni Morrison for Beloved
(1988); and Edward P. Jones for The Known World (2004) (“Pulitzer Prize”). Three African
Americans have won the National Book Award for fiction: Ralph Ellison for Invisible Man (1953);
Alice Walker for The Color Purple (1983); Charles Johnson for Middle Passage (1990); Jesmyn
Ward for Salvage the Bones (2011); and James McBride The Good Lord Bird (2013) (“National
Book Award”).
147
Times. This, despite the fact that a ten year anniversary edition of Evidence was
put out by Henry Holt and Company in 1995 which included a forward by Derrick
Bell (Faces at the Bottom of the Well) and Janet Dewart Bell attempting to draw
attention to the relevance of Baldwin’s message. Snead’s review is dedicated to
both Evidence and The Price of the Ticket, Baldwin’s collected works of
nonfiction that was also published in 1985. It is only in the final four paragraphs
of the review where Snead turns his attention to Evidence, which he ultimately
(and briefly) lauds for the “moral challenge” it offers the reader. Two essays in
the second edition speak directly to the impact of Baldwin’s later work yet
somehow manage to talk around Evidence: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s “The Fire
Last Time” and Julius Lester’s “Some Tickets Are Better: The Mixed
Achievements of James Baldwin.” Both Lester and Gates proffer the idea that by
the late 1960s, with the rise of the Black Power Movement, Baldwin’s writing and
ideas had become outmoded.
One of the more famous examples of what Gates refers to as “Baldwin-
bashing” came from Eldridge Cleaver, the former Black Panther, in his book Soul
On Ice. Cleaver accused Baldwin of having a “sycophantic love of the whites”
and attacked Negro homosexuals in general as having “a racial death-wish” but
being “outraged and frustrated because in their sickness they are unable to have
a baby by a white man” (Cleaver 124, 128; Gates 16). Baldwin did not let
Cleaver’s inflammatory and rather ignorant comments fall on deaf ears or
respond with an incisive rebuke. Instead, in his book No Name in the Street, he
praised Cleaver’s work and chalked the exchange up to a misunderstanding,
148
underlining the fact that the younger revolutionary and the older artist “need each
other” (Baldwin 173; Gates 19). Gates argues that Baldwin’s essays begin to
take on a more revolutionary tone at this point, with very little accommodation for
a white readership. Though both Gates and Lester are correct to describe this
period as one of great transition and searching in Baldwin’s career, their
arguments are far from thorough.
16
For Lester: “If The Price of the Ticket is to be
the summation of Baldwin’s career, then we must be grateful for the wisdom
contained in its early essays and take as a warning the latter ones which are, all
too often, ‘an imitation’ and a ‘continuation of principles’ Baldwin taught us to
despise” (139).
Gates’ conclusion is a bit more nuanced and forgiving. He feels that
Baldwin was “desperate to be ‘one of us’” and changed with the times and thus
began to “mouth a script that was not his own” (20). But Gates also suggests that
there may have been signs in some of Baldwin’s later essays of a return to what
Gates feels was the central argument of Baldwin’s career: “that the destinies of
black America and white were profoundly and irreversibly intertwined” (Gates
15). That he does not then turn to Evidence, again Baldwin’s most substantial
new work in the final years of his life, to either support or refute this is baffling.
As Baldwin’s biographer David Leeming points out, and has been argued
here, Baldwin had expressed the fact that the United States wanted to be told

16
The same events that helped to spur a radical change in black politics to that of Black Power
can be seen as affecting Baldwin as well. The assassinations of Medgar Evers in 1963, Malcolm
X in 1965 and Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, all men that he had a personal relationship with
and a deep respect for, can be read as coordinates through which he was reevaluating his
position (Evidence 4, 88-89; Leeming 361).
149
that the presence of black politicians and authors signified the success of the
Civil Rights Movement and that the nation was “on its way ‘to glory’” (361). At
one point in his argument, Baldwin turns to American foreign policy in a way that
broadens and underlines his previously discussed point about political authority’s
declarative relation to the value of black life. He challenges the reader that
“wishes to know how highly this Republic esteems Black freedom…to watch the
American performance in the world” (27). If one is to view the situation in South
Africa in the early to mid-1980s, Baldwin contends, you would be hard-pressed to
discover that “the Western world has any real quarrel with slavery” (46).
Baldwin’s observations are timely and reflect the then global reality. At the
publication of Evidence, the United States had yet to pass the Comprehensive
Anti-Apartheid Act, a piece of legislation that had been created in 1972 and was
eventually passed in 1986 only after the United States Congress overrode the
presidential veto of Ronald Reagan.
Thus, despite critical rhetoric to the contrary, by the publication of
Evidence, Baldwin was very much in connection with the social moment of the
1980s. It can even be argued that Evidence deserves to be celebrated for its
prescience in the same manner as The Fire Next Time. In the concluding
thoughts of the Gates essay that I have been discussing, which was published in
1992, Gates states that “we are struggling to fathom the rage in Los Angeles”
(22). Gates is referring to the civil disturbance after the verdict in the trial of
Rodney King. For a mooring post, he returns to Baldwin’s words from The Fire
Next Time written thirty years before—“the relatively conscious whites and the
150
relatively conscious blacks” (105)—but the rage and the divide that Gates is
struggling to understand were described in far more relevant detail just seven
years before in Evidence.
Consequently, Evidence, a statement that appropriately and eloquently
challenges the foundations of our present moment, has been willfully unread.
Evidence of this active un-reading of that which lays beyond the developing
horizon that bounds radical blackness can be found in the book itself, before the
title page where the “Books By James Baldwin” are listed. The last work on the
list, The Story of Siegfried, is in fact a children’s story based on Norse and
Germanic legend written by an author of the same name in 1882. This error
exists in the first edition hardcover and remains uncorrected in the book’s
subsequent paperback editions.
How can this gap to be mobilized if its telling, as Baldwin has helped to
demonstrate, so strains for legibility? Here we return to the question that
Wilderson helped us to frame in the introduction: how does a text tell the story of
something that has to have no story? The following two chapters will turn to the
science fiction genre and its borders to explore how Alfonso Cuarón and Colson
Whitehead give us ground, admittedly fantastical and unreal, to stand on.

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CHAPTER FOUR – ALFONSO CUARÓN AND THE QUESTION OF FUTURITY

Already the sun from the Ganges
more clearly sparkles
-Alessandro Scarlatti, L’honestà negli amori

A flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain
Ganga was sunken…
-T.S. Elliot, “The Waste Land”

The first three chapters argue for a link between ideas of utopia and the
development of what has been understood here as a transgenerational
intrapsychic gap within the national psychological apparatuses of the United
States and Mexico. The ever-growing gravitational force of this gap draws in,
among other psychic matter, ideas of radical blackness that would otherwise
compromise the stability of the psychic structure.
Because this gap will always be unavailable, my dissertation is, in many
respects, ultimately a work of theoretically oriented speculative fiction. And
because the coming utopia is always impelling, it must confront ideas of futurity.
In deference to these admissions, the final two chapters will look directly to the
future-oriented borders of the science fiction genre.
This chapter will focus on reading Alfonso Cuarón’s sustained
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engagement with the idea of New World(s) in his two films: Children of Men
(2006) and Gravity (2013). Though, as will be discussed within this chapter,
Cuarón does engage with ideas of blackness in Children of Men, the value of his
work for my project will be primarily gleaned from his films’ relation to race more
generally as well as their link to futurity. For this reason, his second full-length
feature, Y tu mamá también, will remain in the background to offer some
grounding to read in the non-Mexico centered films an oblique disruption of the
identitarian Mexican logic of mestizaje, or racial mixture, and a more direct
critique of the idea of utopia itself. Ultimately, in a conversation structured by
Cuarón’s cinematic quotation of T.S. Eliot’s dystopian poem The Waste Land in
both science fiction related films, I will argue that it is Cuarón’s treatment of the
animal and the child that offers a window into utopia’s tenuous potential for
representing a productively indeterminate futurity.

In what could be described as an accumulation of tragic thought in the
United States academy, there has been a pronounced turn away from anything
drawing upon utopian discourses in the last ten years. This has been especially
felt in the registers of queer and black studies that, in many ways, are concerned
with the illegibility of what are thought to be marginalized subjects. Lee
Edelman’s work on an anti-futurity and Frank Wilderson’s insistence on an Afro-
Pessimism have perhaps loomed the largest in this shift. This accumulation
brings the question: Does the utopian text no longer hold any value in the
development of alternative political thought?
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Erin Graff Zivin’s essay that was relied on in Chapter Two for its proposal
of an an-archaeological critical practice is a helpful entrance point to consider this
question, as it responds to this embrace of the tragic in the context of Latin
America. Her thinking demands a dismissal of both the utopian and tragic
registers under the assumption that neither can offer a viable alternative to
contemporary political thought as they are both based on the idea of a
predetermined future, and thus interwoven with an uncritical “excavational mode
of thought.” Graff Zivin desires “a relation with the past that does not annihilate
futurity” and is in search of an enclave in thought that leaves room for “diverse
(and divergent) avenues of interpretation” and thus the unforeseen and the
indeterminate (197, 202).
I propose here, however, that a rejection of the utopian and the tragic
need not occur to allow for such indeterminacy. More specifically, the utopian
register itself can, in some cases, contain the tragic and, as such, is quite
capable of pointing toward a theoretically rich and productively incalculable
futurity. Cuarón will eventually begin to help articulate this, but first an expansion
of the idea of utopia is necessary.
In my dissertation, utopia has thus far been treated as a relatively uniform
idea. Frederic Jameson’s work from the perspective of the science fiction genre,
however, is helpful in articulating are more nuanced utopian register. He has
proposed a division between the between what he calls the utopian impulse and
the utopian text. The former, an attempt to explain the uncritical and future-
oriented aspect of the everyday, is structured by the predetermined logic of
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futurity that Graff Zivin and others reject. Utopian texts, in contrast, critically
engage with that impulse. And for Jameson, within the bounds of the utopian text
there exists a capacity to demonstrate failed utopias that exceed the possibilities
offered by a mere dystopian reversal. Though clearly all utopian texts do not
attempt to demonstrate such failures, those that do and do so “most
comprehensively,” according to Jameson, carry with them the possibility of
activating an awareness of “our mental and ideological imprisonment” (2007, xiii).
Jameson labels the text that succeeds in presenting such failure as anti-anti-
utopian.
Carlos Fuentes builds a similar idea in his fiction and critical work. In an
essay revolving around Lezama Lima in Valiente mundo nuevo, Fuentes
expands on the notion of the Neobaroque as a form of counter conquest in a way
that further addresses my question concerning the status of the utopian text. He
calls on those born
de la catástrofe de la conquista … nosotros, los indo-afro-
iberoamericanos … ver nuestra historia como un conflicto de
valores en el cual ninguno es destruido por su contrario sino que,
trágicamente, cada uno se resuelve en el otro. La tragedia sería
así, prácticamente, una definición de nuestro mestizaje.

(out of the catastrophe of the conquest, we the indo-afro-
iberoamericanos … to view our history like a conflict of values in
which no value is destroyed by its opposite, rather that, tragically,
each one is resolved in the other. This tragedy would also be,
practically, a definition of our mestizaje.) (217)

Fuentes is working against the traditional understanding of tragedy that would
see the mutual extinction of these values (214). The seeds of his idiosyncratic
understanding of tragedy are to be discovered in the founding of America—in the
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gulf between the utopian idea of America itself and the violence of its conquest.
Heavily influenced by Américo Castro’s push to bring to light the
multiethnic (Jewish/Islamic) composition of Spain, Fuentes views the concept of
tragedy as capable of maintaining the antagonistic relation between the key
components Latin America’s mestizaje (European, indigenous, and African)
without giving into a depoliticized homogenization. Fuentes’ output is marked by
this interest in unsettling the single narrative of the Mexican nation by paying
particular attention to repressed histories and identities. He remains, for example,
one of the few Mexican novelists that have engaged critically and openly with
Mexico’s Afro-descendent heritage in their own work. True to his construction of
the indo-afro-iberoamericano, Terra Nostra issues perhaps his most elaborate
challenge to a world that presents itself as “univocal in its normativity”
(“Cervantes” 69).
When speaking on the totality of Fuentes’ work, Raymond Leslie Williams
has pointed out that it works to both create and negate history by including books
that “seek atemporality in a variety of ways” (110).
1
In Terra Nostra, Fuentes
accomplishes this, in part, by including among his characters representatives
from other foundational fictions (Celestina, Don Juan, and Don Quijote de la
Mancha, for example) and actual historical figures alongside and within
characters of his own invention. With this he is able to present multiple parallel
histories and futures to stage and restage the discovery and conquest of the New

1
Terra Nostra is a foundational aspect of a larger project of the novelist, La edad del tiempo. The
project consists of twenty-eight volumes of fiction. Fuentes’ concept of such a self-curating is
indebted to the multi-volume historical fiction projects of John-Paul Sartre (Les chemins de la
liberté) and Honoré de Balzac (La Comédie humaine).
156
World. As Ann McBride-Limaye noted in her work on the novel, in this recreation
allows “Fuentes to become the narrator of the pre-conquest codices and
manuscripts, of histories of New Spain and of existing works of literature and
criticism” (59). In this sense, he has both taken on and undone the roll that
Sigüenza y Góngora (and Spielberg and Kushner in Chapter Three) assigned
himself in the organization of an archive. However, clarifying Williams’ idea of
atemporality, I would more particularly propose that in Terra Nostra especially
Fuentes is interested in creating a temporal dissonance. Whereas atemporality
suggests a nonrelation to time, Fuentes’ project depends on the relation and
slippage between time(s) in order to disrupt.
The impossibility of teasing out all of these productive disruptions,
resistant to synthesis on all fronts, leads to what Fuentes terms the tragic
opportunity (214)—an enclave in thought that aligns with both Jameson’s anti-
anti utopianism and Graff Zivin’s desires for a governing principle of absolute
indeterminacy.
This tragic opportunity, capable of activating and sustaining antagonisms,
remains latent at the close of the twentieth century when Fuentes writes Valiente
mundo nuevo and when Cuarón begins his career in cinema. As with Fuentes,
the idea of utopia is crucial to Cuarón’s investments. For Cuarón, this can be
traced to his second feature film, Y tu mamá también (2001). The academic
literature that has chosen this film as its object has to a great extent focused on
157
reading the film in large part as an allegory of the Mexican nation in transition.
2

These readings are very much encouraged by the film itself, which famously
derives all significant character names from the theater of the nation’s founding.
The road trip film narrates Tenoch Iturbide’s (namesakes: Agustín de Iturbide;
Aztec ruler who led the people from Aztlán) and Julio Zapata’s (namesake:
Emiliano Zapata) coming of age via their relationship with the older and
enigmatic Spaniard, Luisa Cortés (namesake: Hernán Cortés).
3
Ernesto
Acevedo-Muñoz examines this naming most thoroughly in his work that argues
that the film explores ideas of Mexicanidad, or Mexicanness, and the film itself as
a sort of a counterepic in the spirit outlined by the Mexico-based critic Néstor
García Canclini. As many scholars have pointed out, this complication of
Mexicanness in many ways hinges on the display of a failed utopia, as the beach
the three protagonists visit, Boca del Cielo, is presented as a pre-modern utopia
that will ultimately be disappeared by the incessant machinations of
globalization.
4
This failure is left unresolved in the film’s final scene where Julio
and Tenoch meet by chance and share an awkward coffee a year after their road
trip. They fill in the gaps in their once shared lives and, according to the film’s
voiceover, separate to never see each other again.

