From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <h-review@...>
Date: October 21, 2020 at 8:20:45 AM EDT
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Subject: H-Net Review [H-LatAm]:  Acevedo-Field on Gitlitz, 'Living in Silverado: Secret Jews in the Silver Mining Towns of Colonial Mexico'
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David M. Gitlitz.  Living in Silverado: Secret Jews in the Silver
Mining Towns of Colonial Mexico.  Albuquerque  University of New
Mexico Press, 2019.  xii + 420 pp.  $65.00 (cloth), ISBN
978-0-8263-6079-3.

Reviewed by Rafaela Acevedo-Field (Independent Scholar)
Published on H-LatAm (October, 2020)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz

The monograph _Living in Silverado: Secret Jews in the Silver Mining
Towns of Colonial Mexico_ by historian David M. Gitlitz is a
carefully crafted narrative of three interconnected crypto-Jewish
families who established themselves in the lesser-studied mining
towns in colonial Mexico of Ayoteco, Tlalpujahua, Pachuca, and Taxco.
These narratives, based on late 1500s Inquisition trials, trace the
lives of these family clusters as their respective founding men
migrated from Portugal to Spain and finally to colonial Mexico. Once
there, they became miners, started families, and participated in
secret Jewish religious communities based on friendship, kinship, and
business ties. At times, the monograph is also an intimate portrayal
of day-to-day mining life in colonial Mexico. Parallel to tracing the
trajectory of the families throughout the sixteenth century, this
monograph also examines the regional development of mining in the
cities where these men eventually made their living.

In the first two chapters Gitlitz provides the background and context
of the Portuguese secret Jews and the migration pattern they followed
from Portugal to Spain to Mexico City. Once there, they became part
of the existing crypto-Jewish community and eventually headed to the
towns surrounding Mexico City to try their luck at mining. In
chapters 3 to 9 Gitlitz narrates the trajectory of the first family
cluster of Gabriel de Fonseca and his wife. Gitlitz then focuses on
the trajectories of Fonseca's son and later, his grandson, both named
Tomás de Fonseca. In the 1530s and 40s we see Gabriel's family
struggling to make ends meet. He and others like him slowly made
their fortunes by doing things like selling their comparatively
smaller mining product to larger, more successful miners for
processing while taking up the buying and selling of commodities such
as cochineal and cacao to supplement their income, especially in the
early years of their mining activity.  

The narrative then follows the history of two more related family
clusters in chapters 11 to 14. The second cluster, the
Almeida-Fonsecas, is centered on Jorge del Almeida and his close
friend and colleague Antonio de Cáceres. The third cluster, headed
by Simón Paiba and Beatriz Enríques la Paiba, focuses primarily on
their daughter, Justa Mendez, and her husband, Manuel de Lucena, who
were a devout Judaizing couple who hosted religious events and
proselytized. These histories examine the lives of those men and
women with whom they came in contact, which included both family and
acquaintances from throughout the _converso_ community, including the
very prominent Carvajal family. Chapter 15 is an in-depth treatment
of how each family fared during the Inquisition trials that began in
1589 and dragged on to 1605. Chapter 16 offers some conclusions about
each family and their varying crypto-Jewish identities.

Although the discussions of each of the three family clusters vary in
length, the chapters in the middle of the book follow similar
narrative patterns. For each family cluster, the author introduces a
patriarch miner and his origins in Portugal and follows his migration
at a young age to Sevilla and then to New Spain. Then the reader
learns the varying ways each individual became a miner, started a
family, and, typically, moved from Mexico City, the initial landing
spot in the New World, to a mining town, eventually acquiring an
estate and becoming established. Later, each one connected, or
sometimes did not, to his respective crypto-Jewish faith and
community. Finally, in each case the author explores how the
individual and his social circle, including his business
acquaintances and families, Judaized (or practiced Judaism). We learn
that these practices were contingent on how the individual men and
their spouses approached their religion. Although the men's Jewish
practices were carried out in the context of male friendships, their
wives played a central role in the practice and the creation of a
religious community that revolved around the observance of the
Sabbath and important holidays, like Yom Kippur, Passover, and the
Fast of Esther. All three families owned a home or estate in the
mining city, but like most wealthy families in colonial Mexico, they
also owned a home in Mexico City. It was there that the families
carried on a dynamic crypto-Jewish life in which they tended to
interact and come together to observe Jewish holidays. Woven into
these narratives are some threads that explore the technical aspects
of mining and the development of mining in a given community, such as
the cities of Taxco or Pachuca. The only deficiency here is that a
map showing the location of these cities in relation to Mexico City
and to the more prominent mining cities further north would have
provided a better geographical context.

