I’ve been in this program for a couple of weeks now.  My impressions so far:

• It’s an insane amount of work.  Long hours in the studio almost every day.
• The assignments we’re given are initially presented in a way that is not very explanatory and always requires substantial elaboration and modification later on.  This makes things very stressful and confusing at times.
• Nevertheless, it’s a great experience and I’m very glad I did it.
• I do think, however, that it’s not necessarily a model that works as well for planning as for architecture and other heavily design-focused professions.  For one thing, the extremely heavy design focus, involving a lot of drawing assignments and such, is not as useful in planning, where drawing skills are generally not very important.  Also, the studio setup is not that useful a framework for planning projects, which are generally very multifaceted and collaborative, requiring a lot of research and discussion.  Sitting at a desk drawing all day (an oversimplification, to be sure, but from what I’ve seen not a huge one) is a rather different type of activity.
• This shoehorning of planning into a design-focused setup seems to be typical not just of this program, but of the GSD as a whole.  The graduate planning program revolves mainly around studio classes, which are taken every semester, much as in an architecture program.  While most planning programs involve some studio work, having it be a requirement for every semester is rather extreme, and tends to lead to other classes being given considerably less attention.  This seems problematic for planning, where subject-matter knowledge in addition to problem-solving expertise is rather important.
• Thus, one of the major things I’ve learned as a result of this program is that while I definitely intend to go to grad school in planning, I definitely will not apply to the GSD or any program like it.  This is a very useful thing to have figured out, because it gives me a much clearer set of criteria by which to evaluate schools than I have had before.
• All in all, this has been a great experience, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone interested in a career in these fields.

I’m not the sort of person who likes to take leftovers home from a restaurant. I don’t like carrying things or having to keep track of things, and I’m almost always hungry enough to eat the entire portion that I’m served. My girlfriend, on the other hand, takes leftovers home as a matter of course. She seems to have a smaller appetite than mine in general, and she’s definitely more thrifty about food. When she was in college she spent a year in France, and she says the employees at restaurants and cafés always had a hard time with her constant requests to take things home, although they would grudgingly let her.

I’ve been to Europe twice and I ate out a lot both times, but given my dislike of taking things home and tendency to clean my plate, exacerbated by the smaller portions, I never noticed that people didn’t take food home or that the option wasn’t offered.  This post by Chris Bertram, who is British, implies that this is a general European thing, apparently linked to the smaller portions, so I suppose it must have been the case in the countries I visited (Spain and Hungary).

It’s funny the little differences that you never notice because you’re not looking out for them, isn’t it?

On this day in 1692, a massive riot broke out in Mexico City.  The ultimate cause of the riot seems to have been the failure of both the wheat and maize crops the previous autumn and the resulting shortage of grain, but to call this event a “corn riot,” as many have done, is to simplify things overmuch.  The viceroy of New Spain, the Conde de Galve, did in fact go to great lengths to supply the city with grain, often at the expense of outlying areas.

The problem, however, at least for the urban poor, was how to get that grain.  While supplies in the city were not severely impacted by the overall shortage, prices certainly were, and they climbed dramatically throughout the course of the spring.  The system of grain distribution in Mexico City at the time was based on a public granary (pósito) and accompanying grain exchange (alhóndiga).  As supplies came in from the agricultural hinterland they were deposited in the posito, which the government put a high priority on keeping stocked.  Consumers could then come to the alhóndiga to buy grain from the pósito.

While the pósito and alhóndiga were maintained and overseen by the government, however, much of the grain kept and sold there was not actually publicly owned.  Instead, the owners of the rural haciendas where it was grown shipped it to the city and sold it through agents.  These agents agreed each day on the price to charge for grain, and they were all bound to stick to that price throughout the day.  The alhóndiga, then, though government-sponsored, functioned more or less as a real private market, and was vulnerable to severe price swings such as those that occurred in the early months of 1692.

The government could, of course, change the operating procedures for the alhóndiga if it chose to, and a special meeting the viceroy called with the main city officials on April 29 considered instituting a price ceiling for maize.  This proposal was not ultimately accepted, however, and the viceroy ended up following the advice of one of his advisers who suggested a more laissez-faire approach, under which the government would not interfere with prices and would simply let them rise, which would benefit farmers and encourage urban consumers to be more disciplined in their purchases.

While the economic logic here sounds eerily modern, the viceroy’s decision did nothing to help the struggling poor.  By early June, supplies at the alhóndiga began to run out, forcing it to close early on June 6 and 7.  On June 7 there were some injuries in scuffles between desperate consumers and overwhelmed vendors, so the viceroy ordered one of his major officials to oversee the proceedings the next day to keep things in line.  When the grain inevitably ran out early on that day as well, the official was able to keep the peace by showing the restive crowd the empty bins in the pósito to prove that, contrary to persistent rumors, the authorities were not hoarding grain to benefit from the high prices.