2
This is done through the prisms of globalization and the transnational (Baer and Long),
(Saldaña-Portillo), gender (Amaya and Blair; Linhard; Acevedo-Muñoz), and queer
(im)possibilities (Lahr-Vivaz).
3
Beyond Cortez, Irtubide and Zapata, Julio and Tenoch’s girlfriends, Ceci and Ana, take on the
respective surnames of Victoriano Huerta and José María Morelos.
4
See Lahr-Vivaz, Amaya and Blair, and Acevedo-Muñoz.
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Ignacio Sánchez Prado, another scholar that has significantly treated Y tu
mamá también, effectively agrees with Acevedo-Muñoz characterization of the
film as “only deceptively apathetic” to the concerns of national cinema (Acevedo-
Muñoz 40). Sánchez Prado’s Screening Neoliberalism, produced in 2014 with the
benefit of Cuarón’s body of work up to Gravity, highlights Dolores Tierney’s work
on the Mexican-born director Alejandro González Iñárritu where she is able to
connect his films that are placed outside of the Mexican context (21 Grams,
2003; Babel, 2006) to his Mexico-centered film (Amores perros, 2000).
5
And
though Tierney suggests that the same can be done for Cuarón, Sanchez Prado
spends little time on Cuarón’s non-Mexico situated films, only quickly asserting
that Children of Men and Gravity are stepping stones toward a post-national
cinema that “fully deterritorializes and undermines the codes of the national”
(195).
My proposition is to interrogate where and how Cuarón, in his attempted
anti-anti-utopianism in both Children of Men and Gravity, while reaching for
broader audiences and globally legible metaphors, has sustained a deceptively
deterritorialized communication with the evolving idea of Mexico. Implicit in my
reading is the suggestion that he has broadened his critical palette by skirting the
constricting expectations that come from producing recognizable national
allegory. And though his subjects take him further afield, a portion of his work
nonetheless can be read as engaging with Mexico with a great deal of freedom
and nuance despite, or perhaps because of, its absence.

5
Birdman (2014) had yet to be released at the time of her essay.
159

Based on the P.D. James’ novel The Children of Men, Cuarón’s film takes
place in the United Kingdom in the year 2027. There has not been a documented
birth anywhere around the globe in 18 years. As the film opens, Theo Faron
(Clive Owen) is out for his morning coffee in a local cafe where the public is
glued to the television repeating the news that Diego Ricardo, the world’s
youngest human being, has died. As he exits the cafe, a crude bomb explodes
and Theo just barely escapes with his life. The United Kingdom has become a
militarized state, with forced fertility screenings, strict immigration policies, and
concentration camps for the refugees and otherwise undesirable. Theo, a former
social activist in the days before infertility who has lost his taste for the struggle.
He is ultimately persuaded by his ex-wife Julian Taylor (Julianne Moore) to work
with an immigrant’s right group with which she is affiliated (the Fishes) to help
transport Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey), a refugee, to safe haven. After Julian is
killed by a renegade faction of the Fishes, Theo discovers the true nature of his
errand: Kee is pregnant and Julian had brought him on board because if anything
happened to herself she trusted him to stay above the political fray and steward
Kee to the “Human Project,” a group seeking to cure infertility in the Azores.
Samuel Amago makes the astute argument that Cuarón’s film is “an
oblique adaptation” of T.S. Elliot’s dystopian poem The Waste Land where
not unlike the symbolic journey undertaken by the poet in The
Waste Land, the film narrative ends at the water—not the sacred
waters of the Ganges River, but at the sea near Bexhill—where
Theo expires after having delivered Kee and her child to their
rendezvous with the Human Project. (219)

160
Amago cites Cuarón’s inclusion of the Buddhist blessing shantih that Eliot’s
poem concludes with. As further evidence of this adaptation, Jasper (Michael
Cain), Theo’s friend and helper, repeats this three times, as Eliot does, when he
first see that Kee is with child: “Kee, your baby is the miracle the whole world has
been praying for! Halleluja, hosanna, shanti, shanti, shanti!”
For Amago, the film, in its dry and deadened portrait of the world,
connects most directly to Eliot’s “vision of the decline of civilization and the quest
for meaning in the sterile, infertile modern world” (218). And although both Eliot
and Cuarón share a penchant for pastiche, it is not, he argues, in a depthless
way associated with the postmodernism as theorized by Jameson but rather he
contends that Cuarón’s cinematic text represents a visual rebuttal to Jameson’s
lament of the “apolitical aesthetics of postmodernism” (219). However, if Amago
were to invoke Fuentes’ understanding of tragedy, he could read Cuarón as
working along a different theoretical trajectory altogether rather than simply
critiquing an Anglo-dominated idea of the postmodern.
6
In either case, it is in this
explicitly political intent that Cuarón diverges most from Eliot, as Cuarón
envisions his film as a call to action against present day systems. This is
communicated by Cuarón himself who presents a bonus segment on the DVD,
The Possibility of Hope, that features, among others, Slavoj Žižek and Naomi
Klein discussing globalization with respect to the film.
7
With this overt political

6
Fuentes has suffered from a similarly uneasy critical placement between the discourses of
modernism and postmodernism. This is an unease that an understanding of his relationship to the
Neobaroque helps to lessen. For a more full discussion of this see Michael Abeyta (7-15).
7
Cuarón would return the favor by helping to write Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine (2007)
where she discusses her previously written theories. Jonás Cuarón was the project’s director.
161
commentary attached to the film, it is of no surprise that Children of Men has
inspired an impressive body of critical scholarship, the great majority of which
reads the film as a critique of globalization through the lens of biopolitics.
In this scholarship, much has been made about Cuarón’s ambivalence
toward the biological crisis inherent in the movie’s plot. Academics have been
quick to marshal Cuarón’s own statements about his using James’ infertility
conceit as only “a point of departure” and that he ultimately decided to “not even
care about [the infertility]” (Roberts). Those that wish to disconnect the film from
the Mexican context might view this as a strategy to move away from an
engagement with a Mexican identitarian logic. Many have pointed out that Žižek,
in the aforementioned supplementary documentary, spells this out even clearer.
He views the film as presenting an infertile world as a metaphor for the
ideological despair of late capitalism. Heather Latimer pushes against this
slightly, arguing that “the film’s story line acts as more than just a metaphor
because its reproductive politics are vital to how viewers make sense of its other
politics” (55). She ties this to the film’s reversal of James’ original infertility
premise:
In James’ novel the world is sterile because all sperm suddenly
loses its potency, but in the film all women mysteriously stop being
able to stay pregnant. Connected to this is how the world reacts to
this infertility. While the political effects of global sterility in the novel
are apathy, hopelessness, and complacency, in the film infertility, if
not directly leading to, has certainly played a considerable part in
the spread of world war, fascism, and terrorism. (52)

I would further insist that despite his own words to the contrary Cuarón
has gone out of his way to sharpen the biological crisis from James’ original text
162
in a way that draws the viewer’s attention to it rather than allowing them to move
past it. Furthermore, this effort helps to bring ideas surrounding Mexico into the
frame. In other words, the larger metaphors regarding late capitalism that both
Cuarón and Žižek insist on remain but they must be paired with readings that
take into account an engagement with Mexico.
Many scholars that have written about the film catalogue the other major
shifts that Cuarón has made in his adaptation of James’ novel: the invention of
Kee, a black refugee that now bears the child instead of Julian; the marital
relationship between Julian and Theo; the fact that both Julian and Theo both die
in Cuarón’s version. However, there are a few, seemingly minor adjusted details
that have not been addressed at all that I argue help one to understand the
subtlety of Cuarón’s investment in the biological crisis.
The film’s most groundbreaking and perhaps most written about scene
contains a trace of this investment. It is a three-and-a-half-minute single take of a
car attack that features the murder of Julian, during which the camera never has
a chance to settle. The only exception is a deliberate five-second pause at the
rear of the car that displays the logo of the fictional Swinton University Biology
Institute:

163

Neither the university nor the institute exists in James’ version. This minor detail
only brings to the surface that the notoriously meticulous Cuarón might be
treating this idea of biology more seriously than he has let on.
The creation of Cuarón’s character of Diego Ricardo only adds to this
investment. In James’ novel, the character of the youngest person on earth is
Joseph Ricardo. Cuarón, trying to create a productive departure from the original
text, goes out of his way to make such a minor name shift. James describes her
Baby Ricardo “as of mixed race, born illegitimately in a Buenos Aires
hospital…[and] killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of Buenos Aires” (5). What we
learn of Cuarón’s Baby Diego (how he is addressed in the film) is in the newsreel
that opens the film. With our experience with Y tu mamá también that draws our
attention to naming and the drama of the Mexican encounter, are we to consider
Baby Diego as an iteration of San Juan Diego, the indigenous said to have had
the Virgin Mary appear to him and her image miraculously imprinted on his
clothing? This possibility produces an unresolvable dissonance where Cuarón’s
Diego would be positioned as the last of an old and now infertile world but
nevertheless recall San Juan Diego’s production of the iconic image that would
164
both help to give birth to the Roman Catholic faith in the New World and be the
young nation of Mexico’s galvanizing image.
8

Beyond the shift in the name, Cuarón suggests a very different history in
the brief news clip. Baby Diego was not an illegitimate child but born to a working
class couple from Mendoza, Argentina. While it is unclear if he was born in
Buenos Aires, like James’ version, or Mendoza, it is clear that some type of
migration has taken place, either before or after his birth. And what are we to
make of the evacuation of the mixed-race description from his Baby Diego?
Beginning with Y tu mamá también, Cuarón has demonstrated his interest in the
traces of biological mixture and movement. In Children of Men, he moves from a
racially homogeneous male (Baby Diego) to Kee’s daughter Dylan, a bastard
child of unknown origin that is positioned as the symbol of world’s new hope. It is
my argument that in doing so Cuarón has produced a text that is, in part, legible
within the current post-racial/transnational embrace while simultaneously
destabilizing Mexico’s inherited racialized concept of mestizaje. All of this work is
dependent on an engagement with biology, and thus I read the crisis of infertility
as no mere prop but a structuring element of the film.
Amy Sara Carroll is the only scholar to significantly discuss Cuarón’s
treatment of mestizaje within the context of Children of Men and connect it to his
work in Y tu mamá también. Her concern as it relates to Cuarón’s film is to read
the tensions that exist between the local, national and transnational. Intent on

8
Miguel Hidalgo famously carried a flag with this image in Mexico’s battle for independence from
Spain at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It is widely considered the first Mexican flag.
165
identifying secret histories of gender made legible through the presentation of the
child, Carroll looks to uncover a contemporary iteration of Mexicanness in the film
and ultimately contends that Dylan, the product of a mother of African descent
and an unknown father, is a “universal ‘hija de la chingada’” that “embodies the
unrealized idealism of José Vasconcelos’ postrevolutionary formulations of ‘la
raza cósmica’”

