History is about Oppression

This description characterizes Latin American historiography much more accurately than it does U.S. historiography, where belief in the uniqueness of the American political experiment lingers. Latin America remains an imbroglio of vestigial colonialism, landless peasantries, underdeveloped economies, ethnic strife, export capitalism, liberation theology and Marxian land reforms. It is a story of domination and resistance, and now, negotiation.

And so Sarah Chambers shows us how working-class men negotiated their rights with elites by agreeing on the exclusion of women. Mary Kay Vaughan demonstrates that state power in post-revolutionary Mexico was shored up by a negotiated discourse of resistance, multiethnic inclusion, and modernization. Laura Briggs argues that opposing political groups in the U.S. negotiated common ground in their condescension toward Puerto Rican women. In the Andes, Brooke Larson argues, national elites groped for solutions to the common problem of indigenous peoples who sought to secure their rights in the nascent nation-states.

I’m not sure if these stories are meant to inspire hope (Look! These subalterns had agency and negotiated the terms of their oppression!) or despair (Look! In spite of these subalterns’ agency, they remained oppressed!) – the agenda varies somewhat with each author. But there seems to be a consensus – remarkable in this famously contentious age – on the presence of oppression in nearly all social relationships. When there seems to be harmony, it is attributed to hegemony.

It is almost as if in our attempts to denaturalize power – to portray inequality as a sociocultural construct rather than a fact of existence – we have naturalized it again. Oppression seems to be everywhere; there are no case studies of the victory of justice. Is our definition of oppression, then, too broad? Perhaps power is not inherently oppressive. Perhaps inequality is “natural”, and we should focus more on its abuse than on its existence.

Once, when I was teaching seventh grade social studies, my introduction to the topic of triangular trade was interrupted by an African-American student. “Why we got to always talk about slavery?!” Derrell exclaimed. His anger was shocking to me at the time, because I thought I was helping the students understand oppression. But Derrell, economically marginalized, socially excluded – if someone were to write a history of Rossville Middle he would surely count as a “subaltern” actor – would have none of it.

My concern is that in their visions of social justice, historians are alienating the audiences that could effect social change; that other academics are the only folks listening; and that, paradoxically, as oppression has become the dominant message of history, its ability to compel attention has been lost.