Later, however, an angry crowd marched to the plaza.  After asking for help at the archbishop’s palace and being rebuffed, the crowd came to the palace of the viceroy, who was away celebrating the Octave of Corpus Christi and was therefore not around to hear their grievances.  This was the last straw, and the angry protesters soon began throwing stones at the overwhelmed palace guards and setting fire to the palace itself.  The chaos soon spread to the other government buildings on the plaza, and as the riot progressed the participants turned from burning buildings to looting shops.  The authorities were eventually able to regain control, but not before there had been significant destruction and theft.

The next morning, the authorities began to take stock of what had happened.  The widespread perception, confirmed by the demographics of those killed, wounded and arrested in connection with the riot, was that the main instigators of the riot were Indians, who were widely distrusted and suspected by the Spanish elites despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that their labor was essential to the smooth functioning of Mexican society.  The authorities cast a wide net and arrested Indians based on the mere possession of suspiciously nice clothing or other goods (or coins of higher value than ordinary workers generally earned).  A court was hastily set up to try cases, and the normally strict rules of evidence were relaxed, especially for Indians, who could be convicted of looting based merely on being caught with apparently stolen goods.  For those accused of more serious offenses, such as arson, torture was used to extract confessions, though with strict limitations and the chance to disavow such confessions later.

As a result, over the next few weeks 86 people were tried.  Despite the atmosphere of public hysteria surrounding the trials, the most common outcome was actually acquittal, generally of those rounded up on little to no evidence in mass arrests.  This result was likely helped by the fact that all of the accused were allowed legal representation.  Of those who were convicted, the largest number were sentenced to the traditional penalties of corporal punishment and forced labor, in keeping with the Spanish judicial system’s preference for useful punishments.  Ten, however, were executed, and the bodies of five more who had died in jail were publicly hanged.  This is an extremely high proportion given the judicial system’s usual distaste for capital punishment, and it reflects the unusual circumstances under which the trials arose.

The vast majority of the accused, regardless of the eventual outcome of their cases, were Indians.  This seems to confirm the sense among Spaniards that Indians were the main instigators of the riot, and while this feeling may well have led to a propensity to arrest Indians more than others, similar proportions hold for those killed in the riot and those who were wounded and went to city hospitals.  The remainder of the accused were a mix of mestizos, blacks, and Spaniards, the other main groups in the city.

More surprising than the racial makeup of the rioters, perhaps, is their economic status.  A considerable majority of those convicted of crimes were skilled artisans such as shoemakers, hatters and tailors, while the rest were unskilled workers such as porters.  These were not, therefore, the poorest of the poor, despite the fact that most of them were Indians, who were generally the poorest group in Mexican society.  Rather, they were those members of the poorer ranks of society who were relatively prosperous and not dependent on charity in their daily lives, and thus the people who were, in some ways, hardest hit by the grain shortage.  They were the people who were usually able to afford food, but now suddenly could not.  Coming from a group that was largely marginalized in society as a whole but also given certain privileges by the secular authorities and often represented in their disputes by the Church (note that the protesters went to the archbishop first and only went to the viceroy after getting no help there), they may also have felt entitled to more than they were getting.

This is a class of people, in fact, that is often thought to be instrumental in revolutionary movements more generally.  It is usually not the most desperate peasants who overthrow tyrannical regimes, but the better-educated, more prosperous members of marginalized groups who have a little more time on their hands and who are used to a little more in terms of both material well-being and political respect.  When times are tough and they feel like their socioeconomic status and political voice is slipping, they are apt to have both the motive and the means to do something about it.

These issues are not of mere academic interest.  The rising prices of staple grains, particularly wheat and rice, have recently led to much concern over social stability in many poor and middle-income countries such as Egypt and India.  This is a very difficult problem for governments to solve, and the experience of the Mexican authorities in 1692 is instructive in this respect.  The viceroy’s decision not to set a price ceiling was unusual in his time, when the more common response of authorities was to try to control the economy as much as possible.  These days, the viceroy’s decision is what most economists would recommend, since price ceilings generally just lead to runs on supplies and resulting shortages and black markets with even higher prices.  Since this isn’t what happened in Mexico, the viceroy’s judgment could, in some sense, be lauded.  The outcome, however, was not actually all that good, and it’s hard to see what the government could have done to prevent it.  Economic liberalism does not always lead to universal prosperity, especially in times of crisis, but times of crisis are hard for any other economic ideology too.  Sometimes bad things just happen and there’s nothing you can do.

——

My discussion of the riot is based primarily on the account in R. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), supplemented by Natalia Silva Prada, La política de una rebelión: los indígenas frente al tumulto de 1692 en la Ciudad de México (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, Centro de Estudios Históricos, 2007).  While Silva’s account differs from Cope’s in certain ways that I find unconvincing, on many subjects she includes more detail from the archival sources that both use than he does.

(Cross-posted at EotAW.)

My sister’s graduation in Santa Fe is tomorrow, and my dad’s unveiling in Farmington is on Sunday, so I’m going to be gone for the weekend.  I’ll be back Monday or Tuesday.

While I was driving in the northeast heights today I passed a gas station with a sign showing the price of gas at $3.76 a gallon.  A few blocks later I passed a bike store with a sign saying “Three tanks of gas buys a bike.”

I’ve been looking around for things to do for the year between the program at Harvard this summer and the time I’ll probably start grad school, and as part of that I applied to a few of the internships offered by the Student Conservation Association in national parks.  Today I heard back from one that I applied to at Chaco Canyon, and it looks like that’s where I’m going to be from August through January.

I was in Los Lunas today and took some pictures.  It’s a pretty depressingly sprawly place, and not at all walkable, but I did manage to capture some of its charms, such as the acequias and the restaurant that is the source of my pseudonym.

Hey, so remember that summer program at Harvard I was thinking about applying to?  I did, and I got in, so that’s where I’m going to be from mid-June through late July.

There has long been a tendency for scholars studying Native American history and culture to conceive of their subjects as static and unchanging, whether as brute savages easily overwhelmed by the onslaught of European “civilization” or as romanticized noble savages living in perfect ecological harmony with nature but unable to resist the cruelty and greed of the European invaders. In recent years much scholarship has pointed out the many problems with this perspective, often termed “essentialist,” regardless of what specific agenda it is being used to advance. One area in which there has until very recently been relatively little literature either putting forth or debunking this sort of essentialism, however, is sexuality and gender. This is in some respects unsurprising, since there is quite little information to start with on precolumbian gender and sexuality, and what information there is in colonial sources is both scanty and obviously biased, so there is little foundation to base any sort of analysis on. On the other hand, sexuality and gender are such key elements of any society that it certainly seems like there should be something to say about them, despite the problems with the evidence, and indeed some have tried. Many of the most notable efforts, however, have had definite ideological preconceptions that have tended to lead to an overly romanticized picture.

Such, at least, is the contention of Richard Trexler in Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order, and the European Conquest of the Americas. Trexler’s focus is the berdache, an enigmatic figure found in nearly all known Native American societies. The berdache (the word comes from the Arabic bardaj, meaning an enslaved male prostitute or catamite) was a biological man who permanently took on the clothing, attributes and roles of a woman. This culturally condoned transvestism has made the berdache a key figure for modern homosexual activists, who now prefer the less offensive term two-spirit, and this has led to many scholars interpreting the presence of berdaches in tribes as indicating a societal acceptance of homosexuality and gender ambiguity, a powerful weapon for an argument that modern western gender conceptions are not universal throughout all societies. Berdaches in this view are seen as respected members of their communities who freely chose to change their outward gender, associated not just with standard feminine gender roles but also, in many cases, with magic, divination, and other spiritual practices.

Trexler, however, thinks this is yet another example of romanticism and wishful thinking applied by modern scholars to “exotic” peoples. He argues that, rather than valued members of their societies who freely chose to transvest, berdaches were, at least in precolumbian times, primarily sex slaves whose primary purpose was to be raped and exploited by powerful men to establish and confirm their power. He depends almost entirely on textual evidence from early Spanish observers, with occasional forays into other times and places to find parallels to illuminate conflicting or obscure accounts in the texts. He is well aware of the obvious biases, in various directions, of the Spanish sources, and seeks to counteract them by opening with a detailed examination of homosexuality and attitudes toward it in the ancient and medieval Mediterranean in general and the late medieval Iberian peninsula in particular. Through this he shows that, whatever their protestations of shock at encountering homosexual behavior in America, the conquistadors would have been well aware of the practice in their homeland. This then provides a baseline for him to examine the specific accounts they give of native sexual practices and attempt to deduce what the roles of berdaches really were in these societies.

What he finds, in many different accounts from throughout Latin America but primarily the best-attested areas, Mexico and the Andes, is that berdaches were indeed primarily young adolescents (thought their exact ages are generally impossible to determine, Trexler thinks they generally attained their status around age twelve) used for sexual purposes by the other men of their society. He connects this to a general horror of femininity and thirst for power among men, both European and Indian, that leads them to try to acquire as many dependents as their power will allow, both women and men, and to penetrate them sexually to demonstrate that power. He makes a big deal about the distinction between passive and active homosexuality, and shows (convincingly, I’d say) that the passive role was much more universally derided, at least among Europeans, for being “weak” and “feminine,” while the active role was just seen as a man doing what men do: penetrate. Indeed, he rejects the use of the term “homosexuality” at all for this time period, since he sees it as anachronistic for societies with this attitude toward sexuality, so different from our own.  He contrasts this view, which is based on an elaborate theory of the formation of social structures based on the primacy of warfare and masculinist ideology, with what he sees as the wishful romanticism of those scholars who have tried to show that Indian societies were more comfortable with gender ambiguity than our own. Indeed, he sees a male propensity for sexual violence against weaker members of society, whether male or female, as more or less universal, and the main difference between the European and American manifestations of it with regard to male victims as being the fact that it was only in America that this violence was associated with lifelong transvestism.

And, indeed, much of what he argues is convincing. It certainly seems true that, given the similarities in depictions of transvestism and sexual violence in many different colonial sources, the berdache was at least in some places at some times a role filled by victims of rape rather than men of natural homosexual inclination. Trexler is also right, I think, to point out the importance of sexual violence to premodern social structures and the problems with trying to find justification for our current ideas about gender and sexuality in those of past civilizations. It is certainly interesting to think about what the connections might be between his theories about social power being expressed by number of dependents and the much later system of captive exchange, revolving around children of both sexes as well as adult women, in the southwest borderlands described by James F. Brooks.

There are, however, also some problems here. Trexler never really establishes how or why a close look at Spanish sexuality allows him to see through the biases of Spanish observers of Indian sexuality. Indeed, his rather credulous attitude toward Spanish sources makes for a marked contrast with the careful skepticism of John Moffitt and Santiago Sebastián, who even use some of the same sources Trexler does.  It is therefore difficult to see how Trexler can put so much faith in the early Spanish sources that document widespread sexual use of berdaches, while dismissing accounts by later mestizo historians claiming that the Aztecs and Incas ruthlessly punished homosexual behavior.  I wouldn’t say he’s just accepting the evidence that suits his thesis and rejecting the evidence that doesn’t, since he does at least give plausible reasons for doubting the reliability of the mestizo historians on issues of sexuality, but he is never really able to justify the use he makes of the sources he accepts.  If he doesn’t accept the testimony of the Spanish writers, of course, he has no story at all to tell, since there aren’t really any other sources of evidence for precolumbian sexuality.  There are later anthropological accounts of berdaches in other areas, especially the western US in the nineteenth century, which are more reliable, and Trexler does use them occasionally to buttress his arguments, while (appropriately) conceding that it is hazardous to use them too much to explain the much earlier situation in precolumbian times, before the dramatic restructuring of the native world in the face of the European threat.  Nonetheless, Trexler’s use of his sources is problematic, and tends to inspire skepticism about the validity of the story he tells, plausible though it may be.

An even more serious problem, however, is that, while Trexler sees himself as fighting against romanticization of the Indians, he seems to fall rather deep into essentialism himself.  There is little attempt to contextualize any of the sexual behavior he describes, and he instead tends to throw everything he finds into one category, the berdache, no matter how far apart and otherwise culturally distinct the regions his evidence comes from are.  Much of his most convincing evidence, for instance, comes from Central America, but it is not at all clear that something attested there but nowhere else in the Americas can be assumed to be a universal aspect of the berdache figure.  This doesn’t stop him from assuming just that, however, and the result is a theory that, while plausible, is almost impossibly general and abstract, to the point that it becomes very dubious.  Trexler’s tendency to stretch his thin sources this far has the unfortunate result of casting doubt on even his more convincing arguments.

There’s nothing particularly “exoticist” about this essentialism, however.  He falls into the same problem when describing European attitudes toward homosexual behavior, where any sort of mention of sodomy in the middle ages gets thrown in to support his thesis, from early Norse epics to late Judeo-Hispanic poetry.  His own specialty is Renaissance Florence, and I can’t help but wonder whether the well-attested prevalence of homosexuality there and the resulting societal attitudes toward it have instilled in him a mindset that looks for similar conditions everywhere else (and, of course, finds them).

I would, therefore, be very cautious about using this book to form any conclusions about the subject it addresses.  This is not to say, however, that it is totally worthless.  It is certainly thought-provoking, and Trexler’s frequent statements that further research should be done on a given issue could well result in more reliable conclusions.  The extensive notes, complete with the original text of most of the quotes translated in the body of the book, are also quite helpful in tracing the background of the claims presented, and the sources cited there would be good places to check on some of Trexler’s more dubious arguments.

This is a problematic work, but an interesting one, and while I wouldn’t recommend it to a general audience without serious reservations, it contains quite a bit that could be useful and thought-provoking for those who already have some background knowledge of the subjects covered.

On my way back from Budapest I spent a night with a friend of mine who’s a grad student at Penn.  I took advantage of this to take a few pictures of a part of Philadelphia I don’t usually see much of.