When it comes to organization, three unusual features aid in reading
the monograph. First, instead of the usual five to eight chapters,
this book has a short introduction and sixteen shorter chapters. This
short-chapter format makes for a more engaging, almost episodic read.
Second, the physical and visual layout of the book is slightly
unusual. The book does not include historiographic commentary within
the main text; most of it appears in the endnotes, which is not too
unusual. However, every so often in the text a grayed-out textbox
appears in a different font in which the author provides definitions,
historiographic discussions, or clarifying comments. For instance,
the explanation of the significance of cocoa and cochineal (pp.
72-73) in the commercial life of colonial Mexico provides a deeper
context for understanding why one of the mining families relied on
these commodities to supplement their mining income, especially early
on in their trajectory. One of the most significant historiographical
discussions in this format concerns the importance of historian
Seymour Liebman's work and its impact on the study of conversos in
colonial Mexico (p. 104). Third, historical writing on
intergenerational and interfamilial converso/crypto-Jewish
communities can often lose the reader in the details of individual
names and surnames. To avoid this, Gitlitz includes genealogical
graphs that prevent confusion about each family member and clarify
where each belongs in the family line. Whether these were the
author's or the publisher's editorial choices, they each make for a
more fluid reading experience.

When it comes to sources and historiographic contribution, Gitlitz
relies on Inquisition trials and testimonies from a combination of
the Mexican Inquisition collection at the Bancroft Library at the
University of California, Berkeley, and the Inquisition collection at
the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City. In the
historiography of conversos and crypto-Jews in colonial Mexico, the
study of the Carvajal family and their Inquisition trials at the end
of the sixteenth century is central. This monograph expands that
narrative by de-centering the Carvajal family, even though each
family examined here is somehow related to the Carvajal family
through friendship or marriage. In terms of studying the history of
mining in the sixteenth century, this monograph also de-centers the
traditional mining cities most historians have described in detail,
such as Zacatecas, San Luis Postosí, Queretaro, and Chihuahua, by
focusing on cities closer to the viceregal capital.

Finally, this monograph complicates the narrative of secret Judaism
by explicitly recognizing and exploring the fact that not all
conversos observed the same form of Judaism, largely because they
were not operating in a context where they were close to normative
Judaism. Gitlitz points out, for instance, that conversos did not
have access to a traditional religious quorum (p. 105), which in
practice meant that dietary practices were not necessarily aligned
with theological understandings or traditional practices. In this way
Gitlitz continues the historiographical discussion taking place
across Europe, Africa, and the Americas that has complicated our
understanding of religious, cultural, and ethnic identities in the
early modern Atlantic world. Some individuals, such as Manuel Lucena
and his wife, Catarina Enríquez, were enthusiastic Judaizers,
whereas others, such as Jorge de Almeida and his friend Antonio Díaz
de Cáceres, rejected their Judaism, but the fact that they married
women from the Carvajal family kept them linked to the crypto-Jewish
community throughout their lives, both before and after their
Inquisition trials. Overall, this book provides a better
understanding of the wider crypto-Jewish community in late
sixteenth-century Mexico beyond the Carvajal narrative and beyond
Mexico City. It also opens up the study of mining cities to which
historians have not previously paid as much attention in the
historiography.

