GUHP Newsletter SPECIAL EDITION

Vol II issue 3, July 7, 2019

Dispatches from San Juan

Contents:

Carl Nightingale, Introduction

Andra Chastain on “Modernizing Latin American Cities”

Claire Payton on “Challenging Caribbean Urban Design”

John Mwangi, “Reflections on the Joint Conference”

Robert Cowherd on“Decolonizing Architectural History”

Mariana Dantas, “Reflections”

1) Introduction

Carl Nightingale, Coordinator, the Global Urban History Project

Last week, on June 27-29, numerous GUHP members made the trip to San Juan, Puerto Rico for the first of the two events in our “Global Urban History Summer:” the 28th annual conference of the World History Association. The WHA invited GUHP to co-organize this event and to help to curate the theme “Cities in Global Contexts.”

A few of the attendees have generously offered short reflections on events at the conference.

As many of us prepare to meet at the second event of the Summer--“The Pursuit of Global Urban History” at the Centre for Urban History in Leicester UK, I thought these reflections would allow us to establish some ties between the two events.

First a few introductory thoughts: This conference was a terrific opportunity for Global Urban Historians. WHA President Merry Wiesner-Hanks, who began her career as a historian of women’s lives in early-modern German cities, was an enthusiastic and generous collaborator throughout. She WHA Executive Director Kerry Vieira organized all of the conference logistics, including switching the organization’s contract with a hotel disabled by Hurricane Maria to another, the Caribe Hilton, which was only slated to re-open three weeks prior to the event.

At the conference itself, Professor Wiesner-Hanks showcased GUHP at every turn, from the opening plenary to the final reception. At the plenary, I welcomed the conference delegates on behalf of GUHP; GUH blog editor Michael Goebel introduced a panel that included GUHP –cofounder Mariana Dantas, and member Zaire Dinzey-Flores as well as Jorge Giovanetti of the University of Puerto Rico. Our allies in the Global Architecture History Teaching Collaborative also presented a panel on their work (see the summary by Prof. Robert Cowherd below). Finally, WHA helped GUHP support three younger scholars to come to San Juan under the auspices of the Travel Award program: John Mwangi from St. Paul’s University in Kenya, Claire Antone Payton from the University of Virginia, and Darryl Brock from the City University of New York. John and Claire provided us with reflections for this newsletter.

Needless to say, GUHP owes Prof Wiesner- Hanks and Ms. Vieira, as well as the entire Board of the WHA a profuse expression of gratitude!

Substantively, the conference embodied several of GUHP’s main missions. It brought urban historians together with world and global historians as well as “Big” historians and global architectural historians. It highlighted urban history as a crucial component of global history and clarified the importance to world historians of insights specific to urban history. There were 23 panels at the conference whose titles explicitly referred to urban topics, which included 68 individual presentations. Professor Wiesner-Hanks and I explicitly avoided calling these panels “GUHP” panels to avoid a situation where a co-organized conference became two parallel conferences, and from the audiences I saw, I think this worked reasonably well. In short, the conference offered an eight-course meal with many options for great dishes at each course. It is not the first time that, viewing such a menu, I wished I could divide myself into several people at once!

On top of that, there were a few panels where urban presentations were scheduled alongside others without a specific urban theme. Michael Goebel organized a verv interesting roundtable on the intersections of migration history and global urban history. It involved a conversation between Michael and four historians of migration whose primary source bases are in specific cities—Havana, Manila, and Alexandria—but who do not explicitly consider themselves urban historians. This allowed for a discussion about the importance of space to migrant communities and identities.

In one of the roundtables not intended explicitly as an urban panel, “The Why of the Big and the Small” Marnie Hughes-Warrington of the Australian National University interviewed Macquarie University’s David Christian, of “big history” fame, and Merry Wiesner-Hanks about the experience of “scaling up” their work. Professor Wiesner-Hanks mentioned that her own experience of upscaling started when she revised her dissertation, a close study of women’s lives in Nurnberg, to include sources in a half dozen other German cities, engaging in a form of large-scale urban history avant la letter.  

