Slavery and Abolition in Latin American Film and Historiography

Film Screening: El Otro Francisco

• Details: An old film, likely from $1976$. The only available version with English subtitles is a VHS copy, never remastered for DVD. The quality is described as "crappy," with white subtitles that can be difficult to read against light scenes.

• Recommendation: Viewing it on a large screen in a dark room is recommended for better readability, especially if Spanish is not one's first language.

• Logistics: The screening is on Wednesday at $06:00$ PM in Life Sciences Room $220$ Mark Cubitt's Hall. Attendees are advised to arrive right at $6$ PM, as some people lack swipe access to the building and a chair will be placed in the door to allow entry.

• Discussion Point: The lack of wider availability or a remastered, translated copy of the film (despite $30-40$ years passing) raises questions about how stories circulate and are preserved or neglected.

Course Focus: Slavery and Abolition in Film & Latin American Historiography

• Goal: To provide an historical background on $19$th-century slavery and abolition in Latin America to better understand the film's historical commentary.

• El Otro Francisco Background: The film is an adaptation and deconstruction, or a "Marxist deconstruction," of what might be the first abolitionist novel in The Americas, Francisco or The Sugar Mill, written in the $1830s$.

  • The Novel's Context: Written by an urban bourgeois intellectual from a slave-owning family in Havana, part of a circle promoting abolitionist ideas within a broader Atlantic revolutionary vision for ending slavery and moving toward a democratic system based on free labor.

  • Film's Style (First Part): Employs filmic tools and language of early $20$th-century cinema (e.g., Gone with the Wind), featuring orchestral scores, melodramatic acting, and clear moral motivations (good vs. evil). The enslaver is depicted as cruel and covetous, while Francisco, the enslaved protagonist, is humble and good. This part adapts the novel's original politics, aiming to persuade an urban intellectual audience in Cuba to support abolition.

  • Film's Style (Second Part): Made in $1970$s Cuba, the film critiques its initial premise through a Marxist framework. The filmmaking style changes to a more handheld approach for immediacy; more African dialects are spoken by enslaved characters; and there's a greater focus on propositions, world religion, and rebellion. The enslavers' motivations implicitly shift from emotional/personal to economic, arguing that people are reflections of their economic circumstances and that economic motivations profoundly shape history. The film uses camera movement, score, soundtrack, acting styles, and language to make its arguments.

  • Significance: The film is described as a complex, weird, and brilliant work that demonstrates how editing, language, acting, and sound shape historical interpretation.

Related Readings for the Week

• Ayesha Finch's Essay: What Looks Like a Revolution: Enslaved Women, and the Gender Terrain of Slave Insurgencies in Cuba, 1843-1844.

  • This is the first formal academic historiography piece read this semester, building on last week's Trio reading.

  • It examines the relationship between archives, narrative, and power to understand the stories and experiences silenced in historiography.

• Rebecca Hall's Graphic Novel: Wake.

  • Based on Hall's dissertation research (she is a lawyer and daughter of renowned historian Gwendolyn Midlo Hall).

  • It uncovers the hidden history of women-led slave revolts, primarily in $18$th-century New York and the Atlantic.

  • The novel also tracks the historian's own journey through archives, confronting archivists, and grappling with the silences in sources regarding women's perspectives.

• Interconnections: All three texts (the film, Finch's essay, Hall's graphic novel) engage with how power operates within archives.

Key Questions for the Week

• How do El Otro Francisco, Finch's essay, and Hall's Wake collectively address the core problems of the semester?

• How is history shaped by power at different levels: the event itself, the source (paper records), the archive (organization and access), and historiography (inherited scholarship)?

• What factors contribute to the historical silences that each text aims to reveal?

• What are the benefits and limitations of formal academic research (Finch's article) versus a graphic novel (Hall's Wake) versus a Marxist deconstructionist film (Giral's El Otro Francisco)?