(18). Here, in this “miraculous reincarnation of mestizaje,” she is
attempting to translate what was described in Chapter Two as Octavio Paz’s
archeological, and identitarian Mexicanness without complicating it by involving
the archive that has evolved to counteract it.
While Carroll is right to insist that Cuarón’s film uses the idea of Mexico to
communicate with a global context in Children of Men, and even more keen
connect this vision to Vasconcelos, her approach to Vasconcelos inherits his
construction as unrealized idealism without examining him closer. Though she
does refer to Vasconcelos’ formulations as a “vexed vision of the post/racial,”
being that Cuarón’s engagement with this discourse hinges on a phenotypically
black character of African descent, it is not prudent to ignore Vasconcelos as a
proponent of a discourse of whitening, especially in relation the African element
in Mexican culture.
It is also important to note that eugenic conversations such as this
generated by the Latin American political elite were not at all uncommon at the
close of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, as their rhetorical
struggle continued to be to differentiate themselves from Europe while
maintaining control of the afro-indigenous mass. Vasconcelos’ discourse in
166
particular is formed in the aftermath of the constitutional revolution that began in
1910, where there was a strong push to re-constitute Mexico’s identity on all
fronts (cultural, political, and economic). Vasconcelos’ Darwinian logic allows for
Mexico’s entrance into modernity by way of an incorporation of its indigenous
component, absorption, as he puts it, and complete disappearance of any trace
of blackness. The political corollary to his biological formulations allows for a
nominal or symbolic connection to the indigenous masses while maintaining the
status quo within the political power structure. In the case of Mexico, this is
represented by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) holding power for
over seventy straight years in Mexico. This crisis of democracy is, in part, what
Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también intervenes with. Capturing this incorporative
symbolism perfectly is Cuarón’s Tenoch. This character was supposed to be
named Hernán (after Cortés) but was born as his father was beginning his
political career and it was deemed a politically expedient to give his son a name
that resonate with the ancient indigenous city of Tenochtitlan. Thus, built within
this formulation of incorporation there is a great anxiety of that which can be
neither completely disappeared nor incorporated. Vasconcelos’ cosmic race in
many ways can be read s an attempt to manage that extant anxiety.
But Kee is presented as mestizaje’s unacceptable scenario. This anxious
potential is visible in the diary that Theo keeps in P.D. James’ original text:
In some countries, so we are told, [members of the youngest
generation] are ritually sacrificed in fertility rites resurrected after
centuries of superficial civilization. I occasionally wonder what we in
Europe will do if news reaches us that these burnt offerings have
been accepted by the ancient gods and a live child has been born.
(11)
167

In Children of Men, Cuarón seems to use this musing as a point of departure for
his more particularized version where the invention of Kee reverses the tenets of
la raza cósmica and presents it back to itself as nightmare. In his version, it is the
white Theo that is being sacrificed for the founding of the nation, and will exist in
name only through Dylan (named after his deceased son), and the black refugee
mother is now the clear centerpiece of a new world. This reading does not
contradict the fact that Kee may still be read, as Carroll does, as the concept of
mestizaje extrapolated globally. Nor does it prevent her being read as a version
of the modern Virgin of Guadalupe—the indigenous apparition of the Virgin Mary
that she herself conjures when she jokes with Theo that there was no father for
her baby. Cuarón spoke to his interest and approach to religion in the film with
Filmmaker Magazine in an interview in 2006. While he was not interested in
maintaining James’ more dogmatic overtones, he “didn’t want to shy away from
the spiritual archetypes” (Guerrasio). I argue that the invention of Kee allows
Cuarón to present such an archetype, reposition it in an attempt to ensure a
perpetual destabilization.
Kee’s darker skin and her promiscuous past points to her legibility as what
Bartra understands as the problematic archetype of the Mexican woman: the
Chingadalupe. A compound of chingada and Guadalupe, it combines the two
most prominent origin myths of Mexican identity: Malintzin (or La Malinche) that
was guide, interpreter and lover to Hernán Cortez and the origin of the mestizo;
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and the Virgen de Guadalupe that was discussed above.
9
According to Bartra,
“the Chingadalupe [is] an ideal image that the Mexican male must form of his
companion, who must fornicate with unbridled enjoyment and at the same time
be virginal and comforting” (160). And lending more weight to my suggestion
regarding the significance of Cuarón’s Baby Diego, Bartra maintains that
All Mexicans are Juan Diegos, protecting in the Tepeyac of their
psychic depths the images of their mothers … [and] in exchange for
[Juan Diego’s] veneration, the idolized Virgin curled up in the
Indians blanket, where her image was left imprinted; in the same
way, women of dark skin are accepted into the bed of the Mexican
male and leave the trace of their sorrow on the sheets.
10
(160-61)

To demonstrate how socially ingrained this reading is, he quotes a popular
Mexican song lyric that has been around since at least the late nineteenth
century:
Las morenas me agradan
desde que supe
que es morena la Virgen
de Guadalupe

(“I loved dark girls
from the moment I knew
that dark-skinned is the Virgin
of Guadalupe”) (Altamirano 483-84; Bartra 161)

9
There remains the possibility that Kee had been a sex worker, but this is ultimately left
ambiguous in the film. A version of the script shows that this was once a more defined aspect of
Kee’s backstory. When she finally lets a stunned Theo know that she was obviously joking about
being a virgin, she answers his original question about who was the child’s father: “Fuck knows.
Omar. Sammy. Phil. Most of them wankers don’t know their names. Did some for quid, some for
drugs. Some… Fuck knows, I was horny” (69). The line in the film is far more indeterminate:
“Fuck knows, never learned half the wankers’ names.”
10
Tepeyac is the venerated hill where the Virgin appeared to Juan Diego.
169
But Kee is beyond darkness. Borrowing language from Chapter One, she is
denegrido—constructed as utterly black, or beyond the margins of the psychic
structure. Her status as an African refugee thus throws this already fraught
archetype into further chaos. The possibility of this quotation further undermines
a simple globalization of Kee. If we read the film as intervening with both
Vasconcelos’ utopian theoretical formulations and Eliot’s dystopian vision, we
understand how Cuarón, like Fuentes, is particularly interested in how the gulf
between utopia and conquest can set the stage for a tragic (read: perpetually
indeterminate) opportunity.
In fact, Cuarón’s pseudo-trilogy that I have put forward can be loosely
mapped on to the sections in Fuentes’ Terra Nostra: The Old World/Y tu mamá
también, The New World/Children of Men, The Next World/Gravity. It is in
Gravity, however, where Cuarón most thoroughly explores this gulf between
utopia and its tragic ruin, and even names it. The critically acclaimed space
drama tells the story of scientist Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) as she joins
the mission of Space Shuttle Explorer to upgrade an aspect of the Hubble
Telescope’s scanning system. Within minutes of the start of the film, debris from
a defunct Russian satellite, shot down as means of disposal, comes into the
frame. The violently scattered remnants causes a chain reaction in which all
space colonization is put at great risk and all members of Explorer’s team with
the exception of Dr. Stone and Mission Commander Matt Kowalski are killed. Dr.
Stone and Kowalski, and soon only Dr. Stone, are no longer able to hear Mission
Control but hold out hope that transmissions of their predicament are being
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received. For the remainder of the narrative arc of the—Dr. Stone’s miraculous
return to earth—she remains in “The Blind,” or out of radio contact in the
parlance of NASA that is appropriated by the film. It is in The Blind that Cuarón is
able to directly explore the topography of silence that has interested him since Y
tu mamá también, where the visibly invisible indigenous backdrops were brought
to the fore via extradiagetic voiceovers. In Children of Men, it is through the
passing shots of mistreated refugees that we similarly come to understand what
structures the world being shown.
11
In Gravity, however, The Blind, the usually
invisible structuring element, is front and center and the visible world is lost in the
background.
It is in this blind spot that Cuarón picks up again his engagement with
Eliot. For if Children of Men can be seen to some extent as an adaptation of The
Waste Land, Gravity should be read as a sequel of sorts. Where Children of Men
takes us to the water’s edge to await Tomorrow (the ship that eventually will carry
Kee to the Human Project), Gravity puts us on board the ship, this time the
Space Shuttle Explorer.

As the film begins, before the title card and before an absolutely silent
vision of the earth as seen from space comes to the screen, we are instructed
that “life in space”—that is life in a utopian vacuum without sound and oxygen—

11
For a more detailed review of the voiceovers in the film, see Baer and Long.
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“is impossible.”
12
Here, Cuarón’s critique of utopia is distilled and taken to its
limit, as he has created a sparse space drama where the utopian impulse is
literalized and exposed as flawed.
Gravity, however, approaches Cuarón’s theme of temporal dissonance
with the opposite strategy of Children of Men. In the latter, the aesthetics of the
film are distinctly of the past (its crude documentary film style, and drab and
dusty England) yet the date is the distant and unfamiliar 2027. Gravity’s
aesthetics on the other hand are distinctly of the future, dependent on a host of
new cinematic technology, yet it critiques an old and worn product of our utopian
impulse, the (manned) space program. This productive dissonance is ironically
noted in Cuarón’s naming strategy as it relates to the spacecraft encountered in
the film. The Chinese Space Station Tiangong (translated as Heavenly Palace),
the Shenzhou spacecraft (translated as Divine Vessel of God), and the Russian
Soyuz (Translated as Union, referring to the union between earth and the
universe) all ultimately crash to earth with the escape pod of the Divine Vessel of
God carrying Dr. Stone. Again mixing the real with the unreal, Cuarón has
invented a space shuttle named Explorer, most likely a stand in for Atlantis, the
last shuttle to be launched into space in July of 2011. Thus, Gravity is not as
much science fiction as it is the amplification of a present alternative reality and a
metaphor for an ultimately failed colonization designed to mock the hubris of
humankind and lay bare our utopian impulse.

12
The full card reads: At 600km above planet earth the temperature / Fluctuates between +258
and -148 degrees Fahrenheit / There is nothing to carry sound / No air pressure / No oxygen /
Life in space is impossible
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With Gravity it appears that Cuarón has made an even more forceful
connection to Eliot’s poem. To start with, there is a more direct reference to the
Ganges. The film begins, according to the script’s stage directions, when it is
“early night in India” and “the sphere is almost a perfect orb except for the
darkened sliver on its Eastern edge” (A. Cuarón and J. Cuarón, “Gravity: A
Suspense in 3D” 2). In the scene when Kowalski is in the process of sacrificing
himself to improve the odds that Dr. Stone may survive, we get a vision of the
distant Himalayas and the great river. When he has cut the tether that had
connected him to Dr. Stone, and after a series of exchanges where he is
attempting to calm her and help her to reach the safety of an airlock,
13
they have
the following exchange just before his radio cuts out:
Kowalski: Oh, my God.
Dr. Stone: What?
Kowalski: Wow. Hey, Ryan.
Dr. Stone: Yeah?
Kowalski: You should see the sun on the Ganges. It’s amazing.

This draws us to the poem’s fifth and final section, “What the Thunder Said,”
where Eliot writes of the source of the Ganges in the Himalayan Mountains. After
a period where there is no water and only dryness, the clouds have gathered and
there is only the hope of a sustained rain:
A flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain
Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant. (394-398)

13
For all of Cuarón’s progressive intentions, he has created another female lead (Kee then Dr.
Stone) in need of soothing and direction from her unshakeable male counterpart (Theo then
Kowalski).
173

In Gravity, we begin with this region in darkness but at the close of the
film, when Dr. Stone begins her descent, the great river is a spectacle to behold,
presumably no longer sunken. Cuarón, in this highly sentimentalized film, has
used the metaphor of the river to again depart from Eliot and portray a future that
while certainly fragile, is full of hope. This is further reinforced, as Kowalski’s
reference to the Ganges seems to be double; alongside Eliot, it brings to the
surface the title and lyric of Alessandro Scarlatti’s aria “Già il sole dal Gange”
(Already the sun from the Ganges) from his 1680 opera L'honestà negli amori.
These lines could not be more of a departure from Eliot’s vision of the river:
Already the sun from the Ganges
more clearly sparkles
and dries every dewdrop
of the dawn which cries.
With golden ray
it adorns each blade,
and the stars of the sky
it paints in the meadow. (Retzlaff 66)

That these disparate visions nonetheless share the same root speaks to a
productive inborn and irresolvable dissonance.
Cuarón seems to carry this particular strategy to his approach to the
gendering of Dr. Ryan Stone. I argue that in Dr. Stone, Cuarón has found a
modern day Tiresias, the ever liminal, sexually ambiguous blind prophet of
Thebes that binds Eliot’s poem. Cuarón further grounds his interest in blindness
to Tiresias by choosing to give Dr. Stone a short-cropped sexually indeterminate
haircut and first name. This is foregrounded in the film’s scant dialogue when
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Kowalski, drifting to his own death and much like Theo in Children of Men helping
to deliver Ryan to safety, asks Dr. Stone, “What kind of name is Ryan for a girl?”
Breathless as she attempts to make it back to the safety and oxygen of the
Soyuz’s airlock, she replies, “Dad wanted a boy.” In a sense, this Ryan is a
reconfiguration of Children of Men’s Dylan who also bore a purposely gender-
mixed name.
14
This version is the savior of the world all grown up. This follows
Eliot who, in his notes after the poem, famously writes that Tiresias is the
character “the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest” (13).
Cuarón, in this reconfiguration of Children of Men, has constructed Dr. Ryan
Stone as a combination of Theo (distant and wondering after the death of her
daughter), Kee (bearer of the hope of the new world) and, as will be discussed
later, Dylan (the savior herself).
In the case of Dr. Stone, she is even more closely linked to Tiresias, a
prophet known for communicating with the dead, because of the vision that
comes to her in the turning point of the film. When her escape pod has run out of
fuel and she has lost hope of returning to earth, she shuts down all systems and
waits for her end. It is here that Kowalski, long dead, appears to her. She cannot
believe the vision, attempting on several occasions to ask, “How did you get
here?” Kowalski reminds Dr. Stone of the options available to her—that she can
use the landing jets to propel her to the Chinese station and from there make her
decent to earth. She protests, complaining that she has never successfully

14
Ann McBride-Limaye has examined a similar male/female naming in La muerte de Artemio
Cruz (1962) by Carlos Fuentes (55-56). And Terra Nostra presents a self-fertilizing androgynous
figure at the close of the novel (See Zamora 158-62, McBride 55-56).
175
completed the landing simulator. Kowalski interrupts with the following
monologue:
Listen, do you go back or do you want to stay here? I get it, it’s nice
up here, you can just shut down all the systems, turn out all the
lights and just close your eyes and tune out everybody. There’s
nobody up here that can hurt you, it’s safe. Then what’s the point in
going, what’s the point of living? Your kid died, doesn’t get any
rougher than that, but still it’s a matter of what you do now. And if
you decide to go then you got to just get on with it. Sit back, enjoy
the ride. You got to plant both your feet and start living life.