Another GUHP goal is to foreground urban histories from outside Europe and North America. While the location of the conference highlighted Latin American and Caribbean urban history (see contributions by Mariana Dantas, Andra Chastain, and Claire Payton below), papers on cities from every continent were represented, and many of the panels presented thematic questions using examples from three or four different regions of the world. The conference drew GUHP members from Taiwan, Kenya, Latin America, and the Caribbean as well as Europe and North America.

World history conferences tend to attract scholars working in a longer range of time periods than urban history ones; while only a single panel addressed medieval cities, there were a half dozen that touched on early modern topics. Mariana Dantas took the lead in organizing some fo these panels. In her keynote remarks, she also beautifully laid out her path toward her role in co-founding GUHP:

“I came to the field of global urban history through a project [another GUHP co-founder and Professor at St Andrew’s University]  Emma Hart and I led, which sought to build a research network dedicated to exploring the early modern city as an entry point to studying globalizing processes. … We both anchored our analysis in urban environments; Charleston, in her case, and a comparison between Baltimore and Sabará, a mining town in colonial Brazil, in mine.

“Through that work we came to realize that the actions of artisans, merchants, and enslaved peoples we had uncovered were not merely a function of urban environments. They developed in dialogue with the historical trajectories of the cities we were observing, shaping urban settings as much as they were being informed by urban realities. Additionally, we realized that our findings had implications for the history of people, of exchanges, and of phenomena in other city, and other regions. We were noting dynamics and practices that revealed more broadly how people's interactions with the urban environment shaped a historical moment of global empires, with their emerging capitalist practices and culture of race and racism. …

“In the history of slavery and enslaved peoples, understanding this back and forth that played out in cities offers a valuable window into the ways Africans and their descendants shaped this increasingly globally connected world. The study of urban slavery, through a global urban history perspective, can advance our efforts to place African and their descendants at the center of our analyses of developments in world history. …

…the division of labor anchored on the enslavement of Africans … supported the rise of a white transatlantic elite while depreciating and socially stigmatizing the work African and African-descendants did. Urban dynamics furthered that process. Slaves' desire for freedom and economic autonomy led them to create economic niches within Atlantic cities. But even as their activities aided their survival and ability to secure manumission—and supported urban economies!—they were deemed informal, unskilled, marginal, and thus persistently persecuted and undervalued. These economic initiatives by slaves and free blacks in urban settings enabled early modern Atlantic cities to accommodate (for better or worse) growing populations living at the margins of core urban and capitalist pursuits. They foreshadow, moreover, the complex issue of informality in our contemporary cities. …

Professor Dantas closed “with two calls to action. First, let’s continue to produce comparative histories. Comparisons, I still believe, help us avoid narratives of exceptionalism, or conceptualizations that try to predict rather than explain human actions. For urban historians, they can help reveal cities's concomitant, sometimes coordinated centrality to global processes and practices. … but because comparisons sometimes require dealing with multiple regional contexts, languages, archives, and bodies of scholarship they can be daunting for a single scholar. An important part of future global urban history efforts, therefore, will be continued collaboration between researchers and fields, much like the collaborations the Global Urban History Blog and Global Urban History Project have supported.”

To close my own introductory reflections, I offer the following excerpt from my welcoming remarks at the plenary session. I will have more to say in print about these matters soon. For now, I think they have relevance for the discussions in Leicester and beyond.

“One of the things I learned from Merry [Wiesner-Hanks] in the course of this collaboration is that she has developed a list of ten rules for World History. The seventh of these rules is that “cities are where new things happen, which makes young people move there and older people suspicious of what goes on there.” That sentiment fits well with GUHP’s far less funny central idea that “cities are the creations and creators of larger scale phenomena.”

“As we plunge into discussions of individual scholars’ projects, I hope we can address some of the bigger questions that arise where urban and world history intersect: Just how important are cities to world history? Cities are often seen as co-chronological with human history--the pre-urban age thus was also prehistorical. Do we want to rest with that sentiment? Have cities’ role in history always been important? What caused their roles to increase or even decrease in importance relative to other forms of human habitat? What about other spaces that humans inhabit? Can the particular shape of human built spaces be considered a causal force in world history?  Do we use cities as tools to amplify the geographic reach and the longue durée of otherwise contingent, smaller-scale historical phenomena that they are also known for? Can cities’ role as spaces of synergy be said to therefore explain historical processes and continuities?”

