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JGI Seed Corn Funding Project Blog 2023/24: Jo Crow

I’m a historian who is keen to learn how digital tools can strengthen our analysis of the material we find in the archives. I research histories of race, racism and anti-racism in Latin America. I’m particularly interested in how ideas about race travelled across borders in the twentieth century, and how these cross-border conversations impacted on nation-state policies in the region.  

The book I am currently writing investigates four international congresses that took place between the 1920s and 1950s: the First Latin American Communist Conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina (1929); the XXVII International Congress of Americanists in Lima, Peru (1939); the First Inter-American Conference on Social Security in Santiago, Chile (1942); and the Third Inter-American Indigenista Congress, in La Paz, Bolivia (1954). These were very different kinds of international meetings. but they all dedicated a significant amount of time to debating the problem of racial inequality, especially the ongoing marginalisation of indigenous peoples. 

Who was at these congresses? Who spoke to whom, and what conversations did they have? Where did the conversations took place? What did the rooms look like? How were they set up? And what about the spaces outside the formal discussion sessions – the drinks receptions that delegates attended, the archaeological sites and museums they visited, the film screenings and book exhibitions they were invited to, the restaurants they frequented, the hotels they stayed in? Luckily, I have found a great variety of source materials – conference proceedings, newspaper reports, personal and institutional correspondence, memoirs of participating delegates – that help me begin to answer these questions.

As part of my JGI seed-corn project, I’ve been able to work with two brilliant researchers: Emma Hazelwood and Roy Youdale. Emma helped me to explore the uses of digital mapping for visualising the “who” and “where” of these congresses, and Roy helped me to experiment with machine-reading. In this blog, I share a few of the things we achieved and learnt.   

Digital Mapping

Emma started by inputting the data I had on the people who attended these congresses – their names, nationalities, where they travelled from – into Excel spreadsheets. She then found the coordinates of their origins using an online resource, and displayed them on a map using a coding language called Python. Below are a few of the results for Lima, 1939. The global map (Map 1) shows very clearly that this was a forum bringing together delegates from North, Central, and South America, and several countries in Europe too. We can zoom in to look more closely at the regional spread of delegates (Map 2), and further still to see what parts of Peru the Peruvian delegates came from (Map 3). For those delegates that were based in Lima – because we have their addresses – we can map precisely where in the city they or their institutions were based (Map 4).

In some ways, these visualisations don’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. From the list of conference attendees I compiled, for instance, I already had a sense of the spread of the countries represented in Lima in 1939. What the maps do do, however, is tell the story of the international nature of the conference much more clearly and speedily than a list or table can. With the city map, showing where Lima-based delegates lived and worked, we do learn something new. By plotting the addresses, I can envisage the contours of the space they occupied. I couldn’t do that in my head with just a list of the addresses, especially without knowing road names.   

The digital maps also help with comparative analysis. If we look at the global map (like Map 1) of all four congresses together we get a clear view of their very similar reach; most delegates to all of them were from South America. We are also able to swiftly detect the differences – for example, that the Lima conference attracted more delegates from Europe than the other meetings, or that there were no delegates from Europe at the 1954 congress in La Paz. We can then think about the reasons why.  

Map 5 above takes us back to Lima. It shows the main venues for the XXVII International Congress of Americanists. It visualizes a circuit for us. I don’t think we can perceive this so clearly from a list of venues, especially if we are not very familiar with the city. Here we can see that most of the conference venues and the hotels where delegates stayed were clustered quite closely together, in Lima’s historic centre. Delegates could easily walk between them. There are a few outliers, though: one of the archaeological sites that delegates visited, the museum that threw a reception for delegates, and a couple of restaurants too. This prompts further questions and encourages us to imagine the delegates moving through the city.  

Machine Reading

As well as digital mapping, I’ve been keen to explore what machine or distant reading can add to our analysis of debates about race in early twentieth century Latin America. It’s widely known, for example, that, in the context of the Second World War, many academic and government institutions rejected the scientific validity of the term race (“raza” in Spanish). A machine reading of the proceedings of these four congresses gives us concrete, empirical evidence of how the word race was, in practice, used less and less from 1929, to 1939, to 1942, to 1954. Text analysis software like Sketch Engine, which Roy introduced me to, also enables us to scrutinise how the term was used when it was used. For instance, in the case of the 1929 conference in Buenos Aires, Sketch Engine processes 300+ pages of conference discussions in milliseconds and shows us in a systematic way which so-called “races” were being talked about, the fact that “race” was articulated as an object and a subject of the verb, and how delegates associated the term race with hostile relations, nationhood, indigenous communities, exploitation, and cultural tradition (see below). In short, it provides a really useful, methodical snapshot of the many different languages of race being spoken in Buenos Aires. It is then up to me to reflect on the significance of the detail, and to go back to specific moments in the text, for example the statement of one delegate about converting the “race factor” into a “revolutionary factor”.  

In all, I’ve learnt how digital tools and methodologies can productively change how we’re able to look at things, in this case “race-talk” and who was speaking it. By looking differently we see differently too. What I’d like to do now is to trace where the conversations went from these congresses, and see how much they shifted and transformed in the process of travel.  

Jo Crow Professor of Latin American Studies , School of Modern Languages