The melodramatic optimism, suggesting a possible resonance with
Scarlatti, is a significant shift from Eliot’s poem. Nonetheless, the engagement
with Eliot in both Children of Men and Gravity makes more legible Cuarón’s
conversation regarding utopia and modernity and opens a space for two of the
tropes that loom large in the films I am discussing: the child and the animal.
Children of Men’s theme of infertility is the most obvious extension. However, it is
Theo and Julian’s child that was killed in 2008 by a flu pandemic that I want to
draw attention to. This death starts a precipitous emotional decline for Theo that
sees his retreat from political activism and the onset of a general apathy that are
the foundation for the film’s plot built around reenergizing this broken spirit.
Dylan’s illness represents another significant departure from the novel.
James’ version of Theo runs over his child as he is backing out of the driveway.
This extraordinarily dramatic event is what drives the final stake in Theo and his
ex-wife’s relationship in the book (he is not previously married to Julian in the
original version). The banality of child death in Cuarón’s vision can speak to the
insidious, everyday nature of biopower that so many critics have latched onto in
176
their readings of the film. There is no one to blame, no large moment of crisis to
rally behind. A child has the flu and dies. Similarly, in Gravity, Dr. Stone’s
daughter’s death is the emotional centerpiece of the film and it is also presented
off-screen as an ordinary event: a blow to the head while she was playing in the
school’s playground. As she tells Kowalski, “Slipped, hit her head and that was it.
Stupidest thing.” This is why she has retreated to the emptiness of first her lab
work, then space. This is what she is learning to let go of before she can return to
earth and, as Kowalski urges her, “get on with it.”
In both contexts, the child-to-die is the product of what was or will become
a failed partnership. I have already recounted the story of Theo and Julian’s
relationship. Dr. Stone admits just before she discloses the death of her child
that, in the words of Kowalski, “there is no Mr. Stone waiting for her on earth.”
Kowalski’s own charismatic meandering stories throughout the film all involve lost
love: a wife that leaves him when he is away on a mission; and a friend’s
girlfriend that he cannot court because she is in a relationship with a woman. And
the musical motif that surrounds him at key moments in the film is his constant
replaying of Hank Williams Jr.’s “Angels are Hard to Find,” the crooning country
song that dwells on lost love.

This mixing of frustrated sexual encounters overlaid with stories of New
World encounters has been an obsession of Cuarón’s since the opening of Y tu
mamá también, where we see Julio and Tenoch with their respective partners in
177
scenes of anxious coupling.
15
For Cuarón this exploration of both failed and
frustrated sexual connection seems to be about a rhythm; something natural is
out of rhythm and the consequence, in his later two science fiction related films,
is child death. However, there is another trope of modernity that works in concert
with this, and that is that of the displaced animal. In Y tu mamá también the
animal may be interpreted as a disruption of a more natural order and the
introduction of intense globalization under the auspices of NAFTA. As Acevedo-
Muñoz notes in his work on the film, this is most clearly evidenced in the scene
where Cuarón introduces a time lapse that flashes forward to tell us that the
Chuy and Mabel, the local fisherman and his wife that had taken Tenoch, Julio
and Luisa in when they finally arrived at the beach, would soon be displaced by
one of the large hotels and he would be forced to give up their sustenance fishing
and instead work as a janitor. But it is animals that immediately prefigure this
disruption for the viewer: a drift of pigs trample Julio and Tenoch’s campground
the day before they are to leave Luisa behind as they remain unaware that her
unannounced cancer will soon take her life.
This animal motif is on full view in Children of Men when Kee first
discloses her pregnancy to Theo. It is a typical Cuarón mash-up that mixes an
attempted critique of globalization while simultaneously recalling the Nativity

15
Much like I have argued for Children of Men, many have read the sexual relationships in Y tu
mamá también as intervening with Mexico’s founding myths. Saldaña-Portillo, for example, reads
the character of Luisa as “mama España … enable[ing] the performance of a biological mestizaje
when she has sex with the boys separately and together. In sex, she embodies the principle of
the incorporation of the foreign element as the grounds for independence from it.”
In a more comedic register, this interest in the metaphoricity of sex can be traced to his first
feature length film Sólo con tu pareja (1991).
178
where Kee is in a manger and has stripped herself naked in order to show Theo
that she is carrying a miracle baby. However, alongside Kee and Theo are
several cows connected to a milking machine. Both Sarah Trimble and Zahid
Chaudhary have written expertly on this from the perspective of gender.
Dissecting screen cuts between Kee and animals, Chaudhary makes the
argument that
Kee’s association with animals happens at several registers at
once: the sound of the cows’ cries punctuate her lines (and not
Theo’s), the cut that links the subject of cows with Kee herself, the
camera that incessantly pans from the cows to Kee and back again,
the biopolitical order that regulates the lives of the cows and the
lives of illegal immigrants like Kee. (94)

Trimble takes this a step further claiming that Kee’s request for Theo’s help
facilitating the birth of her child “evokes a complex history of dispossession and
violence, and raises important questions about the gendered and racial politics of
James’ and Cuarón’s respective fantasies of infertility” (252).
I do not think that either is wrong to suggest that Cuarón has established
an equivalence between the animal realm and those whom he views as beyond
the margins. However, I would argue that this relation between animals and
those on the margin is some of the more theoretically rich, though flawed in
moments, radical components of his two science fiction adjacent films. Following
the work of Akira Lippit on modernity and the animal that suggests humans as
“dehumanized beings … that have broken their primordial link to nature [and
animals],” I view Cuarón’s work in both films as attempting a suture of this divide
179
by articulating his animals as capable of showing human beings their “pre-
rational, pre-management, pre-cultural essence” (20,13).
A poignant example of this takes place in Children of Men when Theo,
Kee and Miriam (the midwife) make their way through Bexhill, a violent refugee
camp, to the coast and ultimately to the ship Tomorrow. Everyone in the camp is
oblivious to the fact that Kee is pregnant despite very close contact and the fact
that she is quite obviously showing. In order to find the accommodations where
Kee will eventually give birth, they are connected with Marichka, who is
described in the film as “an Arab, gypsy, or something [that] always carries a
shitty little dog with her” and speaks Romanian. It is this dog that first notices that
Kee has given birth, sniffing her and trying to get at the blanket that covers the
secret. Following Trimble, here again Cuarón has announced a connection
between the marginal and the animal. And later, as Theo and Kee escape
through the battle, it is the howl of dogs that react to the birth of the child before a
fighting human being realizes what has happened. It is only when the child cries
that those around become aware and the soldiers cease their fire to stand in awe
of the child. This lasts only a few moments as they quickly forget this miracle and
resume fighting. This connects to a larger motif of Cuarón where the animal is
depicted as having access to a language that we humans need, and marginal
characters are painted as closer to this.
16

16
This is a point where, if one wanted to complicate the film’s racial politics, they could explore
this potentially dangerous exoticism.
180
This howl of the dog returns in Gravity. While in the Soyuz escape pod just
before Kowalski’s visitation discussed earlier, Dr. Stone hears a transmission that
at first she thinks is coming from the Chinese space station. It is only after she
hears the howl of a dog that she realizes the transmission is coming from earth.
After a conversation between the two that is completely lost in translation, she
begins to communicate in howls and the man, whom she believes is called
Aningaaq, imitates her.
More of Aningaaq is revealed in an official seven-minute spinoff
(Aningaaq) written and directed by Jonás Cuarón, co-writer of Gravity and son of
Alfonso Cuarón. It is available in the DVD extras and on various Internet
platforms. Here, we get the backstory and subtitles that translate the Inuit
language that Aningaaq is speaking. The dog that is howling is sick and
Aningaaq laments the fact that he must put it down. All of the dialogue that Dr.
Stone does not understand is in reference to this.
And while seeming to fill in the blanks, the short film works in a similar
fashion to the extradiagetic narration in Y tu mamá también, by drawing more
attention to the gaps. In other words, this short film seems to encourage an
awareness that the speech that the viewer may have desired to be translated in
the feature-length film is ultimately insufficient in addressing a gap. The counter-
intuitive dissonance provided by this added perspective is only compounded by
the fact that Alfonso Cuarón, already splitting a screenwriting credit with his son
Jonás Cuarón for Gravity, has ceded claim to a directorial vision entirely in this
short film.
181
The end of the Jonás Cuarón’s interpretation, has Aningaaq hang up the
receiver and immediately walk to shoot his ailing dog (off screen) as the camera
pans up to the sky where we see what Jonás Cuarón seems to be suggesting is
Dr. Stone’s escape pod plummeting to earth. For Dr. Stone it is a second chance
at life on earth, a rebirth, framed here in a circle of life metaphor. However, the
temporality of both films do not align. In Gravity, after the transmission is over Dr.
Stone has not even reached the Chinese space station where she will find the
Shenzhou spacecraft that will deliver her to earth. This companion film can be
read as a step toward the multiple and contradictory authors, interpretations and
time frames that are presented in Terra Nostra.
Returning to Gravity, before Dr. Stone has ended here conversation with
Aningaaq, the howling dogs have disturbed a nearby baby—its cries are what
immediately precede her decision to turn off the machinery in order to die and
become united with her daughter. Here, Cuarón continues to link the above-
mentioned animal sensitivity to an extraordinarily marginal character in Aningaaq,
and one who, at least in the story of Gravity and in the spirit of both Y tu mamá
también and Children of Men, remains purposefully relegated to the margins. But
something different occurs in Gravity. Dr. Stone is visited by Kowalski, given the
pep talk quoted earlier, and she is reborn with a closer link to this primordial
essence. In an interview with The Daily Beast, Cuarón articulates his intentions
for the final scene where Dr. Stone emerges from the water where her escape
pod has crashed and walks on the earth for the first time:
In this case, it’s about adversity and the possible outcome as a
rebirth…It’s the optimistic scenario, the Darwinian chart at the end.
182
She comes from the primordial soup, crawling out into the mud, and
then she’s on all fours, and then she’s standing up curved like an
ape, until she goes completely erect. (Stern)

I would argue that in Gravity Cuarón is attempting to give Dr. Stone a
symbolically marginal death. Shortly before she shuts down all systems and
during her helplessly incoherent conversation with Aningaaq she states,
speaking to him but more to herself, “nobody will mourn for me, nobody will pray
for my soul.” I read this as Cuarón’s attempt to connect her with the unmournable
that play in the backgrounds of all three films we have been discussing here—the
indigenous on the side of the road in Y tu mamá también’s Mexico, the refugees
whose lives are meaningless and similarly in the background in Children of Men,
and, finally, Aningaaq, an emblem of indigeneity. It is this symbolically marginal
death that allows for her to be reborn with a rediscovered primordial connection.
To underscore this, the film shows a frog come into view as she is struggling
under the water of the lake after the pod has crashed. The script’s directions
imagine it as “THE FROG cross[ing] in front of her, effortlessly swimming on its
way to the surface” (A. Cuarón and J. Cuarón, “Gravity: A Suspense in 3D” 100).
Attentive, she sheds her bulky suit, her old skin, and she, too, is able to ascend
to the surface following its lead:
SHE SETS HERSELF FREE, and-
SHE SWIMS UP, stroking with her, good arm. She is completely
out of breath, only the tiniest bubbles rise from her nose.
She is about to lose consciousness, when she sees-
THE FROG swimming ahead of her, sliding smoothly through the
water toward the rays of sunlight diffracted by the surface. (100)

When Dr. Stone finally reaches the surface, she takes her first breath and
183
lets out a scream described in the screenplay as “almost primal, like the first
breath of a newborn child, it burns her lungs but reclaims life … She drags
herself from the water, like the first amphibious life form crawling out of the
primordial soup onto land” (101).
Where Dr. Stone’s character in Gravity may be considered subversive in
its relation to ideas accepted as intrinsic to modernity (the figure of the child and
the animal), I argue that Cuarón’s reliance on the metaphor of rebirth, ultimately,
represents an inability to avoid the pull of modernity’s utopian impulse. This is the
largest departure from Y tu mamá también, a film that in its very conclusion
sustains an actively antagonistic relationship with the ideas of narrative closure
and predetermination. Lee Edelman’s reading of futurity, enunciated in the
register of queer thought, is particularly helpful in understanding how Cuarón has
shifted his approach to the future in Children of Men and Gravity. Edelman is
focused on the rhetoric of the child in politics and contends that “the fantasy
subtending the image of the Child invariably shapes the logic within which the
political itself must be thought” (2). In order to threaten the logic of this thought, a
childless, queer oppositionality must be sought. With Children of Men, there is no
equivocation in relation to the centrality of the child in the film’s vision.
Interestingly, Edelman, whose book was written before Cuarón’s film, takes P.D.
James’ novel with its concept of rebirth as his object to underscore his theory.
Cuarón’s film, and its marketing apparatus, does little to dislodge this reliance on
what Edelman pejoratively calls futurity, an aspect of our collective utopian
impulse. A quick scan of the text from the principal movie posters announcing the
184
film make this abundantly clear: “The year 2027: / The last days of the Human
Race / No child has been born for 18 years / He must protect our only hope”; “In
20 Years. / Women Are Infertile. / No Children. / No Future. / No Hope. / But All
That Can Change. / In A Heartbeat.”; “Our Women Cannot Give Birth. / Our Men
Cannot Stop Fighting / Our Future Will End Without This Child. / A Fight to Save
Our Future.”