Citation: Rafaela Acevedo-Field. Review of Gitlitz, David M., _Living
in Silverado: Secret Jews in the Silver Mining Towns of Colonial
Mexico_. H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews. October, 2020.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54950

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.

From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <h-review@...>
Date: October 21, 2020 at 10:56:53 AM EDT
To: h-review@...
Cc: H-Net Staff <revhelp@...>
Subject: H-Net Review [H-Environment]:  Ludwig on Horn, 'The Future as Catastrophe: Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age'
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Eva Horn.  The Future as Catastrophe: Imagining Disaster in the
Modern Age.  Translated by Valentine Pakis. New York  Columbia
University Press, 2018.  296 pp.  $105.00 (cloth), ISBN
978-0-231-18862-3; $35.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-231-18863-0.

Reviewed by Jason Ludwig (Cornell University)
Published on H-Environment (October, 2020)
Commissioned by Daniella McCahey

Eva Horn's new book is an insightful meditation on fiction and
futurity. Horn analyzes a range of fictional disaster scenarios from
works of art, literature, and the sciences to examine how the
anticipation of catastrophe has come to shape modernity's orientation
toward the future. Through insightful analyses of diverse texts, the
book traces the emergence of a modern catastrophic imaginary in
nineteenth-century Romanticism and tracks its transformation into
present-day collective anxiety about the consequences of atomic
weapons, nuclear accidents, and anthropogenic climate change. The
book's major strength lies in the diversity of texts analyzed, which
underscores the pervasiveness of the catastrophic imagination that
Horn seeks to uncover. At the heart of this analysis is her concern
with the kinds of fiction that underpin the prediction of future
catastrophes. As she writes, "all knowledge of the future contains a
degree of _non-knowledge_," to the extent that all predictions of
catastrophe place fictitious narrative structures upon phenomena that
cannot yet possibly be known in their totality (p. 15).

Horn argues that the modern catastrophic imaginary first emerged in
the apocalyptic works of writers and artists associated with
Romanticism. The Romantics dismissed the eschatological model of
history prevalent in Christian thought, which depicted the apocalypse
as the ultimate triumph of divine justice over evil. Instead, they
imagined catastrophes that would reveal the inherent fragility and
meaninglessness of contemporary social and political institutions,
implicit critiques of Enlightenment notions of infinite human
progress. Horn produces a novel reading of Lord Byron's poem
"Darkness" (1816), arguing that its depiction of humanity in the
throes of famine and violence draws on Thomas Malthus's _Essay on the
Principle of Population _(1798) as well the poet's own observation of
the volcanic winter that struck Europe in 1815 due to the eruption of
Mount Tambora. The protagonists of the apocalyptic works of Byron and
other Romantics were the "Last Men," the final survivors of numerous
imagined catastrophes whose perspectives their authors adopted to
reflect on the mechanisms that would bring about an end to human
history. Horn shows how Cold War films like _Dr. Strangelove _(1964)
and_ Fail-Safe _(1964) revived the "Last Men" trope to shed light on
the self-destructive nature of the nuclear arms race.

One of Horn's major arguments is that present anxieties concerning
climate change can be distinguished from the catastrophic scenarios
imagined during the Romantic era and the Cold War by their
"eventlessness." This, she argues, is a result of the complex modes
of knowledge-making that shape contemporary understanding of
anthropogenic climate change, a topic she delves into in chapter 2.
Unlike Cold War think-tanks that sought to predict the damages
incurred by specific acts, such as the detonation of a nuclear bomb,
knowledge-making about climate change applies computational models
toward comprehending the drawn-out processes marking human disruption
of planetary ecological processes--a catastrophe without event. This
eventlessness, Horn argues, has challenged researchers, artists, and
science communicators to develop images and narratives that can
convey the ubiquity of disaster brought about by climate change. She
analyzes a diverse set of works that do exactly this, from the
apocalyptic fiction of Cormac McCarthy and J. G. Ballard to Al Gore's
film _An Inconvenient Truth _(2006), all of which present climate as
the "medium that contains and preserves humanity," the disruption of
which threatens the basis of all existence (p. 88).

Chapter 3 turns to an examination of how catastrophic imaginaries
shape regimes of survival. Horn analyzes imagined disaster scenarios
that probe the steps necessary to ensuring the preservation of human
species. She argues that such imagined disasters index a biopolitics
of catastrophe in which the survival of life itself is purchased only
through death, and she insightfully contrasts two modes in which this
ideology has appeared. She locates the first in "war of the worlds"
narratives inspired by the Great-Power conflicts of the twentieth
century, in which the survival of a community is assured only through
the death of an enemy Other. The second biopolitical imaginary
emerged amid neo-Malthusian debates in the postwar period over
unchecked population growth and resource scarcity, and is
characterized by a "Lifeboat Earth" ethics in which group survival
hinges on deliberations over who _within_ the group must live and who
must die. Following Giorgio Agamben's work on biopolitics, she argues
that such narratives open up a "'zone of undecidability' between the
realm of the law and the realm of mere physical necessity" (p. 115).
She finds the consequences of such arbitrary choices over who lives
and dies best comprehended in the postapocalyptic melancholy of
fictional works like Samuel Beckett's _Endgame_ (1957), in which the
resultant perishing of communal connections and norms renders the
very prospect of survival meaningless.

Horn moves on in chapter 4 to analyze technical safety regimes,
arguing that efforts to control the potential catastrophes latent to
complex technological systems constitute a ubiquitous fear of
technological disaster, the "white noise of modernity" (p. 173). This
is the most ambitious and challenging chapter of the book as Horn
ties together such thematically and temporally disparate works as the
German philosopher Friedrich Theodor Vischer's ideas on the "malice
of objects," Charles Perrow's seminal analyses of high-risk
technologies, and the _Final Destination _film series (2000-11).
While she does not always make the connections between these works
fully apparent, Horn's broader point in this chapter is an important
one: that imagined accidents in literature and film evince a modern
desire for latent catastrophes to manifest themselves so that they
might be made available to human understanding and control.

The final chapter draws together many of the threads of the previous
ones to argue that knowledge of catastrophic futures can only exist
in the form of disaster scenarios, speculative models,
postapocalyptic texts, and other kinds of fiction "that look back on
the future as something in the past" (p. 174). Horn proceeds to
catalog films and literary works in which imaginations of a
catastrophic future animate efforts to prevent it and argues that no
text better captures this aspect of modernity's fearful relation to
the future as Franz Kafka's short story "The Burrow" (1931), whose
narrator relentlessly probes the vulnerability of his home and
fruitlessly attempts to secure it. She brilliantly examines the story
as a parable of the impossibility of achieving perfect security--no
matter how much the narrator shores up the defenses of his home, an
interminable array of threats reveal themselves. This analysis of
what Horn describes as the "paradoxes of prediction" perhaps sits
uncomfortably with her conclusion, which makes the case that disaster
fictions like "The Burrow" can serve as tools for spurring action
aimed at preventing the worst consequences of looming environmental
catastrophe. As she herself asks, however, how might we integrate
these fictional catastrophes into our own imagining of the future
"without succumbing to the epistemic, political, and ethical pitfalls
of alarmism or remaining stuck in comfortable interpassivity" (p.
236)?

Regardless of one's answer, Horn's book is a valuable contribution to
environmental studies insofar as it urges one to consider such
questions. _The Future as Catastrophe_ is theoretically rich and its
arguments are bolstered by the sheer breadth of texts with which it
engages. Skillfully combining methods from intellectual history,
literary criticism, and the environmental humanities, Horn's
breathless analysis of a diverse corpus of texts constitutes the
book's main strengths, but this may also make it too challenging of a
read for undergraduate or introductory courses. The best audience for
this stimulating book would be those already well versed in the
ever-expanding literatures on risk and disaster.

Citation: Jason Ludwig. Review of Horn, Eva, _The Future as
Catastrophe: Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age_. H-Environment,
H-Net Reviews. October, 2020.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54978

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.