  • Consider the kind of work each format does, how they are experienced differently, what is gained or lost, and how they engage with the archive and historical speculation.

• How has gender influenced the history and historiography of slavery and rebellion, and what forces are Hall and Finch (and implicitly Giral) challenging to bring women's participation to light?

Visual Metaphor and Historical Understanding

• Wake's Visuals: The graphic novel, illustrated by Ngozi Ukazu, uses visual metaphors (e.g., reflections) to convey the experience of engaging with history in specific spaces, not just to tell a story.

  • Reflections: Similar to how looking through a spyglass in films highlights the watcher/watched dynamic, reflections in Wake serve as a visual metaphor.

  • Past and Present: Reflections connect history to the present, showing how past events "haunt" contemporary life and impact us today.

  • Scholar's Psyche: The visual device also offers insight into the scholar's inner world, her anxieties, and the current realities weighing on her.

  • Multiple Historicities: It illustrates how individuals exist in the present while simultaneously inhabiting spaces shaped by layers of multiple pasts and historical moments. This concept highlights how memories can "explode" when encountering familiar places, demonstrating that we are constantly experiencing not just the "now" but also the weight of various pasts.

Cuban Revolutionary Cinema & the Legacies of Slavery

• Slavery as a Major Genre: In the $1960$s and $1970$s, colonial history and slavery were significant themes in Cuban film production by ICAIC (Cuban Institute for Cinematographic and Industrial Arts), the state-run film industry organization.

• Sergio Giral: Director of El Otro Francisco ($1975$), also made other films on Cuban slavery like El Rancho ($1976$) and Maluala ($1979$).

• Tomás Gutiérrez Alea: Considered Cuba's greatest post-revolutionary filmmaker.

  • La primera carga al machete ($1969$): Uses a newsreel style, set in $1868$ during the First War of Independence, depicting "film crews" interviewing soldiers to capture perspectives of both Spanish and Cuban forces.

  • Lucía ($1968$): A famous film exploring women's participation in anti-colonial and later anti-dictatorship Cuban revolutions, framed as the culmination of a century-long struggle for independence.

• Themes of Revolutionary Cinema: These films helped legitimize the Cuban Revolution and addressed the legacies of slavery in post-$1959$ Cuba.

  • Racial Equality: They grappled with the $19$th-century discourse that defined Cuban national identity as anti-racist, promoting a project of racial equality for black, white, and mixed-race Cubans to achieve independence.

  • Contemporary Relevance: Explored how slavery, a central fact of $19$th-century life, continued to shape the multiracial, revolutionary society of the $1960$s and $1970$s.

  • Oral History: Connected to works like Biography of a Runaway Slave (Juan Francisco Manzano), an oral history of a $110$-year-old former enslaved person interviewed by Cuban anthropologists in the $1960$s, which explored how sugar and tobacco shaped Cuban society from the $19$th century onwards.

  • El Otro Francisco specifically examines both the past of Cuban slavery and how economic and political interests have shaped our understanding of that past.

Historical Context: Latin American Independence and Abolition

• Contrast with the U.S.: Unlike the United States, a key achievement of independence across Latin America was the immediate end of slavery or the initiation of a process leading to its abolition.

  • Methods: This often involved "free womb laws" (children of enslaved mothers born free) or manumission for enslaved individuals who fought for independence.

  • Timeline: Mexico abolished slavery in $1829$, followed by Chile, Central America, and Bolivia. Others like Colombia, Argentina, Peru, and Venezuela formally ended slavery by legal decrees in the early $1850s$, about $30$ years after independence.

• Exceptions in Spanish America: Cuba and Puerto Rico did not overthrow Spanish rule in the early $19$th century. Brazil also maintained slavery longer.

  • Sugar Production: These two sugar-producing islands became vastly more vital to Spain and the Atlantic economy following the Haitian Revolution.

• Haitian Revolution ($1791-1804$): Ended slavery and defeated the French military, creating a significant void in the global sugar market.