185

The marketing for Gravity suffers the same fate. This is evident in the
movie poster and DVD cover that feature the fetal position pose Dr. Stone makes
prior to her reentry:

186
This and the film’s narrative arc are reinforced on the sonic and visual planes of
the cinematic text. Visually, Dr. Stone’s reentry, filled with burning debris that
hurdles toward earth, evokes a lone surviving sperm impregnating mother earth:

And the score, filled with a mix of silence and discord throughout, finds this
conflict resolved in the film’s final minutes with a recognizable and triumphant
human voice returning to the forefront for the only time in the film.
17

Thus, despite great strides in opening up the possibility of what Fuentes
helps us understand as the tragic opportunity, Cuarón’s science fiction related
projects ultimately leave no gap in which this tragedy can sustain itself. While
present within Y tu mamá también, within Children of Men and Gravity, it is
precisely this lingering ambiguity that is left behind. However, we need not read
Cuarón’s cinematic turn away from The Blind and ultimate embrace of a utopian
impulse as a limit of the genre, but rather as a turn away from a productively
indeterminate anti-anti-utopian enclave that his cinematic texts have nonetheless
played a role in visualizing.

17
See the compositions “Shenzou” and “Gravity” in Steven Price’s score.
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CHAPTER FIVE – TOWARD A RADICAL DARKNESS

“It did rain. It had been raining pretty much constantly
since that day. At the window of the conference room,
Mark Spitz looked out into a solemn nigrescence that
was interrupted only by a white dome of light leeching
out of Fort Wonton.”
-Colson Whitehead, Zone One

The previous chapter suggests the productive potential of a text that is
able to present and dwell upon the idea of a failed utopia. This productivity is
intimately tied to an ability to activate and sustain an anxious awareness of an
indeterminate futurity. In this final chapter, I will argue that Colson Whitehead’s
zombie apocalypse novel Zone One succeeds in encouraging such activation
where Alfonso Cuarón’s science fiction films ultimately could not by avoiding the
future-oriented pull of a utopian impulse in a novel that engages with, in large
part, the United States’ contemporary march toward a post-racial ideal.

Whitehead’s narrative tells the story of Mark Spitz in the final three days of
Zone One, a walled portion of an undated New York City. It had been the avant-
188
garde of the reconstruction of the United States in the wake of a zombie
apocalypse. Spitz, part of the armed, three-person Omega Unit, was responsible
for going beyond the walls and slowly regaining the city.
Sunday, the last day, begins with the failure of the Zone’s principal barrier:
When the wall fell, it fell quickly, as if it had been waiting for this
moment, as if it had been created for the very instant of its failure.
Barricades collapsed with haste once they were exposed for the
riddled and rotten things they had always been. Beneath that
façade of stability they were as ethereal as the society that created
them.

(275; my emphasis)

Whitehead invests these lines with an extraordinary antagonistic
ambivalence. On the first read, the pronoun “they” is used to describe the
barricades themselves—true to the genre, Whitehead’s is a story of barricades
and breaches. As one of lieutenants of the reconstruction effort notes: “The
barricade is the only metaphor left in this mess. The last one standing … There
are small barricades—across the apartment door, then a whole house nailed
up—and then we have the bigger barricades. The camp. The settlement. The
city. We work our way to bigger walls” (121). And thus, Zone One is a text that on
a topographical level is designed to demonstrate what breaks through from this
or that side to the other.
But the repetition of “they” that begins in the second sentence suggests a
certain indeterminacy that allows for this word to be read as signifying the
surviving humans themselves—Barricades collapsed with haste once humans
were exposed for the riddled and rotten things they had always been—or the
zombies of the coming horde—Beneath that façade of stability the zombies were
as ethereal as the society that created them. This indeterminacy collapses the
189
possibility of otherness and we are left to understand that the zombies are within
us, the conception of the human, and what is breaking through the barrier can
and should be described as an internal leak, a secretion from some intrapsychic
structure.
This striking indeterminacy is seen again later in the novel while Spitz and
the two other members of his crew—Kaitlyn and Gary—having survived the
repercussions of the initial rupture find themselves among the living, but not for
long: “They fired until all that needed to be killed had been killed, and they stood
numbly looking into the darkness for more, the next apparitions hiding in the
wings, for surely they were not finished. They were human beings, after all, and
full of things that need to be put down”

(267; my emphasis). Gifted with the
previous anxiety we are left productively unsure of who exactly is not finished
and what is being classified as human.
This chapter’s epigraph returns us to a point earlier in the novel, at the end
of the first day and pages before the zombies will assert their dominance, as is
both expected and allowed in this genre. Spitz stands above the walls of Zone
One, peering through the glass window in a conference room that had been
repurposed as one of the military nerve centers of the reconstruction. He looks
out into what is described as a “solemn nigrescence” (124). Nigrescence, defined
as the “process of becoming black,” in this instance clearly references the
darkening night but also characterizes the looming zombie threat as one of
becoming dark.
190
But when paired with the indeterminate reading above that will come two
days later, we realize that Mark Spitz is now, on Friday, observing, perhaps
unaware, his own nigrescence—his own becoming darkness. It is the distorted
effect of “leeching” white light that sharpens the contour of that which is beyond
darkness.
This is certainly not the first time that Whitehead has taken cover within a
genre novel to find a surprising freedom for an oblique social commentary. In The
Intuitionist (1999), his debut, the former MacArthur Fellow used the noir detective
genre to explore the nexus of race and social change via the prism of warring
schools of thought in the elevator inspection community (Intuitionists and
Empiricists). All of this was set in another undated, Gotham-like city. Now as
then, his humor, satire and clever knack for reigning in a seemingly disparate
accumulation of cultural references are presented front and center. This is the
same Whitehead, after all, that penned a New York Times Op-Ed in 2009, “The
Year of Living Postracially,” where he announced his tongue-in-cheek candidacy
for Obama’s secretary of post-racial affairs, satirizing the notion that centuries of
“institutionalized dehumanization” could so easily be cast away.
The particular levity of Zone One is undoubtedly related to these
meditations. The recovering New York City that we are introduced to is from all
signs not only post-apocalypse but also post-identity, and fully embracing of a
vacant and insignificant multiculturalism: Fort Wonton, for example, is the name
of a military staging area beyond the walls of Zone One that was once a Chinese
restaurant. Spitz is the everyman hero for this post-identity world. Before Buffalo
191
had been established as the headquarters of the reconstruction and Zone One
established in Manhattan, Spitz had already on his own accord survived the initial
zombie onslaught and the interregnum that followed. This uncommon feat is
attributed to him being a specimen of “unrivaled mediocrity” (322). One that “had
led a mediocre life exceptional only in the magnitude of its unexceptionality. Now
the world was mediocre, rendering him perfect” (183). His post-distinguishability
is set off by the fact that Mark Spitz is a nickname he had earned for his inability
to swim—the name borrowed from the swimmer who once won seven gold
medals for the United States in the 1972 Munich Olympics. But, as Whitehead
tells us, this is only “one of the subordinate ironies” in his naming (287). The
other, which is only confirmed toward the end of the novel, is that he is
phenotypically black and thus aligns with the stereotype that this racial group
cannot swim.
But it is a stereotype that has lost most of its resonance within the novel,
as Spitz himself needs to attempt to explain it to Gary of the Omega Unit. And if
one is to return to his introduction earlier in the novel armed with knowledge of
his racial background, we learn that while he may have found some objection to
his naming in a previous time, that time has passed: “They called him Mark Spitz
nowadays. He didn’t mind” (9). The fact that his racial identity is of no other
consequence to a narrative that features no other visible blackness confirms a
certain commitment on Whitehead’s behalf to the visualization of a post-racial
world.
192
This is all certainly very clever, but this is a zombie novel and there are
darker things afoot. In this final chapter, I will follow my initial reading with the
argument that Whitehead has attached himself to a significant strand of the
zombie genre that not only primarily trades in an anxiety born of the threat of
radical blackness, but that Whitehead, in his effort of post-apocalyptic speculative
fiction, has adjusted the genre to allow for a writing of this dissertation’s
speculated coming apparent horizon. To read this, I first must reread the roots of
the genre.

In their introduction to Generation Zombie: Essays on the Living Dead in
Modern Culture, editors Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz draw on Derrida’s idea
of metaphoricity’s relation to contamination to explain what they call the
“metaphorical transferability” of the figure of the zombie. The thematic diversity of
the texts presented in their edited collection testifies to the elasticity of this
transferability. However, as it concerns a disruption of the racial paradigm within
the United States, I contend that this is not merely one of a near-infinite amount
of applications of the undead metaphor. Rather, it is the genre’s founding
metaphor. In other words, though the figure of the zombie has successfully
contaminated a number of contexts, it was written both for and because of this.
Though often assumed as such, the zombie is not outside of the orbit of
the much larger science fiction genre. In the case of this dissertation, this is
important to note as Cuarón’s and Whitehead’s investments are implicitly and
explicitly being put in conversation. Boluk and Lenz point out that it is within
193
novels of the plague where the zombie, a mutation of contagion, finds its roots.
Plague literature and zombie literature are birthed of the same concern for a
modern society in peril, and both trade in the anxiety present at the nexus
between utopia and dystopia (8-9). There is of course Daniel Defoe’s A Journal
of the Plague Year (1722), but it is Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) that is of
particular importance here. In it, Shelley makes a firm connection to the concerns
of a fragile modernity that she had filtered through the story of Dr. Frankenstein
to extraordinary genre-founding effect.
For traces of this shared heritage in the contemporary moment, one could
turn to a film that will be later examined in this chapter for its role in founding
what is considered the modern zombie genre: George Romero’s Night of the
Living Dead (1968). The impending zombie incursion is prefigured at the start of
the film as Barbara (the female lead) and her brother make their way to visit the
grave of their father. They are met with radio distortion, the hint that something
technical might explain the coming biological distortion. Later in the film, when
the countryside is being overrun, we come to find out that it is probable that
NASA’s Venus probe, shot down by the government, is the cause of the radiation
that is the source of the mutation. Romero is also famous for openly admitting
that the film can be seen as an adaptation Richard Matheson’s last-man novel I
am Legend (1954).
The figure of the zombie does not reach its more legible adolescence until
the cinema of the 1930s. This sudden appearance has been widely read in the
scholarship as a response to the anxiety related to the United States occupation
194
of Haiti and growing interest in Haitian voodoo from firsthand ethnographic
accounts. Chief among these is William Seabrook’s The Magic Island (1927), the
sensationalistic work on Haitian rituals that contains a chapter on zombies. The
major films of this inaugural era—White Zombie (1932) and I Walked with a
Zombie (1943)—and serial radio broadcasts are all decidedly under its
influence.
1

White Zombie, which starred Bela Lugosi as Murder Legendre just after
his acclaimed role in Dracula, jumpstarted the image of the zombie in the
collective imagination of the United States. Framed as a horror-romance, the
movie tells the story of a Haitian plantation owner’s attempt to foil the budding
romance of a young couple that has come to the island on his invitation to be
married. Having designs on stealing the bride, the plantation owner relies on the
services of Legendre who is in possession of a potion that turns humans to
zombies. He had been previously using the potion to control a workforce of near
catatonic workers on the plantation. Gyllian Phillips’ scholarly work on the film is
interested in the character of Legendre and exploring his status as a creole
figure, arguing that he signals an ambiguity that unsettles white subjectivity.
Here, she is employing the notion of creole subjectivity that involves racial
mixing. For her, the conflation of the zombie and the creole give way to “the
notion of a sovereign independent body, white and self-owned, [being] invaded
by the colonized other, not only sexually and genetically, but also through the

1
For a treatment on these radio broadcasts see Chris Vials’ “The Origin of Zombie in American
Radio and Film: B-Horror, U.S. Empire, and the politics of Disavowal.”
195
body’s tissue and membranes” (30). This anxiety is captured in the film’s title,
which suggests that zombies, a figure theretofore imagined as black, can, in fact,
contaminate a version of whiteness. In her argument, the work of the film is to
eradicate this contagion and put a threatened white psyche at ease. To support
this she call attention to the films end where Legendre and the plantation owner
have been thrown off a cliff and the young couple reunited. From this
perspective, this first film of the genre can be read as managing the psychic
threat of racial mixture.
Although the film brings us to a twentieth-century Haitian plantation and
Phillips readily embraces the anxiety of a white subjectivity, she does
substantially connect her analysis to the deep anxieties that, especially in the
1930s, resonated from one of the Western Hemisphere’s largest narcissistic
wounds: the Haitian Revolution. In fact, in many ways this blindness in regard to
the zombie genre emerges, in part, from the burgeoning scholarly discourse’s
insistence on tying it so firmly to United States occupation of Haiti (1915-1934).
Many scholars who have worked to establish this particular link do note these
deeper anxieties but do not mobilize them as central aspects of their theoretical
explorations. Chris Vials, for example, astutely points out that Seabrook’s work
“reveals a psychological need to contain the subversive potential of this memory
by representing Haiti as the site of the world’s last and only docile slaves” (46).
But the stress of his intervention remains on the concurrent occupation of Haiti
with little reflection on the living legacy of that memory being played out by the
growing threat of global radical blackness being felt within the United States. A
196
response to this threat can be read, for just two examples, in the widespread
lynching in the southern states, or J. Edgar Hoover’s founding of what would
become the FBI to deal with, in part, the threat offered by Marcus Garvey and
other black radicals.
The United States occupation of Haiti, however, was centered primarily on
United States business interests, military strategy, and not ceding any
hemispheric dominance to potential threats (mainly Germany) (Renda). It was
not about the fear of a viable black republic that would threaten the United
States. This is not to diminish the great violence involved in securing United
States interests in the Caribbean, nor the vigor of the Haitian protests.
2
However,
given the relative geopolitical positioning of both nations, the stakes were not
nearly as high as they were at the turn of the previous century.
However, popular fascination with the idea of a nineteenth-century Haiti as
a once independent and potentially dominant black republic is active in the
United States when Seabrook and Hollywood flesh out the figure of the zombie.
Eugene O’Neill, for example, spoke of Haiti and its former president Tirésias
Simon Sam (1896-1902) as part of the inspiration for the setting and character
development of The Emperor Jones (1920) (O’Neill 57-58). Paul Robeson, while
he was still by many accounts considered the most beloved and famous African
American in the world, would star in a 1924 theatrical revival and again in its
1933 film adaptation. In 1936, just four years after Lugosi helped to put a face on

