Mary Ann Mahony '76

Getting Here

      People often ask how I became interested in Latin America. They seem to think that Latin American history is an odd field for a woman descended from generations of Massachusetts Irish Catholics. My long-winded professorial answers tell a complicated story that involves changing times in my home state of Massachusetts and a strong dose of serendipity. They also discuss my junior year abroad in Madrid and a number of inspirational professors, one of whom was Chuck Tatum, who taught at Holy Cross, I believe, from the fall of 1974 to the spring of 1976.

     In September 1972, I was one of four new Spanish majors in the historic Holy Cross class of 1976-the first in which women would enter as first year students. I had very little idea of what the future held; I had decided to major in Spanish during the summer (after applying to the college as an English major) with absolutely no sense that it would lead to my current career. Exactly why I decided to change majors I cannot remember now, but I recall thinking that studying Spanish seemed more socially useful than studying English in a state where the Spanish-speaking population was growing daily.

      Over the next four years, that decision to study Spanish made me one of Holy Cross's few foreign language majors, but it also gave me the opportunity to spend an academic year studying in Europe. The study abroad experience-with the Saint Louis University program in Madrid-changed my life. It was the first time I had been immersed in a Spanish-speaking culture; it was my first introduction to life in a major city; and it was my first trip out of the United States that did not involve Canada. Along with about thirty other students from colleges (primarily but not entirely Jesuit) across the country, I spent two semesters studying in the small building that housed the Saint Louis University Study Abroad Program, between the back entrance of the University of Madrid campus and Cuatro Caminos. There, I took literature, history and political science classes in Spanish, as well as a course on European politics in English through the New York University Program nearby.

      The times were complex. During my first year at Holy Cross, Roe v. Wade had struck down anti-abortion laws across the country; the draft had ended; and, although Civil War still raged in Vietnam, U.S. ground troops had ceased to be involved. While I was preparing to go to Spain, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in the wake of the Watergate cover up and Vice-President Gerald Ford took his place. As I was leaving my home in rural Massachusetts, black and white students were preparing to desegregate Boston Public Schools for the first time, under the watchful eyes of the police, national news media and enraged parents. In January 1975, while I was travelling in Europe during Christmas break from classes, the U.S. Senate began to investigate U.S. government efforts to overthrow political leaders, democratic and otherwise, around the world. Shortly after I returned home, the Church Committee, as the Senate Committee in question is commonly known, began to publish its findings, including its investigation into the U.S. role in the military coup against the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, on September 11, 1973.

      The turmoil in Spain was less obvious, but nonetheless powerful. The nation was on the brink of a major transition. General Franco, Spanish dictator since 1939, was elderly and infirm, no longer able to run the repressive regime that he had instituted at the close of the Spanish Civil War. No one knew for certain when he would step down as head of state, nor exactly how King Juan Carlos would handle the changes that would follow, but changes were clearly coming. Next door, those changes were already underway. Portugal's experiment with fascism, called the Estado Novo, had fallen to a left wing military coup in April of 1974, and popular democracy was bubbling up all over the country, but especially in Lisbon, with the "Carnation Revolution" Spaniards were watching those events with excitement or trepidation, depending upon their political beliefs.

     As undergraduates, we were aware of some, but not all of this political turmoil at the time. Censorship-both government and individual-was everywhere in Spain. Many Spaniards supported the government, but those who did not were terrified of criticizing the leadership both publically and privately, for fear of being arrested on charges of sedition. Professors, who normally taught in Spanish, switched to English whenever they were about to say anything about the past or the present that implied a criticism of General Franco. That meant that the last third of my Spanish history class was taught in English and that my political science professor, one of Spain's most important authorities on international relations and a man who would go on to serve in the Spanish and European Union Parliaments, often made his remarks in English. After all, a course in Spanish history required discussing the Spanish Civil War and Spanish fascism, while courses in either comparative European politics or International Relations meant dealing with contemporary politics in Spain. The police did not lurk outside our classroom doors nor outside the faculty offices, but both of my professors feared that the Spanish members of the staff-from other professors to the custodians and secretaries-might belong to one of the networks of informants that the Franco government maintained. Studying history and politics in Franco's Spain introduced me to the relationship between "acceptable" history and political power.

      That said, for the most part, those of us who were foreign students did not notice the repression on a daily basis. Many aspects of Franco's dictatorship did not apply to us. Female SLU students who lived on the University of Madrid campus in the fall of 1974, saw that particularly clearly. We lived in the Juan XXIII dormitory, the most liberal women's dorm on the University of Madrid campus, but women who lived in the dormitory next door had much less freedom of movement. They could not leave the building after dinner, even on Saturday nights, and could not travel on weekends without their parents' express permission. No man who was not a member of their family could visit the residents at all. We were stunned at such social conservatism.

     These repression in Spain was brought home to me particularly strongly during May Day weekend of 1975, when a friend and I travelled to Portugal to see the results of the first democratic elections in more than a generation. After the absolute lack of popular political participation in Spain, we were stunned at the political effervescence bubbling over in Lisbon. Young and old, men and women, all seemed to be engaged in political debates about the elections that had just taken place. From our hotel room window we watched thousands of people march past in a demonstration celebrating the elections that created a constituent assembly to write a new constitution for Portugal. After 40-plus years of right-wing dictatorship in Portugal, posters and supporters of left-wing parties-including Social Democrat, Socialist, and Communist-were everywhere. Freedom of speech was alive and well in Portugal, if not in Spain.