2) Roundtable: Modernizing Latin American Cities: Local Spaces, Global Processes

Andra Chastain, Washington State University Vancouver

The aim of this roundtable was to spark a conversation about the challenges and possibilities of writing, researching, and teaching at the intersection of modern Latin American urban history and world, global, or transnational history. The organizers, Andra Chastain of Washington State University Vancouver and Adrián Lerner Patrón of Yale University, invited the panelists to reflect on several questions:

How does Latin American urban history intersect with world or global history, with particular attention to notions and practices of modernization and development at different scales?

What strategies have you found most effective for researching the connections between urban history and world or global history? For example, what sources or archives do you use? To what extent do you incorporate a transnational or comparative framework? What strategies have you found most effective for narrating the connections between urban history and world or global history? How do you attend to different scales of analysis? How do you recover marginalized voices and critically interrogate sources written by planners and government officials?

In answering these questions, the panelists drew on their research in Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Peru, and the United States. In addition to Chastain and Lerner Patrón, participants included Anna Rose Alexander of California State University, East Bay, and Marcio Siwi of Bowdoin College. Their comments ranged from a discussion of an urban transit system in Santiago de Chile and U.S.-Brazilian connections in designing New York City, to Amazonian urbanization in Peru and Brazil and urban fires and other disasters in Mexico and California. (Unfortunately, due to circumstances beyond their control, Constanza Castro of the Universidad de los Andes, Colombia, and David Yee of Stony Brook University were unable to join us.)

Chastain, whose research examines French-Chilean collaboration in building the Santiago metro system under democracy and dictatorship in Chile, discussed the challenges of drawing out the broader significance of the project beyond historians. From one angle, the Santiago metro is a dramatic success story with lessons for policy makers in other cities, as it has expanded rapidly in recent years and is financially solvent. Yet from another angle, the metro’s success was built on a history of authoritarianism during the military regime of Augusto Pinochet and, more recently, has been built on the erosion of labor rights. 

Lerner Patrón, who compares urbanization processes in Iquitos, Peru, and Manaus, Brazil, emphasized the value of comparative frameworks for understanding regional and global trends in urban growth in the Amazon, as well as the particularities that set these cities apart. Contrary to popular notions, the Amazon is not an undifferentiated wilderness; rather, it is a culturally diverse, ecologically varied, and highly urbanized region that, in Lerner’s view, needs to be understood from an urban perspective.

Alexander discussed how personal experiences can be harnessed to archival research to show how the past informs the present. In her case, she studies the history of fire in Mexico, from the late nineteenth century in her first book, City on Fire: Technology, Social Change, and the Hazards of Progress in Mexico City, 1860–1910 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), to the late twentieth century in her current research on the 1984 Pemex gas explosion that killed hundreds of Mexico City residents. Local adaptations to modernization, as she aptly observed, include shantytowns in Latin America as well as homeless encampments in the United States. Terror and trauma follow disasters, whether in Puerto Rico with Hurricane Maria, the 2018 fires in Northern California, or the historical disasters studied in the archive. 

Lastly, Siwi discussed the bidirectional flows of influence between São Paulo and New York City in the mid-twentieth century by examining an effort to remake Sixth Avenue into the Avenue of the Americas. In the 1930s and 1940s, in the context of the Good Neighbor policy and Panamericanism, New York City’s businessmen saw an opportunity to bring prestige to Sixth Avenue by recasting it as the cosmopolitan capital of the Americas. This was an elite vision, brokered by Robert Moses, who had earlier worked in São Paulo and wanted to ensure that New York City remained ahead of its southern rival.

In sum, the panelists argued that comparative, transnational, and global approaches to Latin American urban history can offer compelling frameworks for research, writing, and teaching. They allow us to trace influences in multiple directions (not just from north to south), examine differences and similarities across national borders, and perceive global patterns in local processes of urbanization and modernization. While urban history illuminates the texture of local spaces and communities and sheds light on the specificity of a particular city, it is only by connecting these individual histories to broader regional or global processes that we can make sense of critical urban phenomena—from urban renewal, informal urbanization, and urban disasters, to the environmental hazards of rapid urban growth. The panel ended with a renewed call to draw out the relevance of our research for the broader public, including students, local communities, and scholars beyond history.

3) “Challenging Caribbean Urban Design”

Reflection by Claire Payton, University of Virginia

The dual theme of this year's WHA-GUHP conference was "Cities in Global Context and the Caribbean as Crossroads." Few conversations intertwined these two ideas as seamlessly as "Challenging Caribbean Urban Design and its Logics," a pair of panels chaired by Professor Zaire Dinzy-Flores of Rutgers University. Presenters offered unique perspectives from multiple disciplines, including history, cultural studies, sociology, and architecture. Together they exemplified a critical and necessary dialogue about the role of cities and the built environment in Caribbean life.

Caribbean Studies often focuses on rural culture, economies, and traditions. This reflects centrality of both colonial era plantation slavery and the formation of post-emancipation agricultural peasantries. But the twentieth century brought enormous demographic and economic transformation to the region, transformations that have shifted the nexus of economic, cultural, and social life from rural towards urban areas. The future of the Caribbean lies increasingly in its cities and towns. “Challenging Caribbean Urban Design and its Logics” showcased new scholarship that is reckoning epistemologically with this critical juncture.

Across the presentations there was a shared concern with housing and the built environment as key sites for making claims about the nature of the Caribbean family and household. Yara Colon Rodriguez showed how disaster recovery in Puerto Rico in 1899 and 1918 became opportunities for the state to assert colonial ideas about privacy, sanitation, and social relations as a way of imposing modernization ideals on the poor Puerto Rico family.  Ryan Hamilton's paper revealed that, in the 1970s, the Dominican state demolished and rebuilt Samana, dismantling an independent, multicultural, multilingual community to make room for one that was more in line with the government’s ideal of a white hispanophone, and Catholic citizenry. Omayra Rivera Crespo explored about social meaning of the porch or balcony to comment on how Puerto Ricans make and inhabit public and private spaces--and by extension, their social lives and communities.

Situated at the crossroads of ocean currents, the Caribbean is defined by incessant movement. This came across in the panels through a preoccupation with mobility and the circulation of people and ideas. Johanna Londaño traced the origins of the concept of barrios from Moorish Spain to the first U.S. census takers in Puerto Rico, exploring the different socioeconomic contours of the communities the term referred to in different contexts. Jose L. Morales Rosado examined how housing projects in Puerto Rico in the twentieth century communicated Cold War ideas about modernization, technology, and development between U.S. and wider Latin America. Mario Mercado Diaz tracked the migrations of middle class Puerto Ricans to Houston, Texas, focusing on how the design and aesthetics of their homes bridged both their Puerto Rican identity and their aspirations for bourgeois wealth and privilege in the United States.

The question of precarity and ruin permeated the presentations and conversations. Panelists addressed the strategies and setbacks men and women faced as the built their homes and communities in a world brought into being by European colonialism and slavery, and continually beset by natural disaster, financial decay, and predatory ambitions of the United States. Presenters shared histories of families losing their homes from natural disaster or by state design; people building Caribbean households on other shores; communities rendered invisible because imperial authorities didn’t recognize the terms those communities gave to themselves. By bringing these themes into the foreground, the panelists expressed some of the fundamental characteristics of the Caribbean urban experience.

4) Reflections

John Mwangi, St. Paul’s University, Limuru, Kenya

The joint conference of the World History Association and the Global Urban History Project (GUHP) 2019 was intellectually enriching in multiple ways.  It offered an opportunity to find points of scholarly engagements between the themes of world history and urban history. In particular as per the goal of the GUHP project- the study of world cities offers the connection between the urban and the global and which is an exciting intellectual enterprise. 

I would like to highlight a few of my experiences at the conference. One is to appreciate the early career workshop on history. As an early career scholar, I picked several points of reflections for my own career and for mentorship in coming days. The workshop enabled me to situate the kind of transferable skills that PhD graduates should possess and how more importantly they would navigate the academic environment. A highlight for me was a mapping exercise that we did to situate the things we enjoy more and less, but also the kind of specific skill sets that one should possess as a PhD graduate.