2
Mary Renda’s work on the subject estimates more than 11,000 Haitians as being killed during
the nineteen-year occupation (10). The media attention garnered by a 1929 protest turned
massacre was much more of a public relations nightmare that forced the Hoover Administration to
begin to review their approach to the occupation (Renda 221).
197
the zombie, a twenty-year old Orson Welles directed a Works Progress
Administration-sponsored all black cast in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Though the
text was unchanged, Welles shifted the setting from Scotland to Haiti during the
reign of Henri Christophe. By turning Shakespeare’s witches to voodoo
priestesses, the well-attended production came to be known as Voodoo Macbeth
(France 66).
3

In the same year as Welles’ production, William Faulkner’s Absalom,
Absalom! (1936) would provide a dynamic drawing of an independent Haiti’s
delicate placement within the United States’ psyche. As is commonly known,
Faulkner’s novel recounts the legend of Thomas Sutpen’s ascendance from
poverty to the fulfillment of his grand “design” as a southern patriarch and his
subsequent disintegration. Sutpen shows up, out of the ether, in Mississippi with
a band of “wild negroes” that would offer the gateway to his initial ascendance.
As the narrative continues, it is revealed through unstable secondhand
flashbacks that Haiti is the island where Sutpen comes face to face with his
primordial negroes and subdues them. Very little of this origin story has survived:
“Not how he did it. He didn’t tell that either, that of no moment to the story either;
he just put the musket down and had someone unbar the door and then bar it
behind him, and walked out into the darkness and subdued them…” (200).
However, as has now been discussed at length in the academic
scholarship, this confrontation is figured in an alternate history. It takes place in

3
Alejo Carpentier’s would ground his 1949 novel El reino de este mundo (Kingdom of This World)
in Haiti prior to and during Christophe’s reign.
198
1827, thirty years after the beginning of the Haitian revolution and twenty-three
years after Henri Christophe assumes the throne. In other words, when Faulkner
stages the Haitian incidents in the novel there is no historical possibility of French
planters with collections of black slaves. Hortense Spillers’ 1991 essay “Who
Cuts the Border?” breathed life into the anachronism by suggestion it as a
symptom of the South’s repression of its role in the slave trade. Richard Godden
further contributed to this debate in 1994 by suggesting
that [since] Faulkner wishes to foreground the continuous potential
for revolution within the institution of slavery, he needs Haiti, the
only successful black revolution. Given that he wishes to
characterize the plantocracy as a class who suppress revolution, he
requires that his ur-planter suppress the Haitian Revolution, and go
on doing so. (689)

Some scholars have suggested that there is no such anachronism as
Faulkner never names the negroes as slaves (only “wild negroes”), while others
maintain that it is an author’s error and nothing more (Ward 51n11, Godden 685).
This debate is ultimately immaterial for the purposes of my particular position that
holds true regardless of Faulkner’s intention: Haiti, as the site of what is
considered the first major successful slave revolt, is absolutely incompatible with
the notion of white supremacy in the Southern United States. To acknowledge
the historical fact of Haiti would be to acknowledge a tremendous psychic loss
and thus Faulkner has presented for the reader, consciously or unconsciously, a
subtle yet elaborate encryption. For Faulkner could have just as easily found his
“wild negroes” in some other part of the Southern United States, or elsewhere in
199
the hemisphere and ignore the impossibilities that Haiti represents. Instead,
needing the active fantasy to keep the reality at bay, he un-writes the history.
Whatever the motivation, by un-writing this most unimaginable radical
blackness, Faulkner has succeeded in writing the anxiety related to producing its
foreclosure—or telling the story of something that has to have no story.
So while I agree with the scholars that have traced the zombie genre’s
roots to the plague and the resulting anxiety of contamination, I argue that this
root is irrevocably intertwined with the particular anxiety presented by this
particular contamination—the possibility of being overrun by blackness—and the
psychic barring that this possibility demands.
And though Faulkner writes Absalom, Absalom! in the 1930s, he is by no
means the first to so centrally locate this absence and thus articulate its contours.
I am brought back to the Jesuit missionary Andrés Pérez de Ribas’ rewriting of
the treaty agreed to by the Spanish Crown and Yanga’s maroon community that
created the San Lorenzo de los Negros in 1609. The wild negroes of Pérez de
Ribas—drinking the blood of the whites—rival those imagined by Faulkner’s
Sutpen. And Pérez de Ribas’ secondhand ventriloquizing of the utterly black
(denegrido) Yanga is paired with an account that, like Faulkner’s, contradicts a
historical record and reformulates a psychically troubling narrative as one of
submission.
However, if one were to look to the United States, perhaps no narrative in
its literary canon has depended on and successfully sustained such an un-writing
of the irresolvable nature of this anxiety more than Herman Melville’s Benito
200
Cereno (1855)—the novel based on Captain Amasa Delano’s encounter with a
battered slave ship hugging the coast of Chile in 1805 carrying one mysterious
Captain Benito Cerreño.
4
As the now famous story goes, the slaves had staged a
mutiny and attempted to force Cerreño to carry them back to Africa. Delano
boards the ship to offer whatever assistance he can but remains unsuspecting of
the mutiny as everyone, under the command of the seemingly docile slave Babo,
performs the ruse that Cerreño is in control. Delano eventually comes to
understand Babo’s design and is able to help return the vessel to the United
States where Babo is tried, deported, and executed.
Melville’s novel spends most of its time on board Cereno’s ship and
follows the perspective of Delano as he pushes away unnamable “forebodings”
all the while trying to make sense of the “odd-looking blacks.” Delano’s
forebodings are evident from his first view of the ship. He sees its name, the San
Dominick, written “in stately capitals, once gilt … each letter streakingly corroded
with tricklings of copper-spike rust; while, like mourning weeds, dark festoons of
sea-grass slimily swept to and fro over the name, with every hearse-like roll of
the hull” (7).
The ship’s name, an invention of Melville, references the former French
colony Saint-Domingue that had just the year before been overthrown to form the
Republic of Haiti.
5
Written mention of this revolt is entirely absent in the novel.
However, there are echoes beyond those contained in the ship’s name. The

4
Melville would adapt the name’s spelling for his novel’s character (Cereno).
5
The original name for the ship was the Tryal (Grandin 2).
201
scholarship of Robert Wallace attempts to place the work of Melville in an active
conversation with that of Frederick Douglass. Douglass’ anti-slavery newspaper,
the North Star (1847-1851), would often publish material related to the Haitian
Revolution and Toussaint L’Ouverture (Grandin 197-98). In April of 1849 he
would give his famous “Slumbering Volcano” speech in Melville’s native New
York and later reprint it in the newspaper (Wallace 44-45). In his address,
Douglass would remark that “the slaveholders are sleeping on slumbering
volcanoes, if they did but know it” (Wallace 110-11; Grandin 198). It is a line that
Melville would seemingly appropriate six years later when describing the San
Dominick, well before Delano is aware of what it conceals, as “a slumbering
volcano” (Grandin 198; Wallace 110-11; Melville 39).
Delano, like Melville, is from the northeast (New England) and himself not
personally invested in the institution of slavery. His trade is that of a seal hunter.
Despite his more liberal geographic location, in the course of Melville’s narrative
maintains a near-complete blindness to the “what lies beneath” of Douglass’
metaphor. Melville articulates it as a blindness structured by his inability to
comprehend, even with, or perhaps because of, his more liberal perspective, how
“the shrewder race” could be so calculatingly deceived by a group of West
African slaves (Melville 50). To imagine this complex character, Melville did not
have to go far. As Greg Grandin notes in his recent study on the events that
Benito Cereno is drawn from:
Melville didn’t have to make Amasa’s kind of oblivion up. Denial was all
around him, in his friends and neighbors, people whom he respected.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom for a while Melville considered the darkest
and deepest ponderers of the human condition America had yet produced,
202
wrote with a naive nostalgia that the southern master and slave “dwelt
together in greater peace and affection … than had ever elsewhere
existed between the taskmaster and the serf.
6
(271)

Benito Cereno is a far cry from the psychic salve that is Spielberg’s Lincoln. This
difference is made more dramatic when one takes into account that the film is
staged only ten years writes Benito Cereno. In fact, Michael Vorenberg, in his
article on Lincoln, raises the point that when Spielberg wanted to properly turn
his attention to slave rebellion in Amistad, he painted the famous events with the
same brush used in Lincoln:
The story begins with horrific if justifiable acts of violence by black
men seeking freedom—a slave rebellion. The violence gets the
men only so far. To secure their freedom, they need white lawyers
to use peaceful methods applied along politically acceptable
channels…In Amistad, the abolitionists who gather outside the
rebels’ prison in New Haven are a sanctimonious, useless lot. Only
moderate men like Roger Baldwin and John Quincy Adams make a
difference. (“Spielberg’s Lincoln” 568-69)

Though both Lincoln and Benito Cereno register an institution of slavery in
its moment of decline, Melville’s narrative serves to activate a great anxiety in
relation to what lies beneath the fragile psyche of the United States at the time of
the accounts retelling. It is for this reason that I read it as a progenitor of the
zombie.
As with Faulkner, Melville’s intentions are of no consequence to my larger
argument. Whatever the reason, he is drawn to the invisible nature of this
palpable anxiety that has to not be understood. Ralph Ellison was himself so

6
Grandin is quoting from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Life of Franklin Pierce (1852), a memoir of
Hawthorne’s close friend General Franklin Pierce. Pierce would become the fourteenth President
of the United States a year later as a Democrat that opposed staunchly opposed abolition.
203
drawn to Melville’s exploration that he would introduce Invisible Man with Benito
Cereno’s last interrogation: “You are saved,” cried Captain Delano, more and
more astonished and pained; “you are saved: what has cast such a shadow upon
you?” At this point in the novel, almost all has been revealed. Babo is in chains
and will soon be returned to Lima, Peru, and hung, his body “burned to the
ashes… the head, that hive of subtlety, fixed on a pole in the Plaza” (119).
Delano in his questioning is encouraging Cereno to count these facts as blessing
and embrace his salvation. Cereno cannot. In three months he, too, will be dead,
seeming to implode from the troubles within. In his epigraph, Ellison does Melville
one better by further un-writing the unutterable, for what he omits is Cereno’s
response to the origin of the shadow: “the Negro”—or, rather, the now impossible
to ignore psychic threat of radical blackness (118).

As discussed above, Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead is
considered to be the founding of the modern day zombie, and largely viewed as
a complete departure from its Haitian-inspired predecessor.
7
Boluk and Lenz
elaborate on this and are by no means alone in their position that “Romero
severed the figure [of the zombie] from its Caribbean origin in Night of the Living
Dead … inject[ing] a new purpose into the figure by removing the witch doctor,
adding the violence of cannibalism, and relocating the menace to an explicitly
American cultural landscape” (4). Sean Moreland similarly calls for recognition of

7
A third, more recent iteration of the figure of the zombie is as epidemiologic threat where
infected humans take on zombie characteristics. See Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002).
204
the fact “that most cinematic zombies are not really derived from the voodoo
variant” (79). For these scholars “what is fundamental about the zombie is that it
has come to signify an internal threat, an enemy within our borders” (Moreland
10; my emphasis). While noting the obvious shifts in the zombie figure, more
“robotic than undead” as Boluk and Lenz succinctly contend (4), the figure has its
origins in the anxiety produced within the United States by Haiti’s radical slave
history. Melville helps to articulate a through line from this anxiety to Romero’s
genre-bending film Night of the Living Dead.
So not only does the absence of a more detailed conversation of Haiti limit
our contextual appreciation of a film like White Zombie where such a psychic
barring of radical blackness is obliquely presented, it forecloses the awareness
that Romero’s distinct form of the zombie has in fact unleashed the prior film’s
“subversive potential” and by no means moved away from it (Vials 46). While
Romero’s zombie has become a man-eater, it is mobilized as a critique of
anxieties rooted in the fear of a radical blackness. In other words, the critique of
the United States’ racial paradigm embedded in Romero’s first film is not
peripheral, owing to the figure of the zombie’s dexterous metaphoricity, but
central to its foundation. The zombie-related scholarship of Tyson Lewis is
particularly helpful to double this point and create a bridge from Romero to
Whitehead.
Lewis turns his attention to the films of George Romero (Night of the
Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985)), exploring
the connection between Giorgio Agamben’s notion of bare life and the figure of
205
the zombie. Lewis posits that the zombie dwells in this region of illegible life and
through a review of Romero’s films intends to “rehabilitat[e] the zombie as a
figure of a coming politics [that embodies] forms of resistance” (91). I am
particularly interested in his reading of Romero’s first film, Night of the Living
Dead, the simply constructed film that ultimately finds a small group of strangers
in an abandoned country home trying to work together as they uncover the
details of the sudden zombie incursion and develop a strategy to survive. In his
focus on bare life, Lewis fails to incorporate the ideas of race, and specifically
blackness, that have since connected themselves to Agamben’s work.
8
This is
despite the fact that Romero, I argue, is clearly making these connections
himself.
Describing the end of the film where the zombie threat has been
neutralized, Lewis writes that “what truly causes a sigh of relief [for the audience]
is not simply that ‘humans win’ the struggle against the ghouls but the binary
between life and death is once again reinstated” and we are no longer forced to
“gaz[e] upon the zombie as a bearer of bare life” (92-93). Lewis goes on to
explain the complexity of Romero’s work in a passage that is worth quoting in full:
The hero of the film, Ben, is in the end mistaken for a zombie, shot
dragged with meat hooks, and callously added to the burning pyre
of zombie cadavers. In this final scene, Ben’s sudden murder
indicates that all of us can become mere ‘corpses without death,’
that any of us can be killed without trial of murder, that all of us can
be rendered bare life by a sovereign decision. Thus the pyre of
cadavers offers a brief reinstatement of a dichotomy between life
and death and a source of new horror – no one’s death is safe. (93)