      On the way back to Madrid, we met a group of Spaniards who had also travelled to Portugal to observe events there. As soon as they discovered we were American, the questions began: Why had the United States waged war in Vietnam? Why was the opposed to the Cuban Revolution? Why had the United States overthrown the Allende government in Chile? Why were American students so complacent? Why did they care so little about the behavior of the United States abroad?

      Our new friends were particularly incensed about the role that the United States played in overthrowing Salvador Allende. They had a bootleg tape of Santa María de Iquique, the popular cantata about the massacre of miners in Iquique, Chile by the Chilean military in 1907, composed in 1969 by Chilean Luís Advis Vitaglich and performed by Quilapayún, Chile's premier Nueva Canción musical group. As we made our way back from Portugal, they played it for us, although wisely they turned off the tape when we reached the Spanish border crossing-if the border guards had found it, we would all have been arrested.

      According to my mother, I returned from Spain a different person. For her, the primary sign of that change was my new tendency to speak with my hands (I wonder where that came from?)! But I felt different in other ways. While in Spain, I had finally become fluent in Spanish and I had developed a new way of looking at the world and at my country. It felt strange and alienating to return to an English-speaking campus where students were more interested in getting a job or getting into graduate school than debating the role that the United States played around the world or the problems workers faced in Chile. Many of my fellow students seemed to think that throwing rocks at young black children being bussed to school in South Boston was a perfectly reasonable way to behave. Thankfully, the arrival of a new professor in the Spanish Department-Chuck Tatum-meant that the Spanish Department would continue to be an intellectual home on campus.

      Professor Tatum is an expert in Latin American literature and popular culture who had received his Ph.D. at the University of New Mexico. I met Chuck, as he liked to be called, before classes started and I'm not sure if he or I was more shocked at how little I knew about Latin American literature. Before leaving for Spain, I took a Spanish American literature course, but we had spent the entire semester reading the Argentine classic epic poem, Martín Fierro. Chuck was determined to make sure that I did not leave the college so ill prepared. Over the course of the next two semesters, I took courses on colonial and modern Latin American literature and a seminar on the Twentieth Century Latin American novel. We read marvelous books, essays and poems, the copies of which sit on the shelves of my campus office to this day. I read Pablo Neruda, Júlio Cortazar (whom I had the honor of meeting many years later), Carlos Fuentes, Juana de Ibarbouru, Gabriela Mistral, Mariano Azuela, Mario Vargas Llosa and, of course, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, as well as a host of others. I remember reading One Hundred Years of Solitude in one weekend, sitting in my room on the fourth floor of Wheeler.

      Chuck opened my eyes to an entire new world of writers who thought about politics and history but expressed their ideas in poetry and prose. I adored it. When I finally began graduate school a number of years later, I studied Latin American history. My one attempt at studying twentieth-century Latin American literature at the graduate level ended on my fifth unsuccessful attempt to write something coherent about a book by Jorge Luís Borges. I eventually ended up in a Latin American history course and never looked back.

      Although today I am a history professor, I believe that my study abroad experience and my work in Latin American literature with Chuck Tatum influence my work in profound ways. Living in Spain taught me about living with repression, enabled me to see my homeland through others' eyes and allowed me to become fluent in Spanish (although my Spanish is heavily influenced by Portuguese these days). That experience made reading about what had happened in Chile or elsewhere in Latin America in the second half of the twentieth century more personal than it might otherwise have been. Spanish fluency made my masters' thesis research-an oral history of women in the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua-possible. And my admittance to Yale's Ph.D. program in Latin American history in the fall of 1985 would have been impossible without that research.

      In the fall of 1985, serendipity stepped into my life in the form of a Foreign Language Area Scholarship (FLAS) that paid my tuition and provided me with a graduate stipend as long as I studied Portuguese. At the same time, civil war in Central America and the constant possibility of a U.S. invasion of Nicaragua made me question the wisdom of planning Ph.D. research there. As I was trying to decide what to do, I picked up a copy of a novel written by Brazilian writer Jorge Amado in 1933 called Cacao. It was a Spanish translation of the novel, which has still never been translated into English. As I sat and read the story that weekend, in which the young Brazilian "tried to tell… with a minimum of literature and a maximum of honesty, the life of the workers of the cacao plantations of southern Bahia." That story-the tale of the workers and small farmers of the cacao plantations of southern Bahia -became the topic of my Ph.D. thesis and still the subject of my scholarly research.

     Today I teach Latin American history at Central Connecticut State University. In the United States, I have also taught at Yale University (while a graduate student), the University of Notre Dame, and at Columbia College in South Carolina. In Brazil, I have been a visiting professor at the State University of Santa Cruz, in Ilhéus Bahia, and a Fulbright scholar at the Federal University of Bahia. But wherever I have taught, and now teach, my history classes always include at least one Latin American novel. This semester, the students in my survey of Latin American history since independence are reading Isabel Allende's novel, Of Love and Shadows, a story about life under the military dictatorship in Chile after the overthrow of Allende. In an upper division class called Historical Representation in Latin America, we are reading Jorge Amado's novel, Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon. Both writers use their literary talents to discuss the major political issues of their day, and I use the readings to give students a sense of what Latin American intellectuals have to say about their own nations. I guess my background as a Holy Cross Spanish language and literature major follows me to this day.