From the keynote and the panel sessions, I learned lot about world history and the value of inter-disciplinarity beyond my primary field of international relations. I have also picked themes/ideas in urban history that will form part of my ongoing and future research interests. It has been a worthwhile experience to attend a conference themed on world history but also to find connections across global cities.

As an early career scholar interested in research themes such as identity politics, I will re-examine the place of the archives in its multiple forms as way to broaden research angles and interests in urban history. I am further persuaded to explore the value of urban spaces and how they offer lived experiences of communities in distinct ways. Here I have in mind instances of ‘graffiti’, music, films and the kind of everyday insights they offer to urban studies generally.  This conference further triggered in me the value of art-based methodologies in investigating urbanity themes. This would be in reference to use of digital methods such as photography, film making and so on to study urban questions.

Regarding my own presentation, I was on a panel titled: The Shifting Forms of the Colonial Paradigm. My own paper was entitled “The Legacies of Colonial Agency in Africa: Reflections of an ‘Ethnicized’ Space in Kenya and Rwanda.” My paper reflected on the pre-colonial and post- colonial historical periods to situate the nature of ethnic conflicts in the two countries. The place of culture, language and geographical spaces were relied as a lens to situate the rise of the ‘ethnic space’. From this conference, I will seek to situate geographically with the city as a site with which to situate some of the variables that link with notions of negative ethnicity in upcoming research projects.

I am indebted to the Global Urban History Project for the kind award of a travel grant which made participation at this conference possible.  I am grateful for the all possibilities of this wonderful connection!

 4) “Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative (GAHTC) Session: De-Colonizing Architectural History”

Robert Cowherd, Wentworth Institute of Technology

In her introduction to the session “De-Colonizing Architectural History,” Eliana AbuHamdi Murchie characterized the core mission and key strategies of her organization. As Project Manager of GAHTC, it has been her role to guide scholar-instructors young and old to produce and share teaching materials that are truly global. Her short presentation characterized what she and her organization have come to mean by “global.” First, it is a matter of being more inclusive by awarding grants for the development of teaching materials on sites, topics, and societies that have too long been under-represented in history survey courses. Second, in identifying immediately the trap of considering the problem as being solved by simply adding more — Euro-American canon + China (and maybe India) — Murchie characterized the “new” global as benefiting from a fundamental critical re-examination of prior discourses in order to better foreground them for explicit examination by instructors and students alike. The final challenge being addressed by the work of the Collaborative is to displace the 20th century norms of knowledge worker replication with new pedagogical framings and methods more supportive of an empowered global citizenry.

The former President of the Society of American City and Regional Planning History and New School Associate Professor Joseph Heathcott provided the first of three vivid demonstrations of these three characteristics of the “new” global in a presentation of his research on Swahili Coast architecture and urbanism. The categorical distinctions between “canonical” and “vernacular” architectures manifest in the coastal towns of East Africa as sharply delineated preservation zones. Omani stone structures deemed worthy of heritage conservation stand less than two meters from a Swahili thatched roof waddle and daub structure apparently unworthy of special attention. In Heathcott’s traces the problematic distinctions in contemporary preservation practice to its colonial and race-based roots asking: What is the appropriate framing of these histories in the context of contemporary East African societies? Heathcott celebrates the work-a-day nature of Lamu’s urban core with its auto garages and vibrant night scenes as a font of a dynamic creativity of the sort responsible for the unique cultural innovations now frozen as the “traditional” heritage of Lamu’s Stone Town historic district.