8
Frank Wilderson makes a similar critique of the work of Agamben’s work in Red, White & Black:
Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (35-36).
206

While Lewis has identified an aspect of the film’s central anxiety, he has
not fully understood it. His contention that “any of us can be killed without trial of
murder” misreads the deeper social point that the film makes: it is not any of us
that has been confused as this “bearer of bare life,” it is Ben, the film’s only black
body, and no one else. Citing the scholarship of Kim Paffenroth, Lewis does go
on to complicate his own reading by noting that the gang of community members
combing the fields for remaining zombies “cannot be dissociated from lynch
mobs, both of which engaged in ruthless killing above and beyond the law” (93).
However, his final reading of the film remains colorblind:
Thus Night of the Living Dead ends not with hope but with the
emergence of another truly terrifying nightmare that this time at the
hands of humans themselves. The death of Ben suggests that the
very attempt to cleanse the community of the remnant of bare life
that traversed its sacred boundaries results in an equally
destructive return of violence against the community itself. (93)

The deployment of the words “community” and “human” without an interrogation
of their foundations misses that the film is encouraging such an interrogation,
quite overtly as Paffenroth’s observation makes clear.
Filmed in 1967 and released in theatres in October of 1968, it is my
contention that the film is responding, in part, to the utopian march toward a
colorblind society that was described in Chapter Three. The film can be viewed
as a social experiment that presents the potential for a utopian community
contained in the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement.
207
After the zombies claim the life of Barbara’s brother and she is forced to
find shelter in an abandoned home, we come to find that there are other
occupants that have been hiding in the basement. When all are revealed, it is a
representation of the at-the-time imagined social make-up: Ben, a black man who
has been given the powers of a white man, as he is most in control; a young
couple who are liberally minded and reasonably aligned with Ben in all of his
suggestions; and Harry and Karen (and their sick daughter), an older couple
representing an older logic that is resistant to Ben throughout the film. Ben’s race
is not mentioned once, despite the fact that it is a clear undercurrent in the
contentious relationship between himself and Harry. The film gifts the audience
this utopian community only to quickly deconstruct it.
Lewis’ valuable insights seem to have accepted this ruse of a colorblind
community and thus are unable to identify the source of a new radical politics the
film itself seeks to uncover. Gaining critical strength from a reliance on queer
studies that seeks a “more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal,” Lewis
believes that the zombie is “space of exception where livingdeath becomes a
rebirth beyond birth” with the capacity to “shift the staging of politics beyond the
mute survival of bare life or the inclusive politics of liberal democracies and
outward toward a new, coming community” (94). However, his analysis, without
an interrogation of community, tends toward the very liberal inclusivity he is
attempting to work against. Though Lewis takes a queer approach in his reading
of Romero’s films, he is unable to avoid the orbit of “rebirth” (the coming
community) that Edelman helps to describe in Chapter Four.
208
However, this should not be read as a limitation of the genre. Romero has
demonstrated how, despite Frank Wilderson’s claim to the contrary, such a
popular film with an intentional social critique can “embrace ethical dilemmas
predicated on the destruction of civil society [without] mak[ing] a structural
adjustment, as it were, that embraces the ethical scaffolding of the
Settler/Master’s ensemble of questions concerning institutional integrity”
(Wilderson 26).
9
For Wilderson, this ethical scaffolding is most clearly
represented in the conflict-oriented (stasis-conflict-resolution) narrative strategy
deployed in most popular films. In my analysis above, we see how Romero
openly contradicts and thus unsettles such scaffolding by figuring the
irreconcilable. Whitehead has tapped into this critical potential and pointed it
toward contemporary neoliberal discourses on race and culture that occlude
radical blackness.

Zone One’s last section that tells the story of the day the Zone was
overrun. It is introduced by the following epigraph: “Move as a team, never move
alone: Welcome to the Terrordome.”
10
The quote is only credited extratextually
on the copyright page where the reader learns only that is from Public Enemy.
The lyric comes from “Welcome to the Terrordome,” one of the singles released
from their aggressively anti-establishment album Fear of a Black Planet (1990).

9
In this critique of Wilderson, I maintain the same criteria that he sets for the films he reviews: “at
the level of intentionality” they must attempt an engagement with an idea of radical blackness
(29).
10
Whitehead has similarly repurposed quotes from Walter Benjamin and Ezra Pound to open the
first and second sections respectively and this aligns with his take on the genre that constantly
mashes supposedly “high” and “low” cultural references.
209
This is the same album that contains the anthem “Fight the Power” that famously
introduced Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing (1989).
“Welcome to the Terrordome” contains strong opinions on the civil
disturbances that occurred in the summer of 1989 at Greekfest in Virginia Beach,
a Labor Day beach party attracting thousands of black youth and celebrities. The
festivities were centered around “The Dome,” a large Virginia Beach
entertainment facility. With crowds growing each year since its inception in 1986,
the city and its inhabitants had begun to express concern. In 1989, it all came to
a head with hundreds of arrests, claims of police brutality, and the destruction of
local businesses. In the song, Chuck D, the group’s outspoken lead MC, speaks
of not only what became known as the “Greekfest Riots” but also of the racially-
motivated shooting of Yusef Hawkings in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of
Brooklyn. He describes his lack of patience in waiting “for the state to decide the
fate” and warns of a coming “subordinate terror.” Public Enemy would film a
music video for another single from the album (“Brother’s Gonna Work it Out”)
that is a reenactment of the Greekfest incidents from the perspective of a black
community.
As has been argued here, the figure of zombie is born out of a fear of
black rebellion. But by separating this lyric from its context, Whitehead’s
deployment only activates a subtle antagonism. This strategy understands that
what lies beneath can no longer only be described as a slumbering volcano. By
presenting the Public Enemy lyric as he does the zombie—as something that has
passed a barrier but nonetheless cannot be assimilated into a full
210
understanding—he has presented an extratextual element that can itself be read
as a metaphor for what escapes from the developing apparent horizon between
radical blackness and becoming darkness. This element—what I read as the
anti-anti-utopian concept of radical darkness—joins others that have passed
through the barrier. In Whitehead’s speculative future, this accumulation has
reached a critical mass: the sea of the dead.
This sea of the dead is representative of a certain wasteland, a term that
is used throughout the novel.
11
Unlike Cuarón, who returns to Eliot’s conception
of this dystopian space to revise and ultimately irrigate it, Whitehead is not
interested in this version of futurity.
12
He instead sees the theoretical value in
embracing this dead zone as is:
It was not the dead that passed through the barrier but the
wasteland itself, the territory he had kept at bay since the
farmhouse. It embraced him; he slid inside it…the black tide had
rolled in everywhere, no place was spared this deluge, everyone
was drowning. Of course he was smiling. This is where he
belonged. (283)

11
“Wasteland” and other iterations (“Wastlanders” and “wastelanded”) are used 22 times in
Whitehead’s novel.
12
The genre of the undead provides an intrinsic critique of the politics of futurity that Cuarón’s
science fiction adjacent films ultimately align with. Whitehead has gone above and beyond this
boilerplate to provide elements within the narrative to further enunciate this critique. The
Tromanhauser Triplets, born during the tenuous attempt at reconstruction after the initial zombie
surge, are the symbols of that human hope. As Spitz reflects: “to pheenies these babies were
localized hope, and they needed the Triplets to pull through” (52). Pheenies are the true believers
in the project of reconstruction. Numerous characters throughout the novel are shown to be
irrationally interested in the health and well being of these symbols. Spitz is no pheenie and thus
suffers from no illusions of futurity. At one point, the zone that was the initial home of the Triplets,
is overrun. Spitz wonders, sardonically, “what was their sideline, besides the Triplets? Munitions?
Pills?” effectively categorizing the fever over the triplets as the business of the reconstruction
(239).
211
This embodiment has given Spitz what Whitehead calls “wastelanded” eyes
capable of viewing the nature of the barricade (305):
Mark Spitz saw it clearly: Kaitlyn’s implacable march through a
series of imaginative and considered birthday parties—here
parents were so thoughtful, here was a blessing bestowed from
one generation to the next—each birthday party transcending the
last and approaching a kind of birthday-party perfection that once
accomplished would usher in an exquisite new age of bourgeois
utopia. They strove, they plotted, they got the e-mail of that new
magician in town with his nouveau prestidigitations. Maybe, he
thought one night, it wasn’t utopia they worked toward after all,
and it was Kaitlyn herself that summoned the plague: as she cut
into the first slice of cake at her final, perfect birthday party,
history had come to an end. (58)

The plague is imagined in the above quote to be somehow “summoned” by our
collective utopian desire. There is an underlying banality here: birthday cakes
and magic shows. Kaitlyn is imagined here as one of the summoners. Her prior
inoffensive life—described at one point as “bioengineered in the birthing vats of a
sanctified midwestern principality, an upper-middle-class Kingdom of
Bruiselessness”—has nonetheless led to this fall (57). Or, rather, the horde of
similarly inoffensive lives has led to the fall. This connects to the for-his-time
relatively inoffensive and blinded Amasa Delano, and those that inspired his
characterization. Whitehead has provided a subtle critique on the nature of the
“dangerously disoriented human beings”—to borrow again from Baldwin—that
we have become.
It is the we that imagines events such as those at Greekfest in 1989 as
both an outrage and quite distant from our own realities. In what can be read as
an inconsequential aside articulating Spitz’s nostalgia when he comes upon a
212
seemingly untouched block of New York City, Whitehead gives a subordinate
and radically dark account of this psychic distance between humanity and the
unimaginable radical blackness beyond:
It was any city block on a normal day of that expired calendar, five
minutes before dawn, say, when most of the city was still sleeping it
off … Nothing had been boarded up, there were no firefight traces
or other signs of mayhem, and a finicky wind had kicked all the litter
around the corner. From time to time Mark Spitz happened on
these places in Zone One, where he strolled down a movie set,
earning scale as an extra in a piece about the dead world.
The swiftness of the evac, and the fact the island hadn’t
endured a major engagement— been firebombed like Oakland or
nuked like St. Augustine or whatever the hell happened in
Birmingham— meant that entire stretches of the city were pristine.
(79; my emphasis)

It is a portrait of New York, the center of civilization, as an isolated island that
was given the benefit of all available resources. Oakland, Birmingham and St.
Augustine are described as standing-apart, almost-unregistered sites of violence,
even in the violent apocalypse. When read through the nexus of state-sponsored
violence and radical blackness, the cities mentioned by no means form a random
list. If it had been Oakland, Birmingham and, say, Minneapolis, perhaps I might
have read on, assumed there to be no alternative resonances. But the addition of
St. Augustine, Florida, site a of a violent but more obscure race riot in 1964, calls
attention to the fact that Whitehead has summoned three critical sites to the
violent history of the black radical movement of the 1960s. It is the registration of
that which can no longer be registered. But the remnants nonetheless emerge.
But this emergence is something other than a symptom of repression. It is no
longer a haunting. It is a secretion. The indeterminate specificity of these
213
references creates a subtle disruption that allows for an understanding of the
barrier under consideration in my dissertation as governed by the dual psychic
processes of secreting and secreting.
Perhaps a similar awareness washes over Mark Spitz as he stands at the
conference room window watching his own solemn nigrescence. Solemn, of
course, bringing its own myriad interpretations: grave, sober, holy, grim, earnest,
dignified. Or perhaps his awareness, like Amasa Delano’s, has not been
conditioned by a vague understanding of the fact that what is beyond is within.
We cannot read this. All we do know is that at the end of the novel, Spitz,
Whitehead’s “last man,” is faced with the potential of finally being overrun.
Instead of resisting, he opens the door to where he had been hiding and simply
walks “into the sea of the dead” (322).
Whitehead, and for that matter the zombie genre, had long prepared the
reader for the fact that this is how it would end. Perhaps never more clearly than
in a flashback where the reader is briefly introduced to a character by the name
of Quiet Storm. She is part of a unit responsible for clearing cars off one of the
main highways that accesses New York City. Had things ended differently, this
would have made way for commerce as the nation was rebuilt. Those who work
with her are baffled by her insistence on arranging cars on the highway’s
shoulder in the oddest ways. But they let her persist, assuming it is just a quirky
manifestation of her PASD, or Post-Apocalyptic-Stress-Disorder. Later,
Whitehead’s narrative uses this instance to further explore ideas of information
214
loss that govern the apparent horizon between radical blackness and becoming
darkness that I have put forward in my dissertation:
[Spitz] told his unit how he’d discovered the clandestine heart of the
Quiet Storm’s maneuvers. He was aboard the chopper on his way
to the Zone … He finally saw it from above, what she had carved
into the interstate … The grammar lurked in the numbers and
colors, the meaning encoded in the spaces between the vehicular
syllables, half a mile, quarter mile. Five jeeps lined up south by
southwest on a north-south stretch of highway … Ten sport-utility
vehicles arranged one-eighth of a mile apart east-west were the
fins of an eel slipping through silty depths, or the fletching on an
arrow aimed at—what? Tomorrow? What readers? (288-90; my
emphasis)

What had Spitz discovered? In the banter of disinterested soldiers, Spitz,
Kaitlyn, and Gary discuss the nature of this indecipherability as they sweep the
storefront of a fortune-teller beyond the wall. Spitz contends that it is some
emblem of the future that “we don’t [yet] know how to read” but nevertheless
need to “pay witness” to; he thinks to himself that perhaps it is a warning. Kaitlyn
offers that it may be an invitation, while Gary, clearly not impressed by such
musings, claims to have known a man in one of the camps that “wrote Bible
verses in his own shit” (290). With this, the conversation is dropped. What
remains is left indecipherable—a subtle anxiety that only recalls the absence of a
grammar.
215
CONCLUSION – OR BEYOND A COUNTING

I began to approach what would become my dissertation after the
observation, in a great variety of contexts, of an apparent vanished idea of
blackness within Mexico’s imagination of itself. These observations registered to
me as a more embryonic yet nevertheless collective casting aside of those ideas
of blackness that most threaten the United States’ imagination of itself as it
currently marches toward a teleological cusp of racial egalitarianism.
The theoretical foundations of my dissertation then grew out of a dialogue
with discourses that intersect with ideas of race and blackness in the Mexican
context. More and more I found myself engaged with discourses that ground
themselves in a faith in processes of recording and retrieval, be they
characterized as anthropological, ethnographic, archeological, historical, or some
combination thereof. It is this faith in recuperation—or, as Erin Graff Zivin has
characterized it, an “inability to call reading reading” (201)—that this dissertation
works to undermine by ultimately arriving to the domain of science fiction in an
effort to demonstrate the value of a practice of reading and writing that honors a
more self-consciously unstable starting point in the articulation of ideas of
blackness, and their futures pasts, across the Americas.