  • Impact on Cuba: Haitian planters fled to Eastern Cuba, establishing coffee production there. Ironically, Haitian freedom inadvertently fueled the vast expansion of slavery and sugar production in Cuba.

• The Ever Faithful Isle: Cuba earned this nickname because Cuban elites, fearing another Haitian-style rebellion (the "specter of white death" and enslaved people taking control), clung more tightly to Spain. This fear fostered a determination to avoid independence, leading to the rapid expansion of sugar production and the militarization of Cuban society, along with a hardening of white, elite sentiment in favor of slavery as essential for wealth and societal position.

• Slavery's Persistence: Slavery lasted longer in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Brazil than in any other American society in the Western Hemisphere, for varying reasons.

  • In Brazil, slavery went largely unquestioned by Creole and Portuguese elites until later in the $19$th century, despite anti-slavery rebellions among enslaved and free people of color (e.g., Tinker Taylor's Rebellion in $1798$).

• Demographic Shift: The early $19$th century saw rapid growth in Cuban sugar production and a massive importation of enslaved Africans (more than were imported into the United States in its entire history within that period). The islands' increasingly black demographics, with whites becoming a smaller minority until the $1870s$, reinforced white Creole loyalty to the Spanish crown due to the fear of rebellion.

• Creole Nationalists: Despite the general loyalty to Spain, a new generation of Creole nationalists emerged in the $1810$s-$-1830$s, including poet José María Heredia, novelist Anselmo Suárez y Romero, and abolitionist priest Félix Varela.

  • Félix Varela: A famous priest who, as a representative of Cuba in the Spanish legislature, repeatedly proposed the abolition of slavery. Sentenced to death for his advocacy of independence and abolition, he fled to New York City, becoming a parish priest in Five Points (a statue of him stands outside the Church of the Transfiguration in Chinatown today).

  • However, these nationalist figures represented only a tiny fraction of Creole society; most Cuban whites were not pro-independence or pro-abolition.

• Challenging the Narrative: While historical narratives often focus on revolutionary nationalist elites like Carlos Manuel de Céspedes (Cuba's first revolutionary leader, who freed enslaved people on his plantation during the Grito de Bayamo) or Antonio Maceo (a free man of color and $19$th-century revolutionary leader), it is crucial to recognize the struggles of countless enslaved and free people of color who fought for their own freedom through legal means and rebellions.

Key Rebellions and Conspiracies in Early $19$th-Century Cuba

• José Antonio Aponte Conspiracy ($1812$):

  • Leader: José Antonio Aponte, a carpenter, artist, and military officer, who was also a revolutionary.

  • Organizing Tool: Aponte used what is described as a "$19$th-century PowerPoint presentation" – a book of paintings – to recruit for the anti-slavery conspiracy. This book, now lost but extensively described through torture transcripts, holds mythical status among historians.

  • Content of the Book: It reportedly included images of black kings and queens, and lithographs of Toussaint Louverture (the Haitian revolutionary leader), arranged in a collage to inspire thoughts of freedom and organize the rebellion.

  • Goals: The conspirators planned to burn sugar mills, attack fortresses and armories in Havana, seize weapons, and arm $400$ organized men. A public declaration of freedom was to be nailed to the doors of the government palace.

  • Outcome: The conspiracy unraveled after some cohorts were captured and tortured. Aponte was arrested and executed, and his corpse (along with those of other alleged conspirators) was displayed across Havana as a warning.

  • Legacy: The Digital Aponte project allows access to Spanish and translated documents related to the conspiracy. Cuban and Haitian artists have also imagined the book's contents in the Visionary Aponte: Art and Black Freedom exhibit.

  • Influence of Haiti: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution were highly influential in early $19$th-century Atlantic revolutionary thought. Their success in achieving freedom and establishing a republic provided a powerful framework that mobilized enslaved and free people of color in Cuba to fight for self-determination.