Winner of the prestigious Society of Architectural Historians’ Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award and University of Pittsburgh Associate Professor, Mrinalini Rajagopalan, offered a dramatic example of how a more critical selection and framing of specific content can do much to decenter a wider range of colonial dualities. Seizing upon the formal and spatial operations of imperial and sexist norms in architecture, Rajagopalan richly complicates our presumed norms of Hindu practices by the millennia-old celebration of gender fluidity in the village of Koovagam, Tamil Nadu. For 18 days each year, the Koothandavar Temple is thronged with transgender celebrants from around India and the world to re-enact Lord Krishna’s transformation from a man into a woman to marry Aravaan as recorded in the epic poem Mahabharata. In the process, gender fluidity is not just tolerated but venerated as the key to Aravaan’s resurrection and victory on the battlefield. Rajagopalan juxtaposes this celebration with the recently revealed poetry of British feminist Letitia Elizabeth Landon (aka L.E.L., 1802-1838) who dares to write empathically from the perspective of the subjects of British India cast low by birth, race, gender, or orientation. The lesson is built around the mobilization of women’s voices and non-gender conforming bodies in the cultural construction of space and form as a strategy for de-colonizing the histories we teach.

Finally, I presented Amsterdam and Batavia (Indonesia) as two sides of a single city separated not by a river or railroad tracks but by a 21,000-kilometer trade route. I paired 17th century depictions of north and south versions of the same shophouse program, the same Simon Stevin-inspired canal town, and town scenes depicted by the same painter according to nearly identical representational strategies. The lecture was framed as a critical correction to the narrative presented in the textbook. By starting with the particular sites of history in all of their evidentiary particularity, we can model for our students the methods of interrogating the evidence to confirm anew, or correct, inherited narratives. I then presented student visual analysis and formal argument writing (produced the prior afternoon back in Boston). Half of the students use quick overlay sketching to figuratively and literally draw out analytical explorations and short formal arguments to correct or confirm prior claims made in the lecture. The other half collaborates in a shared document to produce an original narrative arc tying together the analytical arguments of their peers. These student-produced histories are then offered for improving the next iteration of the course.

Between content challenging the colonial projections of prior history teaching and the more or less radical retooling of how we engage students, the GAHTC session demonstrated some of the potential approaches for a de-colonizing the classroom. The bringing together of the World History Association and the Global Urban History Project proved to be a watershed meeting of minds made all the richer with the participation by our colleagues in the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative.

6) Reflections

Mariana Dantas, Ohio University, GUHP Board of Directors

The World History Association conference was a very productive setting for a GUHP event. The conference brought together a diverse group of scholars dedicated to global history, engaged in urban history, and overall curious and open to new discussions, topics of studies, and methodological approaches. I was very encouraged by the response we got—and that I personally got after the keynote roundtable discussion. People were interested in the proposal of the Global Urban History Project and eager to exchange thoughts about ways the global urban history approach can enrich world histories, and how it can engage with, but not dismiss the relevance and unique perspective of other approaches (rural histories, area studies, local histories, etc.)

Aside from participating in the keynote roundtable, I organized two panels for the conference on the topic of mixed urban households and the negotiation of power in the early modern Atlantic. I had initially circulated an email with a call for proposals to a long list of scholars, including some working on the Indian Ocean. But perhaps because of name recognition and my own research, the proposals I received were from Latin Americanists and Atlanticists.

The idea behind the panels was to consider early modern households as a key urban space that mediated clashes between local, regional, and imperial interests; shaped possibilities and limitations of social mobility and power negotiations; and solidified the broader socio-economic order that emerged from colonial contact and the practice of slavery. My general premise is that urban households often stand as microcosms of broader social, political, and culture environments. They are the most fundamental social unit, space of conviviality, and source of material well-being (or deprivation) in cities and towns. As a result, urban households influence the daily lives of city dwellers, their experiences with power, and their sense of belonging or of marginality.

Within the early modern Atlantic World, urban households often comprised a mix of elite and non-elite members; women, men and children; free and enslaved people; the indigenous and foreigners. They also tended to include members of diverse gender, racial, religious, and ethnic groups. Therefore, they can help us understand the emergence of early modern power structures supported by gender and social-racial categories that were negotiated in this most common and fundamental urban space.

Altogether, there were six papers in the two panels:

Randy Sparks (Tulane University) discussed the household of Richard Brew, a powerful British slave trader who was based in the port of Annamaboe, on the Gold Coast. Brew was united by a local marriage to the daughter of Annamaboe's most prominent merchant. His household merged European material traditions with Fante social practices, and became the center of a large network of traders and credit systems. Brew's rise and fall illuminate the social (and not just economic) process that favored the Atlantic slave trade while revealing the discreet ways in which the relationships his household produced promoted at times Fante interests and at times British priorities.

Andrew Wegmann (Delta State University) discussed the household of François Lacroix, a Cuban-born resident of early nineteenth-century New Orleans, and the child of a white French father and a mixed-descending mother from Saint-Domingue. By placing Lacroix's extensive household and network of clients and acquaintances—supported by his tailoring and landlord businesses—at the center of a discussion of identity, Wegmann argued for the role these personal and private spaces played in creating a community of mixed-race people (Creoles) in New Orleans.

Together, Sparks and Wegmann's papers offered a new insight into the narrative of prominent male figures in Atlantic societies, by demonstrating how the households they cultivated were the source of their economic power, authority, and sense of belonging in societies where their social-racial status could be a liability to their success or survival.

Danielle Terrazas Williams (Oberlin College) focused on African-descended women in the town of Xalapa, New Spain, during the early colonial period. She highlighted that these women often achieved economic and social prominence through careful acquisition of land, management of their businesses, and cultivation of profitable family and patronage ties. But she also demonstrated the importance of Xalapa's connection to the port of Veracruz, through the Camino Real, and these women's ability to take advantage of the circulation of people, products, slaves, and credit in this Atlantic-connected urban space to ensure intergenerational wealth for their families.

Rachel O'Toole (UC Irvine) also submitted a paper focused on African-descended women, but in colonial Trujillo, Peru. Unfortunately an illness prevented her from presenting at the conference. But she pre-circulated her paper to the panel members. Her work offers a fascinating discussion of mixed-descending household established in Trujillo's female convent. She argues that African-descended women, of mixed-descent, rented cells and affiliated themselves to the convent to cultivate the reputation that would afford them the social capital necessary to enter beneficial financial transactions and raise children who, though not biologically theirs, became their family and heirs.

Danielle and Rachel's papers thus illustrated the role women of African descent played in securing the economic resources and stability of urban households and in insulating their mixed-descending family and dependents’ vulnerability to the exploitative forces of slavery and colonialism.

Ian Read (Soka University of America) offered a fascinating paper about family and household networks in the sugar plantation region of coastal Bahia, demonstrating the ties of patronage between landowner and free African-descendants that afforded poor black families social and economic security. He then demonstrated how this working racial relationship was disrupted by disease, namely a cholera epidemic that spread to the plantation district through urban Atlantic and river ports as a result of disease-stricken ships with African slaves or, alternatively, European migrants. The effect of the disease, which decimated the local enslaved population and was felt heavily by the mixed-race population, helped to unsettle race relations and to fed “scientific” racial notions about weak and unhealthy black bodies.

My own paper also examined emerging notions and practices that supported race formation in Brazil. My focus was on the towns of colonial Minas Gerais, the Brazilian mining district. Through a close reading of marriage records from one mixed-descending family, I demonstrated the marriage strategies of a household formed by a white Portuguese father and a formerly enslaved African mother. I argue that marriage patterns of this family stand as an example for the broader ways in which ideas about race in the Portuguese empire informed family formation, and how families of mixed-descent strove to carve a particular niche for themselves within local the urban marriage market to mark their distinction from slavery and African-ness.

Together, Ian and my papers suggest how social and environmental urban realities place particular stress on populations attempting to negotiate the meaning of African descent and race in Brazilian colonial and imperial society. Opening or closing family and household ties to particular social-racial groups becomes crucial at these moments to uphold privileges and hard-won social mobility.

Altogether, the papers generated productive discussions about the importance of family and households in promoting, managing, and negotiating social-racial categories and their implications in the early modern Atlantic World. The participants agreed that the emerging exchanges (economic, cultural, demographic) of this period created promising opportunities for Africans and African descending populations to cultivate favorable businesses and social ties, sometimes upsetting European idealizations of a colonial or Atlantic social order. But we also agreed that noting the particular household dynamics that placed asymmetrical value on European and non-European material, legal, financial traditions, diffused and reinforced in these urban settings, could help explain how, in moments of stress, European-ness and whiteness became identified with privilege and greater power.