216
A brief turn to the ongoing census projects of both the United States and
Mexico underscores the urgent need of such a practice. Both projects, while
certainly embracing imperfection, nonetheless point themselves toward a full
accounting and appear unaware of the science-fictional nature of the documents
they produce. In the year 2020, for example, there will be no more Negroes in the
United States, while across the border, in that same year, negros will perhaps
reappear on the national register for the first time in centuries.
In the case of the United States, the racial descriptor “Negro” remained on
the 2000 and 2010 censuses. This was due in large part to the fact that in the
late 1990s the Census Bureau conducted research that showed over 56,000
people self-identifying as “Negro” when given the option to input “some other
race” (Holpuch). As former Census Bureau director Robert Groves maintained in
a defense of the decision, “full inclusiveness was the goal” (Fama). It was thus,
ironically, neoliberalism’s mantra of inclusion, and a correlative anxiety born out
of the desire for full awareness, that maintained the antiquated descriptor for fear
that older generations not yet accustomed to identifying as black or African-
American would go uncounted. Self-identifying “Negroes” would drop to 36,000 in
2010 (Holpuch). This drop, alongside the poor optics of a growing tide of news
outlets lambasting the continued use of the “Negro” descriptor, led the Census
Bureau to conduct more research and to make the decision to hereafter banish
“Negroes” from the official record of the United States (Holpuch; Fama).
The United States Census Bureau’s public reversal seems designed to
signal both a progressive evolution and an attempt to restore any faith lost in the
217
science of its counting. However, this incredible instability is, of course, not
limited to the “Negro.” Take another aspect of the 2010 accounting of the “Black
or African American” population in the United States. Imagine, for example, that
when presented with the choice to identify your race, you were uncomfortable
with checking the “Black, African Am., or Negro” box because of your Nigerian
ancestry. You could have decided to self-identify in the write-in space allotted for
“Some other race.” Given that Asians are required to identify themselves racially
by national origin (Chinese, Korean, Filipino, etc.), it might not at all feel strange
for you to self-identify as Nigerian.
1
Though no indication of how self-identified
responses will be read is provided on the form itself, this response in 2010 would
have nonetheless been counted as “Black or African American” because, as is
made clear in the Census Briefs released in the year following the 2010 Census,
“Sub-Saharan African entries are classified as Black or African American” (“The
Black Population: 2010” 2). That is, as one might or might not expect, “with the
exception of [those identifying as] Sudanese and Cape Verdean” who were
counted as separate “because of their complex, historical heritage” (2). And if
you self-identified by way of a North African nation, you, perhaps unknowingly,
identified yourself as “White” regardless of your reasoning for not checking the
“White” box in the first place. All of this, naturally, is dictated by the standards of
the United States Office of Management and Budget (“The Black Population:
2010” 2).

1
The United States Census Bureau is considering allowing citizens to racially identify themselves
as Hispanics for the first time in 2020 by combining the race and origin questions. In previous
censuses, Hispanics were asked to specify their nation of origin and seperatley select a race
(Krogstad and Cohn).
218
As was stated in this dissertation’s introduction: it is a complicated
universe to be lived in.
In the case of Mexico, a portion of the population had an opportunity to
become negro in the eyes of the federal apparatus for the first time in the nation’s
history just this past March in “La Encuesta Intercensal” (“The Intercensal
Survey”). Members of six million households were asked if “de acuerdo con su
cultura, historia y tradiciones, ¿se considera negra(o), es decir, afromexicana(o)
o afrodescendiente?” (according to your culture, history and traditions, do you
consider yourself black, Afro-Mexican, or Afro-descendant?) (5). The
respondents were given four options: (1) yes; (2) yes, partially; (3) no; (4) I don’t
know. The results from this question will determine whether or not the greater
Mexican citizenry (more than 30 million households) will have a similar
opportunity to respond in 2020.
Addressing the potential of this unprecedented acknowledgement in a
New York Times article, Ricardo Bucio Mújica, president of Mexico’s Consejo
Nacional para Prevenir la Discriminación (National Council to Prevent
Discrimination), reminds readers of the importance of counting to any neoliberal
project of inclusion: “If it is not known how many there are, their conditions, there
can’t be an agreement on the part of the government for their inclusion at large”
(Archibold).
The pressure for the Mexican government to take steps toward such an
accounting has come largely from the international community and nations in
Latin America with more aggressive policies in regard to reparations for their
219
Afro-descendant populations (Brazil, Peru, and Colombia are the most prominent
examples). In attempt to unify this charge, the United Nations High
Commissioner for Human Rights declared 2011 the Year for People of African
Descent and strongly encouraged UN member nations to participate in the effort
to “fight against racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance
that affect people of African descent everywhere” (“Info Note” 1).
2
It is only after
this prodding that the Mexican government, under the direction of the
aforementioned Bucio Mújica, produced its “Guía para la acción pública contra la
discriminación y para la promoción de igualdad e inclusión de la población
afrodescendiente en México” (Guide for Public Action Against the Discrimination
and for the Promotion of Equality and Inclusion of the Afro-descendant
Population in Mexico) in 2011.
3

A principal objective of the GAP, as it is abbreviated within the document,
was to change the national census to be inclusive of Afro-descendants in Mexico
in order to diagnose the scope of the problems related to their invisibility (62).
Leading academics were consulted throughout the development of the
document, with María Elisa Velázquez being recognized as one of three principal
authors. The GAP also works to highlight organizations within Mexico and abroad

2
The UN’s Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent initially imagined this
intitiative in 2001. (“Info Note” 2).
3
It was just two years before that the Mexican government, in conjunction with a common
sponsoring government agency (Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes), produced the
book project Viaje por la historia de México to celebrate Mexico’s then coming bicentennial. As
was discussed in Chapter Three, this book, designed to give both children and adults an
understanding of Mexico’s rich history, failed to appropriately present Mexico’s Adro-descedant
population.
220
that are working in various capacities to support the nations Afro-descendant
populations (86-87). Its self-described goals are as follows:
1) Ofrecer información sobre la importancia de las poblaciones
afrodescendientes en el pasado y presente de nuestro país y
datos para entender por qué no han sido reconocidas
oficialmente en México. (To offer information about the
importance of Afro-descendant populations in the past and
present of our nation and information in order to understand why
these populations have not been officially recognized in
Mexico.)

2) Presentar los principales ámbitos en que las poblaciones
afrodescendientes han sido invisibilizadas, las acciones y
actividades que se han hecho para resarcir esta situación y las
recomendaciones para la realización de políticas públicas. (To
present the principal areas in which Afro-descendant
populations have been made invisible, the actions and activities
that have been made in order to repair this situation, and
recommendations for the enactment of public policies.)

3) Proponer acciones encaminadas a restituir el derecho a la
identidad de las personas afrodescendientes, invisibilizadas por
la historia oficial, por acciones y omisiones, así como
estrategias para promover el respeto, protección y garantía de
sus derechos. (To propose actions aimed at restoring the right
to identity of Afro-descendants who have been made invisible
by the official history, by actions or omissions, as well as
strategies to promote the respect, protection and guarantee of
their rights.)

4) Proponer estrategias y acciones para el reconocimiento e
inclusión de las personas afrodescendientes en los distintos
ámbitos de la vida pública y de sus derechos económicos,
sociales, culturales, civiles y políticos. (To propose strategies
and actions for the acknowledgment and inclusion of Afro-
descendants in the distinct areas of public life and of their
economic, social, cultural, and civil and political rights.) (15-16)

In each of these four pillars of the GAP’s mission, the traces of what my
work in this dissertation is pushing against are evident. Words pointing to
processes of recognition (reconocidas/reconocimiento), restitution (restiuir), and
221
reparation (resarcir) all suggest a faith in the ability to return to a prior state, a
state where things are known and an accounting for the whole of Mexican culture
is possible. Bucio Mújica offers a brief introduction to the GAP that mirrors this
faith in the ability to “emprender esfuerzos que reviertan acciones y omisiones
que se han infligido en contra de las personas afrodescendientes durante toda
su historia” (undertake efforts that reverse actions and omissions that have been
inflicted against Afro-descendants throughout their history) (9). Later in the
document, the proposed work is framed as a project of spreading awareness
(sensibilización social) in which it is possible “recuperar la historia” (“to
recuperate the history”) of a people that have been rendered invisible (61).
Given the faith in the possibility of reproduction, it is of no surprise that
ethnographic-oriented academic forums and photographic expositions are the
privileged tools of the action plan to enact such a reversion (9, 54, 40-43). At one
point, the text nevertheless acknowledges the failure of these methods to have
the “repercusión necesaria para la valoración social de las culturas de origen
africano en México” (the necessary impact on the social valorization of the
cultures of African origin in Mexico) (43). However, rather than call for an
investigation of the methods themselves and their attendant reproductive
blindnesses (their gaps), the GAP expresses the need for more full governmental
support of the same methods in order to achieve more comprehensive analyses
that will lead to a more permanent recognition (43).
It is a strategy that suggests an incapacity, or refusal, to understand the
pull of what in this dissertation I have articulated as the national psychological
222
apparatus’ intrapsychic gap that has enacted Mexico’s vanishing of blackness
across generations. And, as has been argued for in the previous chapters,
without a meditation on the unthought nature of certain ideas of blackness, one
cannot trace how the effects of this vanishing emanate within and throughout the
entirety of the present moment.
Complicating the occlusion of this unstable yet productive awareness is
the fact that the focus of the entire document is to address present-day Afro-
descendant persons and communities in Mexico. It is a focus on ideas of
blackness that are only embodied and thus more easily presented as set apart.
No attention is paid to the idea that racial mixture has spread ideas of blackness
beyond the confines of the marginal peoples and communities whose rescue is
being attempted. With this limited perspective, the GAP is able to understand
itself as benevolently calling for a redoubled effort to identify this distinct
community so that the powers that be—implicitly unmixed with the afro-
descendant population—may diagnose and more fully redress centuries of
vanishing. If one is for a moment able to shed the cynicism that an encounter
with the Mexican state apparatus deserves, one could argue that it is an
appropriate first step in the recognition of a long forgotten community. And,
certainly, depending on the amount and integration of these investments, one
could imagine the achievement of some identifiable positive results. This is
especially the case given the amount of grassroots organizations potentially
connected to such investments.
However, when read through the prism of this dissertation, it is clear that
223
the results will be severely limited and limiting, as the Mexican collective psyche
is simply in the process of inventing a new becoming darkness. However
progressive this may appear, it is an idea of blackness that can only be
registered if it identifies itself without laying claim to the radical possibility that
trapped within the benevolent gesture between “us” and “them,” the GAP, is a
failure of cognition that has always remained, however vanished, within and not
apart from the collective psyche of the nation. Without an attempted engagement
with this vanishing force itself, the intrapsychic gap, that which structures how
one reads without itself being read will remain beyond awareness. The fact that
such a process escapes awareness in the GAP, a project that so directly
trumpets awareness, only further reifies what I have identified as the apparent
horizon between ideas of becoming darkness and those that must remain
unthought.
While select ideas of blackness are slowly being made material in the
collective Mexican psyche, the opposite appears to be the case in the United
States. However, radical ideas of blackness, that psychic matter that lies beyond
a counting, are suffering similar fates in both nations. Though we in the United
States have yet to accumulate the generations of such information lost to the
unthought, my work has proposed that we are rapidly moving in this direction.
For this reason, Mexico has and continues to provide an active example that can
inform the critical practice of reading and writing that this dissertation has begun
to articulate. It is a practice with the principal purpose of mobilizing anxiety by
seeking to point to the contours of this ongoing recession that finds ideas of
224
radical blackness accelerating toward the unthought region developing within the
collective psyche of the Untied States.
225
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Asset Metadata

Creator Wilson, Ricardo Alfonso, II (author)

Core Title Becoming darkness: Mexico, the United States and the psychic vanishing of radical blackness

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Publication Date 07/15/2020

Defense Date 03/23/2015

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Abraham and Torok,Afro-Mexican studies,Black studies,Comparative Literature,Latin American studies,OAI-PMH Harvest,post-racial,psychoanalysis,radical blackness,social death,zombies

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Díaz, Roberto Ignacio (committee chair), Graff Zivin, Erin (committee member), Rowe, John Carlos (committee member)

Creator Email rawilson@usc.edu,ricardoawilson@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-595404

Unique identifier UC11301286

Identifier etd-WilsonRica-3605.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-595404 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-WilsonRica-3605.pdf

Dmrecord 595404

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Wilson, Ricardo Alfonso, II

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA